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Eyrie Productions, Unlimited
Gryphon
Charter Member
13230 posts |
Jan-24-14, 09:07 PM (EST) |
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"tested.com"
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So I'm sure I'm the last person in the 'hood to notice this, but (after glancing past mentions of doings concerning it for ages in Adam Savage's tweets) I finally made my way to tested.com the other day, and, well, gosh. Coming to it so late is kind of a strange experience, because it was obviously a well-established tech-nerdery site before Adam (and Jamie Hyneman, albeit he strikes me as a rather more reluctant contributor somehow) started participating in it, and one rather gets the impression that they sort of conquered it a couple of years ago, possibly with the help of a pile of Discovery Channel's money being dumped on the site's parent company. The comment streams on the early Mythbusters-related content have a certain "hey, wait, what is this, no fair" flavor about them. (In fairness, the guys who ran the site before they came along, Will and Norm, A) are still there, B) seem thrilled to have them as collaborators, and C) don't really appear to be good enough actors/liars to be faking B.) Anyway. I say "Mythbusters-related content", but it's really more "Mythbusters-related content", if you take my meaning. Jamie appears only sporadically and doesn't quite seem to know what to make of it - one rather gets the impression that he's slightly grudgingly humoring someone (but then again, one rather gets that impression from Jamie a lot of the time). Adam, on the other hand, is as active there as his peripatetic lifestyle allows, and indeed occasionally gives the impression of ever-so-slightly overextending himself. What he does on the site isn't about the show itself, though, so much as what he does for the six or seven minutes a week* when he's not working on the show - hacking stuff, collecting weird things, going to Comic-Con, knowing cool people. (One of the videos on the site is a bangin' one-hour conversation with John Landis, director of The Blues Brothers, Animal House, and other classic comedies, and guest-starring Adam's adorable dogs, Huxley and Maggie.) To give you a flavor, here's the latest in the "Adam's One-Day Builds" semi-series, released Wednesday, in which Adam builds a carrying case for a piece of taxidermy (no, really) and Will Smith (not that Will Smith) makes puns about the kind of animal it is until he actually can't stand himself any more. :) I've only just started exploring the rest of the site, beyond the "inside Adam's shop" videos, but like I say, it appears to have been a pretty standard "we test the new FrammiPhone 9000"-type site that than went berserk expanding into the whole art-technology intersection/maker culture thing. They still DO the "we were at CES and we saw this cool new widget" articles, but the overall Weltanschauung of the thing is much more eclectic and weird than that. Also, in one of the older "Adam's shop" videos, it is revealed that Adam owns the exact make and model of engine lathe we have three of in the Mechanical Engineering Technology department's Machine Tool Lab at the University of Maine (where my workstudy gig is). There are also several newer ones by another manufacturer in there, but when I was taking the introductory machine tool class myself, I always preferred the Shenwais, so discovering that one of my favorite Famous People personally owns one was a peculiar sort of "oh hey!" experience. Anyway, like I say, I bet I'm seriously late to this party, but on the off chance that anyone reading this A) is a fan and B) hasn't discovered it yet, I encourage you to check it out. There's some cool stuff. --G. -><- Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/ zgryphon at that email service Google has Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam. |
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Gryphon
Charter Member
13230 posts |
Jan-29-14, 09:50 PM (EST) |
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4. "RE: tested.com"
In response to message #2
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>I've been listening to the Still Untitled podcast (Adam, Will, and >Norm) for a while now. Good stuff that is only sometimes >Mythbusters-related. Still Untitled is great, except of course for the frequent long, tedious digressions into how much Adam loves the work of Quentin Tarantino. But aside from that! Lots of fascinating insights into the lives of a couple of seriously interesting dudes. (Norm doesn't talk much, so there aren't enough insights into his life for me to be able to tell; it is entirely possible that he is also a seriously interesting dude.) One of the many highlights for me so far was the one where they were talking about video games, and Adam said he prefers exploring the worlds to combat, and will, whenever possible, cheat to avoid the tiresome business of dying all the time so he can just wander around, see things, and move along the game's storyline if it has one. And I'm over here talking to my iPod, like he can hear me through it, going, "Yes! Exactly! That's exactly the thing!" Because I have so done that with every Elder Scrolls game I've played*, among rather a lot of others. --G. * OK, admittedly that's only the most recent two. I never encountered the first two and, to judge by the Internet Buzz, I may be the only person on Earth who didn't like Morrowind. But still. Cheated like a bastard in Oblivion; didn't have to so much in Skyrim because they implemented the "trivial" combat-diff mode correctly. -><- Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/ zgryphon at that email service Google has Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam. |
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Gryphon
Charter Member
13230 posts |
Jan-29-14, 09:43 PM (EST) |
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3. "RE: tested.com"
In response to message #0
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Upon further review, I am weirdly hypnotized by Tested's "Print the Mystery Object" feature, which is nothing more than a time-lapse video of a MakerBot Industries 3D printer making something, set to some farty How It's Made-style techno. For extra fun, start with the oldest ones; they've been doing this for nigh-on four years now, with four different generations of MakerBot printer, and it's fascinating to see how far that technology has come in such a short time. Their first one, which appears in the earliest videos, can only make very, very small things and seems barely able to get out of its own way sometimes, whereas the current one is a Magical Thing (and there are a few videos in which they borrow one even more advanced than it is, which is flat-out amazing). --G. -><- Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/ zgryphon at that email service Google has Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam. |
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