Thinking of a happy place: Tested.com

Tested.com gets even better with each passing week.

I found the site perhaps a year or so ago and I doubt if there's a day I don't visit morning, afternoon, and evening. Psychologically it's such a good place to be that I'm probably living my life on San Francisco time.

To understand my mild obsession, you have to know that I live in a small northern working class town with no culture to speak of. I have to travel miles into either Liverpool or Manchester to find a bookshop. We have none locally and, thanks to government cuts, our local library has already been half-demolished. Not all is bad news, however. As a town we have eight tattoo parlours. I suspect I'm the only guy in town that doesn't have a single tattoo. Not sure if you can understand how that makes me feel except to say that I feel utterly like a freak: hugely overqualified, can't find decent work, and with interests that few people share. And that's why I love Tested. It's a window onto a better world where being a tattoo-free over-educated nerd is the thing to be.

I've never been so proud of being a nerd as I've been since I discovered Tested. It's filled with articulate people talking about things that fascinate them. Amazingly for an American website, it's not shrill. It's not that horrible twisted version of nerddom you find on Battlebots, where the jocks have taken over and the nerds pushed to one side. Tested is pure unadulterated nerd: intelligent, occasionally awkward, but so totally human. I've never bought a scale replica of anything in my life and I don't intend to start now. However, for reasons I can't fully explain, I now find myself fascinated with replicas. Maybe it's the design, the artwork, or simply the craftsmanship. Never before in my life have I wanted to know how to make a foam mould of something yet I've watched more Frank Ippolito videos about learning to mould than is healthy for a man who never intends to make a mould. I even find myself growing interested in technology that has never before really been my thing, such as 3d printing, drones, miniature cameras, and virtual reality.

None of it makes any sense to me yet, somehow, the site makes complete sense.

The site actually makes me want to use a lathe and I have absolutely no reason to use a lathe...

I suppose it makes sense in the way their most casual conversations affect my life. The site is largely hosted by Norman Chan and Will Smith, who carry the weight of the output. Adam Savage, of Mythbuster's fame, is the Big Daddy of the operation and it's his energy which infects everything they do. However, it's Will and Norm that keep me watching because they carry their knowledge lightly, with enough humour to keep it grounded and well away from that Comic Book Guy cliche that makes that entire world so off-putting.

If you'd told me years ago that my favourite website would be about making a replica topiary, I'd have said that you were deluded. Yet that's exactly how I felt watching Savage build a replica of the Overlook Hotel maze a few months ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAGu2TPt_78

What's key is that the whole thing is largely unscripted and people talk about the things that interest them without dumbing everything down. The BBC New usually begin every story about Pluto by reminding people that Pluto is far from the sun so it's cold. Tested take that stuff for granted and it's a huge relief that they do. When the talk, I find myself feeling dumb because I don't know half of the stuff they know. It triggers my brain into activity and to hunt out answers. I happily stick one of their podcasts on in the background as I work and I'm in raptures because it constantly helps me generate new ideas. I've not read science fiction in too many years but, thanks to Tested, I've rediscovered my love for hard science fiction. It's so good to listen to people who are as excited by NASA's Pluto flyby as I was.

The week before last was Comic Con in San Diego, an event that largely passes me by because I'm not a huge fan of superheroes hype. I don't read any of the comics (I tend to prefer underground comics), though I've a passing awareness of Frank Miller's Dark Knight. I'm not the full-on fan but enough that I've seen the odd animated film in addition to the live action Batman movies. Avengers leaves me cold like near all of Stan Lee's oeuvre, with the exception being Spiderman. In fact, I'm pretty picky in my tastes. I love the best stuff and I'm very dismissive of the worst. Loved the new Dredd movie, hated Captain America.

Yet Tested just knows how to work its way around my defences. Watching a grown man excited by the cooling system he's created for his cosplay replica suit from Kubrick's 2001 is about as good as the internet gets. The fact that he then introduces a second suit for astronaut Chris Hadfield and they begin to talk about how Kubrick got the sound effects for 2001...

Well, this weekend, realising I wanted to write this blog post explaining my love for the site, I thought I'd do that by putting it into a cartoon. So, here is my latest, in honour of what, for me, is undoubtedly the best site on the web.

If you haven't already and you suspect you have an inner nerd, go check out Tested.com.

ABC's New Series of Battlebots: Reviewed Through English Eyes

I geeked myself out tonight, though I had to scour the web to do it in a way that was probably a little bit wrong. I got to glimpse the first episode of Battlebots, the returning ABC show that will probably never get shown here in the UK. From what I've seen, they have four fifths of a remarkable show and one fifth of something that deserves to be dumped somewhere mid-Atlantic.

The great four fifths are the robots, the robot builders, the crowd, and the arena. Look closely and these are people who love robots and the technology behind robots. I say with a note of pride that these people are geeks. They're the kids who didn't fit in at school because they were in love with servo motors and engineering schematics. These are the kids who organized their own tournaments and then went home to watch Mythbusters and other shows made specifically for them. They are, in other words, my kind of people. They're the people that the website Tested is built for and it was over at Tested that I first learned about the new series of Battlebots. I'd watched Norman Chan's interviews with all the builders and I was as excited to see the first episode as I was also frustrated to know that I might not see it.

Thankfully, in the dark corners of the web, ghosts of these shows persist long enough that non-Americans can see them if we look hard enough and, like I said, I loved four fifths of what I saw.

Yet that leaves one fifth of the show I've not mentioned. That one fifth is the presenters and they really do bring the whole thing down.

I don't understand why a show aimed at geeks and powered by geeks should be hosted by what, in the American vernacular, are 'jocks'. These are the most anodyne of American TV presenters, more bull than brains. They are drivel-spouting cliches of the worst kind. One (Kenny Florian) is an 'MMA Star', whatever the hell that means but I'm guess it means that he beats people up for a living. Not very 'geek' at all. Another is Chris Rose, apparently a professional sports presenter, which explains why he's so big, loud and grating. He only needed to say 'they've poured blood, sweat and gears into this' before I wanted to attack my own forehead with an electric drill.

This for me is the sad part of what could be a great show. The first episode had the robot Plan 9, built by Lisa Winter who I remember from robot battles of the past when she was a precocious young gear-head driving a bug shaped robot. Since then, Lisa has grown up. Her hair has turned pink and she's now covered by tattoos. So, okay, I'm not a fan of tattoos myself but I can sometimes make an exception when it's part of that West Coat hipster vibe. I don't like tattoos on anybody but I like people who are themselves and unique. Even if you could argue that the hipster look is itself now derivative, the people who have it tend to be interesting, articulate, and intelligent. Winter is no different. When she speaks, she does so without resorting to scripted banalities. She is a great representative of the culture from which battling robots has emerged. It's one of the parts of the America I love. It's the good bit of a sometimes terrifying and depressing nation.

Sadly, that erudite, witty, individual culture is here being enveloped by something that's utterly mainstream and as ugly as hell. The main host is Molly McGrath who is as far from Lisa Winter as you could get. McGrath is toned and tanned to TV perfection. She's got a great smile and legs that go well past her knees. She articulates her phrases unlike anything you hear in real life. She knows how to stand in the highest high heels and her dress is slightly transparent so you can really see how far those leg go. She's a geek's dream girl, stunning yet in a totally artificial way you've seen a thousand times before and which means that, really, she isn't stunning at all. Lisa Winter is stunning because Lisa Winter is individual and creative and representative of a younger generation doing their own thing in the outlands beyond the mainstream.

And that's what I take from the first episode of Battlebots. It's a geek festival being taken over and ruined by the professional athletes and the professional presenters, who were the very people the geeks of the world wanted to escape back when they went off to do their own thing in high school. Even more than the sound of metal upon metal, the most grating thing about Battlebots is that somebody somewhere thought we needed those meatheads to justify the competition. It's the corporate mainstream glitz and misguided 'professionalism' that actually brings Battlebots down from the lofty heights it might have reached had it a little self-awareness. Perhaps it's just because I'm English that I'm particularly sensitive to this kind of overly produced American TV but had Battlebots been on the BBC, with the same people and the same production values, it might not have had quite so many flashing lights and braying asses for hosts. It might have had a few more wits and, like Top Gear, it might have taken over the globe and List Winter would rightly be its star. I'll definitely try to catch the rest of the series but, geek though I am to the last fibre of my being, a lot of this is really not for me.

How Has Adam Savage Customised His Toilet?

I've become about as obsessed with Tested.com as a man can get without actually buying a subscription. Not that I wouldn't buy a subscription but life isn't exactly great at the moment and 'cash' and 'surplus' are words fitted with opposing neodymium magnets. I just can't get the little buggers to stick together.

Yet even as a non-premium member, I confess that I'm utterly addicted. Never before have I found a website which is so like an electrified needle pushed straight into my man-lobe, should there be one and I have no doubt that somewhere deep in my brainbox there is such a lobe controlling my love of manly things.

I have no idea how Tested.com came into existence. My devote atheism denies a role for divine inspiration but, without that, I can't believe evolution would produce something so perfect. Tested is a place for makers (that is, people who make things). I'm not a maker myself in the sense that the things that I do make aren't anything other than digital, or occasionally, ink and paper. However, I'm fascinated by people who are.

I think it wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration to say that if I had to name the greatest human being currently living on this great soggy globe of ours, I'd probably name Adam Savage. Savage, for those of you who haven't been enlightened, is the more talkative host of Mythbusters but he's also one of the stars (maybe *the* star) of Tested.com. He describes himself as 'a maker of things' but that really doesn't do him justice. He's really King Nerd, the guy the rest of the world should really look up to instead of all the grifting shysters and semi-evolved rappers. Savage lives his life in the zone that people like me just consider home.

Example the first: he's just build a replica of the maze that Jack Nicholson looks over at the Overlook Hotel in Kubrick's Shining. The videos that accompany that build are just manna for anybody like me who loves Kubrick. (Speaking of which, I highly recommend, if you can find it online, Jon Ronson's excellent documentary about Kubrick's boxes.)

Take, another example: Savage's current obsession with flying drones.

I've written before about my concerns about drones but I'll admit right now that the more I see what they can do, the more the bloody things excite me. I know now that I'll never own one or get to fly one but that doesn't mean I can't live vicariously through those people that do. But even my sheer excitement about new technology is different to the joy I get from watching Savage work. When body augmentation kicks in, I expect Savage to lead the field replacing his buttocks with something more functional and contain compartments to keep his wood glue. Until that day arrives, I'm satisfied watching him making all manner of things for his new toys. His 'One Day Builds' on Youtube are worthy of any TV station and, I'd say, are better than 95% of the stuff on the BBC. If they had a 9pm slot on BBC2, they'd become a worldwide hit. They're simply that good. They're an example of what intelligent people can do when given the resources and the freedom not to chase profit.

Whenever I complain about the degradation of society and culture, I should really parenthesise all that and say that in some ennobled places in the world, culture is still on the rise. Noe Valley in San Francisco seems to be one such place. It's where Tested.com has its home and where Savage brings order to the chaos. His has to be some highly evolved form of autism: a delight in order and arrangement. Yet it's more than that. What excites me about Tested.com is that the thing is so damn friendly. It makes you feel that human beings aren't so bad when they can work as a community to share a passion. I can't recommend it enough.

Having said all that, in his latest video, Savage and Norm (Norm's great) look at the tools and gadgets that help Adam fly his drone. Just the attention to detail is something I admire. Yet the attention to detail didn't go so far as shutting the bathroom door behind them.

First thing to note: Savage keeps his toilet seat up. Of course, that's the way to go from a practical point of view but perhaps this is a small detail which distinguishes the amateur operation from the seriously professional. However, in the absence of Jeremy Clarkson from our TV screens, this is the next best thing men are going to get to 'manly TV' for a little while. I tried not to look into the bathroom but I did begin to wonder about what is in there. If Adam Savage likes to customise everything in his life, how the hell might he have customised his toilet?

I've been giving this far too much thought and I now believe that the first thing I'd do is to counter-weight the toilet seat. I've often wondered about that before today. Why should it be the obligation of men to put the seat down? Shouldn't it be the obligation of women to leave the seat up? Or solve the problem entirely with a simple weighted solution to make toilet seats like seats you find in a cinema.

But knowing Savage, I suspect a counter-weighted toilet seat wouldn't be enough. I can only conclude that he has magnets on his flies and that there's some kind of floating truss in there which connects quickly to his lower regions. The truss takes care of the handling leaving his hands free to do more valuable things such as spray paint a model or drill some MDF. I thought I also spied a foot mechanism to control the flush but I might be wrong. All I know is that the possibilities are endless. Perhaps it will be a future video. If so, I'll be hooked. In the meantime: feed your inner nerd and check out Tested.com.