Steampunk Con Mixes In More Maker Fun

California has once again been blessed with another steampunk convention, this time to be held in Emeryville, CA on March 12-14 as the "Nova Albion Steampunk Exhibition." This year's event promises to mix in much more of the DIY/maker flavor for a greater hands-on feel. Steampunk has been gaining much broader appeal in recent months with the continued growth of maker communities, and the many delightful varieties of music and literature. The con will feature, among other things, a 2 day track of 2-hour how-to, hands-on, and interactive workshops gear towards makers, DIY-ers, mad scientists, and evil geniuses. Of course, if you are an evil genius you probably don't need a workshop except as a gathering for potential test subjects.

Comments

MAKE sucks

[Gothmolly]

I got MAKE when it first came out, and after the 2nd or 3rd issue, when someone basically shined off the workings of a PID controller as "I don't know how it works but who cares, the $5 chip just works", I threw it into the trash. Science and technology are not 'pop' subjects, despite however many Mythbuster episodes you've seen.

Re:MAKE sucks

[DerekLyons]

And dangit, you want it to *stay* that way so you can feel elitist and justified in telling those kids to get off of your lawn!

Re:MAKE sucks

[Tetsujin]

And dangit, you want it to *stay* that way so you can feel elitist and justified in telling those kids to get off of your lawn!

I don't know - I was just disappointed that a magazine that seemed like such a promising work of applied technology turned out to have such a large incidence of fluff... It's kind of motivated me to check out "Nuts n' Volts" again, though, see if it can do better.

Re:Self-Reflexive

[FooAtWFU]

If you want to make a steampunk-con from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

Re:Damn

[derGoldstein]

Most steampunk is crappy anyway. It's been so every since the steam engines started featuring LEDs. Now it's not really possible to define it, most of it looks like a low-budget sci-fi from the 80's.

Cyberpunk died of "natural causes", it wasn't because it got mainstream -- there was simply too much of it for a span of time and the market got saturated. I miss is though, especially the stuff that was written by people who knew what they were writing about. The hard-science cyberpunk, that was mostly based on things you could, in theory, pull off. Now everything is "cyber-saturated", it's simply not 'exotic' anymore.

(yes, I was born old)