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Yes, he owns a flat-screen television, but he has modified it with a burlap frame. He uses an iPhone, but it is encased in burnished brass.
Urge to kill… rising. I got killin’ hands!
I would start with these guys…
… but I’m comforted by their diminished influence in life because, if they truly embrace their anachronism, 75% of the people in that picture cannot vote (if only because their whale-bone corsets have crushed their organs so tightly that standing up to go to a polling place causes excruciating pain).
I look forward to this movement causing some PSAs on television about the dangers of dueling with pistols at dawn.
It’s amazing how some people can take something so inherently cool and nerd it up so much.
….Shut up, L’Kevin.
And yes, for the record, the style itself is amusing. It’s fun to draw. It’s cool to see in movies. But the second the more pathetic of our number take an interest in anything like this, they extrapolate the thing to such an absurd degree that it sinks beneath contempt under its own weight and MUST be ridiculed.
I still have no fucking idea what steampunk is. I see it several times a week on boinboing, it confuses me momentarily, and then I forget about it and have never even bothered to google it because I’m sure knowing more about it would make me want to put a fork in my eye. And John, even knowing nothing about this, I’m going to go out on a limb and state that based on what I’ve seen, nothing associated with any of this could ever have been construed as “cool”, inherently or otherwise.
From a designers point of view, there’s a whole fuck of a lot that’s cool about it.
John said:From a designers point of view, there’s a whole fuck of a lot that’s cool about it.
agreed. if i had enough disposable time and money, i’d think of steampunking stuff. it’s fantastic to look at.
Brass/burlap = cool, ipods/flatscreens = not.
John said:From a designers point of view, there’s a whole fuck of a lot that’s cool about it.
O.K. then maybe I do have to have this explained to me because everything I’ve seen of this stuff has been best described as rennaisance fair sci-fi which is a horrible aesthetic connotation. Possibly because I’ve never been into either one, so maybe that’s it….So what exactly is it?
john how are you a designer?
Lots of brass, clockwork, cogs, and elaborate machinery. A common theme is to take some piece of technology, something clearly not victorian, and to cast it in a victorian light — how it would have been built with the materials of the time. Because victorian furniture and such was so ornate and elaborate, you end up with some pretty neat stuff.
Like… look how fucking awesome these watches look:
http://www.akihabaranews.com/en/news-14321-Steampunk+watches,+will+you+dare%3F.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/07/08/artisanal-steampunk-.html
http://www.steampunklab.com/watches/11
Totally nonfunctional, sure. But amazing concepts, none-the-less.
Then you’ve got various bits of culture that have that aesthetic running lightly under them, like all the tech they use to do their stage magic in The Prestige or very heavily influenced, like Steamboy.
And then, for some reason, there’s lots of Star Wars/Steampunk crossovers. Dunno why, but they always end up looking fantastic:
http://ericpoulton.blogspot.com/2007/03/steampunk-star-wars-desktops.html
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=31&t=477974&page=1&pp=15
http://www.slashfilm.com/2008/04/11/cool-stuff-steampunk-star-wars-action-figures/
Whoah, someone made a steampunk Flux Capacitor:
http://www.slashfilm.com/2007/10/29/steampunk-flux-capacitor/
john how are you a designer?
Are you just being a huge asshole or are you serious?
i’m serious
Steampunk is getting mad played out — some of it is elegant and nice to look at, but every day there’s another nerd modifying something that somebody else has already altered 500 times before they did it. Congratulations, your Volkswagon Bug runs on coal, has a steam whistle and candles for headlights. Try driving it in the rain, asshole.
I had to edit this paragraph 500 times . . . fucking cold medicine.
Big Bill said:Congratulations, your Volkswagon Bug runs on coal, has a steam whistle and candles for headlights. Try driving it in the rain, asshole.
HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAH!
Kev, I’m a web and graphic designer. It’s my living.
aren’t these guys designing watches and what not, you can’t really wrap this web site in burlap right.
It’s an aesthetic. Aesthetics aren’t limited to a single medium. All those links I posted up there show the various mediums you can use it in.
eh, all blocked. i grow tired of this topic
Seriously, I think the steampunk thing is cool IN THEORY. I like the way things work in League of Extraordinary Gentleman (though the movie is kind of awful), and I like seeing steampunk revisions of Star Wars even though I don’t really care about it, etiher… but that shit just looks retarded in real life.
I went to that stupid article and wanted to give everyone in those pictures a wedgie, but I couldn’t, because their underpants are probably more like long-johns than briefs. The reason steampunk doesn’t work in the real world is, well, because you look like a fucking idiot amidst all this contemporary technology and modern and post-modern architecture and design.
I bet those black dudes are really cool, but if I saw them walking down the street as depicted in the picture of them walking down the street, my head would explode and I’d shit myself. I’d launch into a race-irrelevant hate crime.
I pray I see those white/Asian kids featured in some park one day. I’m going to beat them senseless with a baseball bat. They quite literally won’t know what hit them, as in their mind aluminum hasn’t been discovered/harnessed yet.