4 Responses to “Crab Fu Steamworks”
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Hello, and welcome. I'm a writer and journalist based in the UK. This place is a collection of my writing, including essays that have no other home. My online notes are now here. It might also advertise my work:
A book about videogames, our lives, and the lives of people in far away cities. Dwell magazine said it was "like a New Yorker article that you wish would never end."
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Much of my writing isn't in paper form, although I do write for PC Gamer, Wired, Edge, and many other exciting, glossy magazines. On the internet you can find my regular column over on Offworld, and the rest of my ramblings at the world's greatest single asset: Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
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May 1st, 2006 at 12:44 am
Charming! I sent the link to my parents, who have recently learned how to use the internet. Dad, a life-long steam buff, was very taken with these robots. Somehow steam-driven machines seem more ‘alive’ than any other kind (to me they do, anyway). Perhaps it’s because of the way they huff and puff, seeming to breathe and to exert themselves.
May 1st, 2006 at 2:09 am
I like the idea that modern machine tooling and so on makes it even easier to build weird automata. More often than not this stuff could be conceived but not created by earlier generations and so its kind of satisfying to think that we finally managed to make what they dreamed up. It’s as if we’re being faithful to their imaginations.
Incidentally, I did enjoy The Etched City. I hope a new book is on the way.
May 1st, 2006 at 7:20 pm
Nice thoughts.
May 1st, 2006 at 11:08 pm
I like thinking of how, out of the dust that formed the galaxies, the nuclear reactions that formed the sun, and the long process of evolution, there emerged a consciousness with a desire to make, and capacity to admire, small steam-driven robots (and all the other weird fantastical things we invent).
Glad you enjoyed EC, Jim. I’m tinkering with a few other projects and I suppose one of them will get finished and published, by one or another means, sooner or later. (But none of them are very much like EC.)