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.
