I’ve long disliked how TIME titles its news pieces with rhetorical questions and pretends that what happens on Facebook is news. Apparently The Onion is even more fed-up than I am:

TIME Announces New Version Of Magazine Aimed At Adults

This video is the very embodiment of film nerdiness. First, because it’s Star Wars. Second, because it’s goofing on silent cinema:

The New York Times covers the volatility of being in your twenties in America:

The 20s are a black box, and there is a lot of churning in there. One-third of people in their 20s move to a new residence every year. Forty percent move back home with their parents at least once. They go through an average of seven jobs in their 20s, more job changes than in any other stretch. Two-thirds spend at least some time living with a romantic partner without being married. And marriage occurs later than ever. The median age at first marriage in the early 1970s, when the baby boomers were young, was 21 for women and 23 for men; by 2009 it had climbed to 26 for women and 28 for men, five years in a little more than a generation.

This isn’t purely a reaction to the downturn in the economy. According to the article, this trend far predates it.

Occasionally I post videos that I think media people would find interesting on Canted under the category of “YouTube Finds.” Some pay homage to classic movies of decades past. Others are contemporary works that are aesthetically impressive as works of media art. The two videos I posted there last week fall under the latter category, and they’re both so good that I had to re-post them here.

The first is “Le Cafe,” a silly (well animated, but silly all the same) video about a man who relies on coffee to get him through the work day. My roommate Steven Bosse, a man who likewise needs his coffee on a regular basis, showed it to me one afternoon and added afterward, “This is why I don’t use our coffee maker”:

The other is a short film that I heard about sometime ago—”The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello.” This Australian film by Anthony and Julia Lucas was nominated in 2006 for an Academy Award in the category of Best Animated Short. I’ve been wanting to see it for awhile now, but I only just became aware that the full thing was up on YouTube a few days ago.

When trying to analyze whether a book or film is “steampunk,” it often feels like the term is artificially placed or forced. Not with “Jasper Morello.” It comes chock full of brass, steel, complex machinery, airships, aether rifles—we’re talking full commitment here. Beyond being a prime example of the subgenre that happens to strike my fancy though, the animation style is a work of pure artistry:

A.E. Flint over at Trial By Steam digs into a question that’s been on my mind ever since the first Great Steampunk Debate took place a few months ago: how do we define steampunk?

The overall impression I got from the discussions that I perused on the Great Steampunk Debate (and to be sure, there is a lot of material there and I never got through so much as a quarter of it) was to fall back on defining it purely as an aesthetic.

That doesn’t square with me for the same reason it doesn’t square with Flint: the word “punk” in “steampunk”:

…many participants in the Steampunk subculture view the “Punk” aspect of Steampunk as a powerless suffix. As a member of the Punk movement, it bothers the writer that -punk gets affixed to new and fashionable subgroups without regard for Punk as it’s own set of ideologies. And you know what? It bothers me too.

What’s the difference between Steampunk and Neo-Victorianism? In my view, it’s the Punk in Steampunk that indicates our ability to draw from, but disdain replication of, the past. The Punk in Steampunk allows us to turn all sorts of Victorian conventions on their heads: gender, government and politics, race, culture… it’s all up for redefinition in the Steampunk I love.

Flint is framing this thought specifically as a discussion of cosplayers versus lifestylers (for those curious, here is a primer), but I think this makes a broader point about steampunk.

Defining steampunk purely as an aesthetic means it’s no longer steampunk: it’s just “steam.” The word “punk” has deliberate political connotations. As I touched on in a previous post, how and to what degree this punk element manifests itself in a given work varies widely. In the past it has been any combination of anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, anti-mass production, or (in the broadest sense) anti-status quo. There’s an element of the politically incorrect to it, and it’s this element that makes it more than purely an aesthetic.

I usually brag about the great weather we have in Tucson, but I generally don’t get the chance to during the summer months. Today is an exception. A storm front rolled in, blocking out the scorching sun and bringing a cool breeze with it. In July the average temperature in the afternoon is usually around 100 Fahrenheit (37-38 Celsius). Today I don’t think it got above 90 and it’s dropping fast as night sets in.

Not only did I turn off the AC, but I opened all the windows in the house too to get some fresh air.

Pictured above is the view from the backyard, facing west, at about six in the evening. It’s been thundering for some time now so we might even be in for some rain.

The state of the economy has lead to a boom in the proliferation and popularity of personal writing about being jobless. In this subgenre of creative nonfiction, Sam Biddle is fast proving himself a master. Much like how Will Leitch chronicled his semi-employed wanderings in the post dot-com crash wilderness for his “Life As A Loser” column (and later a book of the same title), Biddle is detailing his life as a post-grad student with a degree in philosophy, trying to make a go of it in New York City. The self-deprecating wit and honesty with which he lays bare his situation makes for great (meaning in my case, cathartic) reading:

To sit in the NYPL’s [New York Public Library's] reading room is to be ostensibly part of some enterprise, and to feel good for it. There’s nothing I look forward to more than a friend asking some variation of “So, what exactly… do you do every day?” My usual response would be something along the lines of “Oh, ha ha, yes, wonderful, I was hoping you would ask that unintentionally devastating question. But before I answer—my word! Look! Look behind you! Some sort of explosion! It’s a bear, exploding!” and then I leap out the nearest window.

I ran into such a scenario (minus the window leaping) over lunch with friends a couple weeks ago. I was meeting one of the gentlemen dining with us for the first time, and at one point he asked me, “So what are you doing now? Just taking a break?”

To which I replied, “I think they just call it ‘being unemployed’ now that I’ve graduated college, but yes.”