New Kindle Vella: SHE IS A DUCAL MODEL IN A ZOMBIE-LURKING GOTHICK WORLD.

My wife gave me the idea for that title. Moe, she says, Moe. If you must do this, go with Gilbert and Sullivan*. In fairness, I told her I was looking for a bad pun.

Anyway, the first three (and free!) episodes of SHE IS A DUCAL MODEL IN A ZOMBIE-LURKING GOTHICK WORLD** is now live, after many an annoying adventure along the way yesterday night. The rest will hopefully load today.

And check out that cover! Made using only the finest paint.net pixels. Artisanal, those are.

*I am paraphrasing. Perhaps unfairly.

**Formerly THE DEFENSE OF CASTLE WINDERMERE, which would have been a fine title except that a) the party was only briefly at Castle Windermere and b) was never actually shown defending it.

#commissionearned

Yes, I have heard of the Palin Steampunk comic.

I suspect that the author of the review is just a touch offended at the choice of villain (Dude.  Spoilers!), but the man does have a point about the pinups.  That’s a bit… freaky, really.

Still: the thought of Palin, Obama, and McCain as a steam-cyborg hero team against a worldwide conspiracy?

That’s just cute.

Moe Lane

PS: Out of curiosity, when did the romance genre start mining steampunk, fantasy, science fiction, and – most relentlessly – horror?

And now, a very cool Nerf Steampunk gun.

As near as I can tell, there was almost no structural modifications done here:

The artist obviously painted the toy, but if you look at the original (the Nerf N-Strike Maverick Blaster) closely there’s actually a lot of steampunk-friendly detail there already. Even the nameplate is actually in the original; the paint job merely makes it obvious. It makes you wonder why Nerf didn’t simply produce this beauty in brass and brown rather than yellow and gunmetal in the first place…

How to tell if you’d be into Steampunk.

Well, presuming that you like women, that is.

Anyway, if you look at this:

steamuhura

…and your response is Yowza, congratulations: you’ll probably be into Steampunk. I suggest that you start with The Difference Engine, The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and go on from there.

Via Nodwick.

Corpse-feeding military robots.

What could possibly go wrong with this? (via @allahpundit)

A Maryland company under contract to the Pentagon is working on a steam-powered robot that would fuel itself by gobbling up whatever organic material it can find — grass, wood, old furniture, even dead bodies.

Robotic Technology Inc.’s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot — that’s right, “EATR” — “can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically-based energy sources), as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable,” reads the company’s Web site.

That “biomass” and “other organically-based energy sources” wouldn’t necessarily be limited to plant material — animal and human corpses contain plenty of energy, and they’d be plentiful in a war zone.

Wait. Steam-powered?

OK, that upgrades it slightly from Disturbing to Disturbing, Yet Slightly Awesome. Something like that would make the retro-future so actinically bright, you’d have to wear goggles.

DVICE is having a “Steampunk Cylon” contest…

they think that people can come up with something better than what they did:

steampunk_cylon_contest-thumb-425x727

…which may not be the easiest thing in the world, actually. More here and here, with added picture goodness.

Personally, I think that the BSG 1.0 Cylons were closer to the entire steampunk aesthetic than the BSG 2.0 ones – although in 1978 I wouldn’t have said so, being both: a, eight; and b, utterly ignorant that Powers, Blaycock, & Jeter were going to invent the steampunk genre a decade later.

If you’re looking for a handy resource on “dinosaur/prehistoric gaming”…

…and really, who among us is not? – Anyway, I suggest that you check out this post by Yours in a White Wine Sauce!, which appears to be a site that’s all about the VernianWellsianCastle Falkenstein flavor of steampunk.

No, there’s more than one flavor to the genre.  For example, compare the above to, say, The Difference Engine