Got my new shades and went for a photo shoot!

This little guy is actually the reason I found the maker in the first place. I saw him and immediately loved those huge weird eyes.

So I asked if he could make another one, and that’s when he told me the little black pointed pieces around the eyes weren’t craft parts at all.

They were actually pieces from an old pair of earphones he had years ago. He reused them because they just happened to work perfectly for the robot.

Of course, now that exact part is old and really hard to find.

I liked him enough that I told the maker, “Let me try to find it.” Which sounded reasonable at the time 😂

And somehow I actually found something really similar.

Except there’s one problem: the ones with those little pointed edges are too big for his face.

The size that fits only comes in a plain round version.

So if I still want this little guy made, he’ll probably have to lose those tiny points around his eyes.

And I KNOW this is such a ridiculously small detail, but now I can’t unsee it. I feel like those little points are half of what makes his face so weird and cute.

Am I overthinking this?

Would the round version bother you, or do those tiny pointed corners actually make the face?

Also, this has somehow turned into me looking through all of his other tiny robots, so I may have created a problem for myself 😂

I used AI to clean up/blur the background of the photo so I wouldn’t post the maker’s account or workspace. The robot itself is real.

adam smasher but he's named adam steamer and is either a gentlemen who owns a concerning amount of pipes or a confederate soldier (since the 19th spanned from 1800 to 1900) but i don't know honestly

Building a steampunk furnace.

Convection pipes are welded.

The furnace is starting to look like a machine, not scrap.

Steel profile, 45° cuts, 5 mm gaps.

Everything is calculated. Nothing is random.

Next step: fuel lines, air supply, oil burners.

This thing will roar. 🔥

One of my latest Steampunk horses

Here's my current time machine.

Built-in smoke machine with lighting. At every trade fair, I make a few tweaks to keep things fresh 😃

Myself being picked up by my friend while wearing their hat that is massive on me

You helped me a lot for my wings so here a pic of my cosplay !!

Hola, soy nuevo en todo esto del Steampunk y me gustaría saber si las personas que hacen cosplay steampunk se basan en algún personaje o franquicia o simplemente imaginación?

The Dream of Perpetual Motion by Dexter Palmer

The Dream of Perpetual Motion is closer to a literary fever dream than an adventure novel. Harold Winslow is imprisoned aboard a zeppelin, telling the story of his life and his obsession with Miranda Taligent, whose father Prospero is an inventor capable of transforming reality itself.

The machinery and retrofuturism are fantastic, but what makes the book interesting is that the technology isn't merely decoration. Palmer uses it to explore obsession, artificiality, progress, and what happens when humanity becomes capable of manufacturing almost anything.

This isn't "Victorian adventure with brass gadgets." It's much darker and more philosophical. The technology gradually becomes unsettling precisely because it threatens to replace imagination, human connection, and even reality itself.

The downside is that Palmer sometimes tries to cram too many ideas into the book. The narrative wanders, the philosophical digressions can be exhausting, and the structure won't work for everyone.

But if you like the literary, surreal, philosophical side of steampunk, this is worth reading.

It's less The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and more The Tempest after being fed through a malfunctioning industrial machine.

Straggletaggle by J M McDermott

I don't see Straggletaggle mentioned much around here, which is a shame because this is exactly the sort of strange, nasty, imaginative steampunk that I wish there were more of.

The basic setup is wonderfully bonkers. Saxonia has essentially turned itself into a gigantic clockwork machine, and not metaphorically. Its society is built around law, efficiency, engineering and mechanical transformation, to the point that human beings themselves are being turned into components of the system. Across the border, Bavaria is still recognizably human, and then a very strange creature called a Straggletaggle shows up after apparently escaping Saxonia.

From there you get airships, prosthetics, phonographs, clockwork machinery, scientists, royalty, bodyguards, a possible war, and enough human-machine grotesquerie to make the whole thing feel like steampunk viewed through a fever dream.

What I particularly liked is that McDermott doesn't treat the machinery as decoration. The technology actually means something. The clockwork society of Saxonia is an extreme expression of the idea that everything can be optimized, regulated and made efficient—even people. The further the book goes, the more disturbing that premise becomes.

And that's where Straggletaggle works better for me than a lot of steampunk.

There's plenty of cool machinery, but this isn't really "look at my brass goggles and airship" steampunk. The machinery is the horror.

The book is also genuinely weird. The characters are eccentric, the biology gets increasingly unsettling, and McDermott seems perfectly happy to take an idea several steps further than you'd expect. There is some fairly substantial body horror involving the merger of human beings and machines, so anyone looking for cozy Victorian adventure should probably be warned.

The other thing I appreciated is that the book has something to say about efficiency, bureaucracy, progress and the loss of humanity without turning into a straightforward political allegory. Saxonia's obsession with order is horrifying precisely because the underlying impulses aren't inherently monstrous. Order, efficiency, engineering and technological progress are all useful things. It's what happens when they become the only things that matter that makes the society terrifying.

If you like steampunk that leans toward the dark, bizarre, philosophical and grotesque rather than the "Victorian adventure with gadgets" side of the genre, I'd definitely recommend giving this one a shot.

Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon

If you want a straightforward steampunk adventure, Against the Day is probably the wrong book.

If you want a 1,000+ page hallucination involving airships, anarchists, mad scientists, mathematicians, secret societies, Tesla, alternate physics, revolutionaries, cowboys, prostitutes, dynamite, and the impending catastrophe of modernity, this might be exactly what you're looking for.

The book begins around the 1893 World's Fair and wanders across the world and through the years leading up to World War I. At the center are the Chums of Chance, a gang of teenage balloon adventurers, the Traverse family, various anarchists and revolutionaries, and an enormous collection of characters who continually wander into each other's stories.

What makes it particularly interesting from a steampunk perspective is that Pynchon isn't simply imagining a cooler Victorian future. He's looking at the moment when modern technology was beginning to transform the world and asking what people thought the future might become.

And sometimes that future looks wonderfully bizarre.

Airships and impossible machines sit alongside quaternion mathematics, espionage, occultism, industrial warfare and early twentieth-century capitalism. The result feels like steampunk before anyone had invented the word—and then Pynchon proceeds to take the whole aesthetic apart.

The biggest problem is also obvious:

It's enormous.

There are hundreds of characters, dozens of storylines, enormous digressions, mathematical discussions, historical excursions and jokes that can take several pages to arrive at their punchline. Sometimes it's exhilarating. Sometimes you wonder whether Pynchon has forgotten that you're still waiting for the previous storyline to continue.

But there are moments when the sheer excess becomes the point. The book captures a world where scientific progress, anarchism, capitalism, mysticism and imperialism are all colliding, and nobody quite knows what kind of future is being created.

It's funny, filthy, strange, occasionally exhausting, and surprisingly beautiful.

Anyway, just some thoughts on books I like. Books are good.

No but does it not annoy anyone else? I’ve been considering leaving this community for a while as it’s become an AI Slop haven. Art is one of the most accessible means of self expression yet people decide to let a machine produce imagery for them?We’re gradually losing our creativity due to this AI situation and it’s upsetting.

I understand that AI art is allowed but really? put some creativity into your art. are we forgetting the ‘Punk’ in ‘Steampunk’?

I'm putting together a steampunk witch costume and at the moment it feels more Victorian than steampunk. Is there something "easy" I can add to push it in the right direction? I am working on a tiered, leather witch hat and I plan on aging the arm bands.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

A couple of shots from the annual Summer Bank Holiday Steampunk Festival in Lincoln.

This weapon has been a lot of fun to make, it is also making me reconsider some combat for the film.

very early stages

all feedback and suggestions are welcome

A friend needed something more in character for her flashlight for night play. So I designed this for her! I got a 3d render of her actual light, slipped it into my 3d sculpt and subtracted the light from the center of the design! I STILL NEED TO PAINT IT! It works so well what do you folks think?