Monday, July 30, 2007

Steampunks at Burningman


Burningman in color infrared
Originally uploaded by ioerror.

Found on flickr, photographic evidence of steampunkery at Burining Man. Given the intense heat in the desert, I don't know if I could handle wearing such attire.

This picture also supports the idea that Pith helmets rock the house.

Thursday, July 26, 2007

Day 300


Day 300 - Focus
Originally uploaded by Drhaggis.

I'm approaching "endgame" of my yearlong photography project. With just a couple more months to go I'm looking forward to the project's completion.

Still upcoming is my trip to Dragoncon, which has lots of photographic opportunities.

I'm not quite sure what project I'll take on when this is done.


Previously on Slashboing

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Cats love the screech of an electric guitar

The new Guitar hero game "Encore: Rocks the 80's" drops today. I have it on order from Amazon.ca, so until it arrives, this will have to suffice:


Previously on Slashboing:

Sunday, July 22, 2007

Thursday, July 19, 2007

Name that emblem


Day 295 - Name that emblem
Originally uploaded by Drhaggis.

I picked up this pin on eBay for a steampunk costume because it looks cool, and the symbology is not readily recognized. Then I thought I should probably know what the pin meant before I starting wearing it.

The left hand side has a coloured enamel bandage wrapped skull, while the right side is an embossed profile of a living man. The bottom has a torch and the letters "EMRB". The pin was made in France, and the auction was French, so I'm presuming that the organization that used this pin was also French.

I have googled the letters "EMRB" and "ERMB" and nothing meaningful has come up.

The question to you is: What is this? What does it represent.?

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Concentric rings mark the earth

There are some interesting concentric rings carved into the ground at the Canadian Forces Base Suffield near Medicine Hat. This "bullseye" is either part of an extensive live fire training system, or the military is communicating with beings from beyond Pluto.

Saturday, July 14, 2007

Steam Wars: A film extravaganza

In the quest for steam, I came across the art site Steamwars.com. A simple site with a collection of art depicting some great steam powered robots of war. Some exiting stuff.


Image © 2007 by Larry Blamire.

Re-reading the site more closely, I realized that the artist Larry Blamire is the writer-director of the indie cult film THE LOST SKELETON OF CADAVRA. He has made a treatment of this and wants to eventually develop it into a full film. Given the unadulterated awesomeness of "The Lost Skeleton," and the brain swimming goodness of steampunk, I really want to see this thing made.

Previously on Slashboing

Summer Movie Trends Continued

As a follow up to my previous post, demonstrating blogosphere chatter of some summer films, I used the BlogPulse trend graphs to chart the buzz that Harry Potter has generated in comparison to the latest Pirates movie.



The first big Harry Potter spike we see on February first is for the announcement of the release date of Book 7: The Deathly Hallows. The HP blip on March 28th indicates the chatter that followed the release of the Book 7 Cover. This is about the same impact the release of the Pirate trailer had the week previous. The blip on May 31st during the Pirates craze shows the impact of the announcement of the Harry Potter themed amusement park. Of course the hockey stick at the end of the graph is the hype machine for the latest film, "The Order of the Phoenix." To contrast this I also graphed the impact of the June release of the new Fantastic Four movie, "The Rise of the Silver Surfer." Ouch.

This shows that the Book related announcements garner almost as much attention as the release of a large summer movie. However the Harry Potter movie experience dwarfs the impact of other summer film releases. Of course this analysis is a completely qualitative investigation, so if you dislike Harry Potter, you are free to dismiss its cultural impact. Or worse, one may manipulate these trends to show the shocking dominance of film media over book media, and popular books like Harry Potter over serious literature. Not that I'm cynical.

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Summer Movie Trends

Using the fantastic trending tools at Blogpulse I charted the instances of "Spiderman," "Pirates," and "Transformers." This is a super tool for both serious analysis, and my non-quantitative figuring. At a glance we can how much relative "buzz" or "ink" each Summer movie has generated. Each big peak is their respective opening night, while the the little ripples afterword show that most posts are made during the week, with big drop-offs on the weekends.

The Transformers bump in mid-May shows the echo in the blogosphere after the release of a trailer.


A casual glance showed that "Pirates of the Caribbean" generated the most buzz of the three films, even allowing for the higher base reading from other non-movie posts about pirates.

Interesting? To me? Yes.

Monday, July 02, 2007

Morse Code vs Text Message

As part of my exploration into the Victorian age for my steampunk ensemble, I inevitably came back to Morse Code. As a Cub Scout I learnt how to "pound brass" and send Morse messages with lights or sounders. I have lost this skill, but I may need it again if I'm to make a proper Airship Captain.

Through this research I found the following video on Youtube, where Morse Code is pitted against the fasted cellphone texter they could find. I won't give away the ending.