Steam Punk in Normal entries

There was this guy a few years back … he probably is still a guy if he’s still alive and if he’s not it would have been foul play but he sure wouldn’t have had a sex change if he was dead. Let’s try that again. There was this guy a few years back who made these tobacco pipes out of mixed media, sort of like a plumber and carpenter fucked and bore a brawlin’ bairn of a Sherlock holmes. He called the company Steam Punk. I read about him in Pipes and Tobacco magazine. His pipes were pretty original, ugly, I mean I didn’t care for them, but original. I think the concept and name weren’t. I don’t know for certain but if you saw one you’d think “I’ve seen something like that before” maybe a genre of art or sculpture. The name steam punk sounds vaguely familiar too.

I suppose you could have smoked anything combustible in them, but they were expensive like pieces of art or tobacco pipes. I don’t know anyone who smokes dope who hasn’t made a pipe out of an apple, tin foil or a beer can. Up until recently the only brick and mortar vaping store I’d been too was half head shop and they sold these five to seven hundred dollar glass contraptions. In reading some reviews of their website they sold five hundred dollar glass pips that didn’t always work and could not be fixed. At least the reviews made it sound that way, I’m thinking if I needed something fixed I wouldn’t go looking for some idiot who dropped five bills on a dope pipe he didn’t know how to use. In that respect the steam punk pipes were inexpensive and idiot-proof.

I just got a personal vaping box mod that is in a similar style, but, instead of taking a classic design and throwing a monkey wrench at it, it takes a new product and tries to make it seem classic. The body is rosewood, even the battery cage, there are, however, pieces of a vaping box that need to be metal. It’s beautiful, under three figures and is called a snow wolf. I’m not sure if that’s the name of the company or the line (it’s not the first snow wolf I’ve seen, but the first I thought was cool enough to have). Not only is it unique in style but it has all the most modern features, the recent one being temperature control. The technology of these things is moving at a stupid fast pace.

Given my fairly standard usage it’s like a have garages full of Maserati’s to drive around the suburbs in. That’s not a horrible analogy if you throw in I drive them a lot while keeping it under thirty miles an hour. Oh, and the cost is really low on these things these days. This industry does something kind of funny, before a product actually hits the market they do pre-sales, or, at least, vendors do, which I’m sure they think is guaranteeing sales and stock, well, it is a guarantee. But, the pre-sales are, very often, below what the retail will be. Like the computer industry back around y2k, retailers had a small window during which things could sell at market value. I think the vaping industry helps vendors with that window by doing pre-sales, it’s also a good form of advertising a product line.

Wow, yeah, boring myself here. It’s hot and I think I sprained my left wrist.