Last November I had the great pleasure of attending White Mischief’s barely believable event, From The Earth To the Moon in London.  It was a night of amazingly dressed attendees, stunningly entertaining acts and a gloriously fun filled atmosphere!

And now, I have secured my tickets for the second Steampunk themed event on the 7th of June – Around The World In 80 Days, from White Mischief!  With a lineup of acts and entertainers even more impressive than the last (snake dancers, Victorian comedian troupes, vintage spinning DJs and world record holding sword swalloweresses, to list but four) and with a new theme for the evening – Jules Verne style exploration – I admit to being rather excited about the whole thing.

So, if you intend to attend, if you’ll be dressing to impress, if you’ll be taking a tipple in a topper – then I very much look forward to meeting you there!

Please do not be alarmed – one post has dissapeared, and another went on a brief holiday.  We’re still getting used to the WordPress system for letting people create and edit their own posts, so tales of posts getting eaten by rabid airkraken are grossly overexaggerated.  They’re just overexcited, and they really just nibble.

Now updated! Apparently the demand is such that they’ve pushed the deadline back a day, just for Brass Goggles readers.

Quickly! Do you want a collection of of Steampunk tales from some of the best authors in the business? Do you seek tales of metal men, corsets aplenty and more cogs than you can shake a tesla-cane at? Perhaps you’d like it discounted and personally ‘blimped’ by the editors, Ann and Jeff Vandermeer? Then you want a copy of the Steampunk Anthology!

Then haste ye to to your aethermail and Paypal those hard working souls (vanderworld at hotmail.com) or email them (to reserve it) and then send a cheque to the address at their site. Until tomorrow Friday, it will set you back $12 in the US (with shipping), and various other reasonable sounding prices for Canada, Australia and Europe. Apparently they are working their fingers to the bone personalising every book ordered up to the 15th 16th of May with a little airship/zeppelin/blimp picture, just for you. If you don’t make it in time for the deadline, it’s still only $14.95 and there abouts.

Now, in a parrallel dimension somewhere, Steampunk ladies and gentlemen of sufficient wealth and meager instincts of self-preservation know that when you just have to have something disintegrated – only Doctor Grordborts rayguns will do.

Of course, as much as we might like it to be, disintegration is not for every day, and sometimes you just want to cross the plains of Mars in style, or perhaps go spelunking in the crushing pressures of Saturn, and if that is the case, the unhinged and genteel will turn to Doctor Grordbort’s Contrapulotronic Dingus Directory!

But now, through some frightfully revealing tear in the aether/time continuum, the directory is available for purchase by mere mortals such as we. (Yes, I realise some of you may not consider yourself ‘mortals’, never mind ‘mere’ ones, but do play along.)

The Directory has lovingly drawn diagrams of the internals of the Grordborts rayguns, as well as items that the good Doctors sponsors, Weta (with the aid of Dark Horse Comics), have not yet managed to bring to market such as the Lazoplod 300 for Martian perambulation, the Courage Coat for extreme pressure space jaunts, and the above, mighty and delightful Goliathon 800 Moon Hater Death Ray – for when that pale baleful face in the sky has laughed at you one too many times. Lastly, but not least, there’s an illustrated account of one of the adventures of the magnificient Lord Cockswain and his ‘little’ hunting trip.

(Amazon affiliate links follow: UK, US.)

It’s been quite some time since I posted my request for co-writers for the Brass Goggles blog, and I was very pleasantly inundated with offers of assistance!  I’m only just getting to the end of contacting those kind souls and setting them up, but as I’ll shortly be approving the first post from a contributor, I thought it best to let you all know what’s coming up!

Prepare for Steampunk from around the globe, from far wider afield than a mere Tinkergirl could manage – I’ll continue to post myself, but with this influx of new blood (Ms Mina would be pleased) Brass Goggles should be once again a far more lively beast.  Check for the names of the new posters in the top left hand corner, and please welcome our new writers when you spot them!

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Odd as it may seem, this video is surprisingly catchy – it shows the irrepressible Mr Elemental waxing lyrical about his preferred beverage, tea. Clad in his pith helmet and more than a little wide-eyed from rather a lot of caffine, and accompanied by a gyrating lady and his phonograph-spinning butler, he comes across as a little strange, but well – he’s just very keen on tea. Around the world in 80 brews – herbal? No thanks. Thanks instead go to Mr Alexander Edmund Clough for his excellent taste in videos.

I’m rather a big fan of the young person’s series of Steampunk books by Messers Reeve and Wyatt, known as the Larklight trilogy, so it is with great excitement and no small amount of crossing of extremities that I hear that the filming for the first book in the series, Larklight, has been given the green light, a budget and a director!  Mr Shekhar Kapur (director of Elizabeth and the sequel, Golden Age) has been signed on with a $200 million budget to bring it to the silver screen – a not insignificant amount of money, I hope you’ll agree.  Thank you for pointing it out, Jwlphoto!

With Warner Brothers at the helm, I cannot help but wonder who will be developing the inevitable game to accompany this huge a budget of a film – being a games industry person myself I am wringing my hands over the fear that a game might be rushed and shoddy (please don’t be!)  But to give an indication of how much I enjoy Larklight and its sequel Starcross, I’ve recently started reading it aloud to my gentleman friend – what an enjoyable way to revisit a book it is!  How strange that it is only children who get to enjoy such treats – I look forward to reading out Starcross and the upcoming Mothstorm in the same manner.  (Amazon links to the Larklight series in the UK and the Larklight series in the US.)

Mr Sillof, who has been featured here before due to his magnificient Gaslight Justice League custom action figures, has outdone himself with his Steampunk Star Wars custom figures (only some of which can be seen above – the ‘baddies’ are just as well realised). Made some time ago, but held back for a convention grand reveal, he’s looked at the essences of these characters that so many adore, and applied them to an alternate Steampunk world.

I think that the most telling aspect of these is that I can quite easily imagine a scene where a bowlerhatted young boy re-enacts and re-invensts the thrilling adventures he’s seen played out at the magic lantern shows. Vast imperial ships patrolling the aether and a small band of rough and ready rebels with quirky steam automatons and mysteriously powered swords. These are art in our world, but they’d be well loved toys in another world – keys to fantasy; both heroes and friends. Very well done, Mr Sillof!

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While many (if not most of you) are aware that Issue 4 of the Steampunk Magazine has been out for a while now, I do want to mention it here on the site!  The Steampunk Magazine continues to publish thought provoking (and action instilling) articles on things of interest to a wide variety of Steampunk fans – from well written short stories and serials, to interviews with interesting people, to instructions on hat making and mad science!

The magazine is still available for free download, donation, or purchase, with how to get in contact with their contributors for other work should you wish to commission something.  I also want to let you know that the Steampunk Magazine has their own forum called the Gaslamp Bazaar – catering to those of a more anarchistic bent (those with more punk in their Steampunk).  A nice contrast to the Steampunk Forum here at Brass Goggles, and with some very interesting discussions there on many important subjects.

Lastly, it seems that the Steampunk Magazine has decided to go bi-yearly, with a small summer edition with fiction and reviews, while the more substantial winter edition will be replete with the same, and supplemented with how-tos and articles.  I am sorry to see it become less frequent, but I can barely imagine how difficult it must be to run a magazine!

Dear all,

With recent outages of Brass Goggles and the Steampunk Forum (for which I am sincerely sorry for) and my lack of regular posts in the last few months, I finally admit that while I struggle alone – I could really do with some help.

So I thought I better ask here first – because I know that there are phenomenally talented people both here and on the forum, and no-one knows Steampunk and Brass Goggles better than the readers.

I’ve got two ‘roles’ to fill, you see:

1. Co-Writer for Brass Goggles.
2. Technical Aetherweb Assistance.

The co-writer would help me keep the post regularity up here on Brass Goggles – I have no shortage of things to post about, I merely lack real world time to turn them into posts written with care.  If there were someone enthusiastic about Steampunk who could in their own well written style contribute 2-4 posts a week, remembering to stay on the lighter side of Steampunk, I’d very much like to hear from them.  If I get more than one volunteer (as I have one volunteer already – a very kind offer indeed) then I’ll have to make some tough choices, but anyone who offers to help already has my heartfelt thanks.

The technical request is due to my lack of cunning with the more technical side of running this site.  As you may know, Brass Goggles is run on WordPress (a rather out of date version) and the forum runs on Simple Machines (again, somewhat out of date).  I’m with Fasthosts, mostly due to the fact that I have unlimited bandwidth.  I’m really seeking some occasional assistance to get things up to date, stop the hacking that has been sneaking in (my apologies to anyone who saw the contents of that RSS feed), and generally get this house in order once again.  An occasional hand, really. The Brass Goggles site is something I run because I love Steampunk (and the people involved in it) and I do not make money from it – that said, I pay for the hosting out of my own pocket and always consider the donations I occasionally get to be ‘extra thanks’ so while I could not pay a co-writer over any length of time, nor could I ‘employ’ an aetherweb advisor, I’d like to give out occasional gifts of thanks from the ‘kitty’ as and when appropriate if I could.

Thank you for your time, and consideration, if you think you could be of assistance, please either comment below with a link to an example of your writing (preferrably to do with Steampunk) if you are interested in co-writing, or with some indication that you have aetherweb muscles AND brains to technically assist.