The Steampunk party

Last Monday S and I went to the Steampunk party "Futures Past", thrown by EFF and some other organizations as part of the South By Southwest conference. S had to be dragged down there kicking and screaming, although I thought he would enjoy the robot exhibit by the Robot Group, who demoed several new cool robots (new being those I haven't seen at their earlier exhibits). But S wasn't impressed with robots-as-art. He thinks robots are only cool if they do something functional. Oh well. I myself went there primarily for the costumes galore. Steampunk costumes! Victoriana with a techy twist! Yum. Mile after a square mile of lace-up boots and fishnet stockings, and much more.

An upright robot - a bubble on wheels, made by The Robot Group of Austin, Texas

I'm reporting on this event only now, because it took me this long to sift through the 200 pictures I took and post them on my photo gallery.

I got a glimpse of Bruce Sterling and his wife Jasmina. And somebody played a theremin, of which I dutifully made a video, but my buggy camera often causes the audio be out of synch with the movie; and while that's tolerable in baby videos, it makes a theremin video completely pointless, since you can't see the correspondence between hand movements and sounds. Too bad the sounds he made weren't very melodious; it was, I'm afraid to say, a rather tuneless improvisation. I've heard some theremin performances where it played actual music.

But the biggest attraction was a duo of two young women acrobats, Popsy Purvy. The name very well describes what they do. Since a picture is better than a thousand words, I'll say no more. The pictures are at the bottom of my blog post at this link. I also took a couple of videos of their acts, embedded below.