If you've ever been to a Renaissance fair you're probably familiar with the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), the folks who learn how to make armor and chain mail, joust, and call each other Sir This and Lady That. It seems to me that the new "steampunk" movement (not the writing of fiction but the creation of Victorian-looking gadgets and artifacts) is just the flip side of SCA—still creative, still an anachronism. GalleyCat had an item that included a video where a guy describes how he made his spanking new flat screen monitor and PC look like they came straight from Captain Nemo's Nautilus. The movement is also described in an article that references a steampunk tree house (click where it says" tree house" on the map for a 360 degree tour).

It sounds like a fun thing to do—almost a contrary movement, to take something new and make it look old. The PC decorator also made a telegrapher's key that can receive RSS feeds as Morse code, partly to confound future generations who won't understand what it is.

Or maybe they just have too much time on their hands?