I’m not sure how many of you are aware of a movement called “steampunk.” It is a fascinating sub-culture where Victorian times and sensibilities meet with mechanics and the fantastical world of authors like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.  It is all about levers and gears and big clunky robots.  Fans cosplay in big dresses and tiny hats with gauntlets holding seemingly anachronistic gadgets while the men proudly display goggles and ray guns over their pantaloons.  Personally, I love it!  LOVE IT!  The fiction, the look, the recall to a time of simplicity where the promise of science still engaged our hearts as well as our minds.  Just wait till you see my Steampunk Sweetums costume at Comic Con!

There was a time when steampunk wasn’t too far from reality.

 Back when machines made sense.  You could look into the belly of anything mechanical and literally see how it worked.  Here’s the gear that turns this other gear and this pulley does this and now we have a spinning wheel or what have you.  Technology was science.

Take our good friend the television set for example.  It was big and lumbering, requiring large bribes of beer to get your friends to help you move it.  But inside, it made sense.  You could understand why it was so big, so heavy.  There was science inside!  You had tubes and magnets and wires and dials on the front.  Why look at that cathode ray tube glow!  Isn’t it magnificent? But careful. If you break it, all kinds of crazy photons and poison gases will come out and eat your brain!  Science! Ahh!

But in today’s world of high tech, we have moved away from the science and been asked to have faith in our machines.  Tech has turned into religion.  The most extreme example of this has to be the iPad.  Have you seen one, actually seen one, in person? Held it in your hands, felt the “weight” of it?  It’s a short stack of paper!!  There are no moving parts, no discernible access hatch to stick my head into and spy on the mechanisms!  And yet, I can watch television shows and movies upon it.  I can read countless novels and speak to friends around the globe.  If the iPad existed 200 years ago, it would’ve been pronounced a witch and dumped in a tub of water.

And what about the more traditional TV’s in our living rooms.  Mine is twice as big as my last tube set and I can carry it all by myself.  What?!  Why is this thing so thin?  At least my sister’s TV has some weird alien plasma gas inside of it, but mine is LCD. Is that some sort of compulsive disorder?  Does my TV need a therapist now?  Why are there no screws on the back?!  I want some phillips head screws. I must be able to get inside in case of emergency!  Oh my God it is hanging on the wall!!  WITCH!!! WITCH!!!

Of course, the truth is TV sets, like virtually everything else from stereos to refrigerators, have gotten exponentially more technical over the years and less mechanical.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t miss half my living room being occupied by my television, but there was a comfort in knowing science was sitting there watching Silk Stalkings with me.  Modern TV’s are advanced, too advanced to even warrant us pondering their workings any longer.  Leave that to those lab coats wearing “science priests.”  All we have to do is have complete faith and press the buttons on the remotes.  Wait, where did my buttons go on my remote?!!