Steampunk R&D: Page 3

It wasn't that long ago that we started seeing a variety of beers catering to the Steampunk crowd, so why not some wine?

With the new year right around the corner, it's time to talk about the end of the 19th century, a time which plays an enormous role in Steampunk. If you've done any reading of British books written from about 1890 to 1899, you may have come across the phrase 'fin de siecle' and wondered what it meant. You also may have come across this term in reading about the late Victorian era. No worries, I'll tell you all about it!

Religion is one of the most-ignored topics when it comes to Steampunk, which is surprising given how important religion was in Victorian England. Even the hot-button issues of race and gender are confronted with a greater awareness than religion.

Those of you who have attended a Steampunk convention in the last year or two may have heard of something called "Tea Duelling" and been intrigued.

I don't know how many of you had this experience in your youth, but when I was a kid, I used to actively think about what would happen if I suddenly woke up in a fantasy land, or were to pass through a portal into another space and time. I knew it wouldn't really happen, but when you're a kid, these can be important issues to you. So I slept with my glasses on every night, just in case.

LEGO has not attempted a blimp, zeppelin, or similar airship since 1999, the 5956 Expedition Balloon which used highly specialized parts. This is unfortunate as these vessels are well and truly part of the pulpy adventure and steampunk scene.

This most recent school shooting, one of the worst in history, has devastated our country. That such an act can be performed not by a begrudged child, but by one or more adults, is nearly unthinkable.

This post has been brought to you by the letter S.

Once you have the skills to bring your ideas to life, the hardest part is coming up with ideas. What do you do when you can't think of something to make? What happens when your well of inspiration runs dry?

Steampunk music is an oft-debated genre, full of bands playing all sorts of different sounds. While this can make it difficult to generalize about the genre as a whole, it means that the average person is bound to like at least some Steampunk bands.

My name is Cassi. Many people call me Sprite (Like a fairy) because I am smaller than my group of friends. (Ok, I am not THAT short at 5'3" but to the rest of them I am)

I've tried my hand in the past at defining Steampunk, but as anyone else who has made a similar attempt will tell you, there's a significant backlash from the community against working to create a real definition of what Steampunk is.

I can imagine you sitting there thinking to yourself, "I've played a lot of games! I bet he won't have any that I don't know about!" Well, that's entirely possible. I'm only drawing from my own personal experience here, so you may, in fact, know of all these games.

There was recently a case that came to national attention where a gentleman was arrested at an airport for having a watch that looked like a bomb, among other things.

Sometimes I forget that I'm also a fiction writer, so I thought it might be a nice change of pace to share one of my stories with you. I wrote this piece awhile ago for an anthology that never came together and I'm tired of just sitting on it.

Full disclosure: I didn't create this.

As I said in this earlier post, there's no easy way to explain or define the Steampunk aesthetic. There are a large number of Steampunk tropes or "cues", as I call them, that bring to mind the feeling of Steampunk. These cues combine to push past the "not-Steampunk" threshold into firmly "Steampunk" territory.

I just returned from a trip overseas and I came across this great article over at The Chronicles of Harriet about the role of black men in the evolution of Dandyism.

I obviously do a lot of Steampunk projects, but there are a ton of things out there that I haven't tried yet. So, in an effort to broaden my horizons, I recently taught myself how to use Arduinos, which I plan to incorporate into some of my future Steampunk builds.

Hello. New to steampunk (though have liked this stuff all my life- just never knew there was a name for it!). Went to my first SteamCon- had a blast, learned tons, can't wait to do more steampunk stuff. ~Cheers.

In the first part of this two-part guide, I covered cutting, grooving, beveling, making holes, and stamping/tooling. I hope you enjoyed that part, because we're pushing the accelerator to the floor and moving ahead at full speed!

I've had a handlebar mustache for about five years now, and I've learned a lot over those years about how to grow and care for it. I will now share all of that information with you! Hopefully this will encourage you to grow one for Movember!

You may or may not care about this, but sometimes it physically upsets me when I see gears stuck together haphazardly, with no concern for whether their teeth interlock. I mean, what do you do with non-interlocking gears?

I chose to make this a Steampunk iPad case, but you can change the details and make it look as modern as you'd like. As I said earlier, Steampunks probably shouldn't buy iPhones or iPads, but if you're going to get one, you may as well make it look cool, right? The iPad pictured below was borrowed from a friend of mine, though I should add that this design will easily work with tablet computers of any variety, Apple, Android, or otherwise.

Is "Last Resort" Steampunk? Well, no. I mean, how could it be?

I couldn't make this up if I wanted to. There's a steampunk adventure book about knitting, and featuring knitting patterns. The full title is "Needles and Artifice: A Refined Adventure Story with Ingenious Knitting Patterns". It's real! Just look at these pictures!

While this is pretty out of the way for people who don't live in Poland, this restaurant, Wodna Wieza, is really gorgeous!

So I'm 15 and just got into steampunk about 3 years ago. I'm one of those people who has those fantasies about having another profession in a different type of world, and my profession would be 'blacksmithing'. So any suggestions for clothing anf gadgets. And how to make gadgets?

Let's say that you've got thelook down, and you have your Steampunkprops all ready to go. Congratulations! You're a Steampunk!

For those who don't know, LEGO recently came out with a new line called Monster Fighters. This set is about fighting monsters, sure, but it's about fighting classic monsters in a Steampunk universe. Just look at this promotional picture from the LEGO site:

Hardly anyone writes by hand anymore, but I would consider starting again if I had this pen.

The trailer for the new Bioshock game, Bioshock Infinite, takes the series away from its dieselpunk roots and into the realm of steampunk.

This clock is amazing, and I think I really need one. I wonder how hard it would be to just make one. It doesn't look that difficult in concept, at least. Might be tricky to get the timing right, though.

I saw this on the internet the other day, and I thought it was great. I think I remember someone making a steampunk pumpkin sculpture a few years ago, but I really loved this one!

Many of us in the Steampunk community have pets that we love and cherish, myself included, and we want those pets to share our joy of Steampunk. In reality, they couldn't care less, but for some reason we still love to dress them up. Their reactions usually range from bemused acceptance to temper tantrums, but the awwwws we get from onlookers usually makes it worthwhile.

I've seen some pretty ugly steampunked guitars in my day, but this isn't one of them. This one's about as beautiful as they get. French company Wild Customs made this Gibson LesPaul into a steampunk masterpiece.

I just saw that the book Steamdrunks, containing 101 steampunk cocktails and mixed drinks, is on sale for... free! Provided that you have a Kindle.

I'm not any good with Photoshop myself, but this article on Designer Daily has links to fifteen different steampunk-based Photoshop tutorials. Judging by the images of the finished products, they look really amazing!

The show doesn't have a name yet, but a TV show following a "sexy" Thomas Edison is developed by NBC. Edison is best known for being the inventor of the light bulb, but is the subject of much controversy in the Steampunk world due to his less-than-savory business practices and poor treatment of contemporary Nikola Tesla.

What I'm going to do in this tutorial is, as the title implies, teach you how to make nearly anything look like metal. This can especially come in handy in Steampunk, as most of us don't have the ability to machine brass. We do, however, have access to wood, PVC, and spray paint. Not to mention that, as a costumer, I can speak from personal experience when I say that things made of brass are really, really, really heavy!