Introduce yourself (Mk. III)

[J. Wilhelm]

Hullo everyone,

I'm a general science fiction fan who's joining the community forum to learn more about steampunk. I grew up in the shadow of Manchester's dark satanic mills, tramped around Great Britain as an antiquarian (i.e., "archaeologist"), and moved to Emperor Norton's California, before finally settling in New Jersey. It was in New Jersey, that I attended one my first steampunk convention—one of the COGS Steampunk Expositions (a gaming-centric one).

My curiosity about steampunk is driven by several adjacent or near-adjacent enthusiasms, including:

• games, whether tabletop role-playing games, miniature war games, board games, or play-by-(electronic)-mail games,
• fanzines (I edit—well, write—a general SF analogue games 'zine titled Back to the Spaceport),
• scientific romances,
• Mr. Bryan Talbot's Luther Arkwright and Mr. Michael Moorcock's Oswald Bastable,
• psychogeography and hauntology (especially utopian futures that never happened).

Finally, I have a (slowly) developing interest in eco-marxism and William Morris's dream visions which I hope steampunks will not find too distressing.

Sincerely,

Welcome to the forum Mr. Harsldson! Feel free to post, and don't forget we have a Historical section for those personalities from yesteryear, A Metaphysical section for all the theoretical discussion, and a Textual section should you engage in fiction writing.  There's a couple of Esoteric Meta-Clubs in a child section of Metaphysical that may need dusting off, but they're still there.

One thing though, we are strictly an apolitical forum. And finally, you'll find that we are strong on aesthetic movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

I remain at your service

Adm. J. Wilhelm.

[David Vivian Haraldson]

Thank you for the warm welcome, Adm. Wilhelm--and for the helpful clarifications. All greatly appreciated.

[Ernst Frutphlinguhr]

Greetings to you, my Lords, Ladies and Distinguished Personages of Other Designations. Permit me to introduce myself. My name is Ernst Joachim Frütphlïnguhr and I am a scientist (principally of biology, but with an interest in Aetheric Physics and certain branches of organic chemistry), irrespective of the less savoury sobriquets that have been assigned to me by lesser minds. I am quite sure you have at least some familiarity with them. The Beast of Berindu, the Maniac of Mukacheve and the Monster of Marston Bigot. Yes, I am familiar with those and sundry others. What I trust is apparent to you is that these events and similar unpleasantnesses are the exception, not the rule. You only hear of my exploits, outside of refined academic circles, when those heroic do-gooders and their assorted hangers-on turn up to disrupt my perfectly reasonable experiments. As may then be expected, certain disasters are more or less bound to occur. I freely admit, in the spirit of openness to which I have signed, that the incident in Jalová was entirely my own fault, and I am pleased to learn that most of the valley returned to habitability within two years; although I am given to understand that the locals now lock their doors at night and burn their dead.

Until October 1886 I held tenure at the Ostoba és Veszélyes Gyakorlati Tudományok Akadémiája Kárpátalján, or for my English speaking readers, the Transcarpathian Academy of Ill-Advisedly Applied Sciences, as the Chair of Applied Kakóology. However, after the blundering idiots of the Ethics Committee¹ decided to investigate the hybridisation process that I had developed in, might I say, mid-experiment and the resultant release of a pack of honey badger-cassowaries² with their eidolonic fields still in morphic flux, I was called to order. Or at least I would have been if not for the tragic misunderstanding with the splendid chaps of the High Energy Aether team, now deceased³, that lead to the creation of the lovely new geological park and lake east of Synevyrs'ka Polyana. This explosion, which I am pleased to report was heard as far away as Uzhhorod and Stryi, was apparently the last straw and I found myself stripped of my Seat⁴ and expelled from the Academy. To be honest, I do not fully understand the seriousness of the problem. Within two days a matter copy had been assembled of the Academy itself, lifted from a nearby partial parallel that we had initiated for just this type of event. There was some muttering about unethical animal experimentation and a jaw-droppingly cavalier attitude to workplace safety, or so I'm told, but since the evidence was now safely lost in the functionally infinite parallel realms, I felt that it didn't really matter.

I did, however, find myself without board and lodgings and my stipend for some tediously bureacratic reasons, so I was forced to seek my sustenance elsewhere whilst the last wrinkles were ironed out.

A brief career as an itinerant doctor came to an abrupt halt when agents of Her Imperial Britannic Majesty's government found me in Strasbourg, eager to ask me pointed questions about the Marston Bigot affair. To cut a long story short, I was given the offer of joining the active arm of the British Imperial Expeditionary Force or discovering the joys of the gulags. Two airships, one train ride and a secret court hearing later and I found myself paired with Lady Emeline Mausbracket and whisked off on my first out of context adventure. That was nearly a decade ago.

I am now three years beyond my initial term of service and parole, but I have come to realise that the war we fight is bigger than my pride. We cannot lose this, the stakes have never been higher.

Cogsworth Hall, October 15th 1897

______________________________

¹  A recent visit to another Earth introduced me to the remarkable word, "Cockwomble", defined as a useless bumbling idiot. Never has a word so accurately captured the members of the Ethics Committee.

²  Unusually for me, this was a comission rather than pure research. No, I am still not at liberty to identify the client.

³  For a suitably vague definition of that word. I understand that it has recently become the fashion to descibe their status as, "Discorporated, banished or otherwise presumed absent for the conceivable future".

⁴  Interestingly, owing to the loss of records resultant from the event, although I was stripped of my seat, I still technically hold tenure, if only because without the original certificate bestowing the position, it is apparently bureaucratically impossible to revoke it. What a fascinating world we live in!

[von Corax]

Welcome aboard, Prof. Frütphlïnguhr, and my condolences to a fellow victim of the Ethics Committee, bane of Doctoral candidates everywhere.

[RJBowman]

I don't think I ever submitted an intro. Since the board has completed migration, I guess this is a good time.

I'm Robert Bowman from Monroe, Michigan, a town on Lake Erie where General Custer was born. I co-own a comic shop and handle the mail order portion of the operation. Since I was a child, I've loved antique machinery, early science fiction, and Rowland Emmet kinetic sculptures. There was a 1910's era book of electrical experiments that I used to love to read, but at the age of 12, I didn't really have the skill or resources to build any of the apparatus described. That was the 1970's. I guess was into steampunk before it had been named as such.