The Gadgeteer is either wearing a wig, or the kind of hopelessly rigid hair that marcels itself with nobody’s help, and hasn’t been in style since the Barrymores were all men.
It is quite a struggle for people to accept that raw pedal-to-the-metal intelligence is sexay when it appears to look like this.
This is because any sensible person knows what a nerdboy does with a proper user manual.
They read it, they digest it, they tear it to shreds and stomp on the bits in total fury, and go design a better object, or a better manual, or both.
When this attitude is applied to dealing with the desire to please someone else in various ways, the results can be truly awe-inspiring.
I’m a little afraid to show pictures.
I couldn’t possibly do justice to the capabilities of nerdgrrls, either, who are even more wildly inventive on these matters.
I merely mention that these days manuals are available on quite a startling variety of subjects.
You may just have to remind them, when they have gotten deeply into pickling vs. fermentation experiments or the biochemistry of gill filaments, to swing back through some of their earlier interest in minor topics, such as, say, sex.
Just saying.
Mind you, this test result is particularly amusing given that I was just locked away from the Intarwebs for 2 days by a wireless router which probably overheated and required merely being unplugged and plugged back in again.
So I’m back, safe and sound, and swearing that no, I’m not an internet junkie, I can stop ANY TIME I Like.
You’ve heard this before, haven’t you?
On the positive side, while caged away from the siren lures of the web, I got a book chapter re-edited, and also edited a chunk of a rather bewildering little thing that sounds remarkably like Dance and Drin in another lifetime on an estate somewhere in the British Isles (most peculiar, and in dire need of Brit-picking) and then I hunched over my little desk and kept kicking various cats off my keyboard and I hammered out another two and half chapters of the English wierdness. Oh, and looked at various other surprising old bits that, at the time, I thought could never see the light of day, and which now seem like some nice ordinary queer boys who probably belong in a poorly-drawn yaoi manga, honestly. It would take industrial editing to fix the clumsy bits.
I can see some of the flist is looking at their watches and exclaiming over the time.
So, gadgeting!
It seems a bit odd to me that gadgeting could seem sexay to folks who grew up on GW Bush’s reign of willful ignorance. OTOH, perhaps it’s the usual appeal of generational reversal: What your grandmother or great-grandmother was doing was very geekily bizarrely intriguing but what your parents were doing is totally dorky and full of FAIL. So you get this flipflop of styles and fictional tropes and a thin line of grim survivors who carry it over through the unfashionable eras until it is rediscovered. Tattoos, anyone?
Science, apparently, may be one of those tropes now.
Especially the ebullient tinkering experimental type of science of the Victorian and Edwardian periods, when people were figuring out how to build lab equipment with some glassware and a Bunsen burner and lots of wacky specimens.
The originals were deriving their energy from a very positive mood.
It makes me feel better to see that.
I’m just not sure if nostalgia for the happy period of experimental high explosives is quite what we were talking about.
If I’m tinkering successfully with objects, apparently they really must be Victorian.
I mean, I could show you pictures of my aquarium with the CO2 gas tank associated with growing better aquatic plants, for instance–never mind the plants are real, they still look like the weird plastic ones. Why yes, gas regulators are an important part of Victorian scientific history, why do you ask?
However, you’d also notice that, strangely, my tank just looks remarkably like all those other tanks which desperately need cleaning.
At least wipe down the algae on the front glass, Igor, for crying out loud!
BTW, , I do notice that the elegant creature portrayed as the Aristocrat from the same meme over on ‘s entry for the 2nd, see here:
https://doll-paparazzi.livejournal.com/624242.html
I don’t quite know what Drin is up to, but he left a rather cryptic email to forward to you.
He notes that picture, and continues:
Given the powder dusted on the shoulders, it looks remarkably like a chemtrail assassin to *me.*
Must be fairly self-sufficient with all the antenna in the hair, even if it’s hard to tell precisely which kind with the sensor array folded back for a social occasion like that. Probably a heavy-duty military installation there, which is a little too obvious with the out-of-period clothing. Claiming to be steampunk does not mitigate the necessity to be careful about the fabric combinations and styles. The power-generating part of the outfit is clearly visible as the stripes in the pants, which jars on one’s delicate historical senses as anachronistic with the jacket. They must be losing any kind of oversight, because that sort of sloppiness was never tolerated before. It’s a mark of bad training as well as bad maintenance.
I assume Eric can sort it out? I daresay he’s not pleased to referenced in public so often.