• About

Bespoke Blog

~ Science! Culture! Computational Engines!

Bespoke Blog

Tag Archives: rant

Steampunk Makers, We Need To Talk

17 Sunday Jul 2011

Posted by bwkeller in projects, steampunk

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

rant, steampunk

PREEEEEETY

THIS IS GOOD WORK. DO MORE OF THIS.

Short post tonight, as I’ve spent the day just reading and relaxing (AND FREAKING OUT ABOUT THE STUPID WATERMARKS IN TELESCOPE IMAGES THAT THE GOD DAMN REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA REQUIRE SCREWING UP MY RESEARCH).

As some of you, dear readers, may be aware, I enjoy carousing among the various steampunk hangouts of the internet, and making my own projects from time to time.  One of the big bitchfests I see whenever someone posts some new steampunk projects is that it looks like you just glued some fucking cogs onto something.  Now, I too find that a pair of plastic Nike sneakers with gold paint and strips of fake leather hanging off to be a bit straining on the imagination’s attempts to picture said artifact as something from an alternative industrial revolution.  However, I think that the complaint is actually two complaints, cleverly mashed together into one ugly Harvey-Dentesque complaint.  First, there is the complaint that the work is ugly. Now, we all agree that beauty is subjective, etc, etc. but the whole idea in having an aesthetic category like “steampunk” is that the things in that category share common features.  And dripping hot glue is not one of those things.  I would be glad to see a world free of ugly things!  Secondly, there is the complaint that what has been added adds no functionality to the original item (or in the case of scratch-built items, is useless).  Also, no complaints from me!

However, I think the complaint is only really fair if it is leveled at both aspects simultaneously.  There are plenty of works out there (Jake Von Slatt’s keyboards are a perfect example) of beautiful modification that takes a mundane object and elevates it to a piece of art.  And I don’t want to see that kind of work go away.  There are also wonderfully clever bits of automata and other lovely bits of technology that are fiendishly clever at what they do, yet still seem a bit cobbled together.  I don’t want to see that go away either.  Prototyping is important, and often form must follow function.

So, if you find yourself burning with the urge to glue cogs to your hat, stop.  Ask yourself: am I doing this to make it beautiful, or am I doing this to make it work better.  If the former, it better damn well be beautiful.  If the latter, it has to actually do something.  Of course, don’t take this as a discouragement to go tinker!  Just think of it as a bit of an explanation if people don’t fawn over your latest creation.

January 2023
M T W T F S S
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
3031  
« Mar    

Ben’s Tweets

  • RT @OJ_Astro: A blog post by physicist Syksy Räsänen (@SyksyRasanen), who has published with us twice, about why overlay journals are an an… 1 day ago
  • RT @JokesAstro: If the Islands of Hawaii were very massive stars, Kauai would be going supernova soon. https://t.co/NEboP6FRWd 2 days ago
  • RT @AnicaSeelie: @gauravmunjal Imagine if there was a duck but it had human ears 2 days ago
  • RT @jfmclaughlin92: Friendly reminder that if you're at a public university, your institutional email can be searched basically whenever. B… 2 days ago
  • @rcrain_astro Academia has a lot of problems. Precarious employment, massive overworking of junior researchers, poo… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 2 days ago

Nicholas’ Tweet’s

  • RT @michielsdj: New paper! Retrieval-augmented models are expensive. Make them faster by partially pre-computing passage representations. W… 5 days ago
  • RT @michielsdj: New paper! We propose FiDO, an improved version of Fusion-in-Decoder with faster inference and better performance. Work don… 1 month ago
  • @_julianmichael_ @LukeZettlemoyer @emilymbender @nlpnoah @ssshanest Congrats! 5 months ago
  • RT @michielsdj: Now accepted to @iclr_conf! 🎆 1 year ago
  • @mjskay Yeah, I feel a major point people were missing is that an endless spiral into the drain is actually the perfect visual metaphor. 1 year ago

Top Posts

  • Basic Data Plotting with Matplotlib Part 3: Histograms

Tags

100daychallenge advertising astronomy bash biology blogs BMC books browsers Bulshytt calligraphy canada coding cognitive computers computer science css EEE elvish ereaders ethics evolution experiments facebook google government html humor humour ICP I hate this class iliad internet explorer irex java javascript lego letter libraries marketing materialism matplotlib maze mindstorms mods morality mysql networking neuroscience pens philosophy philsophy php Pilish prime minister programming psychology reading review robots science SENG servers sociology steampunk stupid technology time ubc UNIX url vim web web design writing

Blogs We Read

  • Bad Astronomy
  • Boing Boing
  • Rationally Speaking
  • Terry Project (UBC)

RSS Nicholas’ Terry Posts

  • An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 162 other subscribers

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • Bespoke Blog
    • Join 74 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Bespoke Blog
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar