Go forth and fill your libraries with media.
Seriously, thanks to everyone for being so amazing and patient. You are the reason I love Vox.
I was just told that the Amazon Conduit will be fixed by tomorrow. I will post here as soon as I get word that it's back up and running.
I know this has been frustrating and I am sorry there wasn't more I could do to make it less so. I really appreciate your patience though.
Cheers,
Many thanks to everyone who voted in last week's survey about the future of the Steampunk Librarian. The overwhelming majority told me to keep everything as is, and so it shall be!
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I took this last summer and was a Gadgeteer. Apparently my tastes have changed a bit.
Your result for The Steampunk Style Test...
The Ragamuffin
18% Elegant, 55% Technological, 13% Historical, 48% Adventurous and 60% Playful!

You are the Ragamuffin, the embodiment of steampunk playfulness. Chances are, you approach the genre from a much more casual and lighthearted standpoint than most other fans. To you, there is always an element of play inherent in the genre, and you may very well enjoy fashion as much for the opportunity to dress up as for the style itself. You probably wear goggles as an accessory, and rarely as actual eye-protection. Your outfits are likely to incorporate a lot of brown or cream, and combine large boots, Victorian corsets or vests, aviator caps or bowler hats, and gypsy skirts or slacks, simply because you like them all.
Anyway! Steampunk Month continues over at Tor.com, with all sorts of neat posts and book excerpts. As for books, has anyone read Kage Baker's stories? They look intriguing.
Also intriguing: the web production titled Riese: The Series. The costuming alone looks awesome!
Steampunky websites with fabulous names: Strange Undisciplined Dreams of Great Things and the Electro-Plasmic Hydrocephalic Genre-Fiction Generator 2000.
The artist known as Tin does quite beautiful art with robotic overtones.
And finally, a poster that could serve as the Steampunk Manifesto!
Bad news. As many of you have probably noticed, the Amazon Conduit was not fixed in the last week's release. Unfortunately, there was an undetected bug that is preventing the conduit from working.
We are working on this bug fix and hope to have the Conduit back up and running this week.
I will keep you posted.
Thank you for being so patient.
Blog Action Day is every October 15th, when blogger are asked to post something about a single issue to show our strength and conviction as an online community. It's a great way to feel connected to the greater good, and the participation of so many bloggers to support the world's leading non-profit organizations is something you can do to help, right now. By blogging today, you're supporting some of the world's leading non-profits and sharing your voice for change.
This year's topic is climate change, and we'd love to read your thoughts on the topic. If you participate, leave us a link to your post in the comments, so we know to check out your post!
Go to www.blogactionday.org to learn more, get a badge for your blog showing your participation, and see some ideas for your post on climate change.
Can't wait to read your posts!
~ daisy
We interrupt our regular schedule to ask you, the reader, about...regular schedules. I recently discovered that there are more readers out there than I thought, which is thrilling and surprising and has led to me thinking about what to do in the future with this. Should I move away from Vox? Should I post more often? Should I leave well enough alone?
As a result, I post a poll, where you can weigh in with your (anonymous) opinion!
I was sort of hoping that we would uncover an intricate design in the center of the room, which would be a mysterious coded message to a secret treasure in a faraway land...but, um, there wasn't anything. Still, we are pretty excited about the corners.
Other recent discoveries include the collection of Richard Balzer, who has a treasure trove of objects made before movie cameras, such as thaumatropes, myrioramas, and other optical toys, with flash galleries and tons of information.
Disney is planning a movie titled John Carter of Mars, and the casting has begun. I'm not sure how I feel about this yet. Tentatively optimistic, perhaps?
Steampunk must now be truly mainstream, as it's an actual party theme this season. (Some good ideas in there, regardless!)
More examples of the steampunk mindset infiltrating regular life: The Clockwork Man is one of those "hidden object" games that may or may not be a guilty pleasure when whiling away winter evenings. If you prefer your games to be a bit more action-packed, keep your eyes peeled for The Guns of Icarus -- it was originally scheduled to debut online yesterday, but has been pushed back a bit.
Speaking of guns...dieselpunk, a sibling of steampunk, is growing in popularity and web presence, hooray! It's darker and grittier and more mechanized in general; think 1930s rather than 1890s. The dieselpunks.org website just keeps getting better and better.
Punks and geeks of all sorts may be interested in an iPhone app called The Universe Splitter, which does just what it says. Sort of. (I am not well versed in the world of apps, as my cell phone looks like it's from 1989 and behaves accordingly, but this looks like fun.)
The good people at Tor.com have dedicated October to steampunk, so you should get over there and immerse yourself in some good writing. On the graphic novel side, io9 has a great article on François Schuiten -- his website, although mostly in French, is definitely worth a visit for the art of it all.
A Brooklyn bar named the Way Station is to open soon, and promises to bring steampunk to the neighborhood. They have a page on Facebook listing events and more information; I may check it out when I'm in town next!
More stuff coming out that may interest steampunky types: Boilerplate in book format and Rotor'Scope, a "fiendishly difficult" computer game. And for the retro gamers, take a gander at the Frankencade Machine!
(As a postcript, I will mention that I list steampunk-type events over on the Steampunk Empire as I find them; if you have an event, please feel free to hop over there and list it as well! We're going for a comprehensive calendar!)
