A week from several hours ago (or longer, if you already went to bed before I sent this out), we'll be meeting for the FIRST TIME EVER on a Wednesday... in almost a year... I thought this no-meeting-on-a-Wednesday thing was a no-brainer until I tripped lightly through my emails and found that we met on Wednesday, 25 May 2011... At the April 2011 meeting, we must've been stoned on Duct Tape glue and watching Marcel the Shell and Hank the Cave Peanut, and decided it would be a good idea, so on May 25 we did suminagashi or onomatopoeia or something with many syllables and lots of ink.
This Wednesday we're going to make Steampunk accessories. Goggles, if you got an extra pair of glasses or swim goggles that you want to donate to the cause. Or something else, if you've got one of those.
What's Steampunk? I hear Lysander ask. Well, you know, the whole Steampunk conceit is that high-tech stuff, like computers, and engines, and lots of other techie functionality that we take for granted, got invented hundreds of years before they did in our timeline, so you have a lot of 20th-century technology presented in Victorian era styling. Perhaps Materials Engineering isn't as advanced, so rather than a lot of sleek plastic stuff, the Steampunk equivalent is clunkier and metallic, or even wooden. Still neatly put together, and clever as heck, but encumbered by exterior wires or pipes or gears and details that would be largely hidden today. Heck, them Steampunkers were probably proud of all those visible underpinnings of technology, and decorated it up to draw attention to themselves. Solar-steam-heat powered wristwatches the size of baseballs? Sure. Here are a few examples stolen brashly from the Web:
What should I bring? asks Giselle. Well, something to serve as a basis for your accessory. Glasses or swim goggles were mentioned above, but other ideas include a hat, or an aviator's chinstrap-tightened headcover, or an old recorder, or an old Fender guitar body, or a small handweapon, or that old pair of spats that have been gathering dust at the bottom of the closet. Then to enhance your accessory, some tubing or gears or dials or expansion bladders or transparent globes or cardiac stents or whoopee cushions or pipe cleaners or shoelaces or grommets or other "similar" stuff. Glue is good - there is a new thicker superglue out there that comes in tiny tubes (since once you open it it'll dry like a bastid in a week anyway, or tape or carpenter's glue or noxious plastic dope cement or solder or an acetylene torch set-up. And then paint and/or stain or marker or dyes.
The object wouldn't be to just past gears on willy-nilly. I mean, how many gears can Willy wear, for crying out loud? But a glimpse of gears, a section of pipe, hinting at some truly functional mechanism beneath, that would be good. Are you enhancing your goggles to see in infra-red and ultraviolet, at the twirl of a dial, or take snapshots every time you squeezed the perfume bulb? Or enhance the audio pickup of your aviator hat thingie, so it could pick up a whisper 5 miles away, using a small parabolic antenna and giant earpieces, with knobs and dials to limit frequencies and volumes and such. Think exposed functionality, more than empty decoration, coupled with the fashion sense of Queen Victoria or Charles Dickens.
That's it for now. We'll announce where we'll meet closer to Wednesday. Chances are it will be near where we live, even in the home or workplace of one of our membership, for a change...
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