September 2011 Articles (41)

Hello world this is France calling....

Steampunk in France is an underground culture but is growing more and more and a lot quality French books and comics have this last 5 years received a lot of succes. But what about Dieselpunk ? In order to get my fellow countrymen know about it I posted an article in my blog "What is Dieselpunk?". There seems to be an interest on Dieselpunk it as it was published on a webzine and is my top 5 consulted posts.

Let's make…

French proto-Batmobile:

Built by Avions Voisin, a great small company blessed with unique vision, innovative solutions and extreme nonconformism. Unfortunately, these blessings were not enought to make it into a really successful business.…

... for a dynamic world.

All governments make 'worst case scenario' contingency plans which are kept under wraps from the public. These documents were unearthed buried deep within the American National Archives in Washington, D.C. - a top-secret document once regarded as the most sensitive on earth.

It was in 1930, that America first wrote a plan for war with 'The Red Empire' - its most dangerous empire.

But America's foe in this war was not Russia or Japan or even the burgeoning Nazi…

Another forgotten chapter of the air war history:

The Lohner company Series 111 aircraft was an Austria-Hungarian prototype single seat biplane built in 1917 by Lohnerwerke GmbH. The fuselage was a laminated wood construction. The wing struts were an "I" requiring no wires tor structural stability. Power was provided by an Austro-Daimler engine generating 185…

Last summer we featured the Fairbairn combat smatchet, a fat bladed weapon that was one part axe, another part short sword. Designed by William E. Fairbairn it became a little known weapon in the inventory of British soldiers during World War II. Fairbairn would also design the now ubiquitous double edged dagger now synonymous of English commandos.

However,…

Welcome to Two Fisted Tuesdays, Dieselpunks' weekly beat on the mean streets.

Starring Gerald Mohr and starting with the famous lines, "Get this and get it straight! Crime is a sucker's road and those who travel it wind up in the gutter, the prison or the grave." The Adventures of Philip Marlowe runs about 25 minutes without commercials. You can listen to this blast from the past in MP3 format for free at the link below.…

Lights out, everybody.

On Miskatonic Mondays, we celebrate the "weird" fiction of HP Lovecraft and the genre of otherworldly horror that it spawned.

Murray Groat, the artist, illustrator, and all around cool guy that imagined a series of Tintin books set within HP Lovecraft's mythos universe has released an all new set of Tintin covers that are just as fabulous as his first series.…

Hot, dry, and stranded here at the Cabaret today. Our trip out west to California has been delayed, seeing as we're broken down in a little one-horse nowhere town in the Nevada desert called Las Vegas. It's a small little Hillbilly town with pretentions of glamor, a small dirty strip of seedy casinos full of tired dancing girls and rotgut whisky, like some remnant of the Old West. Now this fellow out of New York named Benjamin Siegel says there's real hope for this place, claiming he'll make…

What do you do with a spare biplane engine? Make it into a coffee table!

Currently on display at Decoratum Gallery in London, the Cylinder Radial Engine Table is made from a US Army Boeing-Stearman PT-13 engine acquired from the Canadian Museum of Flight, Langley, British Columbia. Constructed between 1936 and 1938, the innovative piece features a simple clear…

Night trains. In some places, they run all day.

An elegant semi-streamliner and its coachbuilder's story:

The Sodomka company was established by Josef Sodomka in 1895 in Vysoke Myto in what's now called the Czech Republic*. Within a surface area of 92 square meters and with only five workers he began production of all kinds of coaches, both sleighs and horse drawn carriages. They became the largest and best known coachbuilding company in the Czechoslovak Republic.…

The greatest WWI ace and his friend:

Here's an extract from Manfred von Richthofen journal and some pictures of his Jasta 11 squadron - with and without Moritz:

The most beautiful being in all creation is the genuine Danish hound, my little lap-dog, my Moritz. I bought him in Ostend from a brave Belgian for five marks. His mother was a beautiful animal and one…

Whether mounted on ships or land, the UP rocket and projector was a novel and simple method of British air defense during World War II.

A barrage weapon, the UP (Unrifled Projectile) rocket was a barrage weapon system fielded on ships of the British navy as well as put into field emplacements- Z batteries- around England as part of the Home Guard defense…

Warm or cold, sometimes both, it always boils down to some bloody affair, anyway.

Thank you very much, everybody, for such a warm welcome to these pictures. Like I already said, this is truly the very best reward you can hope for your stuff, when it sparks off more creativity in someone else in turn…

Welcome to Two Fisted Tuesdays, Dieselpunks' weekly beat on the mean streets.

Starring Gerald Mohr and starting with the famous lines, "Get this and get it straight! Crime is a sucker's road and those who travel it wind up in the gutter, the prison or the grave." The Adventures of Philip Marlowe runs about 25 minutes without commercials. You can listen to this blast from the past in MP3 format for free at the link below.…

I have the feeling Senator Hays wouldn't have liked this one.

Another challenge for the talented noir stories writers out there... ?

Lights out, everybody.

On Miskatonic Mondays, we celebrate the "weird" fiction of HP Lovecraft and the genre of otherworldly horror that it spawned.

The 2nd annual H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival concluded this Saturday with a reading/discussion event, screening of three feature films and nine short films, followed by awards, and film cast…

Greetin's, y'all. Things they's turned f'r the worse here at the ol' Cabaret. Fleein' west 'bout any which a way we cain here, be it an ol' country road or a box car smellin' a' cow piss. Cain't hardly see the sky, what with the dust storms over Okie. Don't make no diff'rence anywho.

Them juke joints a' Mississippi, they was good an' all, but them ol' boys in the white hoods...well, seems a might o' them is also the ones wearin' the blue down in them woods, iffin' ya' get my drift.…