I’m a tinkerer, that’s for sure. I like to know how things work, and I don’t give up very easily on things that are within my reach to understand.

But steam punk specifically… I’m not sure. Although I appreciate some of the creations that are labelled as “steam punk”, it isn’t making something that looks fanciful out of bits scavenged from antiques (which is what most of the steam punk “genre” seems to be about) that appeals to me. I like real, honest to goodness precise mechanisms- note, not needlessly complex, but engineered. Mechanical clocks, computers, guns, aircraft, even a well-made sword or a really good screwdriver: and not even so much for what they do, but how they do it. I also think that the fact that, by figuring such devices out, I’m somehow “superior” in my own limited way to someone who can’t figure them out, is appealing to me.

I think electric or digital clocks don’t interest me very much in part because a) I understand how they work; and b) there is nothing in them that really permits much craft. If a digital clock stops working, you throw it out and buy a new one: trying to make it work again is largely pointless, since the entirety of the mechanism that *can* break costs about twelve cents to manufacture.

Hmmm. That’s a bit too much psychoanalysis for today, I think 🙂 By the way, my clock has been running since Monday without a hiccup (although it has gained about four minutes over the week) and I’ve got it gonging correctly on the hour now. I’m planning on making a more permanent fix to get it in beat without cardboard under the legs this weekend… we’ll see how that goes.