sean vidal has an interesting question um it is great to hear you're coming to the
upcoming con in toronto yeah we'll we'll see if they let americans over the border
when the time comes but it's currently looking positive um how do you find that your celebrity
has changed your con experiences over the years um significantly significantly i will tell you
um the first con back in florida was a little bit of a of a of a perspective shift because i've
spent 18 months being totally anonymous um yeah i had i mean until until very recently when you know
we started to travel outside without masks briefly i hadn't been recognized on the street in in well
over a year um so go into the con experiences like jumping back into a very specific kind of pool
um but you're asking about how it's changed the con experiences over the years in so many
different ways um and george clooney had this funny thing to say about celebrity because he
was a television star and then he was a movie star and he says there's a specific dichotomy not that
my experience tracks with clooney's in any way but i think what he says here is instructive
um he said when you're on television you're like in people's living rooms you're part of
their daily life and they treat you as such you're like a friend to them you are familiar
but when you are a movie star and they go to some darkened palace to see you
you hold a different spot in their heads and thus they they keep you at a slightly greater distance
they give you a little more distance because you have a little more mystery to you and i found
actually over the years that mythbusters was on um for the first three or four years our ratings
were slowly climbing um and during that time i i would definitely say i was kind of like the
your best friend television star you know and we were reality stars right we're not playing
some characters so with all of us carrie grant tori jamie and i uh what you see is very close to
what you get uh in person and so people just come up and talk to you tell you stuff it was great
when the show was kind of at its peak which i'd say is probably from like 08 to probably
12 or 13 i think 12 or 13 is when that when the ratings finally started to drop a little bit
but during that peak i found that we'd been on television long enough and we had been in our
position long enough that i noticed people stopped approaching like they kind of held
you in this sort of more rarefied regard um and that also tracked at the cons um
i think the difference in the way my celebrity i don't even think that it's had
i'm trying to get to this point that i wanted to make which is the thing i love about the cons
is it's how people respond to me and that i get to see them directly and we get to have
direct interactions that's my favorite part um acknowledging what they've been through to
make a costume to get there to show me the thing that they're that they're making to talk about
the difficulties they had over lockdown um that interaction is really important one to me and it
it is it's very uh energy generating for me when i go to the cons um so i i love one of my favorite
things about going to these cons and constantly having interactions with people and now that i'm
signing autographs and taking photos on the regular at every con i'm having
much much more fan interaction um that results in little things like at the end of the night
i'm at the elevators and instead of people coming over and being like can i get a picture can i get
a picture they see me they know it's the end of the night and they go have a good night adam
and i go thanks so much mando and then we go our separate ways and there is a level of like peerage
there that i find super super delightful now we're gonna go to a uh oh and that question was from uh
sean vidal sorry this question comes from joelle brooke and it's on my last page but i thought it
was a really good one joel brooke wants to know any tips on how to properly design and measure
with allowances in mind i find that i'm building as i'm building my own
designs if a single cut is slightly off several other pieces won't fit properly
aside from continual practice in the craft and mentally shifting away from perfectionism
is there another method i can apply ah well i think you've answered your question
in all of your caveats at the end so properly designing and measuring with allowances in mind
is the kind of thing that only institutional knowledge shows you where the pitfalls are it's
easy to remember at the top level that it's always better it's always easier to take away material
than to add material so always cut with that in mind always add a half inch and if you're not
sure add another half inch and if you're not sure add another half inch tolerance is always one of
my biggest problems i'm always cutting too tight i'm always wanting to like make a box and then the
space in that box i want to be as big as possible so i'm shoving everything into the corners
and your other thing you say here is aside from continual practice of the craft that's my first
answer continual practice of the craft is one of the ways you build the institutional knowledge
to know i've got to cut this seam bigger
um and mentally shifting away from perfectionism that's that's another one um
in working on spacesuits for instance i have sometimes
like looked at the seams that ryan nagata makes and been so humbled by how precise
they are that i'm not even sure i want to tackle uh a similar kind of scene but then
i look at some of the ways that the the nasa stuff has been cobbled together and sewn up and
adjusted over the years and it looks way more like hand hewn even than ryan's work sometimes
so yeah absolutely mentally shifting away from perfectionism is important
the other method you can apply is
is really like always how do let's see when you're really good at it
when you really know like oh i'm cutting the arm part here and so that means that this part is
going to get tighter and i only learned that the hard way when this thing i made aside from that um
planning to build it more than once that is the other thing that you can do with
that kind of tolerance uh to to explore that kind of tolerance so if you're cutting out a
piece and you're not sure it's the right size cut out two of them and make one extra large
yeah and so i'll often have that and to have those extras standing in the wings rather than having
to go back and re-measure and cut them from scratch makes a big difference uh making sure
you're mentally prepared to make more than one and sometimes more than two and more than three
is is the other part of that equation thank you so much joelle that's a terrific question
let's see here
sorry hold on i'm going to sneeze
thank you joe need bala says that i've recently been able to return to the convention world
and it's great to see how palpable my joy is but not everything is as positive as we could want
aside from the obvious no hugs masks etc what in the new normal do you miss
most from the old convention days
right now the cons are lightly attended they're because of all the reasons
uh and that you can feel that you can feel you can feel the energy
being like a notch or two lower than it would be if you had a fatter bigger crowd um
that's definitely it um what i'm finding on the floor though is that there is no loss of
the love and the joy of the interactions of cosplayers and the people going to the con
and the one i spent the most time on the floor of is silicon the one i run here in silicon valley
uh and honestly the the the flavor on the floor and i know i'm totally biased because it's our
con but the flavor on the floor was really loving and it was a that was without a doubt the the the
smallest con i've been to so far we've only had a few thousand people on both days but
you know it's not about the numbers it's about the experience and what i'm finding is the die hard
con goers are bringing that love to the cons there's just a certain bump up in energy
when you reach a certain critical mass and i miss that but it'll happen again um let's see here
sorry no not that one um
uh
james dutrow asks have i ever read to like the lightning i have not but then he asks what is next
up on your reading list i have just read a book that has blown my freaking mind called the flow of
time by carlo rovelli he is a physicist i believe a theoretical physicist it is about the way in
which he understands the flow of time within the structure of the field he is currently exploring
there are a lot of competing theories that help tie together newtonian and quantum physics
and he is working on one of them and
to explain in this kind of bottom-up way how his field thinks about time
and it it reset my my understanding of physics it really did i mean it was like there was me before
i read this book and me after and i finished it in portland and then i started reading it again
because i'm going to read it from start to finish again because it's it's also insanely poetic
it's so beautifully written the prose is itself poetic but that does not he uses
the poetry of writing to help you understand on almost an emotional level the way each of
our experiences of time is completely our own and doesn't track with anybody else's notion of time
um and then after that i have to read hail mary uh andy weir's new book because i
like everyone i know is just like so good and i'm dying to read it i love andy's writing um
it's been really hard for me to read it has been really really difficult for me to read
that's just been a that's been uh uh one of the results of kobit is that
i it's hard for me to find the mental space to sit down and open a book which is why uh the flow of
time was so great because it's a little book and i can kind of go a few pages at a time but i know
that the moment i crack andy's book i'm going to want to spend like hours and hours which is why
it's one of the books i'm going to take with me on the next con trip it's perfect for airplanes