Recommendation: Tested.com

Tested.com is a website hosted by Adam Savage, formerly of the US TV show Mythbusters, although I think the driving force is presenter Norman Chan. And it also frequently features Simone Giertz who you might now (particularly if you’ve seen my social media) is Queen of the Shitty Robot Nation.

Much of this website is devoted to making homemade models of movie props. (Although, when I say homemade, Adam used to work for leading Hollywood special effects company Industrial Light & Magic, so the standard is actually cutting edge – no pun intended.) Or it’s devoted to making cosplay costumes and wearing them at comic conventions. Or it’s devoted to discussing pop culture events, particularly super hero movies.

I’m actually interested in surprisingly few of these. But I love that: I love tuning into regular shows made by people who are fantastically enthusiastic and knowledgable about things that I know comparitively nothing about.

Adam Savage himself, eternally upbeat and encouraging, can sometimes veer a little into hyperbolic self-parody. He is not above the occasional humblebrag or three (then again, aren’t we all, darling?) And one of the Tested crew at one point told the story in their podcast about how he was standing outside the office looking up at the recent eclipse of the sun, and Adam suddenly appeared on a unicycle holding a bunch of welding visors, which he proceeded to hand out to everyone. It was described (to Adam himself) as ‘peak Adam’.

Yet this does not seem to discourage me, at least at the moment, from counting the seconds until the next podcast or video.

Perhaps because there is something fundamentally so… constructive about their world. Literally, contructive. They refer to it as the ‘Maker culture’: a community of self-proclaimed nerds who like nothing more than to acquire and share new skills.

And occasional self-parody aside, I think Adam Savage is an extraordinary human being, with a vast and deep knowledge of turning ideas into physical objects, and I would love to have just a fraction of that skillset.

Current Favourite Thing:

The Tested team talking, in their typically hyper-technical and hyper-analytical way, about the Great British Bakeoff (16m 50s in).

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