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.
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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.