December 10, 2015

I recently bought a personalized engraved brick to support the Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe. The bricks are part of a fund-raising campaign to create a museum and science center on the site of Nikola Tesla’s final laboratory. The original purpose of the laboratory was to create wireless telegraphy and power transmission. The site included a…

September 29, 2015

I have attended numerous sci-fi and steampunk conventions over the years, but this was my first visit to the biggest of them all – Dragon Con.  Over 70,000 people attended the event, which is held throughout a collection of hotels in downtown Atlanta, GA. We had an absolute blast! If ever there was a place…

August 28, 2015

For the last two weeks I have experienced the joys of a major home renovation. My first poor decision was to refinish the hardwood floors and remodel the master bathroom at the same time. Did you spot the error in my strategy? Needless to say, refinishing the floors before starting the bathroom renovation would have made a…

June 1, 2015

I recently attended The Steampunk World’s Fair in Piscataway, New Jersey. The Fair is the world’s largest steampunk event. It’s a very friendly convention. Everyone who attends loves some aspect of the Victorian aesthetic and is genuinely thrilled to meet others of the same mindset. The Fair is a celebration of creativity. There are fantastic…

May 14, 2015

Yesterday I survived the virtual Hunger Games/Battle Royale/Thunderdome process of buying convention tickets for the 2015 New York Comic Con. I was one of the lucky 141,000 people who managed to secure tickets after sitting through hours of website crashes. Per the NYCC website, “When the ticket queue opened at noon, there were already more…

April 28, 2015

“We (Pip Ballantine and Tee Morris) have been writing Steampunk since 2009; and even after five years, we still face the question of the ages: What is steampunk? Perhaps a lazy, shallow way to look at the genre is to simply call it “Victorian Science Fiction” and that be the end of it. Truth be…