The good people at Clockwork Alchemy have declared their 2026 theme and it is, frankly, exactly what the Formula ordered: Rogue Makers & Air Pirates. October 16-18, Redwood City, California. Grand Bay Hotel. You show up, you craft wonders that others fear to dream of, you seize the sky by the lapels. That is the entire pitch. That is enough.

If you have been waiting for the universe to give you permission to build a ridiculous aetheric contraption, strap on a flight coat, and demand that the horizon respect you, congratulations: the universe just sent you a formal engraved invitation. Artists’ Bazaar applications are open right now. The Doctor will be watching the attendee photos with great personal interest and mild professional jealousy.

Via: Clockwork Alchemy 2026: Rogue Makers & Air Pirates (theme art by Laura Carns, Gretchen Kisler, Danielle Hill, and Charlie Wong)

The Formula works on hardware. We have proof. ACEMAGIC took one look at the original 1985 Nintendo Entertainment System, nodded slowly, and stuffed an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 inside the shell: 12 cores, 24 threads, 5.1GHz boost, integrated Radeon 890M graphics, 32GB of DDR5, a 1TB NVMe SSD, Wi-Fi 7, and a USB4 port. The Retro X5 looks like a prop from your childhood game shelf. It plays Cyberpunk 2077 at 60fps. That is, objectively, the funniest sentence I have written this year.

The design pulls the NES colorway without crossing into licensed territory: grey plastic, a bright red power button, functional mechanical grille vents, and zero RGB lighting screaming “GAMER” at you from across the room. It ships with RetroPlay Box, a built-in launcher that sets up your emulators without the usual three-hour Friday-night yak-shaving session. The tool-free snap-fit lid means you can crack it open and swap RAM like a cartridge. I respect this deeply and I will not apologize.

Is it a $1,049 conversation piece that Nintendo’s lawyers are almost certainly side-eyeing? Yes. Do I care? The Doctor does not care. The Omega7Red Formulae has been validating exactly this kind of decision since before the Pi-Day incident. Slap modern silicon into a retro shell, ship it with a red power button, and call it transformation. That is literally the job. Good job, high-5.

Via: HotHardware

The Commodore Callback 8020 is a flip phone. A FLIP PHONE. With a T9 keypad, a dome LED that glows instead of screaming notifications at you, and SID chiptune ringtones because of course. It runs Sailfish OS (Linux, de-Googled, Android app compatible) and it hard-blocks social media and browsers at the system level using patent-pending technology, which is the most 2026 sentence I have ever written. The colorways are called things like “BASIC Beige” and “ProtoPET White” and one of them ships with a 24k gold-plated Commodore C= key, and honestly? The Doctor approves of the aesthetic choices, even if everything else is [expletive deleted] insane.

Here is the part where I have to say the quiet part out loud: this is NOT Jack Tramiel’s Commodore. It’s a YouTuber who bought the trademarks and hired some old-timers, which is basically someone buying the Batmobile and calling themselves Batman. That said, the thing they built is legitimately interesting: $499 for a phone whose entire value proposition is that it makes smartphone usage annoying enough that you stop doing it. You are paying five hundred dollars for friction. That is either the stupidest or most brilliant product pitch since they put a “close door” button in elevators that doesn’t actually work. Pre-orders open June 30th. Shipping targets Q4 2026. In BASIC Beige, naturally.

My C64 and I spent entire summers on BBSes racking up long-distance bills my parents still don’t know about. The SID chip was the sound of God. So when Commodore (or whoever this is now) puts SID ringtones on a phone designed to cure you of your screen addiction… I don’t know whether to load a disk or throw it across the room. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal.

Via: Tom’s Hardware / Commodore

Gentlefolk of the Punk-iverse, a moment of your time. You know the goggles. The goggles. The ones glued to every top hat at every convention since 2003, doing precisely nothing except looking magnificent. The Doctor has always defended them on aesthetic grounds alone. Well. ASUS ROG and XREAL have gone and run those goggles through some kind of Formula of their own, because the ROG XREAL R1 is a 91-gram pair of AR glasses that projects a 171-inch virtual Micro-OLED screen directly into your eyeballs at 240Hz with a 0.01ms response time. They have electrochromic lenses that auto-tint when you look at the screen and go clear when you look away. They weigh less than a decent pocket watch. They have Bose spatial audio built in. The future has finally caught up to the cosplay.

Is $849 a lot for goggles? Yes. Is it less than the steam-powered difference engine you were going to build in your garage? Also yes. The Doctor is putting this through the Omega7Red Formulae right now: feed in “gaming AR glasses,” crank the Formula, and what emerges is a CyberPunk street samurai overlaid on a SteamPunk airship navigator, both of them seeing things the rest of the crowd simply cannot. That’s not a product description, that’s a destiny. Expect them to ship July 2026, so you have exactly enough time to add a few gears and call it a con build. Good job, high-5.

Via: ASUS ROG Press Room

So apparently Gen Z is buying Polaroid cameras, carrying MP3 players, and purchasing physical CDs in 2026 because they want to, quote, “slow down” and “own their media.” I need everyone to pause and appreciate what just happened here. The generation that was handed the internet at birth, a supercomputer in every pocket, and the collective sum of human knowledge on demand has looked at all of that and said: “No thank you, I’d prefer the format that melts in a hot car.” Good job, high-5! Welcome to literally every argument I’ve been making since 1997.

Here’s the thing, though: the Doctor is not going to mock this. I’m going to validate it. These kids stumbled backward into the correct answer. Physical media is real. Streaming is renting someone else’s permission slip to your own memories. The Commodore 64 crowd (that’s us, you know who you are) never needed a think piece to figure that out, but hey, if it takes a generation of zoomers panic-buying Walkmans to make the point stick, I’ll take the win. The Omega7Red Formulae has always run on physical, tangible, real objects: brass gears, glass lenses, riveted copper plating. Bits evaporate. Objects endure.

The Polaroid Go Generation 3 is the specific artifact making the rounds this month, a miniature instant camera aimed squarely at the analog-curious crowd. It is, objectively, the least efficient way to take a photograph in the year 2026, and I mean that as a compliment. Sometimes the friction is the point. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, kids, but a physical print of a good moment comes close.

Via: BGR / SlashGear

The Chicago Steampunk Exposition 2026 wrapped up today at the Hyatt Regency Schaumburg, and if you were not there, I cannot help you. The theme was “Adventures in Wonderland” (technically the 1893 Chicago Exposition-through-a-looking-glass, which is the most SteamPunk elevator pitch since someone strapped a pressure gauge to a corset). Gail Carriger was on hand, UnWoman provided the soundtrack to your brass-and-velvet fever dreams, and the Hall of Curiosities was presumably full of things that would have gotten a man arrested in actual 1893. Three days, four exhibitor halls, and approximately one metric ton of top hats. The Doctor approves.

If you missed it: the Underground Market, the Midway Market (Artists/Writers/Musicians), the Hall of Curiosities, AND hallway exhibitors across the entire atrium. That is not a convention, that is a siege. They rolled dice (a d20, a d30, a d60, AND a d100) to determine badge prize winners at Opening Ceremonies, which is the correct way to run any gathering of human beings. Why is every awards show not doing this? I ask because I genuinely want to know.

Mark your calendar now: same Hyatt, same interdimensional time portals, and presumably a new theme that will be equally unhinged in the best possible way. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a weekend in a parallel 1893 with several hundred gear-wearing lunatics comes close.

Via: Chicago Steampunk Exposition

Apple turns 50 this year, and instead of doing anything reasonable like throwing a party or minting commemorative coins, the universe decided to let 8BitDo apply the Omega7Red Formulae to the Apple II and turn it into a mechanical keyboard. The result: the Retro 68 AP50th Limited Edition, a 68-key slab machined entirely from aluminum alloy, finished in that sacred warm beige-and-brown colorway that haunts every Gen X kid who ever typed PRINT "HELLO WORLD" on a 1MHz 6502 and felt like a god. Five hundred dollars. Ships this month. Limited quantities. Of course it is.

Here is what gets me: every external surface is aluminum, chassis, keycaps, buttons, all of it, plus a 6,500mAh battery rated at 300 hours per charge. A KEYBOARD with a 300-hour battery. My Commodore 64 power brick would have wept. It also ships with a certificate of collection, which is either the classiest thing in consumer electronics or the most [expletive deleted] nerdy flex I have ever seen, and I say that as a man who has an Omega Formulae framed on his wall. The Doctor approves. Grudgingly, because five hundred dollars, but he approves.

If you missed the Apple II the first time around: it was 1977, Steve Wozniak built a computer that ordinary humans could actually plug into a TV and use, and it kickstarted the entire PC revolution. That machine deserves a monument. This is pretty much a monument you can type on. Go grab it before it sells out and you spend the next decade explaining to people at conventions why you paid $800 for one on eBay. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal.

Via: The Gadgeteer / 8BitDo Store

Three days. Three locations. One Gulf Coast city with more Victorian ironwork per square foot than any place has a right to. The 4th Annual Galveston Steampunk Festival wrapped June 5th–7th, and if you weren’t there, the Doctor has a few words for you: what, EXACTLY, were you doing that was more important than watching steam-powered teapots race?

The Galveston festival is genuinely one of the good ones. Pub crawl on the Strand Friday night, full festival at Moody Gardens Saturday (noon to 9pm, bring your brass), then a Sunday mansion experience at the League Kempner estate, complete with a Victorian ghost tour, a Model-T driving tour, and an escape room. This is the full SteamPunk experience, not some ren-faire-with-goggles situation. (Not that there is anything wrong with ren-faires, but you know what I mean.)

The city earns it: Galveston was literally built by Victorian industrialists who drove new machines and fabrication methods straight into the Gulf Coast economy. The bones of the place are SteamPunk. The Omega7Red Formulae didn’t even have to work that hard.

Mark your 2027 calendar now. Teapot racing awaits, and old age and betrayal won’t wait for you to get your goggles sorted.

Via: Galveston Steampunk Festival

Right now, as you read this, the fine citizens of Port Townsend, Washington are three days deep into the Brass Screw Consortium Steampunk Festival (June 12–14), a “chronologically discontiguous” weekend where Pirates, Aetherists, Outcasts, and Bodgers settle their differences via games of skill, wit, and an alarming amount of brass.

This year’s plot: a stray Plague Rat has caused a power vacuum in Consortium leadership, and attendees are invited to weigh in on the new regime. Naturally, nature abhors a vacuum, but the Aetherists love one; it gives them something to aetherify. Honestly, “power vacuum caused by a rat” is the most accurate description of several real governments I could name, but the Doctor doesn’t do American politics, so moving on.

The real highlight is the Bodgers’ Grande Exhibition, a maker showcase that is, in essence, a county fair for people who build steam-powered nonsense in their garages and then bring it to a seaport to show off. This is, and I cannot stress this enough, the single most respectable use of a garage in human history. Forget the lawnmower. Build a brass octopus that dispenses tea.

If you’re anywhere near the Olympic Peninsula this weekend, go pay your respects to the rat. Tell them the Doctor sent you, and that the rat has my full endorsement; unlike most candidates, it has never once promised me anything and then failed to deliver.

Via: Brass Screw Consortium

And call it Steampunk…

Via: Reginald Pikedevant