Extreme Makeover: (Steampunk) Home Edition
- Thread starter Logan Westbrook
- Start date
all this is true but, speaking as a person that plays punk music- this house looks cool as shit. Does it have anything to do with punk? no. Cool though.Therumancer said:Okay, after years of this I think I've finally snapped to some extent.
This kind of thing needs to be stopped, it's not Steampunk. What it is is retro-futurism and that is something entirely differant. Basically you have people creating enviroments and items that seemed like they would have popped out of something like "20,000 Leagues Under The Sea", nothing inherantly wrong with that, but that's just archaic science fiction and what people of the time thought super-tech or futuristic concepts might look like.
At some point the media and general fan community got a hold of "Steampunk" and started to apply it to things where it doesn't belong. It's not about brass, rivets, pipes, and other things. That's just retro future from the 1890s.
Steampunk is supposed to have a punk aestetic to it. 99% of this stuff seems like something a proper victorian gentleman would wind up using if he had the technology (or could invent it). That is not Steampunk.
Steampunk is pretty much what Cyberpunk was in reverse. Cyberpunk pretty much dealt with the future as people from the 1980s alternative music/lifestyles crowd would have made it had they been a dominant cultural force. The idea of things like super-tech body modification that was both practical and made a lifestyle statement. Of course then retards got ahold of the idea, didn't understand it, and next thing you know you had movies like "The Matrix" claiming that it was "Cyberpunk" when characters like Neo and such pretty much represented exactly what Punk was not. Only one member of his entorage seemed to even have the look down remotely. Basically if your trying to keep a low profile, and do the "cool, resistance from within" thing your not punk. In fact the heroes in that looked like the bad guys (who were sort of cool in their own right), and only got any kind of rebel cred because they made the "Agents" even more conservative looking... Lol.
At any rate Steampunk is the idea of taking Punk fashion and sensibility and applying it retroactively to a lower level of technology, in this case the age of steam of course. The idea being like taking a bit of modern engineering to one of the older steampowered cars to create say a lowrider with flames down the side and spinners. Or taking Victorian fashion, adding in leather, studs, hair dye, and things like mirror shade monocles.
Some dude walking by with dark purple hair hanging forward over his eyes, a leopard skin tophat and frock coat, a swatch pocket watch, and a mirror shade monocle is Steampunk. If that doesn't sound especially cool... well consider it's going on 30 years since the height of punk fashion.
When it comes to what a Steampunk enviroment would look like, well it does cross over into retro-future mad science and such for the purposes of story. But still your looking at a sensibility where even a "normal" enviroment should be fairly discordant, where the materials are similar, but thrown together like some art-punk melted and riveted a bunch of metal together in a fashion that somehow remains functional despite all common sense. You should be looking around and seeing a lot of disjointed angles and decorative shapes being design in a fashion that is counter intuitive.
Interestingly this is one of the reasons why Steampunk has crossed over into horror in the past because some of the same artstyles are similar to how Lovecraftian sorcerors did things like build without any right angles specifically to prevent creatures from coming through based on geometry.
Don't get me wrong, retro-futurism is fine, but for some reason the buzzword just suddenly bugged me. Sort of like how when Cyberpunk somehow hit the common vernacular it was being used everywhere (and still is to an extent) and used to describe people who are about as Punk as the Pope.
I love steampunk. I think that this is the coolest thing in the whole entire world. When I'm rich and famous, I'm going to have my entire house turned steampunk like this. Words cannot describe how amazing this is...
I wasn't very impressed by the house. It's too open and clean to feel like steampunk. To me, I see Steampunk's charm is that it's clustraphobic, gritty, dirty, and spilling all over the place (spontanious). But they've made it look more like an art gallery than a home.
This looks awesome, but really, really expensive, doesn't mean I don't want to live there though.
It's a double-edged sword that Steampunk doesn't have one or two definitive sources for definition. If you want to be a Jedi or Klingon at a sci-fi convention, each come from a specific series of stories. With Steampunk, there's more room for creativity and self-expression. Without those definitive sources, the community will gradually settle upon general themes. Considering how new interest in Steampunk is, there's a lot of room for variety at the moment.Therumancer said:
Two months ago at Steam Con in Seattle, 1,300 steamrats convened and no one was dressed exactly alike, unless it was intentional. I did not see anyone at the con dressed as you described, although at our recent Exhibition Ball there was a fashionable fellow in a leopard-print fez.
It seems rather pretentious to devise your own definition of an aesthetic that excludes the majority of those participating, but I'll be on the lookout for your steampunks at the next con.
http://www.flickr.com/groups/steamcon/
http://steampunkexhibitionball.com/
laserwulf said:
My point is this, how much Punk is involved?
Unless it has a serious 1980s fashion vibe then it's not really Steampunk.
It doesn't derive from one paticular story or "shared world" like Star Wars or Star Trek, but it does derive from a very specific era of fashion and expression.
As I pointed out, most of the people who claim to be "Steampunk" are simply retro-futurists. Nothing inherantly wrong with that. "Steampunk" is a more popular buzzword however and used in places where it's not appropriate.
I'm confused, are you upset that people are misusing the term, or are you upset because the term is wrong?Therumancer said:
I'm not always the clearest in discussion.nilcypher said:
I am "upset" because people are referring to things as Steampunk that are not Steampunk. Steampunk being a very specific style of retrofuturism, and in general anything that involves retrofuturism from the 1890s or early 1900s is generally being called Steampunk when it's not.
The problem being that true steampunk is actually retro-retro futurism nowadays. Basically 1890s retrofuturism as viewed through the lense of the 1980s punk culture. So basically in doing "Steampunk", you pretty much need to insert the conventions and fashion of the 1980s alternative crowd.
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Let me put things into a differant perspective, with a similar "issue". Cyberpunk is pretty much the flipside of Steampunk (and was more popular by far) being the future as envisioned by the 1980s counter-culture. Without the 80s influance most things being labeled as Cyberpunk are simply "Dark Future".
One of the key elements being that when doing a "Dark Future" setting nowadays a lot of the technology and such used is an extension of what we have now, as opposed to what people thought would be an extension of technology in the 1980s. Sort of like how back when it came out (before the 1980s) Captain Kirk's communicator was a miracle of far future miniturization, and yet nowadays it's a joke compared to a modern cellphone. Cyberpunk would involve similar types of issues, with the technology being "WTF" like compared to how technology actually advanced.
Indeed I'd argue that both Steampunk and Cyberpunk were dead by the time they came into the common vernacular because people more or less lost the abillity to think the way they did in the 1980s due to the way tech actually advanced.
A counter arguement could be made that language evolves, and the meaning changed due to common usage even if it was incorrect, however in this case I don't think that's valid because your dealing with a referance to a specific movement rather than a general descriptive term.
That's long, hopefully it clarified things, but it probably didn't.