One of the things that interests me a great deal is the steampunk sub-culture. I’ve played in a steampunk D&D type game that one of my friends created, became a big fan of the “steampunk band” Abney Park, and grown an obsession with old pocket watches, aviation goggles, and gears.

One thing I’ve always wanted to do (but have never actually gotten around to doing) is to get together a good steampunk costume. Over the past couple days, I have decided that I want to get together a motorist outfit. Hat, gloves, goggles, duster, and a nice long scarf to flap in the wind as a drive down the road in my horseless carriage.

Those of you who know me would now remember that I do not own a horseless carriage… At least not one older than my 2009 Scion tC. I believe that if you are going to do something fun, you need to do it right, and so I present to you, the Educator Steam Buggy.

I understand that the entire point of steampunk is that everything is powered by steam, but being the 21st century, I think I could do it cheaper and easier (less moving parts) if I redesigned it to run on electric power. I’m still not sure on the details, but providing I can figure out where to store it and I can get some help on the suspension system from my friends in mechanical engineering, I should start work on it sometime within the next 6 weeks.

Hello there, everyone. After a couple years of designing websites for people and dabbling with the idea of blogging, I’ve finally purchased my own domain and web space. I’m not sure what exactly I’ll be talking about on this blog, or even if I’m going to keep the blog as the main aspect of this site. Also, I’m not very proficient with PHP yet, so until I learn enough from my dabbling, the blog won’t really have the look I want. I’ll keep playing with it though, so expect the look to change often until I find what I want.

I chose the name Red Leaf Collective, because I eventually hope to expand this website to include some other people that I find interesting. This was formerly just a wordpress.com blog with two other members, but one of them only wrote once, and the other moved to Nevada and started his own blog (which is fairly interesting so far if you enjoy reading about crazy adventures). I also chose the name because I don’t have any particular topic that I will be writing about ever, though it may tend to migrate in certain directions from time to time.

I’ve imported old posts from the former blog so there is actually something there to read until I come up with more material.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you can learn/enjoy something from it.