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A lot of my approach to how to become who I want to be has been shaped by the Iron Man movies. Something about a guy who is constantly failing but who is choosing to get back up and learn from those failures really speaks to me.
So I don't know if you folks at the channel have anything to do with it, but I've recently had a lot of 'members only' videos recommended to me, especially from your channel. Perhaps it's just because you have a lot of 'members only' videos, but as a person who is really vigilant when it comes to identifying psychological manipulations, it doesn't sit right with me. I don't tolerate fomo being weaponized against me. I love Adam and this channel, but the reality is that I'll unsubscribe and stop watching all videos from this channel if it gets beyond a certain point. Not that I think i'm that important, you can do you and I can do me, but I think you should be aware that there are downsides to this members only business that you may not have accounted for.
Geriatric Millennial here. We just had antenna for the first 10 years or so of my life so I consumed movies by recording like the network Saturday evening movie. If I liked it, I kept it and watched it a ton. I would record on EP so I could stack 3 movies per tape if I paused recording at commercials. One of the ones I watched the most was Back to the Future. Then once we got basic cable in the mid-90s I’d be watching the Sci-fi channel a lot and would typically tune in for their Saturday original movie I would relish the occasional premium channel (showtime, HBO, etc) free previews as I could see uncut more recent releases on TV.
I was 8 when I saw Star Wars at the cinema, confirmed geek ever since. I was 9 when I saw Watership Down, traumatised me and shaped my view on animal cruelty. I was 10 when I saw Salem's Lot on TV (with David Soul), slept for years with a pillow over my neck.
I was 10 and a friend of my mom's bought tickets for my 15 year old brother and I to see Blade Runner. Completely inappropriate for my age, but it rocked my world. Been a lover of sci-fi ever since.
1:01 when I was younger I loved offloading and working on jeeps. I started working in a offroad shop. One time I went to an jeep event, and never unloaded my own vehicle because the whole time I was working on others vehicles. I decided then, that I didn't want this to be a job. If you find a way to make you Hobbie into a job, you will never work again, saying isn't always true. Sometimes it take the fun out of your hobbies.
Same for me and getting into automotive, I never had time for my own stuff and wasn't getting paid well enough for my skills and the industry going the way it was. Im glad I got out of it and kept it a hobby, much happier. 911 operator now career wise.
Cooking. Enjoyed doing it for fun. Hated doing it for work and was blocked from doing it for fun because it started feeling like i was at work when ever i cooked for fun.
😂 I used to refurbish and salvage old furniture..so I know how it feels to sell and deliver furniture only for them to ask if I could refurbish their entire kitchen😂.
I was 10 when I first saw the billboards advertising "Alien". I loved sci-fi and I got really excited about the movie. Of course, I didn't know anything about it other than it was sci-fi. When I went to my older brother (he is 8 years older than me) to get him to take me into the movie he wouldn't do it. He told me I was too young and that movie wasn't for me. Later, as a teenager, when I did see the movie I learned that, as much as it frustrated me at the time, my brother was right to not take me to that movie when I was that young 🙂
Parents took me to see 1981 Dragonslayer when i was way too young. I think it was because they couldnt find a babysitter for all us kids. Before the movie, there was a trailer for Poltergeist. Both freaked me out a "little" bit.
I don't know about being *nostalgic* for it, but my experience with changing consumption of media involves using Bearshare and Limewire as a kid in the 90s and downloading a song never knowing if it is 1) labelled correctly, 2) the song you're even looking for, 3) not a troll, and 4) not a virus until it's finished downloading, which itself could take hours for a single song. I remember thinking that Wheel in the Sky was NOT Journey but some other person for years because the version I got from Limewire was mislabelled. I even remember thinking "man, this sounds a lot like Journey".
Man, Limewire was such a Love/Hate thing growing up. "Hey, wanna get the new Linkin Park album and maybe potentially destroy your family PC with an assload of viruses." And you're sitting there like... Hmmm... SURE!
This is cool because in the 90s, Adam and Jamie’s commercial special effect with the bubbles in the bottle is kind of iconic in my memory as a moment that shifted the notion of ‘selling out’ - within the creative arts scene. I was involved in the alternative performing arts scene in Sydney Australia at that time and it suddenly became okay (not uncool) to talk about a tv commercial from the perspective of the creativity and cool excellence. It was totally a ‘moment’ in time. Until I became a Tested follower I didn’t know that was Adam and Jamie. So cool. ❤ 👏🏼 🫧
I have this problem. I loved welding in highschool but knew I'd hate every job that involved it. The 5am to 5pm kinda work life in general would be massively negative on my mental health. Also, I do traditional pen and ink artwork every once in a while, and again I only work when the inspiration hits. If I ever made a job out of the things I love to do, it would kill all love I have for them. I'll take BS jobs that I don't really have to think about so I can enjoy the things I do at my own pace, and not the pace of customer or a company.
I feel like it would still be a rewarding life choice to be able to weld and sell sculpture out of your own shop/garage though. Even if work is work, work on something you love is a little better than with on something you don't.
I've been what we now call a "maker" since I was 8 years old. I'm 61 now. I semi-retired in 2017. The "making" aspect of my life has almost never been a significant source of income for me. I have *NEVER* met a maker who "looks down" on people who also work for a living doing something else entirely. I myself was full-time employed in the computer and network tech development industry from 1979 to 2017 (and I still do it part-time). I was *always* "making" in the background. Whether it was electronics or mechanical things. The last 3 years, I've spent a huge number of volunteer hours restoring a large (12.8m) former-NATO satellite ground terminal for use in undergraduate astrophysics education. Turning ones maker skills to something like that is decidedly rewarding, if not particularly remunerative :)
It's only selling out if you don't have the passion for it any more and do it purely out of greed. There's nothing wrong with something you love to do being profitable and allowing you to live comfortably.
Battleship New Jersey has an episode on the Emeco Navy Chairs. There's a lot of them that were bought for WWII that are still in use in the navy. A major case of "You get what you pay for"... those chairs are many hundreds of dollars new.
The cousin to "You get what you pay for" is "Buy cheap, buy twice"; usually because the cheap one breaks or wears out in a fraction of the time. Often the cheap one isn't to save you any money. That said, it's nice to have cheap options for tools and materials when you get started out in making.
@@wufflykins4369 Completely agreed. I know Adam has even said, if you're getting started with something, don't go all-in on the most expensive version of the tool you can find. Get something that's a step up from the truly cheap stuff to save your money until you know for sure how it works for you.
"It's a project that I thought would take a couple of days that is now eight months and counting. But you know, which amoung us can throw stones?" Might need this one on a shirt @tested
Taking commissions isn't necessarily the same thing as selling out. If you're making someone else's vision to their specifications using their input that's just doing a good job. Selling out is when you compromise your own vision or principles for money, fame, success, etc. For example, if an artist who advertised themselves as an anti-establishment human rights activist accepted a contract to make promotional materials for the IDF then that person could reasonably be considered a sellout.
It really helps that I watched Repo Man just last week. I like where you say it's about repossessing cars. That's like "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" being about fixing motorcycles. Well, kinda, but...
The explanation of workflow really resonated with me as a cgi content creator, in particular 'I go back and forth; sometimes the only way you're going to know what the next step is is to build the previous step' I'm a big believer that a lot of stuff in life is transitive, that one area of knowledge/skill has familiarity with totally 'different' fields. This back and forth is SUPER familiar to, say, writing. One of the biggest challenges writers have is that you need to write a bunch of stuff you end up changing completely or even just don't end up using, even if its good. Because it doesn't work. But you NEED those attempts, or sketches, or test builds, or whatever it is in whatever you are doing to get the ideas you DO end up doing. That ended up a little incoherent, but anyway, back and forth, absolutely.
All in one go…. Impossible. I’ve been working on one project for 10 years and finally finishing it up now. Many twists and turns along the way. Love your channel!
When I was eight, my parents took me to see the original "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956). I checked under my bed for a week after that, but here I am. Also, during the summers in Texas the local channel, 11 at the time - we only had four - would show 'old' 30s to 40s movies like the "Thin Man" series and lots of the musicals. And I never tired of watching the B movies of the time, especially the sci-fi variety, many of which I saw first run at the local theater. I could go on...
I vaguely remember Beastmaster and I was fond of it at the time. I remember that I loved Buckaroo Banzai and never realized it wasn't a hit in the theaters because my family almost always waited until movies came out on HBO to see them. I was shocked in college when they had it for student movie night and my boyfriend had never heard of it.
Buckaroo Banzai is amazing. The only quibble I have with it is that they saved the absolute best track of the score for the end credits. A pity none of the planned sequels/TV shows ever came to pass.
I think you kinda had to be the right age. I'm a year older than Adam, so I was 19, and being 19 in the mid-'80s was a lot different from being not-19 in the mid-'80s, or being 19 in the not-mid-'80s.
Hi there Adam, I am a person who loves to make things out of something and have a Brother and Father that were Machinists for a living, I have a little bit very little bit of experience with a lathe , but recently I’ve been able to get a lathe running and have found that I really enjoy using it even though I have never been trained properly but have been watching a lot of videos on you tube and really been enjoying the process of making things on the lathe
Adam on the topic of the Emeco chair and A pilot system for drilling holes, that’s what I have used my 3D printer for a few times in car projects. You can draw it and print it on paper to see what the pattern looks like then 3D print it with thickness as a disposable pilot template for drilling holes.
A Repo Man liker, nice. It made a huge impact on me as a kid. The music, the vibes, the attitude, the mystery. I love it. Pi had a similar impact on me too, huge recommends.
i have been into hobby building for many years.. i paint miniatures. make models.. carve wood do Celtic artwork and stone carving and metal work and many other things 3d resin and 3d scanning.. and everyone wants to buy what i make. and say you should sell this stuff.. problem is. everything is a one of a kind.. and i know if i sell it i will never have it again.. and i have tried making money from my hobbies. but you are so right.. hobbies become a job.. and loose all the fun of a hobby.. so i stopped selling again.. and now and then i will give a piece away or make something for someone special.. but could not sell them..
Yeah, i used to throw pots, and it's hard to sell something later that you made for yourself. If you have to sell a lot, as you often would as a potter, that would definitely be a job, vs a high level with unique glazes that you could sell a few pieces of.
@@emu314159 yea and i also find people do not realise the amount of work that is put into some items.. and they then complain and try and knock you down on the price.. i rather keep the items.. i only did a small amount of pottery.. always wanted to get into it a lot more but setting up kilns and everything was way out of my price range.. i have done some celtic work though in glazes on stuff but they sit on my shelves.. i enjoyed doing it..
Tome "selling out " isn't profiting or heeding a customers requests, it's working for or profiting off someone that morally comprises me like if Haliburton came to me and said hey well pay you 20 million dollars to make a high end diorama that depicts a grotesque battle scene but makes it seem like this really cool, happy, hero scene that makes fascism good for the whole family especially the kids. Of course this is an extreme black and white example but compromises of your morality usually are much more subtle and shades of grey.
I was 15 when "Heavy Metal" premiered in theaters. I wanted to see it sooo badly. My older brother did go and see it, and i begged him to take me (it was R rated), and he told me "you're not old enough to see that." Which was BS, i had already been reading the Heavy Metal Magazine in book stores anyway. A few cartoon breasts wasn't going to ruin me.
Beastmaster was one of my lost movies. Saw it at the age of... 7? ... when video rentals were a new thing in Norway. No HBO in Norway so I did not re-discover it there. It was one of those few things you have several very clear memories of, but no idea of the actual title. Internet came and I tried several times to find it. Unsuccessfull at first but after some years and possibly after it's region 1 DVD release I found it. Bought it. Watched it. Loved it. Then the soundtrack became available. Bought it. Listened to it. Loved it.
Saw the camera in the back and the phone stand, and thought you had some kind of phone stand to make it look like a retro camera, was a bit sad to realise it isn't, but happy to see the more "retro" camera
I’ve commented on Adam’s Q&A videos a couple times about how much the maker world mirrors that of professional musicians. But here is one difference. Some people - not all by any means - who are full-time professional musicians look down their noses at those of us who have day jobs and are professional musicians at night and on weekends. It’s idiotic but they don’t consider us to be “real musicians.” I’m glad to hear that kind of pettiness isn’t a thing in the maker community!
i appreciate when you describe a movie you're excited about! watching repo man for the first time tonight on this video :) philadelphia story was fantastic!
I think one of the most nostalgic things that the millennials like myself have is the feeling of first booting up certain video games from any physical medium. Now everything is digital property without the physical media that we used to have like CD’s, installing a game using multiple disks was a wild experience.
I am nostalgic for scarcity as well. It used to be that when something would come out new everyone was talking about it and it was just exciting. Nowadays there's so much new stuff coming out that chances are no one you know knows about it until you say something and it's all forgotten about next week. I don't know that I would rather it be like it used to be because I've been spoiled by how much there is nowadays but I do sometimes miss it.
I was born in 79, all those mid 80s action movies like "The Delta Force" and "Commando" and the 2nd and 3rd Rambo movies. Those were the ones I was watching on HBO and Showtime free preview weekends when I was 8 or 9
here in my later life i find myself creating her ideas & building the projects my wife wants. and change from my interests of go-carts, motorcycles, 4x4 bumpers. Now i make planter boxes, patio, deck chairs, kitchen cabinets
My wife and I are major nerds for obscure films and we just saw repo man for the first time because it happened to be playing at the alamo. She immediately remarked after how surprised she was that I'd never seen it. She has a category of films she calls kelsey-core that Repo Man fits comfortably into and yet it somehow has flown just below my radar for 40 years. We still throw random lines into everyday conversation just derailing whatever was being discussed. On its surface it's so mundane and disjointed but so dense with brilliance it's challenging to know where to begin singing it's praises.
I turned my hobby in to a business. I retired at the start of the year but I ran a business producing bespoke laser cut and 3d printed parts for railway modellers. I expanded in to a range of building kits and accessories. It started as a hobby making parts for my own use.
One thing that most people don’t understand is that artists during the Renaissance were considered skilled laborers. They created artwork to spec, on contract. Da Vinci didn’t just have patrons; he had customers, who expected to get a specified product, at a specified price, on a specified schedule. The art market was very different from today, where an artist can produce anything they want and then just sell it (although that also existed, but was not the norm).
When I was 20 and in college for writing, I thought “I love dragons but I could never write a book with dragons, it’s too overdone, too cliche.” Now I’m like “if I ever stop including dragons in my fiction, kill me”. The things that matter when you’re 20 and trying to be approved by your peers seem so trivial in the rear view mirror.
As a kid my teenaged cousins used to take me to see a bunch of movies that i didnt really need to see at that age but two still standout. Jaw's (i was about 7)I remember hiding behind the seats in theater and them laughing at me and the other movie i will never forget see The Cars that ate Paris, seeing someone impaled on a VW stuck in my head since then, and im 54 now, but i am grateful to them to this day for taking me along. PS, and i almost forgot, Food of the Gods
Let's go do some crimes. Let's eat sushi and not pay. Re-po, Re-po, Repo Repo, Repo Man! 😁 My childhood movie is steeped in trauma. For some reason, my parents thought I would be asleep in the backseat as we went to the drive-in and they watched Jaws. Now at 57 years old, I still can't swim, hate boats and being on the water, and am terrified of sharks. Multiple combat tours, been blown up, but cringe at sharks. Totally unrealistic phobia, but there ya go.
Was 7 years old when I found out cool movies would play after dark on the basic cable channels. Saw stuff like the original Star Wars trilogy and then.. "Alien", "Predator", and "The Thing" traumatized me to the point I thought the Xenomorph, the Predator, and the final form of the Thing with the screaming husky that Macready blows up were all hiding under my bed in some Axis of Child Terror tag team. I'd jump out of bed and try to land as far away from the bed and as quietly as possible until I was like.. 14. In my 30s I still catch myself avoiding peeing in the water of the toilet cause I thought the splashing would awaken them all those years ago.
Just looked it up. I believe my childhood movie was Island of the Blue Dolphin (1964), based on a 1960 children's book, based on the true story of a young native girl who spent many years alone on San Nicolas Island in the early 1800s. The traumatic part was that she was with her brother, but there were wild dogs on the island. It only showed her face, reacting to sounds off-screen. That was considered fit for children, along with Bambi, and Old Yeller! Is it any wonder that Boomers are messed up?
Repo man was such a great movie. I saw it at an artsy movie house in Austin when I was in graduate school, probably early 1980s. The same year Liquid Sky came out, another off beat but magnificent move.
Zoomer here, when it comes down to media, I miss going to the DVD rental store on sunday night with dad and a sibling while the rest of the family set up the PC in the living room to watch a movie on it together. We didn't have a TV so watched movies on the family PC.
Ok this is a crazy connection but the way adam speaks about "a narrative unexplored" brings to mind the jazz fills Colin Greenwood gets up to at the end of The National Anthem. I always thought he was teasing the listener as if saying "oh what's going on over here?"
I saw 2001 in the theater at 18mos. and as far as I can tell, I still remember the last parts of it from that. I remember being terrified and fascinated at the same time. I also remember being very young and hearing "Thus Spake Z" in a salad commercial afterwards and being furious that they would rip this fabulous movie thing off like that. They were messin' with my holy experience, man! And of course I'm a SERIOUS space & SF geek.
You need that rebellious "F*** you I'm never selling out" mentality when you're younger. It's a part of that creative fire that you need to produce work fueled by your true passionate feelings. When you start to gain understanding of your craft, how it fits into the larger picture, and how you address real financial needs, it is then beneficial to add to your understanding of "selling out"-- in that not only is it OK to do business with others, but it makes you an even better creator by doing so. But we should never really let go on that initial spark. Always hang on to a small part of it.
1 movie that I always watched as a kid was "Solarbabies". I just had to watch every time I came across it, and thankfully I found it recently on Tubi and watched it again and it still held up!!
great video as usual! love that you brought up REPOMAN. it came out my senior year of high school and was an immediate cult classic with my close friends and i. i played the VHS till it wouldn't play anymore.
I definitely feel that about turning a hobby into a career and losing the hobby. I haven't written code on my home computer for fun in a long, long time. I still have things where it's the only tool for the job, but I actively refuse to code things now for my community and instead pay for things to be done by others. And it's a lot of why I won't do art or writing for money or by request.
My movie moment actually came later. Me and my friends had been huge fans of Monty Python in high school. Years later I saw an interview with John Cleese. "I get these fans that run up to me and quote entire skits. That is great but I feel bad that they have missed the entire point. 'Now for something completely different.' Go make your own skits." I realized a real Monty Python fan doesn't memorize entire movies. They are creating their own thing. This should be applied to everything.
I considered making woodworking a full time career rather than my biotech job. As I ran the numbers and realized I would have to make what the client wants rather than what I want, I decided to go a startup to reinvigorate my biotech career and keep woodworking as a hobby where I can make what I want and take as long as I want.
There is a look that ive seen on Adam's face that expresses an emotion that i feel germans would have a word for, but the best way i can paraphrase the look/emotion is "the feeling you get when something is so dangerous, its hilarious that it exists." my question for Adam is "is there any of Grant Imahara's builds that stand out as giving you the epitome of the previously described feeling?"
Some makers go pro, outsource their products overseas which drastically reduce the quality of the product, but still charge the same or often charge even more and their customers notice. One recent example is the couple who makes cloaks on Instagram. It went from a family business with handmade products to a manufactured pile of crap that they charge HUNDREDS for and their followers are not having it.
When someone asks me to make something, I tell them I have two rules: I have to find the job interesting (I usually do), and I don’t want money. Nothing ruins a perfectly good hobby quicker than turning it into a job.
Not a maker thing but I also have to find it interesting. When a mate asked me to design a website for his sister's side business and offered to pay, he couldn't understand why I said no and that it wasn't about money.
In the music community, we have a similar perspective. I've played music for money, which I enjoyed. There was also a season when I only played for myself, which I also enjoy. But when I stopped enjoying the work it takes to play well, I gave up the music for almost a decade.
As a professional mechanic, many people think we hate backyard mechanics, the truth is, we might pick on them, or jest at their expense, and we might b!tch about them if you bring in work done by them that was inadequately done, but I think I speak for most mechanics when I say that we all started out working in our garage or our driveway or our backyard, often with family members like our father or grandpa or uncle. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that backyard mechanics are the cornerstone of the automotive mechanic world. They are the ones doing the work that we don't have time to do, or are doing work that someone cant afford to have done at a professional shop. Without backyard mechanics, the industry would surely grind to a halt.
Omg Beastmaster, Sunday morning Star Trek, goonies, neverending story labyrinth... Jim Henson everything. The one that really touched my Childhood self was Watership Down.
For me, selling out would be doing something I find morally objectionable just for the money. I took a commission from a TechShop lead to lasercut a pendant from a design he got from the internet and didn't have the copyright. The artist specifically wanted people to ask permission. I had requested permission but not heard back, but the client was bugging me about his deadline and implying he'd make my life difficult as a TechShop member if I backed out of the deal. I went ahead and made it, but I was worried enough I didn't notice the seat belt was stuck in the door of my car. Someone stole my car and it wasn't located for 6 weeks, I had to pay $500 to get it out of impound the same day it was taken, and about $500 in booth fixtures (and my beloved decorated top hat) were all gone. All this for a $25 pendant. Currently, I design and manufacture laser-cut California/Bay Area souvenirs. I have decided NOT to do the Balclutha/Star of India or any of the missions because of their legacy of slavery. Depicting a beautiful ship (that was built to carry human cargo like cordwood in the hold) or a historic church (that coordinated the slavery and genocide of Indigenous people) will only perpetuate the romanticization of our white supremacist past. (Junipero Serra should never have been beatified, because it isn't like he repented from enslavement and genocide and that's what was holy about him.)
Movies always on cable in my youth: Solarbabies, Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, Battletruck, and Mad Max. I didn't realize until just now how much dystopia I was exposed to in my formative years.
I do coding projects the same way as you build projects! For me its easier to think of general architecture top down and then brainstorm smaller parts of the program that I had a general idea bout but the nitty gritty "how" wasn't done yet until i got to that part. It has drawbacks but it works best for me. Every planning-working style works different for different people.
I also was made to watch Alien young. It was a right of passage among my brothers, and it only became reinforced as we naturally all grew to adore Alien. What's interesting to me about it as a formative experience though is everything else I was watching at the time and how they collectively impacted me as writer of science fiction. I watched it young enough that I still had recent-ish memories of the episode of Kipper the Dog where aliens visit, and I think I first saw Scooby Doo and the Alien Invaders some time after I first saw Alien. I'm sure there were many more examples. But in general I grew to love tonal whiplash as a feature of first contact scenarios and alien encounter scenarios in general.
Adam describing the feeling of the gift wrapped package of money scene reminded me of a Doctor Who line from the 11th Doctor era where he says, “…there’s quite a difference, isn’t there, between what was and what should have been. There’s an awful lot of one, but there’s an infinity of the other.”
10:34 As one of these people, teetering between millennial and zoomer, I’m nostalgic on how slow young children’s cartoons used to be, from the 80s, 90s, early 2000s compared to today. I still remember an episode of Blues Clues where it was about sitting in a room and listening to the rain. Now, the few bits I see of kids shows, they’re sooo fast, like entertaining them with jangling keys.
I think a lot of people interchange 'selling out' with 'doing it for money' - I do a lot of things that I otherwise wouldn't because it's what puts the food on my table, but those things all fall in the domain of my professional expertise, interests and moral compass. Selling out would be doing something in spite of one or more of these three things for a monetary reward.
I was a young electronic hobbyist from age 12. I would build all sorts of things. When a got out of HS, I went to a trade school for electronics just for the cert. Turns out, in my class was the son of the CEO of a small MRI manufacturer, who said come by and apply for a job, so I did and worked there for almost 25 years. I won't say that being a professional R&D Tech ruined the hobby, but it did scratch the itch, so I didn't really continue my work at home. Over the years I got to work on some amazing technology that I could never afford to get involved with at home.
Why would anyone look down on someone having a hobby? If you end up creating something useful/practical/game changing, sell it. Not as a business but to stay out. Then continue doing what you were doing.
We couldn't help but notice that you have a 3D printed nerf blaster - looks to be a a "pewpew" by pewtech - on the bench behind you, along with packages of fresh short darts! Something coming up with that? It would be amazing to see you get into the foam-flinging hobby - even farther than your already incredible one-day build rival flywheeler! Thanks for everything you do.
Thought it would take a couple of days and ended up taking 8 months... I know the feeling, I'm just coming out the other side of a project like that myself!
We had 12 channels when I was growing up, but two of them were so snowy it rendered them impossible to watch, so we actually had 10 viewable channels. Two of them were HBO and Cimemax, which I wasnt supposed to get in my room, but I found the cable going to my bedroom under the house and removed the filters blocking those channels. Needless to say, I watched a lot of content I really wasnt supposed to be watching.
I was allowed to watch most of The Shining when i was much too young. I feel like I was the same age as Danny when we got it on Selectavision video disk. Most of it didn't scare me as a kid. The scariest parts were the blood in the elevator and Mrs Massey. I wasn't supposed to watch her scene. I was sent outside but sometimes watched through the window. Growing up i realised the scariest parts of the movie were part of my real life with the history of substance abuse in my family
I apparently saw Child's Play at too young an age. I actually don't remember the experience at all, but I clearly suppressed it. I have always had pediophobia aka the fear of dolls.
Maan..I always get sad if someone wants me to change a design. Not because of extra work itself, but because I wasted hours on that. Even if I get paid, I would rather work as a cashier than question myself what am I even doing (as an artist) when people keep changing your concepts. (It doesn't happen often, but i'm making a point). This is the stuff that gives you impostor syndrome. Ps. Much Love man! I have rewatched mythbusters countless times! Still am
0:57. That’s me. Turned a hobby into a job. Then the hobby became work. Now I haven’t touched that hobby in 40 years. 10 years later I took up a new hobby and would never accept money for it. I helped a lot of people, but I would never accept payment. Enjoyed that until I got too old to be able to continue. (Loss of fine motor skills and poor close in vision.)
Re: Gatekeeping, my friend Mary took a bowl turning class at a Rockler store this weekend, and the instructor made a comment to her class about how people who use CNCs aren’t real woodworkers. While “makers” are generally welcoming and inclusive, there’s still a lot of snobbery within the woodworking faction of making. Whether it’s anti-CNC, anti-construction lumber, anti-pallet wood, or anti-power tool, there seems to be a lot of insecurity to go around LoL
Truely "Selling out" is really only the point at which you stop holding personal integrity, pride, and happiness out of something. At different times in your life those things will all change. In reality most people have to 'sell' or compromise part of their vision for a multitude of reasons. Sometimes its money, sometimes is a deadlines, sometimes it's your own energy or well-being, and very often its selling out to admitting a lack of knowledge or experience. In a way all projects have some level of sell-out involved, it really comes down to what aspects of it are important to you and if you hold on to some of those for yourself.
My parents fed me a diet of SciFi when I was a kid, We watched Star Trek, The Time Tunnel, Lost in Space, Land of the Giants, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, etc. at home. Movies of course were The Planet of the Apes, Fantastic Voyage, 2001... But the movie that changed me was Silent Running, (1972). It made me the music loving, tree hugging, aging hippie liberal that I am today. It also made me a huge Bruce Dern fan, who also fantastic in the Zanti Misfits episode of The Outer Limits, by the way.
Adam, I still often think of how you’ve said we are all makers. For the longest time I’ve told myself I wasn’t artistic/creative because I always trended towards maths and sciences as a source of comfort, because it made sense to a young boy trying to understand the world. I told myself I wasn’t artistic, that I wasn’t a maker, because that was for “stupid” people who couldn’t figure things out. I realize that the separation I had drawn between them was a lie, partially of my own making, but largely I believe due to social programming. It took we a really long time to actually internalize that, and I have you to partially thank for it (or blame, depending on who I have to justify it to lol). You are not just a maker Adam, but a mender.
You can end up in a job that closely aligns with your hobby but the freedom of the shed will always be unbounded compared to a frightened corporate NDA workplace. My wokplace has wonderful tools but would take weeks to get a risk assesment in place for what Applied Science/ Codys Lab Etc. does on a table.
Repo Men is one of the few movies I have watched several times. (Written before I realized that I meant another movie with the exact same name but different release year.)
I make pool cues now love your show your shop is like mine love it. 30 years in upper management large construction projects. Met you a number of years in Alameda. Full time cues now. Any you using cnc ?
Which movies shaped you?
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A lot of my approach to how to become who I want to be has been shaped by the Iron Man movies. Something about a guy who is constantly failing but who is choosing to get back up and learn from those failures really speaks to me.
So I don't know if you folks at the channel have anything to do with it, but I've recently had a lot of 'members only' videos recommended to me, especially from your channel. Perhaps it's just because you have a lot of 'members only' videos, but as a person who is really vigilant when it comes to identifying psychological manipulations, it doesn't sit right with me. I don't tolerate fomo being weaponized against me. I love Adam and this channel, but the reality is that I'll unsubscribe and stop watching all videos from this channel if it gets beyond a certain point.
Not that I think i'm that important, you can do you and I can do me, but I think you should be aware that there are downsides to this members only business that you may not have accounted for.
Geriatric Millennial here. We just had antenna for the first 10 years or so of my life so I consumed movies by recording like the network Saturday evening movie. If I liked it, I kept it and watched it a ton. I would record on EP so I could stack 3 movies per tape if I paused recording at commercials.
One of the ones I watched the most was Back to the Future.
Then once we got basic cable in the mid-90s I’d be watching the Sci-fi channel a lot and would typically tune in for their Saturday original movie
I would relish the occasional premium channel (showtime, HBO, etc) free previews as I could see uncut more recent releases on TV.
I was 8 when I saw Star Wars at the cinema, confirmed geek ever since.
I was 9 when I saw Watership Down, traumatised me and shaped my view on animal cruelty.
I was 10 when I saw Salem's Lot on TV (with David Soul), slept for years with a pillow over my neck.
I was 10 and a friend of my mom's bought tickets for my 15 year old brother and I to see Blade Runner. Completely inappropriate for my age, but it rocked my world. Been a lover of sci-fi ever since.
1:01 when I was younger I loved offloading and working on jeeps. I started working in a offroad shop. One time I went to an jeep event, and never unloaded my own vehicle because the whole time I was working on others vehicles. I decided then, that I didn't want this to be a job. If you find a way to make you Hobbie into a job, you will never work again, saying isn't always true. Sometimes it take the fun out of your hobbies.
Same for me and getting into automotive, I never had time for my own stuff and wasn't getting paid well enough for my skills and the industry going the way it was. Im glad I got out of it and kept it a hobby, much happier. 911 operator now career wise.
Cooking. Enjoyed doing it for fun. Hated doing it for work and was blocked from doing it for fun because it started feeling like i was at work when ever i cooked for fun.
😂 I used to refurbish and salvage old furniture..so I know how it feels to sell and deliver furniture only for them to ask if I could refurbish their entire kitchen😂.
Being a pilot It's nice to go fly when you want and not when a scheduler says you have to. There's too much magic in flying to turn it into a job.
I was 10 when I first saw the billboards advertising "Alien". I loved sci-fi and I got really excited about the movie. Of course, I didn't know anything about it other than it was sci-fi. When I went to my older brother (he is 8 years older than me) to get him to take me into the movie he wouldn't do it. He told me I was too young and that movie wasn't for me. Later, as a teenager, when I did see the movie I learned that, as much as it frustrated me at the time, my brother was right to not take me to that movie when I was that young 🙂
Parents took me to see 1981 Dragonslayer when i was way too young. I think it was because they couldnt find a babysitter for all us kids. Before the movie, there was a trailer for Poltergeist. Both freaked me out a "little" bit.
I don't know about being *nostalgic* for it, but my experience with changing consumption of media involves using Bearshare and Limewire as a kid in the 90s and downloading a song never knowing if it is 1) labelled correctly, 2) the song you're even looking for, 3) not a troll, and 4) not a virus until it's finished downloading, which itself could take hours for a single song. I remember thinking that Wheel in the Sky was NOT Journey but some other person for years because the version I got from Limewire was mislabelled. I even remember thinking "man, this sounds a lot like Journey".
Weirdi
Weirdo
Man, Limewire was such a Love/Hate thing growing up. "Hey, wanna get the new Linkin Park album and maybe potentially destroy your family PC with an assload of viruses." And you're sitting there like... Hmmm... SURE!
Damn you just brought back about two years of my childhood with that comment 😂
This is cool because in the 90s, Adam and Jamie’s commercial special effect with the bubbles in the bottle is kind of iconic in my memory as a moment that shifted the notion of ‘selling out’ - within the creative arts scene. I was involved in the alternative performing arts scene in Sydney Australia at that time and it suddenly became okay (not uncool) to talk about a tv commercial from the perspective of the creativity and cool excellence. It was totally a ‘moment’ in time. Until I became a Tested follower I didn’t know that was Adam and Jamie. So cool. ❤ 👏🏼 🫧
I have this problem. I loved welding in highschool but knew I'd hate every job that involved it. The 5am to 5pm kinda work life in general would be massively negative on my mental health. Also, I do traditional pen and ink artwork every once in a while, and again I only work when the inspiration hits. If I ever made a job out of the things I love to do, it would kill all love I have for them. I'll take BS jobs that I don't really have to think about so I can enjoy the things I do at my own pace, and not the pace of customer or a company.
I feel like it would still be a rewarding life choice to be able to weld and sell sculpture out of your own shop/garage though. Even if work is work, work on something you love is a little better than with on something you don't.
I've been what we now call a "maker" since I was 8 years old. I'm 61 now. I semi-retired in 2017. The "making" aspect of my life has almost never been a significant source of income for me. I have *NEVER* met a maker who "looks down" on people who also work for a living doing something else entirely. I myself was full-time employed in the computer and network tech development industry from 1979 to 2017 (and I still do it part-time). I was *always* "making" in the background. Whether it was electronics or mechanical things. The last 3 years, I've spent a huge number of volunteer hours restoring a large (12.8m) former-NATO satellite ground terminal for use in undergraduate astrophysics education. Turning ones maker skills to something like that is decidedly rewarding, if not particularly remunerative :)
Is it really selling out if you can pay your bills and still do what you love?
Depends
No it is not. Denzel Washington says “ Do what you have to do, so you can do what you want to.”
It's only selling out if you don't have the passion for it any more and do it purely out of greed. There's nothing wrong with something you love to do being profitable and allowing you to live comfortably.
not ever
If you're misleading people or intentionally endorsing things you know your average person can't afford just so you receive kickbacks? Then yes ...
Battleship New Jersey has an episode on the Emeco Navy Chairs. There's a lot of them that were bought for WWII that are still in use in the navy. A major case of "You get what you pay for"... those chairs are many hundreds of dollars new.
The cousin to "You get what you pay for" is "Buy cheap, buy twice"; usually because the cheap one breaks or wears out in a fraction of the time. Often the cheap one isn't to save you any money.
That said, it's nice to have cheap options for tools and materials when you get started out in making.
@@wufflykins4369 Completely agreed. I know Adam has even said, if you're getting started with something, don't go all-in on the most expensive version of the tool you can find. Get something that's a step up from the truly cheap stuff to save your money until you know for sure how it works for you.
"It's a project that I thought would take a couple of days that is now eight months and counting. But you know, which amoung us can throw stones?"
Might need this one on a shirt @tested
Taking commissions isn't necessarily the same thing as selling out. If you're making someone else's vision to their specifications using their input that's just doing a good job. Selling out is when you compromise your own vision or principles for money, fame, success, etc.
For example, if an artist who advertised themselves as an anti-establishment human rights activist accepted a contract to make promotional materials for the IDF then that person could reasonably be considered a sellout.
Exactly this.
You had me in the first half ngl.
It really helps that I watched Repo Man just last week. I like where you say it's about repossessing cars. That's like "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" being about fixing motorcycles. Well, kinda, but...
The explanation of workflow really resonated with me as a cgi content creator, in particular 'I go back and forth; sometimes the only way you're going to know what the next step is is to build the previous step'
I'm a big believer that a lot of stuff in life is transitive, that one area of knowledge/skill has familiarity with totally 'different' fields.
This back and forth is SUPER familiar to, say, writing. One of the biggest challenges writers have is that you need to write a bunch of stuff you end up changing completely or even just don't end up using, even if its good. Because it doesn't work. But you NEED those attempts, or sketches, or test builds, or whatever it is in whatever you are doing to get the ideas you DO end up doing.
That ended up a little incoherent, but anyway, back and forth, absolutely.
All in one go…. Impossible. I’ve been working on one project for 10 years and finally finishing it up now. Many twists and turns along the way. Love your channel!
When I was eight, my parents took me to see the original "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956). I checked under my bed for a week after that, but here I am. Also, during the summers in Texas the local channel, 11 at the time - we only had four - would show 'old' 30s to 40s movies like the "Thin Man" series and lots of the musicals. And I never tired of watching the B movies of the time, especially the sci-fi variety, many of which I saw first run at the local theater. I could go on...
I vaguely remember Beastmaster and I was fond of it at the time. I remember that I loved Buckaroo Banzai and never realized it wasn't a hit in the theaters because my family almost always waited until movies came out on HBO to see them. I was shocked in college when they had it for student movie night and my boyfriend had never heard of it.
Buckaroo Banzai is amazing. The only quibble I have with it is that they saved the absolute best track of the score for the end credits. A pity none of the planned sequels/TV shows ever came to pass.
The Phantasm series of movies. Totally underrated.
Repo Man is one of my favorite films. I don't know many that have ever seen it, and even fewer that loved it.
The life of a Repo Man is INTENSE
I think you kinda had to be the right age. I'm a year older than Adam, so I was 19, and being 19 in the mid-'80s was a lot different from being not-19 in the mid-'80s, or being 19 in the not-mid-'80s.
Hi there Adam, I am a person who loves to make things out of something and have a Brother and Father that were Machinists for a living, I have a little bit very little bit of experience with a lathe , but recently I’ve been able to get a lathe running and have found that I really enjoy using it even though I have never been trained properly but have been watching a lot of videos on you tube and really been enjoying the process of making things on the lathe
Adam on the topic of the Emeco chair and A pilot system for drilling holes, that’s what I have used my 3D printer for a few times in car projects. You can draw it and print it on paper to see what the pattern looks like then 3D print it with thickness as a disposable pilot template for drilling holes.
90s and early 2000s movies and cartoons are what currently make me nostalgic at 28!! Born in 96'
A Repo Man liker, nice. It made a huge impact on me as a kid. The music, the vibes, the attitude, the mystery. I love it. Pi had a similar impact on me too, huge recommends.
i have been into hobby building for many years.. i paint miniatures. make models.. carve wood do Celtic artwork and stone carving and metal work and many other things 3d resin and 3d scanning.. and everyone wants to buy what i make. and say you should sell this stuff.. problem is. everything is a one of a kind.. and i know if i sell it i will never have it again.. and i have tried making money from my hobbies. but you are so right.. hobbies become a job.. and loose all the fun of a hobby.. so i stopped selling again.. and now and then i will give a piece away or make something for someone special.. but could not sell them..
Yeah, i used to throw pots, and it's hard to sell something later that you made for yourself. If you have to sell a lot, as you often would as a potter, that would definitely be a job, vs a high level with unique glazes that you could sell a few pieces of.
@@emu314159 yea and i also find people do not realise the amount of work that is put into some items.. and they then complain and try and knock you down on the price.. i rather keep the items.. i only did a small amount of pottery.. always wanted to get into it a lot more but setting up kilns and everything was way out of my price range.. i have done some celtic work though in glazes on stuff but they sit on my shelves.. i enjoyed doing it..
same for me, and a factor is also that I can make way more with my normal 9 to 5 job than I would make selling stuff
Tome "selling out " isn't profiting or heeding a customers requests, it's working for or profiting off someone that morally comprises me like if Haliburton came to me and said hey well pay you 20 million dollars to make a high end diorama that depicts a grotesque battle scene but makes it seem like this really cool, happy, hero scene that makes fascism good for the whole family especially the kids. Of course this is an extreme black and white example but compromises of your morality usually are much more subtle and shades of grey.
I was 15 when "Heavy Metal" premiered in theaters. I wanted to see it sooo badly. My older brother did go and see it, and i begged him to take me (it was R rated), and he told me "you're not old enough to see that." Which was BS, i had already been reading the Heavy Metal Magazine in book stores anyway. A few cartoon breasts wasn't going to ruin me.
Thank you Adam for all the advice and experience, examples from life of success and mistakes.
Beastmaster was one of my lost movies. Saw it at the age of... 7? ... when video rentals were a new thing in Norway. No HBO in Norway so I did not re-discover it there. It was one of those few things you have several very clear memories of, but no idea of the actual title.
Internet came and I tried several times to find it. Unsuccessfull at first but after some years and possibly after it's region 1 DVD release I found it. Bought it. Watched it. Loved it. Then the soundtrack became available. Bought it. Listened to it. Loved it.
Saw the camera in the back and the phone stand, and thought you had some kind of phone stand to make it look like a retro camera, was a bit sad to realise it isn't, but happy to see the more "retro" camera
I’ve commented on Adam’s Q&A videos a couple times about how much the maker world mirrors that of professional musicians. But here is one difference. Some people - not all by any means - who are full-time professional musicians look down their noses at those of us who have day jobs and are professional musicians at night and on weekends. It’s idiotic but they don’t consider us to be “real musicians.” I’m glad to hear that kind of pettiness isn’t a thing in the maker community!
i appreciate when you describe a movie you're excited about! watching repo man for the first time tonight on this video :) philadelphia story was fantastic!
I think one of the most nostalgic things that the millennials like myself have is the feeling of first booting up certain video games from any physical medium. Now everything is digital property without the physical media that we used to have like CD’s, installing a game using multiple disks was a wild experience.
I am nostalgic for scarcity as well. It used to be that when something would come out new everyone was talking about it and it was just exciting. Nowadays there's so much new stuff coming out that chances are no one you know knows about it until you say something and it's all forgotten about next week. I don't know that I would rather it be like it used to be because I've been spoiled by how much there is nowadays but I do sometimes miss it.
I was born in 79, all those mid 80s action movies like "The Delta Force" and "Commando" and the 2nd and 3rd Rambo movies. Those were the ones I was watching on HBO and Showtime free preview weekends when I was 8 or 9
I love your channel so much Mr. Savage!!!
here in my later life i find myself creating her ideas & building the projects my wife wants. and change from my interests of go-carts, motorcycles, 4x4 bumpers. Now i make planter boxes, patio, deck chairs, kitchen cabinets
My wife and I are major nerds for obscure films and we just saw repo man for the first time because it happened to be playing at the alamo. She immediately remarked after how surprised she was that I'd never seen it. She has a category of films she calls kelsey-core that Repo Man fits comfortably into and yet it somehow has flown just below my radar for 40 years. We still throw random lines into everyday conversation just derailing whatever was being discussed. On its surface it's so mundane and disjointed but so dense with brilliance it's challenging to know where to begin singing it's praises.
I turned my hobby in to a business. I retired at the start of the year but I ran a business producing bespoke laser cut and 3d printed parts for railway modellers. I expanded in to a range of building kits and accessories.
It started as a hobby making parts for my own use.
One thing that most people don’t understand is that artists during the Renaissance were considered skilled laborers. They created artwork to spec, on contract. Da Vinci didn’t just have patrons; he had customers, who expected to get a specified product, at a specified price, on a specified schedule. The art market was very different from today, where an artist can produce anything they want and then just sell it (although that also existed, but was not the norm).
My job as a web designer is primarily a hobby. It's nice that I get paid to do it.
When I was 20 and in college for writing, I thought “I love dragons but I could never write a book with dragons, it’s too overdone, too cliche.” Now I’m like “if I ever stop including dragons in my fiction, kill me”. The things that matter when you’re 20 and trying to be approved by your peers seem so trivial in the rear view mirror.
You are a big part of my youth media nostalgia
Glad you clarified the chair isn't there now, I was going nuts looking for it 😅
I used the “sweep” technique to make the top of my 11 ft. Enterprise. It worked really well.
As a kid my teenaged cousins used to take me to see a bunch of movies that i didnt really need to see at that age but two still standout. Jaw's (i was about 7)I remember hiding behind the seats in theater and them laughing at me and the other movie i will never forget see The Cars that ate Paris, seeing someone impaled on a VW stuck in my head since then, and im 54 now, but i am grateful to them to this day for taking me along.
PS, and i almost forgot, Food of the Gods
Let's go do some crimes. Let's eat sushi and not pay. Re-po, Re-po, Repo Repo, Repo Man! 😁
My childhood movie is steeped in trauma. For some reason, my parents thought I would be asleep in the backseat as we went to the drive-in and they watched Jaws. Now at 57 years old, I still can't swim, hate boats and being on the water, and am terrified of sharks. Multiple combat tours, been blown up, but cringe at sharks. Totally unrealistic phobia, but there ya go.
Was 7 years old when I found out cool movies would play after dark on the basic cable channels. Saw stuff like the original Star Wars trilogy and then.. "Alien", "Predator", and "The Thing" traumatized me to the point I thought the Xenomorph, the Predator, and the final form of the Thing with the screaming husky that Macready blows up were all hiding under my bed in some Axis of Child Terror tag team. I'd jump out of bed and try to land as far away from the bed and as quietly as possible until I was like.. 14. In my 30s I still catch myself avoiding peeing in the water of the toilet cause I thought the splashing would awaken them all those years ago.
Just looked it up. I believe my childhood movie was Island of the Blue Dolphin (1964), based on a 1960 children's book, based on the true story of a young native girl who spent many years alone on San Nicolas Island in the early 1800s. The traumatic part was that she was with her brother, but there were wild dogs on the island. It only showed her face, reacting to sounds off-screen. That was considered fit for children, along with Bambi, and Old Yeller! Is it any wonder that Boomers are messed up?
Repo man was such a great movie. I saw it at an artsy movie house in Austin when I was in graduate school, probably early 1980s. The same year Liquid Sky came out, another off beat but magnificent move.
Very insight about that work / life dichotomy Adam. Very nicely put indeed 😊
Zoomer here, when it comes down to media, I miss going to the DVD rental store on sunday night with dad and a sibling while the rest of the family set up the PC in the living room to watch a movie on it together. We didn't have a TV so watched movies on the family PC.
Ok this is a crazy connection but the way adam speaks about "a narrative unexplored" brings to mind the jazz fills Colin Greenwood gets up to at the end of The National Anthem. I always thought he was teasing the listener as if saying "oh what's going on over here?"
The fact is, you have to make things sustainable, whether it's your hobby or profession.
I saw 2001 in the theater at 18mos. and as far as I can tell, I still remember the last parts of it from that. I remember being terrified and fascinated at the same time. I also remember being very young and hearing "Thus Spake Z" in a salad commercial afterwards and being furious that they would rip this fabulous movie thing off like that. They were messin' with my holy experience, man! And of course I'm a SERIOUS space & SF geek.
You need that rebellious "F*** you I'm never selling out" mentality when you're younger. It's a part of that creative fire that you need to produce work fueled by your true passionate feelings.
When you start to gain understanding of your craft, how it fits into the larger picture, and how you address real financial needs, it is then beneficial to add to your understanding of "selling out"-- in that not only is it OK to do business with others, but it makes you an even better creator by doing so.
But we should never really let go on that initial spark. Always hang on to a small part of it.
You are the best question answerer on earth lol
1 movie that I always watched as a kid was "Solarbabies". I just had to watch every time I came across it, and thankfully I found it recently on Tubi and watched it again and it still held up!!
great video as usual! love that you brought up REPOMAN. it came out my senior year of high school and was an immediate cult classic with my close friends and i. i played the VHS till it wouldn't play anymore.
I definitely feel that about turning a hobby into a career and losing the hobby. I haven't written code on my home computer for fun in a long, long time. I still have things where it's the only tool for the job, but I actively refuse to code things now for my community and instead pay for things to be done by others.
And it's a lot of why I won't do art or writing for money or by request.
My movie moment actually came later. Me and my friends had been huge fans of Monty Python in high school. Years later I saw an interview with John Cleese. "I get these fans that run up to me and quote entire skits. That is great but I feel bad that they have missed the entire point. 'Now for something completely different.' Go make your own skits." I realized a real Monty Python fan doesn't memorize entire movies. They are creating their own thing. This should be applied to everything.
I considered making woodworking a full time career rather than my biotech job. As I ran the numbers and realized I would have to make what the client wants rather than what I want, I decided to go a startup to reinvigorate my biotech career and keep woodworking as a hobby where I can make what I want and take as long as I want.
Adam didn't mention it but the Repo Man soundtrack is a punk rock primer that is still a great listen. "All I wanted was a Pepsi..."
Pablo Picasso was never called an a**hole.
@@balzacq not around here
There is a look that ive seen on Adam's face that expresses an emotion that i feel germans would have a word for, but the best way i can paraphrase the look/emotion is "the feeling you get when something is so dangerous, its hilarious that it exists." my question for Adam is "is there any of Grant Imahara's builds that stand out as giving you the epitome of the previously described feeling?"
Some makers go pro, outsource their products overseas which drastically reduce the quality of the product, but still charge the same or often charge even more and their customers notice. One recent example is the couple who makes cloaks on Instagram. It went from a family business with handmade products to a manufactured pile of crap that they charge HUNDREDS for and their followers are not having it.
When someone asks me to make something, I tell them I have two rules: I have to find the job interesting (I usually do), and I don’t want money. Nothing ruins a perfectly good hobby quicker than turning it into a job.
Not a maker thing but I also have to find it interesting. When a mate asked me to design a website for his sister's side business and offered to pay, he couldn't understand why I said no and that it wasn't about money.
In the music community, we have a similar perspective. I've played music for money, which I enjoyed. There was also a season when I only played for myself, which I also enjoy. But when I stopped enjoying the work it takes to play well, I gave up the music for almost a decade.
As a professional mechanic, many people think we hate backyard mechanics, the truth is, we might pick on them, or jest at their expense, and we might b!tch about them if you bring in work done by them that was inadequately done, but I think I speak for most mechanics when I say that we all started out working in our garage or our driveway or our backyard, often with family members like our father or grandpa or uncle. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that backyard mechanics are the cornerstone of the automotive mechanic world. They are the ones doing the work that we don't have time to do, or are doing work that someone cant afford to have done at a professional shop. Without backyard mechanics, the industry would surely grind to a halt.
The hobbyists ARE the glue for the Maker Community.
Good because I’m a hobbyist 😅 I love the maker community.
THE MAN WHO INSPIRED MY DREAMING 🤩
Omg Beastmaster, Sunday morning Star Trek, goonies, neverending story labyrinth... Jim Henson everything. The one that really touched my Childhood self was Watership Down.
For me, selling out would be doing something I find morally objectionable just for the money. I took a commission from a TechShop lead to lasercut a pendant from a design he got from the internet and didn't have the copyright. The artist specifically wanted people to ask permission. I had requested permission but not heard back, but the client was bugging me about his deadline and implying he'd make my life difficult as a TechShop member if I backed out of the deal. I went ahead and made it, but I was worried enough I didn't notice the seat belt was stuck in the door of my car. Someone stole my car and it wasn't located for 6 weeks, I had to pay $500 to get it out of impound the same day it was taken, and about $500 in booth fixtures (and my beloved decorated top hat) were all gone. All this for a $25 pendant.
Currently, I design and manufacture laser-cut California/Bay Area souvenirs. I have decided NOT to do the Balclutha/Star of India or any of the missions because of their legacy of slavery. Depicting a beautiful ship (that was built to carry human cargo like cordwood in the hold) or a historic church (that coordinated the slavery and genocide of Indigenous people) will only perpetuate the romanticization of our white supremacist past. (Junipero Serra should never have been beatified, because it isn't like he repented from enslavement and genocide and that's what was holy about him.)
Movies always on cable in my youth: Solarbabies, Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, Battletruck, and Mad Max. I didn't realize until just now how much dystopia I was exposed to in my formative years.
Bagpus, fixing things, the Wombles, Clangers, wow wow Wubsy, Inspector gadget. These were inspiring engineering based series
I do coding projects the same way as you build projects! For me its easier to think of general architecture top down and then brainstorm smaller parts of the program that I had a general idea bout but the nitty gritty "how" wasn't done yet until i got to that part. It has drawbacks but it works best for me. Every planning-working style works different for different people.
Over on the UA-cam feed for Battleship New Jersey, they did an episode on the Emco Navy Chairs as well. Worth a watch if you have the desire.
I also was made to watch Alien young. It was a right of passage among my brothers, and it only became reinforced as we naturally all grew to adore Alien. What's interesting to me about it as a formative experience though is everything else I was watching at the time and how they collectively impacted me as writer of science fiction. I watched it young enough that I still had recent-ish memories of the episode of Kipper the Dog where aliens visit, and I think I first saw Scooby Doo and the Alien Invaders some time after I first saw Alien. I'm sure there were many more examples. But in general I grew to love tonal whiplash as a feature of first contact scenarios and alien encounter scenarios in general.
Amazing when you said movies of the 80's that shaped me the 1st movie that came to mind was Repo Man.
Adam describing the feeling of the gift wrapped package of money scene reminded me of a Doctor Who line from the 11th Doctor era where he says, “…there’s quite a difference, isn’t there, between what was and what should have been. There’s an awful lot of one, but there’s an infinity of the other.”
I think gene simmons said it best when people give him crap about his merchandising "Yea we sell out, we sell out every concert"
10:34 As one of these people, teetering between millennial and zoomer, I’m nostalgic on how slow young children’s cartoons used to be, from the 80s, 90s, early 2000s compared to today. I still remember an episode of Blues Clues where it was about sitting in a room and listening to the rain. Now, the few bits I see of kids shows, they’re sooo fast, like entertaining them with jangling keys.
I think a lot of people interchange 'selling out' with 'doing it for money' - I do a lot of things that I otherwise wouldn't because it's what puts the food on my table, but those things all fall in the domain of my professional expertise, interests and moral compass. Selling out would be doing something in spite of one or more of these three things for a monetary reward.
I was a young electronic hobbyist from age 12. I would build all sorts of things. When a got out of HS, I went to a trade school for electronics just for the cert. Turns out, in my class was the son of the CEO of a small MRI manufacturer, who said come by and apply for a job, so I did and worked there for almost 25 years. I won't say that being a professional R&D Tech ruined the hobby, but it did scratch the itch, so I didn't really continue my work at home. Over the years I got to work on some amazing technology that I could never afford to get involved with at home.
:HEY! Beastmaster is On!"
OMFG that is hilarious! 🤣
Why would anyone look down on someone having a hobby? If you end up creating something useful/practical/game changing, sell it. Not as a business but to stay out. Then continue doing what you were doing.
We couldn't help but notice that you have a 3D printed nerf blaster - looks to be a a "pewpew" by pewtech - on the bench behind you, along with packages of fresh short darts! Something coming up with that? It would be amazing to see you get into the foam-flinging hobby - even farther than your already incredible one-day build rival flywheeler!
Thanks for everything you do.
Thought it would take a couple of days and ended up taking 8 months... I know the feeling, I'm just coming out the other side of a project like that myself!
We had 12 channels when I was growing up, but two of them were so snowy it rendered them impossible to watch, so we actually had 10 viewable channels. Two of them were HBO and Cimemax, which I wasnt supposed to get in my room, but I found the cable going to my bedroom under the house and removed the filters blocking those channels. Needless to say, I watched a lot of content I really wasnt supposed to be watching.
That method of creating a dome in plaster sounds very similar to how the detailed plaster coving was made for houses 100+ years ago.
I was allowed to watch most of The Shining when i was much too young. I feel like I was the same age as Danny when we got it on Selectavision video disk. Most of it didn't scare me as a kid. The scariest parts were the blood in the elevator and Mrs Massey. I wasn't supposed to watch her scene. I was sent outside but sometimes watched through the window.
Growing up i realised the scariest parts of the movie were part of my real life with the history of substance abuse in my family
I apparently saw Child's Play at too young an age. I actually don't remember the experience at all, but I clearly suppressed it. I have always had pediophobia aka the fear of dolls.
Maan..I always get sad if someone wants me to change a design. Not because of extra work itself, but because I wasted hours on that. Even if I get paid, I would rather work as a cashier than question myself what am I even doing (as an artist) when people keep changing your concepts. (It doesn't happen often, but i'm making a point).
This is the stuff that gives you impostor syndrome.
Ps. Much Love man! I have rewatched mythbusters countless times! Still am
0:57. That’s me. Turned a hobby into a job. Then the hobby became work. Now I haven’t touched that hobby in 40 years. 10 years later I took up a new hobby and would never accept money for it. I helped a lot of people, but I would never accept payment. Enjoyed that until I got too old to be able to continue. (Loss of fine motor skills and poor close in vision.)
Re: Gatekeeping, my friend Mary took a bowl turning class at a Rockler store this weekend, and the instructor made a comment to her class about how people who use CNCs aren’t real woodworkers. While “makers” are generally welcoming and inclusive, there’s still a lot of snobbery within the woodworking faction of making. Whether it’s anti-CNC, anti-construction lumber, anti-pallet wood, or anti-power tool, there seems to be a lot of insecurity to go around LoL
Yes! Repo Man! One of my all time favorites.
Truely "Selling out" is really only the point at which you stop holding personal integrity, pride, and happiness out of something. At different times in your life those things will all change. In reality most people have to 'sell' or compromise part of their vision for a multitude of reasons. Sometimes its money, sometimes is a deadlines, sometimes it's your own energy or well-being, and very often its selling out to admitting a lack of knowledge or experience. In a way all projects have some level of sell-out involved, it really comes down to what aspects of it are important to you and if you hold on to some of those for yourself.
My parents fed me a diet of SciFi when I was a kid, We watched Star Trek, The Time Tunnel, Lost in Space, Land of the Giants, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, etc. at home. Movies of course were The Planet of the Apes, Fantastic Voyage, 2001... But the movie that changed me was Silent Running, (1972). It made me the music loving, tree hugging, aging hippie liberal that I am today. It also made me a huge Bruce Dern fan, who also fantastic in the Zanti Misfits episode of The Outer Limits, by the way.
Adam, I still often think of how you’ve said we are all makers. For the longest time I’ve told myself I wasn’t artistic/creative because I always trended towards maths and sciences as a source of comfort, because it made sense to a young boy trying to understand the world. I told myself I wasn’t artistic, that I wasn’t a maker, because that was for “stupid” people who couldn’t figure things out. I realize that the separation I had drawn between them was a lie, partially of my own making, but largely I believe due to social programming. It took we a really long time to actually internalize that, and I have you to partially thank for it (or blame, depending on who I have to justify it to lol). You are not just a maker Adam, but a mender.
You can end up in a job that closely aligns with your hobby but the freedom of the shed will always be unbounded compared to a frightened corporate NDA workplace. My wokplace has wonderful tools but would take weeks to get a risk assesment in place for what Applied Science/ Codys Lab Etc. does on a table.
Repo Men is one of the few movies I have watched several times. (Written before I realized that I meant another movie with the exact same name but different release year.)
Man, Repo Man was amazing! Proud owner of the DVD :-)
Sphere actually jogged my memory of a different film "Cube"... low budget very limited set but amazing... I think it was an early lionsgate
I make pool cues now love your show your shop is like mine love it. 30 years in upper management large construction projects. Met you a number of years in Alameda. Full time cues now. Any you using cnc ?