Scifi.com are showing the pilot for an animated version of the comic The Amazing Screw On Head. Apparently from the same author as Hellboy (and they’re making sure everyone knows that it’s the same author) it seems as if Sci-Fi are testing the waters with this to see if people like it.

Well, I rather liked it! Don’t go looking for serious highbrow Steampunk, however – it’s more comedic Steampunk/Horror, with werewolves, vampires and zombies quite happily co-existing alongside gentlemen robots, hot air balloons, evil mindreading devices and a clackety cog driven precursor to video-phones in a 19th Century America. It’s a little heavy handed in places, but that may be expected in a pilot (what with a lot of character history being put across).

Verdict: Lighthearted Steampunk/Horror (Lovecraftian?) with a slightly dry sense of humour and a gungho, American attitude. I’d watch again, certainly.

Steampunk Score: 7/10

The above picture would be quite happy in a Steampunk story of hard working steam engineers, pumping steam to new and interesting uses. Curiously though, it’s actually from the Con Edison site detailing their history of steam supply to New York city. It goes into pleasant detail about the early days of Con Edison company, about their first central steam boiler plant (one of the tallest buildings at the time) in 1881, to supplying their first customers in 1882.

Even today, New York city is apparently the worlds ‘steamiest’ city – serving over 100,000 commercial and residential establishments. For heating, cooling, steralizing, stain removal and more – they use the steam for a multitude of things. Personally, I’d never have thought that a city would still be using steam in this day and age, and despite the energy requirements, it heartens me to know there’s still steam being used, and in ways I hadn’t imagined! (Steralizing surgical instruments in the hospital! How clever.)

Once, when I was just tiny and off sick from school, I flicked from channel to channel on the television. Daytime television is a horrible thing at the best of times, but that day is seemed worse than usual – then I found a cartoon… Years later, that half remembered, very long ‘cartoon’ resurfaced in my awareness as Laputa – Castle in the Sky, an anime from the glorious Studio Ghibli. I’d never been so happy to refind a piece of my childhood.

Laputa is set in a wonderful, air-travel obsessed world – there are giant propeller airships that ply the skies for both pleasure and war purposes, and it is on one of these machines – a passenger one – that the tale begins. Instantly there is danger and excitement and from the get go our hearts are in our mouths as a young girl plummets from the sky at a terrible pace. But all is not as it seems. Without going into the story any more (I’d hate to spoil it for you) it’s a story of ancient wise races, of sky pirates with golden hearts and war-mongers with hearts of steel. There are flying machines of every kind, honourable common people of the earth and rough and ready miners. There’s even a steamtrain chase!

Verdict: Oh, I cannot recommend Laputa highly enough. While it’s not ‘Vernian’ Steampunk – it is the Japanese equivalent. If you yearn to fly with props and steam, discovering lost lands and wonderous secrets – it is for you.

Steampunk Score: 9.5/10

Courtesy of the wonderful Gutenberg Project, many of the older works of Steampunk authors are available to read for free online. I thought I would start by linking one of the most famous Steampunk stories – The Time Machine. It’s a fairly short read, but one that would be nice to start out with. What would be more pleasant than sitting next to the canal in the summer shade, sipping a lemonade and relaxing with a ripping yarn with danger and excitement, gentleman inventors and devious enemies.

The Time Machine.

So, The Guardian has an article about an art exhibit of a steam boiler powered Apple Mac computer. Apparently the artist Jeremy Deller, along with his collaborator Alan Kane created it to combine the internet revolution to the industrial revolution. They also describe it as a perfectly impractical way of having a portable computer.

Of more interest to us is the engine, I’m sure: a Merryweather boiler from 1945 that was originally used for pumping water for a fire engine. It’s described as having a fine whistle, brass taps and teak cladding. Sounds ace to me!

(Via Make).

This will probably be old news to many here, but it’s just too good to miss out on. Steampunk Transformers! The Transformers: Evolution series was apparently supposed to start in June, but I’ve heard nothing about it, and we’re well into July now. It saddens me that it’s not out already – mind you, I’ve not exactly got my finger on the Transformers pulse. Transformers: Evolution, Hearts of Steel was/is supposed to be about the Industrial Revolution age, where a charasmatic hammer-man (presumably part of the hammer-guild, a collection of professions that all use hammers – James Watt was denied entry, you know), discovers a very strange steam-drill – that turns out to be Bumblebee! Anyway – the concept sketches (including the Shockwave one above) are all to be found on the IDW Publishing page. I wonder if there’s any news to be gathered about it’s silence.

We recieved delivery of a Wilesco D5 steam engine today – and right after dinner, set it up!  The above picture is it up and running (and it goes at some pace).

For more photos (of the work in progress of assembling it too), see…

• The full packaging.
• Work In Progress 1
• Work In Progress 2
• Assembled and ready to go
• Boiler flames
• Full speed engine

I can recommend a steam engine to people who’d like to know how those big engines work – they’re surprisingly simple to begin with (though I’m sure adding gears to them will make them a lot harder to understand).  Great to learn from though.  I’m out of esbit tablet fuel now though, so until I can find some more, there’ll be no more sputtery, steamy, whistles for me

The above is just one of the impressive Steampunk lego creations over at the Flikr pool.

See here for more block-based, steam imagined creations!

Doctor Sprifford and his four young adventuring accomplices pose for their pre-launch daguerreotype. From left: Archibald McTavish, Miss Felicity Ravensberg, Rupert LeBrock, Doctor R. Sprifford, Leonard Witham-Smythe.

So, I managed to find some intreped adventurers for the journey into the great unknown. My local Lego shop helped me out twice – once with a big grab bin of minifig parts (they’re £1 a minifig) and also with Orient Adventure mini-kits on sale for £1 each! Can’t resist a bargain.

Investigations were made into carrying capacity of a standard cream coloured latex balloon filled as far as I dare with helium. With the lighterweight hairnet applied, and three lengths of thin black thread I couldn’t even lift a minifig! However, cutting off the ‘lip’ on the end of the balloon let it rise to the ceiling promptly! (It made a big difference). However, no fetching headgear could be carried, and only a piece of paper approx 6 postage stamps worth could be carried. I’m right on the edge of my weight allowance! Thinking of making the balloon basket of airmail paper, and writing on that.

As for the image above – it was done in photoshop. Several layers – the base layer was retained, it was copied and then made about 80% opaque, and ‘colourized’ in photoshop Hue/Brightness adjustments to a sepia colour. Another layer with gaussian blur gave the soft look, and a texture/grain/vertical filter was applied. Lastly, a handdrawn border was scribbled round the edge with a fairly hard brush – once at 100% opacity and then a little touch up with 70%.

The second DVD I watched from the set, and I’m ready for a trip to a mysterious land beneath the surface of Victorian era soil. The film starts off promisingly – we’ve got a very handsome (and not at all small) drill based digging machine in the background and nicely dressed well wishers are toasting the two intrepid adventurers – Doug McClure’s wealthy American and his scatterbrained ex-lecturer Peter Cushing. The digging machine (yes, I have a thing about the ‘machines’ of Steampunk films – you noticed?) is very nicely made – the interior is resplendant in leather chairs and valves and assorted nice Steampunk fittings. Once the film gets going, however, we all too quickly leave the digging machine and we’re being chased by men in rubber suits through plastic forests. Now, there are several websites out there that I’m sure do a very brisk trade in rubber suits, but it’s not what I was expecting – these ‘dinosaurs’ are a little too comedy, even for me. They seemed to have figured out how to do a particular special effect – where the actors act in front of a screen with dirt in front of it, and react to the monsters that are later projected. It’s their new toy – you can tell

But enough of that – the story is as cheesy as you’d imagine – but it is the characters I must mention. Peter Cushing’s scientist is woefully overacted (even by my standards) – he prances as if beleagured by ants in uncomfortable places, and is clumsier than a cat with boots on. I still wanted to like him – he’s still a Victorian genius, and the moment when he spontaneously invents archery made me chuckle. But then there’s Doug – Doug getting into fights, doing that smile of his and getting the girl. I’ve seen it before. He’s starting to grate on my nerves.

Verdict: Once again, a very nice mechanical device (the drilling digger) let down by the rest of the film. Watch only if feeling in an MST3K mood, if you know what I mean.

Steampunk Score: 4/10