Greetings and Happy Holidays,
everybody. Adam Savage here from my cave, ready to give you my year-and-favorite-things talk.
There has been so much good stuff that has happened this year.
I know there's also been some bad stuff, but we are focusing on the good stuff right now,
and there are a bunch of different things that people have released and made and built over this last year that
really excite me and I'm gonna walk you through them. First up, my friend Max Keiser Minh
has started a company called Luna Replicas, where he's making some really really beautiful replicas of Apollo era
NASA-type hardware and this right here is actually one of my little favorite things:
It's a pair of sunglasses - note that max includes a beautiful NASA-type label on this.
These are exact replicas of the type of aviator glasses that the astronauts wore.
They come replete with a serial number on the temple here.
I have a pair of vintage Ray Bans from this era and I'll tell you the build quality on these is really nice,
and, also, I love the small aviators, I actually.
Got I think four pairs of these from Max.
I've got a light a dark a mirrored and I'm not sure what to do with the fourth one yet. That's this one,
but these are
fantastic, and this is just the kind of sort of historical cosplay that I like to do with my day to day
wearing so
LunaReplicas.com is where you get these and many other beautiful project products and projects.
They are working on all sorts of really cool stuff for the future for 2019. So keep an eye on them.
Next up, are a couple of beautiful garage kits that you can purchase one from
Industria Mechanika and the other from Machination Studios. I did a video on the Industrial
Mechanika piece here and extolled the virtues of these beautiful castings.
These are garage kits engineered in 3D and then printed and then those prints are molded and
castings made in order to make some of the cleanest and most beautiful garage kit castings I've ever seen and
also Industrial Mechanik- I'm sorry - Machination Studios friend does some absolutely beautiful
castings of his kits and they go together and build together really
well. We've built a few and tested both on camera and off.
It's really important that you support artists like this. These objects are not mainstream. They are
bespoke and they are niche and the world needs things like this.
So make sure you're buying castings of this from the originator not recasts.
They deserve to make a living
making these things and you can help them just by buying one of their beautiful kits and
putting it together and sharing the story of that with others. I love garage kits. I don't just love the kits.
I don't just love that
they go into niche areas that mainstream models would never spend their money on I
also love that they're made by people and over the years
I've been able to befriend many of those people and see that their commitment is to both quality and
To letting other people enjoy the kind of storytelling inherent in putting together your own garage kit.
Okay, my next favorite thing started with this beautiful pair of Captain America gloves.
I've extolled the virtues of Etsy for years and I bought these cap gloves on
Etsy from a store called like Linda from a maker in Italy named Linda Gua Ries. I
loved these so much. I asked Linda if she would take
commissions and the answer was "yes", and she went on to build
these for me. These were the
gloves, I wore with my orange ASIS suit at New York City Comicon this summer.
The level of replication on these
goes even beyond the fact that they're lined and they feel great and the label on them is totally accurate, but I
figured out that NASA applied the silicone
grip on their gloves by squeezing them through a screen and I just emailed
Linda that information and she figured out how to do it on her gloves. These things are so beautiful and so accurate
we've started a relationship of
commissions so Linda's made another pair of space gloves for a suit I haven't revealed to you yet.
And then I also, recently, just bought a pair of her Captain America spats
which I
have to tell you I have some good spats from a good Captain America suit maker
but these are absolutely incredible.
These are gorgeous and when she sent these I just got them literally like two hours ago as a Christmas present.
She sent me another pair of cap gloves. I think these are infinity war gloves dude, Linda. You are awesome
If you're looking for something and you can't quite find it on Etsy
but you have a maker who's aesthetic you really like and it's close, ask them. Etsy engenders a
relationship between the buyers and the makers and these relationships have been some of the more enriching
collaborations I've had professionally and personally over the years. Check it out.
Next up is a piece of very hyped technology that came out this year
these are
magic leap glasses.
I know there was a huge amount of hype and a huge amount of backlash
In the press about these magic leap goggles. I
think that there's no way these goggles could have lived up to their hype,
but I'm here to tell you that these to me personally feel like the future.
There's still a lot about this that is kind of in prototype mode.
The amount of processing that this tiny computer has to do is gargantuan and yet I
want to explain this experience I had I was in my house trying these out:
I was up in my office upstairs and I scanned the room.
My office has three windows that face the street and I scanned the room and then I started to play around with the various
aspects of this Doctor Gord Boortz is so much fun shooting robots is
endlessly entertaining and I'm not even someone who loves gaming but I play I've played that game for hours so far
but the thing that really blew my mind.
There's a there's a whale now. I know that in the
preliminary press hype for magic leap.
There was a whale diving in a gymnasium and everyone looking at it the whale for the magic leap that you can look at. It
doesn't look quite the same but the experience I had was really transformative, because I turned it on and I could hear the whale,
but I couldn't see it and I'm looking around my office for it, and then it swims by my windows on the
outside of my building,
so the glasses scanned my room it knew that my windows were portals and it
rendered the whale as if it was swimming down my street.
I actually got choked up because I haven't had such an intense experience of
that
bifurcation of knowing that something is fake and yet it feels so real and that personally feels to me like the future and the
possibilities in this of telephony
remote communication collaboration
get me really really really excited. These are a
magnificent machine and it is only gonna get better and I can't wait to see how full disclosure I know a lot of the people
developing this machine. You should take my enthusiasm with a big fat and grain of salt. That is totally fine.
You should still try this out because of the way I'll blew my freaking head. Oh, a little side note about these they didn't yet
make the prescriptions when I got these so I made my own prescription glasses for them
There we go.
Yeah, I
have one last favorite-thing to go over today, and I'm wearing it right now. It's not one of my shirts.
It's actually a new pair of hearing aids that I've just gotten.
Those that are regular
watchers have tested and listeners to our podcast know that I've been wearing hearing aids for about a decade and a half and they have
radically improved my life,
but it has been about six years since I got a new set of hearing aids and I've got these new ones.
The ones I bought were made by Widex, they interface with my phone,
I can adjust all sorts of parameters about them,
and while the software is still pretty primitive - because hearing aid makers are clearly not UX designers -
the fact is, is the improvement between my old hearing aids and them
Is so radical that
it's not just this isn't just a benefit to me
It's a benefit to my whole family and all the people that I deal with on a day-to-day basis.
I don't have to say,
"What?" all the time.
I
was talking about this too with another friend who has recently gotten hearing aids and he was saying that he had seen a study that
being able to hear well bears directly on your ability to remember things and, frankly,
while I haven't looked into the studies about that, that rings really really true to me. Being able to take in all of the experience
is so different than missing about twenty or thirty percent of it because you can't quite hear, which is where I am if I don't
wear hearing aids. I talk about it a lot ,because I want to demystify it.
I want to distinct,
because if you think you might have hearing loss and
you feel like getting hearing aids will make you feel like an old person, I will tell you
I'm gonna have a conversation with future you now,
because there's nobody in the world who ever got hearing aids and put them in and thought, "Well, now I feel like an old person."
Everyone who gets hearing aids and puts them in goes, "Holy shitballs. My life is so much better."
If you have hearing loss and you're thinking about getting hearing aids my advice is" Please go do it.
It will make things so much better and there is also so much more to do.
I am lucky enough that I can afford these. They are not covered on my health plan.
I paid seven thousand dollars for this pair of hearing aids, and that is an appalling sum of money for me to have to spend.
If these things cost them a thousand dollars, I wouldn't mind paying two thousand dollars.
I don't mind people making a reasonable profit, but that type of margin feels almost criminal.
This is an area ripe for disruption and I really hope that
technologists around the world are thinking about ways in which to bring hearing aids to people who don't have
7,000 dollars in their pocket, because everyone deserves to hear this well.
Those are my favorite things. There is a lot more, but as usual on Tested, we just cover those all year round.
Thank you for joining me on this. Happy Holidays to everybody. I hope your holidays are awesome.
I hope the cork we put
in the end of this year makes it feel like it was a productive year,
even though it was a difficult one and I love everybody.