Don’t forget to try in mind!
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Transistorpunk - in my mind, a 1950ies/1960ies MIB-ish aesthetic.
Tubes are phasing out, transistors are phasing in.
Everything is smooth, streamlined, functional, new and a bit on the posh side, with the occasional chrome fitting.
Dieselpunk basically is the same, but after heavy use, gritty and patched up.
That being said, I’d take something designed by Syd Mead on any day.
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"I realize that steam engines aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. … "
Yeah, just maybe not a very good one.
I always imagine Diesel Punk as being a reimagined World War 2, with walking tanks and over-engineered super planes. Something less fantastic than Ray Punk, and not as advanced as Atom Punk; but still grounded in the Early-20th Century. So more sort of manufactured rather than cobbled together.
Why not both?
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All Hail Fred.
Steam pah! Wind’s the thing (it is not necessary to dress like Johnny Depp dressing as a pirate)
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Those Strandbeests are wonderfully creepy.
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Cosplay has never been my jam, so please accept my apologies in advance here.
When I think of the term “steampunk” I think of a few scenes from this:
And I think of stuff like this:
Once steampunk entered the realm of fashion etc. I dropped interest in it like a hot potato. A hot steamed potato.
Steampunk had offered me a momentary alternative of the grimy, crowded Bladerunner or Johnny Mnemonic dystopia that was my first assumption about what The Future was going to look like. Well, I’m back to that scenario, splashed now heavily with shots of Minority Report and Gattica and Handmaid’s Tale with a pinch of Through a Scanner Darkly thanks to Deep Fakes and other digital fuckery.
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Actually the real Difference Engine (the non-programmable predecessor to the unbuilt Analytical Engine) in the Science Museum in London that was made to Babbage’s plans has a manual crank with no steam involved. I’m not sure a real analytical engine would need steam either.
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Fascinating and thank you for posting this.
The level of math, precision machining and craft are a sight to behold. Good!
And thank you for keeping these skills alive. I really hope you get an apprentice if you do not already have one!
This paper suggests
Babbage realized that the total mass of the wires and carry sectors that had to be lifted through 0.65 inch in 0.15 seconds for a carry from the units to the 40th cage was around 50 pounds. He proposed to lift a weight during the remainder of the cycle that could then be dropped to provide the force to lift the mech- anism and thus relieve the peak load on the main drive shaft. An examination of the drawings shows that this load is all carried by lug m of the carry warning. In Babbage’s design the lug has a cross section of about l/10 square inch in the shear plane and, if made of brass, would fail with a load of about 1800 pounds. A safety factor of at least 20 is thus built into the design
so, you need a human operator who can speedily lift 50 lbs, over and over and over until the calculation is complete-- which could take several hours.
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Im not old enough to have an apprentice yet. Im only 36. I just dove serious into the deep end of an anachronistic life in some ways.
Thanks though, I’d like to pass on what I know. But just rejoined my local hackerspace to do that, occasionally teach machining classes again perhaps. Have yet to find anyone capable of concentrating long enough to learn watchwork, let alone antique restoration.
If I ever get an apprentice, they will have to be able to stand whiskey and listening to Motorhead and metal while working, or I won’t bother training!
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I was puzzled by that leap also. I thought it was well established that the open source movement is what led to the right to repair movement. That, and the overlaps with farmers, auto mechanics, machinists, and other industries that depend on repairs and the ability to maintain their own equipment.
But Steampunk? I think all they did is ruin the pocket watch and pressure gauge markets on eBay.
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Bah, if you aren’t restoring steam locomotives, you’re just a poser…
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Regrettsy used to have it’s own cathegory named "things that are not steampunk" which in turn inspired this little ditty:
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Fred Dibnah did spend most of his career blowing up Victorian era chimneys though.
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I am reminded of what ‘goth’ was (back in the early eighties) - people wearing amazing, often authentic Victorian clothing, who would take several hours over perfecting hair and make-up, and who could quote a variety of Byron, Shelley et al poetry without needing to think, compared to what goth became…a kid in a black T-shirt and badly-applied eyeliner. Steampunk has its equivalent…the beautifully-crafted, brass, copper and timber thingamajig that the owner has made themselves over hundreds of hours, learning a bunch of new techniques during the proceedings, compared to the person who went to Hobbycraft, bought some mass-produced cog-style papercraft embellishments, and glued them onto a cheaply-made Amazon-bought top hat.
I find the whole thing alternately pitiable and risible, and take it as a dire warning to never, NEVER get involved with ‘trends’.
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As far as I knew it was WW1 to WW2. A bit too much focus on tankies and nazis though, which is a shame considering how many active political theories there were at the time.
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Not blowing them up, but dismantling them with a hammer and the power of fire. 
To each, his or her own fandom.
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That’s the one and it’s really quite packed in places. It’s been running for 11 events now, stariing out at a few hundred and building up every year. Number 10 finally spilled out of old town and took over the BGU (Bishop Grossteste University [sp?]) campus as a seconf major venue, with vintage busses running between the two. Since them the crowds have thinned a little but it’s still pretty tightly packed between the castle and the cathedral.
It’s spread over four days which helps somewhat as not everyone is there every day and there’s a fair few venues spread out over Lincoln’s castle area. But… it’s busy, crazy and there’s never enough time to do everything you want to do. It’s glorious insanity.
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It’s sort of like crediting Star Trek cosplayers with the push to colonize Mars.
There’s a lot of overlap there, to be sure, but yeah, no real causal linkage.
In fact, I think what causal linkage there is mostly goes the other way - I know I started as a spaceflight enthusiast, and that inspired my interest in science fiction, since sf was the only literary genre talking about the future - the future I expected to grow up and live in.
I never really cared all that much for Star Trek, and am more a reader than a cosplayer, but hey - different strokes.
I do know a LOT of people involved in space flight, and many of them are, indeed, Trekkers and cosplayers. And some of them went from SF to space flight, but I think most went the other way.
And I think almost all us of love The Expanse. 
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