Vampire Poets!

It's Charles Babbage's 220th birthday today, and if you want a spot of relevant, erudite and heavily-footnoted post-Christmas steampunk webcomic entertainment, I recommend Sydney Padua's website 2D Goggles, where you'll find the continuing saga of Babbage & Lovelace as 19th century crimefighters. Their current adventure involves Vampire Poets. Read on (the strange numbering is, I assume, intentional):

Vampire Poets, Prologue (in which the shade of a Gothic poet arises to set the scene, and we get examples of real-world bad Victorian poetry featuring the protagonists).
Vampire Poets - Part One! (in which Babbage, collecting statistics on window-smashing, encounters a mysterious young woman high on maddening draughts of Hippocrene; she later disappears, and her sisters - she is in fact Emily Brontë - enlist Babbage's help in finding her).
Vampire Poets Part the Third (in which Babbage introduces the sisters to Lovelace, whose hereditary temperament has acquainted her with the dangers of poetry. We see a spot of Byronic/Holmesian target practice, and get no explanation from Babbage as to why he thought he would have been a poet if he had been blind).

Here's the index to all the stories. And there's a great list of primary documents.

- Ray

To the Difference Engine!

For fans of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage: 2D Goggles. This is the site for animator (Melina) Sydney Padua's steampunk webcomic about Lovelace and Babbage in a pocket dimension where they become crime-fighting adventurers. The strip is under development and bit fragmentary so far, but for coherent sections see the introductions to the characters at Lovelace - the origin (drawn for Ada Lovelace Day) and BBC Techlab; the three-part story Lovelace and Babbage vs The Economy (parts 1, 2, 3); The Person from Porlock (which reveals the truth behind Coleridge's famous interruption).

Sydney Padua, who admits the whole thing is experimental, as she's not a comic artist by profession, describes it as:

either the agonizing birth pangs, or monstrous death-throes, of a comic.

I hope it proceeds to fruition. Her style is brilliant (akin to that of Posy Simmonds) and the commentary about the history and development process is worth reading too:

Isambard Kingdom Brunel was like the Wolverine of the early Victorians.
...
I read the extraordinary Charles Babbage’s comic masterpiece of an autobiography. I urge everyone to read it immediately. It has charts. CHARTS!

And there are generally interesting (if you're a bit geeky) Lovelace/Babbage links such as the Lego and Meccano Difference Engines. The merchandise is fun too, especially that with the nice ST:TNG pastiche of Ada working in the Difference Tubes.

- Ray