Happy new year! Adam and the gang return to the cave to talk about their holiday break, the debut of Mythbusters Jr., rock climbing, and the pursuit of excellence in your craft. Plus, the lies we tell our children, and the lies our parents told us. Lots of fun stuff to kick off the year!
One Day Builds
Adam embarks on one of his most ambitious builds yet: fulfil…
Show And Tell
Adam recently completed a build of the royal St. Edwards cro…
Making
Viewers often ask to see Adam working in real-time, so this …
One Day Builds
Adam and Norm assemble a beautifully machined replica prop k…
One Day Builds
One of the ways Adam has been getting through lockdown has b…
Making
Adam unboxes and performs a quick test of this novel new hel…
Making
When Adam visited Weta Workshop early last year, he stopped …
One Day Builds
Adam tackles a shop shelf build that he's been putting off f…
Show And Tell
Time for a model kit build! This steampunk-inspired mechanic…
One Day Builds
Adam reveals his surprise Christmas present for his wife--a …
My daughter turns 1 in a few weeks and doesn’t love sleeping. Needless to say, most of my Still Untitled listening happens between the hours of midnight and 4 am 🙂
Hi Adam:
Are you watching “Counterpart”, on TV?
If not, you could catch up on “On Demand”, which used to scare me, until I found out that most of it is free!
It’s really good si-fi! Two parallel time tracks of earth, in ours Howard is a meek office slave…in the other he’s a james bond…J. K. Simmons….
After hearing you guys talk about Tidying Up with Marie Kondo last week, my wife and I watched about half the season in one sitting and loved it. I already had her book, The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up, in my Audible library but hadn’t listened to it yet. Inspired by the show, my wife and I did a mini road trip over the weekend just so that we could listen to the book and get the detailed breakdown of how to actually do the exercises they touch on in the show. The book is pretty short, and charmingly funny in the specificity of her point of view on tidying up.
The genius of her method is in two parts: first, it’s by category, rather than by room. This requires me to understand the totality of my belongings in that category first, then to sort items based on what to keep, not what to get rid of. This is easy to get wrong. It’s easy to think of it as “what do I have to get rid of?” or even “what can I live without?” as though getting rid of things were the goal in and of itself. Instead the opportunity is to look through all my stuff, reconnect with it, and retain only the stuff I really like that adds positive energy to my life.
Second, because each retained item gets a designated place as part of this tidying process, keeping order in the future is easier because not only do I know what I have, but I know where it goes. By prioritizing an item’s location not by ease-of-access, but by ease-of-putting-away, the result is nothing short of transformative and there’s an instant feeling of permanence — as though the problem of where to put things has been truly and palpably solved.
After reading the book on Saturday, my wife and I then spent most of the day on Sunday (yesterday) going through step one of her method, which was going through all our clothes at once and just keeping the items that we love. We don’t have kids, and I thought we were pretty lean in terms of our stuff, yet we still managed to give away nine full bags of clothes and shoes. We’ve done similar cleaning out before, especially ahead of moving between apartments or into our house, but this one was markedly different. Not only did we get rid of more stuff than usual, but afterwards we felt really different about it. It wasn’t some sort of general feeling of accomplishment of having gotten rid of things, but rather a palpable serenity in our bedroom. It sounds super woo woo, but there was a sense of harmony that really surprised me.
So all that is to say that if Marie Kondo visited The Cave, I think she’d love it. Adam has already grouped most of his things by category and the space is full of items that bring him joy. His tools and supplies have designated homes and everything is visible thanks to first-order-retrievability. That said, I’m thinking hard about how to apply the Konmari method to tidying up my own shop space. While I don’t think I’ll be evaluating whether or not to keep a particular screwdriver based on whether or not it sparks joy, I do think it would be incredibly valuable to actually take everything out, categorize it, knoll it (duh), and then create a place for everything. Then not only would I have a better sense of what I have (and quit accidentally re-buying things), but I think the shop would naturally keep it self cleaner when everything has a home.
As a high-functioning hoarder with mild OCD (it only rarely interferes with my life) I found that I’d already mostly achieved Kondo’s overarching goals… holding onto the things that give you energy, and make sure it has its place and you are actually aware of its existence.
Some of her techniques are interesting. I might end up reorganizing my clothes for vertical stacking and ease of retrievability, even though they are already folded and categorized into compartments.
I’ve seen the front view shark emblem in some of your other videos but I can’t find any clothing or apparel anywhere. Can you tell me where I can find it? Love the podcast and videos. Adam, your one day builds are awesome. You’ve given me a lot of information on model building I hadn’t known before. Thank you all for sharing your knowledge and introducing us to others in the making community that we may grow in our knowledge of creative and imagination.