Who would have thought that Victorian era sock machines would be a) a home owned item and b) look so deliciously convoluted! The Sock Machine Museum has three pages of such machines (here, here and here) – each one a marvel of careful and long lasting mechanics. I realise it seems quite odd to get excited about the methods of constructing the most traditionally boring item of clothing, but with these machines being strange many pronged contraptions of blackened steel, brass and scrollwork – I can’t really help it. Thankyou Mr Quentin Walpole.

Mr M Ryan, if you’re still reading, I apologise for taking so long to post this – the PyWeek Programming Challenge, week 2 entries. PyWeek is a weekly Python game programming challenge set to encourage new projects and quickly formed games – and week 2 had the theme of “It Runs On Steam!”. Thus, quite a few of the entries had a very strong Steampunk flavour!

I’ve not played them all, but I quite enjoyed 20,000 Light Years Into Space, an RTS with a difference, harvesting steam from vents and trying to upgrade your planetary base despite sandstorms, earthquakes and increasingly devious aliens. Opiod looks good too – appears to be a Thrust variant with a steam powered rocket. Amazing what can be done in a week, and puts my own amature programming to shame.

You may have seen over at Make the post about Stephen’s Weird House and Museum – a Victorian era home so filled with the curious and strange that there’s not a square inch allocated to normality! It was considered a worthwhile hobby in Victorian days to have a collection of some sort – and I believe Stephen has taken that to quite the extreme. Collections of Victorian art and curios, trinkets and displays from freak shows and circuses, quack-based medical instruments (electrical etc) and far more. Each room of the house, and the outside areas (even the treehouse) has been given over to this impressive and delicious mania, and each area can be viewed in 360 degrees of glory in a ‘VR’ view. Stunning – from collections of clocks to Heironemous Bosh paintings, piles of skulls and disgruntled looking sphinx statuettes. A feast for my eyes, and a warning that I keep my magpie-like hoarding quirk under control!

Oh Mr Andy W – how terrible you are. First, you suggest that a film with deulling Steampunk gentlemen would be a grand idea, and then you go and not only find one already made, but a beautiful and delightful looking one at that! I hope you realise that I couldn’t resist posting this today, and you’ve caused me to jump my very own queue of Steampunk goodies. How terrible of you. Anyway, enough of my waffling, Mr Andy W did indeed find that a 3d animation studio known as Blur have recently finished their latest work of Oscar worthy animation, Gentleman’s Duel. It is a tale of the oldest kind – two men, one woman, and only one of them can win her! But here we have a neurotic Brit and a flouncy Frenchman engaging in a battle of wits and giant mechanical steam mechs. How I’d love to see this, but it seems that it’s doing the short film festival circuit at the moment – hopefully it will come to more earthly locales soon. Thank you, Andy.

Mr Zaslow kindly pointed out the lovely planes featured on Make – the planes made by Mr Mikael Carlson. From making prize winning model aeroplanes in his youth, to making his very own historically accurate working full sized planes, to actually working as a professional pilot with Boeing, Mr Carlson has had his head in the clouds in the best possible way for most of his life. Lovely working recreations of planes, they must be quite a thrill to fly!

Kind reader Mr S Rotwang (which I sense may be a pseudonym chuckles) sent me a collection of images that he had gathered back in the mists of time. While the images were lovely, Mr Rotwang was unable to locate the page that he found them on, as it had sunken to the murky depths where not even the Wayback Machine will dare to tread. However, the ways of the internet are mysterious and things that sink are seldom really lost – and so it goes with the artwork of the delightfully dark Aurélien Police, creator of those images. You’ll find images of Victorian ladies sheltering under their umbrellas from the nuclear winter, gentleman trees with pocket watches, faery factories deep in the forest, the above image entitled L’express, and a great many more. More images at deviantART. I hope that reunites you with a favoured illustrator, Mr Rotwang.

I must thank Mr Andy_W for the pointing out Damnation: Hell Breaks Loose, (beware, painfully slow Flash page) and it had most certainly sneaked under my radar. A Western Steampunk, Unreal Tournament total conversion, Damnation: HBL looks quite impressive for what it is! With what seems to be a combination of steam weaponry and Native American themed spirit powers, and apparently a combination of both first person combat with third person adventuring, it sounds like it might be rather good indeed – it certainly has lofty goals. I thought the video was rather good, with a steam powered motorcycle racing the locomotive and creating an impressive entrance just in time to fight the forces of evil. Quite a proliferation of goggles, too. grins

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Mr Huang kindly linked me to a video on YouTube that Mr Paul constructed while at the Vancouver Film School.  It’s a brief, but very well done clip of a steam tank trundling through a deserted city, being shot at from a tower and returning in kind.  Personally, I think it’s a glimpse into how a Steampunk city would be invaded and as such, it makes my mind whirl thinking about how the battle would rage.  In a Steampunk invasion, would everything stop for tea?

So, I had been looking for a link that I’ve misplaced (well, it’s at work, actually) and accidently found another post worthy site! Sparks (as far as I can tell, not related to Girl Genius sparks) is a collection of purchasable and downloadable truetype ‘fonts’ that feature characters and creatures that you can then print out for your gaming needs. They have several themes, but the two of most interest to us will most likely be the “Watch the skies!” set of pulp science fiction (complete with beautiful alien emporesses) and the one shown above, “Sunburned and Rusty” a Steampunk Western set with gun slingers, steam robots and scientists. (There is also the free taster pack with characters from the two above sets and more.) Quite interesting, and were I running a Weird West Steampunk game, I’d probably get some of these for convienience.

Mr Hildebrandt recommended the following page for its photographs of steam powered machinery, trains and engines alike, however I marvelled at the other curious things found on this (very minimalist) page: dog and lion (!!) pulled carts, dog taxidermy from the 19th Century (facinating how the breeds have changed!) and even a photograph of a very old page showing how to hold a menagerie race! (Collect all the birds, dogs and cats and leashe them with string – do not attempt to do these days!)

Obviously, dog carts are not favoured today (barring dog sledding) in quite the same way, but it seems curiously Steampunk to imagine people being pulled along by dogs – not something for the aristocratic Steampunk person, perhaps, and not quite as lovely as steam, but maybe a steam dog?