#professor elemental

[mechadeath]

looking for the single other person in the world that will appreciate this crossover

[mysteryteacup]

Steampunk Primer for D20 Fans

Since apparently there are a fair few people whose introduction to Steampunk was Cloudward, Ho!

Let's start with the basics: Cloho is technically not steampunk. It's Gaslamp Fantasy (the non-scifi twin to Steampunk). The line between the two is very blurry.

With the understanding that these are very basic, beginner-friendly definitions:

Steampunk imagines an alternate history in which the second industrial revolution (yes, there were two: the first industrial revolution was in the 18th century/1700s, the second - the one most people think of when they say industrial revolution in the 19th and 20th centuries. Again, there is some line blurring) advanced technology significantly farther than in reality, with a focus on retrofuturism (which is "a movement in the creative arts emphasizing and harking back to depictions of the future as produced in earlier eras" - i.e. Steampunk is the time between the Second Industrial Revolution and now as the people living through the Second Industrial Revolution might have imagined it).

But the setting is, of course, only half of it. While Steampunk's surge in popularity about ten years ago (urgh) made it very popular to just use the asthetic, the Punk in Steampunk is just as important as the Steam. Punk is an ideological movement, not just a suffix or fashion trend. Generally speaking, punks are politically on the left, being against all forms of bigotry, against animal cruelty, and against the hyper-corporate mainstream culture, while being heavily inclined to mutual aid.(Although, of course, it has been co-opted numerous times by groups that are the opposite of everything it stands for.)

So. Cloho gets this more right than many other Steampunk works, because it is explicitely anti-capitalism, anti-classism, and anti-consumerism.

As for the Steam. I can't believe I need to say this but apparently I do. Steam-powered technology is powered by Coal. Steampunk is always a balance between the Steam "What if the coal based industrial revolution advanced technology further" and the Punk "fucking up the environment with coal is bad, actually". But if you have a Steampunk setting, there will be coal in use to power your cool machines or you have a lot of explaining to do in universe.

Cloho ...has problems with this. We do get mentions of lots of inventions steaming and the Zephyr being coal-powered. But most thinigs seem to just steam randomly with no coal input. Now, this bit is significantly more flexible, so it's not an issue - especially since the biggest offender is Van's prothesis which is actively holding back something magic and putting water under a lot of pressure (thus could make steam without coal). But it is noteable.

...That said. Dear fanfic authors of AO3, for the love of whatever deity you believe in: CLOCKWORK IS A DIFFERENT AND OLDER TECHNOLOGY THAN STEAM POWER. WIND-UP BEINGS LIKE TORSE SHOULD NOT BE VENTING STEAM, BECAUSE THEY ARE CLOCKWORK, NOT STEAM-POWERED. (To be fair, the D20 crew also don't seem to understand that clockwork is powered by kinetic energy manually inserted by winding up when they talk about clockwork automatons, but still.)

Ahem. Pardon. Moving swiftly on.

But I started this with "Cloho is not technically Steampunk" so you're probably wondering: What the Fuck is Gaslamp Fantasy?

Great question!

Gaslamp Fantasy is a term coined by the creators of the webcomic Girl Genius to describe their too-fantasy-to-be-sci-fi work (Kaja Foglio has also said "we have no punk, just the steam"). Girl Genius won the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story three times in a row before the Foglios (the creators) refused to be up for nomination again to prove the category was viably winnable. Yes, it's that good. You can start reading it here if the tagline "Adventure, Romance, Mad Science!" and the premise of "a world where Mad Scientists rule the world ...badly" sound fun to you.

Now, Steampunk and Gaslamp tend to lean towards Victorian England (with the Wild West - which existed at the same time - as a close second) for setting, because Victoria's Britain was where the Second Industrial Revolution kicked off, but that is by no means a requirement (the protagonist of Girl Genius - Agatha - for instance, is from alternate history Eastern Europe).

But as a result British and especially English stuff gets mixed in very easily. BTW. "Wet" as British slang means inept or ineffectual or - to use other slang - a bit of a pussy. It also has some political connotations as Thatcher's supporters called their opposition "wets" to the point that the opposition started calling them "dries". It does not mean that someone is actually wet as in covered in water. Yes, I get how Van having the Vanticle could make that confusing.

Naming in Cloho clearly follows - at least in the Confederated Imperial Republic - a very English style. How can I tell? Because the official spelling of one of the main villain's names is Mordecestershire. Not Murdershire. Mordecestershire. A name which makes USAers weep in confusion and every British person on the planet go "yeah that makes sense, that's not unusual, obviously it would be spelled that way". Why is it spelled that way? For the same reason "Wustersure sauce" is actually Worcestershire Sauce. A shire - usually ending up pronounced sure or sheer - is a a traditional term for an administrative division of land in Great Britain. Basically the same as a county. So a Worcestershire is the shire (county) of the City of Worcester. "Cester", meanwhile, means a place was built on the ruins of a Roman (or, in Cloho, Tressian) military settlement or town. This has the same etymological root as the word Castle. The Wor- and Mor- are thus the remnants of the Old English town names. Wor-cester-shire: the county of the original place name built on a Roman ruin.

If you want more advice on British (English!) name spellings vs pronunciations I cannot recommend enough this Steampunk song: Shibboleth. Because, oh yeah, Steampunk is also a musical genre.

Reginald Pikedevant also has a great song about why just putting gears on something does not make it steampunk, and a festive one for those still in the holiday mood.

Other musicians I would recommend include Professor Elemental/Rapscallion and Chums (very silly, very hopeful, and very British - he has a song about tea. just tea), Abney Park (may I recommend Airship Pirates?), The Cog Is Dead (here's a song about factory labour conditions, although the messaging is somewhat ...mixed).

Now. This has gotten a bit long. So I'm going to leave it open to other steampunk fans to leave their own recs in the reblogs.

So I hope that helped.

Go forth, have fun, find a new favourite!

[shadowsatthedoor]

Happy Bandcamp Friday!

The weather is warming, the sun is returning (for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, at least), and if you can believe it, it's Bandcamp Friday once again – the perfect time to get yourself a spooky soundtrack or three, or indeed an album of jazzy hip-hop songs from an audio drama ghost story musical if you're feeling frisky..!

Find the Earworm soundtrack and the SatD music albums here, and if you like the songs and want to check out Earworm in its entirety, that can be found here whenever you want to get it.

Please enjoy, and have a good weekend ♡♡

[krissiefox]

Steampunk Music

Started putting together a Steampunk themed music playlist on youtube!

[daemoninwhiteround2]

if this isn't Maxwell Gotch's theme song I don't know what is

[thescholarofnoimportance]

Help the Shadows at the Door team make a horror musical, starring some of the top talent in the audio drama sphere!

You all know how much I love Mark Nixon and the Shadows at the Door team's adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. I never stop blathering about how much I love it. Watching Mark grow as a showrunner over the course of our acquaintance has been incredible and at the time Dorian Gray came out it represented an incredible undertaking and I was so, SO proud of him (and the rest of the team). And now Mark has set his sights on branching and developing his skills even more by developing a horror musical.

Tumblr.

Tumblr.

You love independent audio drama.

You love horror of the subtle pleasing terrors type.

You love musicals.

(I personally find them weird, but take that to mean this is a rare endorsement)

You like art made by, for, and about LGBTQ+ folks

🙏 Let's make Mark's newest dream, Earworm, come true 🙏

Kickstarter is {HERE}

[erikasandersonactor]

Earworm - a ghostly audio drama musical

The Kickstarter for EARWORM is live!

A ghostly audio drama musical from Shadows at the Door featuring rap, hip hop, jazz and musical theatre, with the voice talents of David Ault, Professor Elemental, Ilana Charnelle, Erika Sanderson, Michelle Kelly, and Mark Nixon, with music by Tom Caruana.

Geoffrey Troughton can’t sleep. Music bleeds through the walls at all hours interrupting his paranormal studies. But something has crawled its way from the other side, a sinister earworm eager to sink its hook into the right host. As Geoffrey’s weary yet curious mind is hoisted into the darkness, will he surface from the shadows? Or will he be cursed to play second fiddle within his own soul? …And who will be next? 

[segemarldoodles]

"energy never dies it just changes shape, which is why this location is sacred, why a field paved with graves is my favorite place"