The movie will be hitting the big screen on October 19th, but here is the first trailer to get you ready for Tai Chi 0, the Steampunk Kung-Fu movie. While the first two are variations on the same trailer, they are a little different to tilt them towards their target audiences in each country. The third one has more different footage and a different approach to the whole building a trailer process, and the three of them together give a fairly extensive view into the movie. It will be in theaters in September if you live in Asia, the rest of us have to wait a bit longer.
A Tesla Coil is a transformer that is able to generating extremely large voltages, which allows it to throw huge but extremely short-live sparks. So what looks like one long spark is actually a bunch of sparks each second. As any musician with a scientific background will tell you, a given tone is a given frequency of vibration, producing each unique note. So by adjusting the sparks per second from the coil, different notes can be played. And that is exactly what they did in this video; enjoy!
The coil was invented by Nikola Tesla, who also invented AC power, the electric motor, the alternator, the generator, the audio speaker, radio (they took the patent away from Marconi when it turned out it was based on 17 of Tesla’s patents), the florescent light four years before Edison used brute force slave labor to invent the light bulb, and ever so much more which he patented. He also invented some stuff the patent office couldn’t figure out how to process, like broadcast energy and the related wireless charging of batteries (a company finally figured out how to make a profit on that one a decade or so ago for all our portable electronics), Ball Lightning, Radar (it was WWII before anyone decided building that could be useful), and oh, yeah, that earthquake machine he almost sank Long Island with. Tesla has been one of my personal heroes since I was a kid, and if you don’t know about him it is time you learned.
If you are a fan of Lady Sabre & The Pirates of the Ineffable Aether, you will enjoy this interview. If you are not, you should immediately hop over to the Archives and start at the beginning and read your way up to the present installment. And if you missed them, did you also miss Girl Genius? Shame on you, go back and read them both from the beginning!
Doctor Steel’s Fibonacci Sequence is a great example of Heavy Metal Nerdcore, not a well-represented music sub-genre but one with some very interesting songs. His roots were always in his Steampunk background, and I don’t think he got to perform with his Robot Band on stage live since they kept breaking down, but you have to appreciate his attitude and attempts.
The Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences has an audio book available as a podcast series that I would like to recommend. It has all the Steampunk goodness of the written format without the need of focusing your eyes on the printed page, and thereby getting distracted. Not terribly surprising, considering the author had a hand in creating PodioBooks and went on to write several physical books on the topic, starting with Podcasting for Dummies. Personally I love the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences books and universe, and hope you will find it as fun to hang out in as I do.
Yes, you can also get the printed version of these two, but they look real good online and you can read them there for free. The old favorite Steampunk Comic that you have seen mentioned here many times before is Girl Genius, a graphic novel series so good it has won some serious awards. I have been reading it for years and did order the print version (I think I have through volume 8 so far) just because I wanted to read it the old fashion way. On the other hand, I only heard about Lady Sabre & The Pirates of the Ineffable Aether within the past week or so from the folks over at SF Signal, and am enjoying it immensely so far. Check them out, and let me know what you think!