Anyone who is a bit often in my presence probably already heard me talking about it (I tend to not shut up when I'm in some kind of mood), but let me explain anyway.
Steampunk is a retro-future/alternate-history genre. You go back to some time in history (in this case the industrial revolution/Victorian age) and you imagine how the current age would've looked if that style persisted until today. Add in some alchemy, some magic if you would like and build a story upon that.
This is originally very fitting for novels, where Steampunk actually started (Jules Verne is often addressed as the "father" of this genre), but lately also appears in art, fashion and design.
For more info, there's a Wiki on this and Google is still your friend.
Quite recently I got caught again in a sudden burst of appreciation for this and I started looking for more on it. I found a lot of lookalikes but I won't get offended if someone switches some, because the difference sometimes isn't very big. Back to what I found: several Steam-themed websites: Dieselpunks (I'm liking some of the music) and Davenport & Winkleperry among others, but I also found Abney Park, a band that created an entire Steampunk related story around itself and with it also released a novel and a tabletop role-playing game next to their usual music. Let me try and embed another video.
At a certain moment I even found Steampunk themed W40K conversions, but I forgot to bookmark the page and now I can't find it. But still, 2 things that can capture my imagination for a while. Together!
The most interesting part of the entire Steampunk genre is (according to me) the general aesthetics behind it.
For example this. It's a gameboy classic that someone painted in a brass color, glued some cogs and "pipes" on it and called it steampunk. How good some may say it looks, it isn't steampunk enough. If he had removed the casing altogether, organized it in a wooden box and made it look like a "ye olde arcade game" with actual cogs turning on the sides with some retrotronic elements on it I would agree with it being steampunk. Now it's just a golden gameboy with bits glued on it.
The steampunk cellphone does stuff correctly in my opinion. No internet connection, no SMS, no full qwerty keyboard, hell, no keypad at all. Some gauges on a wooden box, punch-cards to dial numbers. Not over the top, aesthetically pleasing, if the Victorians had wireless communication this might have been the "ultralight version" of the busy man.
Anyways, I don't know what else to tell here. If anyone has any more questions: there's a comment section for that...
Let me end with another video, I couldn't resist to not putting this in...
There's been a lot of attention to it some time ago: Illegal downloading.
Lots of protests against SOPA and PIPA (what was ACTA again?), lots of lobbying to get it through anyway... Why?
Yes, I do download.
And some of those downloads aren't the most legal content.
But I must say: sometimes I want to play a game that's long gone from the stores (Homeworld, Descent: Freespace, ...) and knowing the original creators already got involved in bigger stuff, stopped caring about their first spawns or maybe just don't exist anymore I'd think they wouldn't mind that I enjoy their stuff and praise it without actually buying the game.
It's not that I refuse to buy the game... I'd buy it if I had the money. After all it's easier to do so than waiting for a few-Gig-file to download, installing the software, running activation blockers, or finding the folder the game got installed in to replace some files with cracked (and possibly virused) files. I'd rather insert the disk, let it run and play right away, while being assured of a decent support center when something goes askew...
Not to mention the (mostly) broken multiplayer you get with an illegal copy, which sometimes is basically the other half of the fun.
On the other hand, some software just is a tad bit expensive. Buying Adobe Creative Suit 4 as a requirement for your studies, using it for a year and then having to buy CS5 the year after was really an attack on my bank account...
But I still don't get why Big Companies are playing witchhunt on those who extend their software's user base and increasing potential buyers. After all, if it wasn't for illegal downloads I would've never thought of getting a Steam account where Valve could dangle some 5$ games in front of me, making it very attractive to buy more...
And what the hell happened to demo-versions? The only things you sometimes see when a game gets promoted are pre-rendered trailers and you basically have to rely on your computer to be strong enough to handle the software you've just bought...
For example: I (being a total hardware noob) am considering buying Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (purely hypothetically speaking). There is absolutely no way to test if my computer can handle the game or not, I have to rely on my own knowledge (very little) and the info given under "Minimal System Requirements" (note: unexistant on the main website) to understand whether my 5 year old laptop would survive it when I install such a thing. What do all those numbers and letters mean? I tend to figure it out, but I can imagine a lot of people who wouldn't know where to start...
A demo would be nice in those situations to see if your system is willing to handle all that violence and to see if the game is what you expect/want/like it to be. That's mostly what I use cracked games for: to see if my computer would run it may I want a good multiplayer.
(a small remark on MW3: Don't think I'll ever buy the game. The best military shooter has been made already (CounterStrike), now I would like a shooter with more challenge/imagination/creativity (Half Life 3 would be nice))
Anyways, I'm glad there are other approaches. For example (you may have wondered why I waited so long to bring this one up) Notch, creator of Minecraft has tweeted that he's pretty fine with someone pirating the game. "It's a minor offense in the scale of things". Sure, it's quite illegal, but in comparison to the number of people that actually bought it there isn't much reason to worry. Especially knowing Notch is currently a millionaire by making a (relatively) cheap but more than awesome game from scratch and with a completely new/original idea (something we don't see that much lately).
Especially knowing this I don't quite get why the Big Companies keep hammering on "their intellectual property" and how no-one else should have the right to do anything alike except for themselves. Want some more info on what copyright has currently come to? CGPGrey did a very nice instructional video explaining what the current laws are capable of doing.
(Ahh, the joy of successfully embedding videos in you own page)
This post is goining on longer than I originally intended.
Let me wrap this up...
I do download different stuff.
I don't like Big Companies with a lot more digits of income limiting us in distributing/recreating stuff they made.
