More fun with youtube

So I made another video. It's not exactly steampunk, but it is from 1906 (apparently). Someone stood on the front of a streetcar going down Market Street in San Francisco, and they filmed everything that went by. It's pretty crazy, particularly the lack of traffic laws.

There are a lot of videos that use this film, and also this one, which I like a lot, that juxtaposes the same film with one taken perhaps two weeks later, after the devastating earthquake. The speed in these videos seems to be the speed at which the film was digitized, and I think it looks eerily slow.

Not mine though. I sped it up to the right speed - as we all know, people walked about 25 percent faster back then. It's how the West was won, people! Or it could have had something to do with undercranking the camera and then playing it back at normal speed. Anyway, it's way funnier if you speed it up, and of course, pair it Vernian Process's incomparable version of the Maple Leaf Rag. I picked an arbitrary speed for the video, which then ended up shorter than the song, so I added some remixy parts to fit the music better.

What you end up with is a Where's Waldo of chaos and insanity. As you watch, try to spot the following:

• 2, possibly 3, newspaper boys
• 1 newspaper man
  
• 2 men nearly getting run over
• 2 women nearly getting run over (at the same time)
• 2 horse-drawn wagons nearly getting run over
• a car driving the wrong way
• a horse galloping very fast
• a wagon going the wrong way
• 4 cars cutting off the streetcar
• a guy in an apron chasing another guy in an apron
• 2 guys hanging onto a car
• a wagon with a skinny horse cutting off a car, and a streetcar

Let me know if I have miscounted, or missed any other funny things.

My heart exploded, I squealed, I fell over, and this is awesome!

Then I came back to life to post this:

It's the latest set in their series of collectible pins that appear in all the shops at Disneyland. There's more info here.

Now, there are two big, glaring problems here. No, it's not that big bad corporate Disney is commercializing Steampunk (get a haircut, hippie). No. Worse. Where the heck is Launchpad?!? And have they never heard of the Disney Afternoon?

Oh well. As I'll be in Disneyland in a week and a half, I may have to look for some of these, since they're awesome. Aviatrix Daisy and Sheriff Goofy are particularly cute, but I'm once again reminded of how uncomfortable it must be for a duck to wear heels... I wonder if any of them hung out with Scrooge and Goldie in the Yukon during the gold rush.

Railroad Day!

Today I went to the Silver Spike Festival in Tucson, which commemorates the 130th anniversary of the railroad coming through Tucson, Arizona. The mayor, in proper mayor attire, seen here to the right of the lady in the white dress (just his top hat, really, but that's what I mean by "proper mayor attire"), proclaimed March 20th "Railroad Day" in Tucson, and there will be festivities every year from now on.

This is good news, because it was a really fun day. They put bunting on the train, which was restored and presented to the city in 1955, in honor of the 75th anniversary of the railroad. When I rule the world, all occasions of civic pride will have bunting.

The great grandson of Estevan Ochoa, an entrepreneur who presented the railroad with a silver spike in 1880, gave a speech, and it included part of Estevan's original words. He said "we must bend our shoulders to the oars of progress, and... become the shining star in the constellation of the United States". The actual silver spike is in the case in front of the train.

They read a lot of the speeches from back then, when people really had a way with words, remarking on how the iron horse, "with pounding, steel-flocked flanks" had linked Tucson with the civilized world, and how men "with their pluck, courage, and capital, brought the iron wheels of progress" etc etc. There were gunfights, and a cannon (fired quite unexpectedly by guys dressed like they were from the old Presidio in 1775), and tons of people in western outfits! Some of the dresses were really amazing, as were the hats:

There were a few steampunk people in the mix, as well - one of them gave me his card (I was dressed steampunk enough to stand out, I guess). Here are some more cool outfits, and a statue of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday, commemorating the time they killed Frank Stilwell in a gunfight at the train station in Tucson, in March of 1882. It was part of the Arizona War, which began with the famous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Stilwell may have killed Morgan Earp.

Mysteriously Steampunk Old Cartoons!

So I was looking up "Come Take a Trip in My Airship" on youtube, because it's an awesome song, and a picture on deviantArt reminded me of it. It was a popular song in 1904, and it's a very cute love song. I found a few videos of a singer named Billy Murray singing it on old phonographs (odd, because the song is from a girl's point of view), and I also stumbled upon this cartoon.

There's this one too, which has the whole song with the lyrics, and is on acid. At 2:48, the adorableness begins, but the whole cartoon is pretty awesome. I like that the second cartoon has it as a duet. Johnny Cash sang it too, but not all the verses. Who would have been a good singer to sing the woman's part with Johnny Cash?

Here's another video using the song, with some really great old airship clips!

Steampunk Quiz

I made this a while ago, and stuck it on the bottom of my blog, but the link is broken now. It never worked that great anyway. So here is the real link to my steampunk quiz. Put your results in the comments!

Some awesome planes!

Does anyone else think this thing looks like something out of a Miyazaki movie? It's the fe2b, a pusher fighter from WWI, that, despite its looks, was apparently pretty deadly and sturdy. In fact, Max Immelmann may have been killed by one, and the Red Baron had to make a forced landing after being shot by Donald Cunnel from a fee. It may have looked like this - that's the kind of plane the Red Baron was flying that day:

That was in 1916 and 17, when they had synchronizer gears, and didn't even need pushers anymore. See, the idea was, you could fire backwards and forwards, without shooting through the propeller, since it was behind you.

There were hazards though - the gunner was not strapped in in any way, and actually had to stand on their seat and shoot the rear the gun! And if you crashed, you had the engine come down on top of you. Also, the tail section was very delicate, compared to a normal fuselage.

I think they're cool though. Here's one that I drew, but I moved the guns, just because. Actually, it was going to be part of a different illustration.