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Is anyone else over Steampunk?

TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME

TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME

Teacake's Pleather Dome
Premium Member
I am sooooo over it. I thought it pleasantly novel for about the first five minutes I knew about it and it's been all downhill from there. I wasn't over it for a while though, tolerating it was my baseline but that's the past guvner, the coal tinged foggy past.

I'm watching Warehouse 13 now and all I can think is "this is gonna date you" every time I see the copper, the ye old typewriter hooked up to the super computer, the Jules Verne style guns.. I am dreading the new season of Who. The Tardis gets more steampunky every season! It's all steam and pipes and tap tap tapping on round keys!

My hipster friends all have steampunk earrings, steampunk accessories.. they wear steampunk bronze goggles while riding their vintage scooters. It's gone past silly. I am embarrassed for them.

The other day I was watching some steampunk sci fi scene on some show and I found myself longing for the WHITE CLEAN FUTURE. You know, the future we got with TMP. Where everything was slick and sleek and minimalist and there was no hydraulics powering interdimensional travel vehicles. Where it was all sterile and understated. If a trend is making me nostalgic for TMP I must be really sick of it.
 
I like steampunk, and I think it can still be done well without going overboard. People like anachronistic things, or things that seem ordinary but contain extraordinary capabilities that simply shouldn't be. To be honest, I get tired of all the ultraslick stuff myself. Humans aren't that neat. We make a mess wherever we go. :lol:
 
teacake said:
I am sooooo over it. I thought it pleasantly novel for about the first five minutes I knew about it and it's been all downhill from there. I wasn't over it for a while though, tolerating it was my baseline but that's the past guvner, the coal tinged foggy past.

I'm watching Warehouse 13 now and all I can think is "this is gonna date you" every time I see the copper, the ye old typewriter hooked up to the super computer, the Jules Verne style guns.. I am dreading the new season of Who. The Tardis gets more steampunky every season! It's all steam and pipes and tap tap tapping on round keys!

My hipster friends all have steampunk earrings, steampunk accessories.. they wear steampunk bronze goggles while riding their vintage scooters. It's gone past silly. I am embarrassed for them.

The other day I was watching some steampunk sci fi scene on some show and I found myself longing for the WHITE CLEAN FUTURE. You know, the future we got with TMP. Where everything was slick and sleek and minimalist and there was no hydraulics powering interdimensional travel vehicles. Where it was all sterile and understated. If a trend is making me nostalgic for TMP I must be really sick of it.
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Yes, glad I am not the only one sick of seeing steam punk on Doctor Who....though I call it Doctor Sanford and Son...since the Tardis is made from....well, junk. Oh, and bow ties, fezes, and stetsons are not cool.

And I always loved the TMP look and feel. I mainly use steampunk in my stories with goblins, dwarves, and so on.
 
I really like it - the idea of a past that never was. You need to read the good stuff. Either the online comic Girl Genius, winner of many Hugos, or the William Gibson/Bruce Sterling novel 'The Difference Engine'. Really good stuff.
 
I figure it kinda makes sense for the Doctor, since to him everything should be nostalgic and anachronistic right?
 
teacake said:
/.../ I found myself longing for the WHITE CLEAN FUTURE. You know, the future we got with TMP. Where everything was slick and sleek and minimalist /.../
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I'm guessing here: you never entered an apple-store?

The Castellan said:
Oh, and bow ties, fezes, and stetsons are not cool.
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A Fez is as cool as the pair of matching loafers you wear with it, a Stetson is as cool as the ass it rode into town on...

...but a bow-tie will always be the mark of the cool geek!
 
Personally, I'm still impressed by the guy that made the functioning steampunk laptop a while back.

If you're feeling overexposed to steampunk, and that all of your "hipster friends" are overdoing it, you need to get the hell away from hipsters. They make everything boring and tedious, especially when they start going over the top with their obsessions and justify it as being "ironic".

Life is too short to spend it around hipsters.
 
I'm not a big steampunk person, but I do enjoy the aesthetic a lot.

If you hate steampunk, though, you must hate the look of Deep Space Nine. There is a somewhat similar design to certain parts of the station, albeit with an alien/futuristic twist. ;)
 
I still like steampunk very much.

I recently bought this book

Steampunksofties.jpg

and I plan to make some of the toys in it if I can get the items I need to do so.
 
Insert obligatory "Just Glue Some Gears On It (And Call It Steampunk)" reference/link here. :p

I think steampunk can be a legitimate aesthetic in a proper context, but agree that it shouldn't be license to look like a pretentious geek/boob in everyday settings. As for TMP, its look will be awful 'til the end of time; Trek XI did sleek white futurism a thousand times better.
 
I like Steampunk, but I guess you could say I was into Steampunk before people started labeling EVERYTHING with brass and gears steampunk. So you might say I'm more into Verneian (?) Punk.

While I get enjoyment out of stuff like Abney Park and some of the RPGs out there--as cheesy as that stuff gets. I really prefer a Verne type setting over "Oh it's 21st tech, but done with gears and steam! They could have done it...really!!!"

And who started the whole "<insert genre>Punk" thing anyway? Either I missed a nerd memo or I'm just not a good nerd, but everything "Punk" these days. I actually know someone that describes Trek fandom as "TrekPunk" ~grrrrrrr~
 
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teacake said:
I am sooooo over it. I thought it pleasantly novel for about the first five minutes I knew about it and it's been all downhill from there. I wasn't over it for a while though, tolerating it was my baseline but that's the past guvner, the coal tinged foggy past.

I'm watching Warehouse 13 now and all I can think is "this is gonna date you" every time I see the copper, the ye old typewriter hooked up to the super computer, the Jules Verne style guns.. I am dreading the new season of Who. The Tardis gets more steampunky every season! It's all steam and pipes and tap tap tapping on round keys!

My hipster friends all have steampunk earrings, steampunk accessories.. they wear steampunk bronze goggles while riding their vintage scooters. It's gone past silly. I am embarrassed for them.

The other day I was watching some steampunk sci fi scene on some show and I found myself longing for the WHITE CLEAN FUTURE. You know, the future we got with TMP. Where everything was slick and sleek and minimalist and there was no hydraulics powering interdimensional travel vehicles. Where it was all sterile and understated. If a trend is making me nostalgic for TMP I must be really sick of it.
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Well--you gave it the novel approach for a whole 5 minutes , aren't you merciful ;). But if you are unhappy with the future (possibly) to come, fictionally of course. What would you sub it with--

Post apoplectic (Terminator/Mad Max)
1950-1960 Wiz Bang (Everything from Cap Video to Cap Pike)
Submarine Trek of Enterprise? (to much stainless steel)

Look at it from more than one perspective, I always thought Steampunk as quite timeless, people fashioning their monitors and mouses out of wood. Almost surreal, even. Suggests to me, a convergence of technology and culture.

BTW, pigeon-holing the production of a piece of art, doesn't make it's repeat enjoyment any less :

Such as TOS of Trek, Classic Dr. Who, or a slew of other we could mention.

:mallory:
 
If you mean by "steampunk" a visual esthetic that includes textures other than plastic and metal, never. But that really isn't what one means by "steampunk," is it? Doesn't it really mean an evocation of a particular era, primarily Brutish Empire? There seems to be a few variations, but steampunk seems to depend on a love of the good old days when there were kings and empires, upper classes blessed with lower classes who knew their place. That stuff wore out real quick.
 
There's a big steampunk-mod movement within Nerf-fandom (Nerfpunk?). As much as I love collecting--and playing with on occasion--Nerf guns, that when I knew Steampunk was getting close to looping around to self-parody.
 
I don't really want the white future of TMP, I'm just contrasting it to Steampunk. I do like the gritty, messy, non-minimalist look however steampunk is just too gimmicky. I like the Blade Runner look, or the depths of Coruscant look.. to me this feels like a real future where people have lots and lots of tech they keep using any way they can to get by which results in a mish mash of styles. With steampunk everything is the same style, it's artsy fartsy rather than Wall-E's junkyard approach. You don't have the neon of Blade Runner in steampunk because it doesn't fit the rather narrow aesthetic.
 
STR said:
Personally, I'm still impressed by the guy that made the functioning steampunk laptop a while back.

If you're feeling overexposed to steampunk, and that all of your "hipster friends" are overdoing it, you need to get the hell away from hipsters. They make everything boring and tedious, especially when they start going over the top with their obsessions and justify it as being "ironic".

Life is too short to spend it around hipsters.
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I completely agree. I was trapped in a discussion of Return of the Jedi with two hipsters last week. It was horrible. All they wanted to do was groove on the coolness of ROTJ.

They referred to the "planet" Endor and I had to correct them that it was in fact a moon.

Then they were crapping on about how much better it is to watch ROTJ on video because of how Han still shoots first and I had to correct them that this did not occur in ROTJ.

They didn't know anything about Boba Fett at all, only that he was soooo cool. I had to inform them that he was a Mandalorian.

At this point I started to remember why I had no friends in high school. Hipsters are like some replicant virus infecting fandom. You think you are talking to a fandom person and you discover that you are talking to a hipster who thinks you are a fanatic as soon as he sees you care about the fandom in a way that is not ironic. It's terrible!
 
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