For those faithful readers who followed my MySpace blog for a bit, you probably saw the effort involved in making a cyberpunk mixdisc some time back. I have Hoovs to thank for introducing me to the genre - the realms of gritty Sprawl backalleys, hax0rs, Blade Runner, NIN, etc... The dystopian futuristic imagination reels.
And although it fit, to a degree, that genre was never quite home. I always ended up just shy of cyberpunk, adding elements of post-apocalypic Western (a la The Gunslinger) and antiques (my obsession with brass figurines and boxes, for example).
The solution? Steampunk. You can Wiki it here. In essence, it's a What if? type of mentality. What if, in Victorian or Edwardian eras, industry provided futuristic modes of transportation with available technology? What if man's inventive nature never ventured into the invisible, cold world of the microscopic - the silicon-based - the microchip? What if everything we had now was tangibly built from gears, cogs, steam-powered, locomotive, noisy and handmade?
Straight out of the adventures of Jules Verne and H. Rider Haggard, combined with Vernian and Wellsian technological dreams... think of Doc Brown's gigantic refrigerator in "Back to the Future III". Think of Ash's mechanical hand in "Army of Darkness". Think of 19th century drafts of pneumatic subway systems, velocipedes, gaslamps and massive whistling contraptions. Rather gnomish, actually - the "tinker" mode of thought.
I need to find some brass goggles.
4 comments:
i want to see you design a coffee pot that starts when your alarm goes off, it should also crack open your first beer of the morning and give you a blow job. then i'll be impressed.
Wow... that WOULD be impressive. I don't know about the blowjob part of it, I prefer real vs mechanical. But the first two parts ain't bad.
I knew you'd eventually warm to the idea of eyegear. Although, brass goggles would suit more than the Ben Franklin specs I had suggested.
All I can think of is the "sledding" adventure on my parents lawn (wait, was that a bike hooked to a lawn tractor? I can't remember), you and Sean rushing around in the grass, outfitted in gas station goggles. Brass ones might have slowed you down a bit. Maybe that would have been a good thing?
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