Steampunk

I've always loved the steampunk genre, ever since I read three H. G. Wells novels in less than a week for a late school project (I got an A-minus. Shiny). For those unaware, it began as a literary genre exploring what the world might have been if technological development stopped at the Industrial Revolution in the late 19th century, hence the name. Everything would still be powered by steam engine. There are those, however, who believe it should be more than a genre. It should be an entire culture, with it's own fashion, language and social groups. It stems from a love of the antiquity of artifacts from that era. As an example, trains, when invented, were messy, inefficient behemoths. As they progressed technologically, they became works of art, with gilded inlays and mother-of-pearl... things on them. In our generation, technology skipped that Golden Age. I'm paraphrasing from another source that I can't now find, but computers went from "buzzing beige cubes to buzzing shiny cubes". Steampunk is an attempt to recapture the non-existent antique past of modern technology. Here's more from my personal hero, Datamancer:

If you'd like to know more about steampunk, try Brass Goggles. It's a wonderful blog (shown briefly in the video) about the subculture, and has dozens of links.

By the way, if you've seen either "The Wild Wild West" or "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen", I would like to say that though the technology is exemplary of steampunk, the plot and acting of both have nothing to do with us.