how the... are there 56 guests online?

[Andrew_TSKS]

lol steampunk

The steampunk wikipedia entry (and in particular the hilarious "subculture" section) might be my second favorite example of "dude frontin' and saying THERE'S A MOVEMENT IN THE STREETS PEOPLE" when the whole thing is clearly something he alone has conjured and is simply utilizing mass communication means to imply it's something much, much bigger*.  Funny stuff.

But yeah you can't go wrong recommending Mieville, and I guess it falls loosely under what qualifies as "steampunk" (steampunk consisting mostly of a bunch of saps arbitrarily applying that term to whatever they feel loosely fits a set of hopelessly subjective aesthetic criteria)

When my boss got here I talked to her about it a bit and we both were looking at the wiki entry for steampunk and specifically the sub article "List of steampunk works". Both of us felt like it was an attempt by people who wanted to believe that this genre exists to shoehorn anything that remotely resembles such a concept into said concept just to make it seem like there's more of an actual foundation for the concept than there is. I saw a bunch of stuff on the list that seemed to me to be legit steampunk writing but it was greatly outnumbered by the stuff that made no sense. Gormenghast? Joe Lansdale? Thomas Pynchon? What?

[citrus]

any actual literary associations i had with the word steampunk have been completely destroyed by cory doctorow. if i hear about one more random gadget with brass and gears on it...

ok i actually want some brass and leather aviator goggles though for running about in the fog looking for my airship so i'm a hypocrite but still

[Andrew_TSKS]

Thank God I don't pay attention to BoingBoing. It seems like so many cool people I know have had really cool things ruined for them by the fact that BoingBoing likes them and most of the people who read/post to BoingBoing are totally lame. I'd hate to have cool shit ruined for me by stupid people. I guess that's also why I don't read Pitchfork.

[YojimboMonkey]

I check BoingBoing about once a week, maybe a little less often than that these days, and I usually find some cool link that I haven't seen before and I move along.  I think the suck factor of BoingBoing comes into play when you start obsessively hitting refresh and posting comments and generally involving yourself with the mass of Doctorow sycophants and generally giving a shit what they think.

[citrus]

Yeah, I have never read the comments at all...but there is definitely enough good content there to keep me coming back. mixed in with the annoying self-promotion and aforementioned ruining of cool things, of course.

[girl]

So, right now it's me, two ninjas and 63 guests. I can only assume that everyone else is watching the Olympics.

I sure wasn't. I'm at work. Depending on exactly when you posted this, I was either working on a blog entry about U2's album "October" or having a 20-minute conversation with a dude who came in asking me about steampunk

So but yeah, that's what I was doing.

And when I posted that, I actually was watching the Olypmics. Volleyball, fencing, cycling or rowing--I'm not quite sure what was on at the time. Then I went to work, and now I'm home watching the Olympics again.

[Anne the Man]

Me, two ninjas and 71 guests.

I always get slightly nervous when this happens, like SOMETHING DRAMATIC will happen. Like they're going to suddenly flood in and start LOLing on my ass or something.