Another journal

Sometimes, when I’m drinking or just being a jackass, I tell people “I gave the American steampunks* the monoggle.” Which isn’t necessarily true, though it’s probably at least a little bit close to what is truth (there were fancy-ass ones being made in Europe, that stupid word wasn’t being used so much though the design was, etc.).

A lot of cameras go through our house and not all of them leave. I really like taking things apart and how lenses work fascinate me.

I would use cold connections to make ridiculous eye wear out of bits of lens and camera that I’d reclaimed after hours of patiently taking apart something. So many broken twin lens reflexes have been dismantled by my hands.

Then one day I used papier mâché to make an eye cup, for some damned reason used “steampunk” as a tag and then the internet shat itself into my Flickr.

So I made a DIY.

Mind you, some nice things happened and I made some nice friends and got to write a mostly-ignored-but-enjoyed-by-people-I-like article about the use of papier mâché in the Victorian era for SteamPunk magazine.

But pretty much the whole thing (and the steampunks) were sort of a boner killer for the optics and lens stuff I’d been playing with. Which sucked because I loved doing it, but doing it made me feel kind of gross. I’d told myself something along the lines of “when people stop giving a shit about it, I’ll go back to it.”

I think it’s been long enough. So September’s focus month is optics and I’ve already got started and it’s funny how much I’d missed it. Useless things to put on your eyeballs, guyz. Pretty fucking fun to make.  Aiming for four finished pieces by the end of the month. We’ll see how it goes.

*There’s the folk who follow/do SteamPunk and there’s the steampunks. So.

Mirrored from Journal of a Something or Other.