Once registered, you will be able to manage your profile, comment on articles, talk to other users, and even submit articles and blog posts to us for publication here on the website.

To register, please go here, or use the ‘Login’ section at the top of this page.

We are very much looking forwards to hearing from you all, and hope to bring you more guest posts and articles from our readers, writers, artists and contributors in the coming weeks.

After much deliberation, we have decided to close the SteamPunk Magazine forum down for the foreseeable future.

Between the spambots and the technical difficulties, it has gotten increasingly difficult to maintain the Gaslamp Bazaar over the last year or so. We tried to make forums somewhere different and interesting place to hang out, but the fact of the matter is that we just don’t have the time to make them something really special any more. As such, the time has come for us to move on, and focus on other things.

Many thanks to all the people who have frequented the Bazaar over the years and made it generally an awesome place to hang out. Thanks also to T-Kew, who has spent a lot of his time moderating and generally looking after it.

For now, we hope to be seeing more comments and discussion on the articles here in our blog. In the future, we may even be looking into a registration system that will allow people to sign up for accounts, and even submit articles directly to our website.

First off, many, many, many thanks to the wonderful Brigid Ashwood who provided the artwork in the banner and footer of the Vagrants website, we could not be happier with it!

Thanks also go to ewark and Cybrea for creating the brushes we used in the SPM site re-design, and to necrosensual-art who provided the brushes we used to re-work the Gaslamp Bazaar.

And with this redesign, we must offer an open invitation to all: please go away and try to break our website. We don’t mean “Ask that shady hacker that you met the other night to assault us with spambots”, instead, just take a look around the website, click on the links, leaf through the content, and let us know if anything goes horribly wrong while you are doing so. While we have done our very best to make the new website as beautiful and perfect as we can, we aren’t professional designers and the chances are that there are a few bugs here and there that shall have to be ironed out over the coming weeks.

We are also happy to announce the launch of the website for the Vagrants Among Ruins publishing collective. From here on in, Vagrants will be co-releasing Steampunk Magazine alongside Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness as well as publishing all manner of steampunk books and zines besides.

Finally, with the foundation of Vagrants Among Ruins, you are now finally able to purchase copies of Steampunk Magazine from the United Kingdom, for dispatch to Europe and the Rest of the World.

Residents of North, South and Central America are still able to order the magazine through the mail-order page at Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness.

Since Steampunk Magazine began, its base of operations has always been in the United States. The hard work done by Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness to print and distribute the magazine in the US isn’t changing any time soon. However, since Allegra started to help with the editing and publishing of Steampunk Magazine last December, more of the day-to-day running has been done from her base of operations in North Wales in the United Kingdom, where she can bully many of the people that she knows into helping her.

At the moment, we are just laying the groundwork with British small-press printers Fallen Angel Media to begin to offer Steampunk Magazine for sale from the UK. Along with this, we have also started work on establishing an international publishing collective called Vagrants Among Ruins, who will soon be joint-publishing the magazine alongside Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness.

Vagrants will be organised out of the ranks of those who care very much not just about SPM, but about steampunk as a whole, and will include die-hard supporters of steampunk and Steampunk Magazine both old and new. In the months to come, Vagrants will be expanding to include the publication of books (both fictional and factual), ‘academic’ ezines and articles, and even music, all of which will be Creative Commons licensed and offered for as close to cost-price as we can get it, as well as for free download.

Do not be afraid, we will be continuing to put the punk back into steampunk for quite some time yet!

None of these changes are going to be bad news for Steampunk Magazine, which will remain the first priority of this new publishing collective. Furthermore, although any new ventures (such as books, music and the like) will be printed and distributed internationally from the UK, those of you in the US will still be able to purchase your copies of Steampunk Magazine locally through Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness alongside the wonderful selection of things both fine and sundry that they continue to create.

Unfortunately, all of these changes are going to take time, which means that we have had to push back the provisional release date for issue #7 of the Steampunk Magazine from December 2009 to February/March 2010. This will give us the time we need to set up the Vagrants website (keep your eyes peeled for that one!) and to give the SPM site and Gaslamp Bazaar a sorely-needed facelift.

For now, we will be continuing to accept #7 submissions until the end of September, and may possibly open for another wave of submissions in December so that we can ensure that when issue #7 does reach you, it will be the best issue to date!

There will be more information on that project in the coming weeks, however, in the meantime we are in need of an artist to help us with the new website. We require two relatively simple illustrations with a printed/engraved look. The fee for the project is $50 – the same amount we pay for the illustrator of one of our magazine covers.

Interested parties should contact collective [at] steampunkmagazine [dot] com for more details.

My favorite from the gallery is the piece pictured here, “Cascading Chronology” by the lovely Ms. Porkshanks, which features an awesome little story on her DA. ]]> http://www.steampunkmagazine.com/steampunk-links/feed/ 1 http://www.steampunkmagazine.com/an-introduction/ http://www.steampunkmagazine.com/an-introduction/#comments Tue, 01 Sep 2009 23:08:20 +0000 Katie Casey http://www.steampunkmagazine.com/inside/?p=196 Good evening, fellow steampunks!

Allegra invited me to start blogging here some time ago, but I’m afraid I’m only just now getting around to it – but it works out well, because by now you’ll all have seen me in Issue 6! (What? You haven’t gotten your copy yet? Go now. I’ll wait till you get back. Mine is “Corset Manifesto,” if you’re interested.)

My name’s Katie, known elsewhere on the internet as Spiffy and I hope to help make this blog a regular source of steampunk inspiration, to keep us all amused between magazines. If you’d like to help out as well, you need only send an e-mail to blog@steampunkmagazine.com, featuring whatever music, art, events, articles, costumes, literature, or other bits of steampunk-related awesomeness you have recently come across. I’m rather a steam-newb, so chances are I haven’t seen it and would love to check it out and possibly blog it.

I’m quite happy to be here, and hope to have all sorts of interesting things to share! Leave a comment introducing yourself, if you’d like!

Sincerely,
Katie

I have now managed to remove the offending codes and pages and carried out a complete update and re-install of all blog and forum software. For now, all that means is that you may be getting warnings from Google about the site until they check us again and give us a clean bill of health. It also means that things around here (especially the forum) are going to look more than a little different.

This is an unfortunate side-effect of our having to upgrade the forum. Fortunately, it should mean that we get fewer spammers registering in the future (which will in turn mean that we can make the registration process a little easier on everyone).

Over the next few months, hopefully both halves of the website will be undergoing a re-design, and will come out the other side looking much prettier. Until then, be rest assured that the website is once again safe to visit.

Warm regards,
Allegra