After some careful consideration, a few changes are going to be made to the blog.

First, we’re going to disable comments — we have a perfectly wonderful forum for discussion, where we have a team of moderators to deal with the ever-problematic spam.

Second, we’re moving toward establishing a more stable schedule of postings.

Finally, you can now submit things you’d like to see on the blog by mailing submission at brassgoggles.co.uk

Ok, it’s not strictly Steampunk, but it’s definitely in the spirit, and on the lighter side.  I present to you, Fighting Trousers by Professor Elemental:

Fighting Trousers – Professor Elemental (YouTube)

Thanks to Daedala for the link!

James Richardson-Brown of The Artificers’ Club needs your help:

I have received news that a proposed book on steampunk art will be going ahead. Published one of the UK’s leading art publishers and edited by myself. I am now looking for artists of all types to grace the pages of this humble endeavour with your wonderous creations. Apply now…

If you’re a Steampunk maker-artist, and you want to be featured in a book on the subject, this is your chance! Being considered for inclusion requires membership in The Artificers’ Club, which appears to be free of charge, but application-based.

[hat tip: Herr Döktor from our Steampunk Forum]

Fun video tribute to Ghostbusters in a steampunk style. “Whom shall you telegram?” indeed.

Steampunk Ghostbusters video

[via BoingBoing]

The folks at Lost Machine are building a Steampunk pirate ship, but they need help to finance it. Interestingly, they’re not just asking for donations, they’re selling these neat, hand-made, LED tripods:

Head on over to their site, where you can buy or donate, and check out the video as well: Steampunk Pirate Ship

An interesting interview with the developer of the game Cogs is on GameDev.net. Apparently, our humble blog and forum was at least partly responsible for inspiring the design:

Q: Which (if any) games, films, books, etc have influenced you most on the development of Cogs? There were a couple films that inspired the look of Cogs, including Hellboy II and Wild Wild West. But mostly, we spent time looking at websites like Brass Goggles and OObject. Gizmodo and BoingBoing also tend to give a lot of attention to steampunk designs. — IGF 2010: Lazy 8 Studios (emphasis ours)

Thanks, for the complement, Lazy 8!

It’s also interesting that the game was originally more industrial in nature, but the interviewee is pleased with changing to a steampunk aesthetic:

Q: I think the steampunk-ish art direction works great with something centered around steampunk elements like pipes and gears and such – but were any other styles tried? Before Brendan came on board, my original engineer art was more industrial — rusty sheet metal and I-beams. I much prefer the steampunk look. — IGF 2010: Lazy 8 Studios

Looks like a cool game, and we’re definitely proud to be part of the inspiration for the design!

Video:

Cogs on YouTube

Tuesday evening, beginning at 21:00 GMT, the site will be undergoing maintenance. Both the blog and forum should be online for most of the duration; however, there may be unusual slowness and intermittent outages as packages are updated, backups are made, and some general housekeeping occurs.

Thanks for your patience.

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.

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: