I'm still brewing a couple posts on what has been going on in my life, and there has been so very much - but let's shove that onto the backburner whilst I brag, shall we?

The short version:

I am totally blog famous.

This has been a rather jarring development for me, attention-whore though I may be.

The long version:

For quite some time, I'd been interested in making myself a Problem Light. I even documented the day this occured to me on this very blog, and though it took a while (two freakin' years) to get around to it on my list of projects, I was finally making some headway on it.

I had considered who else in my life would "get" such a concept - understand the subtle psychological benefit of having such a device, and immediately knew I had to make one for Christie. She had recently mentioned redoing her living room in a steampunk style, and I had recently come across this wondrous steampunk lamp on my absolute favorite steampunk blog, Brass Goggles.

This confluence of things led to quick inspiration, and I feverishly scribbled out a design. I actually ended up finishing hers before I finished mine, because I was so taken with it. I was prepared to ship it off to her, and add it to my online gallery of various weirdo projects, a trophy of pride in my showroom of obscurity, and let it sit. She'd get it, we'd both have them, and that'd be that.

I was not prepared for it to take a screaming leap out of obscurity, and land me on freaking BoingBoing.

I submitted it to Brass Goggles, paying it forward as it were, thinking since I got such inspiration from Professor Fzz, I might cause the same for someone else. I wasn't expecting it to actually get posted, much less as fast as it did, but later the very same day, it went up on Brass Goggles, and I did backflips. Hooting, gleeful backflips.

Christie then submitted it to BoingBoing, where I was even more certain it wouldn't get posted. But it did, by Cory himself (though he misunderstood its exact use,) and then the flood gates opened.

Over the next couple of days, I got word of it popping up all over hell: TeamDroid, ToolMonger, a bunch of personal blogs and forums

...and about a zillion places that somehow make ad revenue off of reprinting BoingBoing's feed.

A google search for "steampunk problem light" goes 15 pages deep of BoingBoing linkage.

Right now, the Flickr set has 10,300+ views (which is decidedly over nine thoussaaaaaaaand,) and I'm simply shocked.

I've got people wanting me to make them one, people asking for a parts list (which is coming!) and more Flickr comments (some of which call me out quite well on safety and design issues) than I can respond to in a timely manner. Per one of those, I'm probably going to put the obsessively-detailed version of the photo collection up on Instructables. Yes, that'smore obsessively detailed than the Flickr set. I'm a journalist. It's what I do.

It's been crazy, and though it's the kind of thing to give me a big head, it's also been very humbling. This is mass media in the 21st century. I'm blown away by it all.

It's funny, because it completely overshadows the one I did finally finish for myself, which may be infinitely simpler and more ready-made, but I still like a lot.

To my knowledge, aside from intentional calibration tests, both of them have remained off. This is a good thing.

[and i hope that happens from now on]