Yoshi AKAI makes beautiful, functional music and audio equipment with a definitely Steamy touch! The photo gallery at his site makes for some beautiful viewing.

If you’re visiting the site in a browser, you may notice a new look. This is a lightweight theme designed to ease the load on our servers a bit, without being too ugly.

If anyone wants to design a better-looking, but still light-weight WordPress theme for the blog, please feel free! When you have a demo site up with the theme, drop proteus a private message on the forum.

Update: based on feedback, I’ve tweaked the color scheme – this doesn’t make it any heavier, but hopefully it looks a little better. Again, I invite those with a more artistic eye to develop alternate stylesheets or whole themes and send them to me.

Bradley W. Schenck writes in with:

“I’ve been working on  Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual for months, and it’s just launched. It’s a series of (densely) illustrated and (lightly) interactive stories from the retro future that can be read in their entirety at the web site (for free!) or purchased as full color books (not for free!). There are also some free downloads like desktop wallpapers and screen savers and, for the moment, a single diversion in the site’s “Derange-O-Lab”. That’s the   Pulp Sci-Fi Title-O-Tron a random pulp science fiction title generator.

The first Thrilling Tale is “Trapped in the Tower of the Brain Thieves” which is itself the first part of a longer story called “The Toaster With TWO BRAINS”. Yep. That’s what it’s called, all right. There’s a trailer for the project: you can find it on the front page of the Thrilling Tales site. Please do!

Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual

The Steampunk band “The Cog is Dead” has released a new album “Steam Powered Stories”

The Cog is Dead is a time traveling band with a bit of a musical identity crisis. Formed in Grimsby, England in 1893, the Cog is Dead have traveled to various points of time in an effort to save clockwork mechanics and steam power! Along the way they have discovered several types of marvelous music which has helped to inspire their own.

“They say you can’t please everybody… sounds like a challenge to me!” – Captain John Sprocket

Find out more on their Website:  The Cog Is Dead

I have come up with something that might be crazy or might be wonderful fun. If you are game then speak up , come forward and lets have some good friendly sport.

All that could be can be read here :   Steampunk Flying Olympics

Approved and edited by HAC

The wonderful Steampunk band Sunday Driver is having a contest .

You stand to win two copies of the bands album In the City of Dreadful Night (one for your best mate!), a vintage signed poster from their first ever Steampunk gig, one of only 5 remaining copies of the 2003 promo ‘More Than Flies’. Sacred Cow their 2001 compilation of demos from the early period, as well as MP3s of the bands entire back catalog… also some great memorabilia such as old flyers and some lovely Indian jewelery

The ones who shall judge you are the band, Rainbow Joe,my self Evelyn Kriete of Gilded Age Records , Allegra of Steampunk Magazine and Major Tinker & Lady Elsie of The Asylum Lincoln

So enter the contest, help the band and win some great things.

(reviewed and approved – HAC)

Weta, Green Button and Cyberport are sponsoring a contest to for all those dabblers in 3d art  that have a hankering to design a raygun.

Details and sign up available Here!

A quick administrative note. As of today, you can use either the current brassgoggles.co.uk or the new brassgoggles.org domain name to access Brass Goggles.

Update: (see below for more) we’ll be staying at brassgoggles.co.uk indefinitely! brassgoggles.org will also work for now – it might be re-purposed in the future for a related task, though.

Why?

Update: Tinkergirl noted this post, and we’re now in touch and working toward ensuring that brassgoggles.co.uk will continue to work! Yay!The registration for brassgoggles.co.uk is set to expire in September of 2010. TinkerGirl, the site’s founder and original administrator, owns this registration. Unfortunately, I have been unable to reach her to determine whether she intends to renew that registration or no. As a result, I’ve registered brassgoggles.org as a “safety net”, to ensure that there will always be a way to reach this site.

What’s next?

1. If I don’t hear from TinkerGirl in the next 30 days, I’ll be switching the default domain for this site to brassgoggles.org.  URLs using brassgoggles.co.uk will continue to work as long as that domain exists and points here (I just don’t control either of those things).
2. In September, if TinkerGirl chooses not to renew brassgoggles.co.uk, I will attempt to renew it myself.  However, depending on the exact policies of the current registrar for that domain, there may be a period of time when brassgoggles.co.uk domains won’t work.

Note that brassgoggles.co.uk will continue to work until at least September 2010 no matter what happens, so:

The folks over at The Steampunk Magazine have just released Issue #7. Its available in the “Downloads” section of their website.

“There are articles on steampunk’s relationship with politics, the future of steampunk fashion and the melting pot of 19th century Europe, poems about Alice in Wonderland, fiction about airships and hot air balloons (how very retro!) and instructions on how to raise your own island out of the deathless oceans. On top of all of that, there are interviews with Sunday Driver and The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing, and a good helping of all the other wonders that you have come to expect from SteamPunk Magazine.”

The folks over at HiTechSys put a Steampunk VTR controller on display at this year’s NAB conference.

Check out this thing of beauty (click to make bigger):

[via BoingBoing]