Whether it’s the experiments on ‘MythBusters’ or my earlier work in special effects for movies, I’ve regularly had to do things that were never done before, from designing complex motion-control rigs to figuring out how to animate chocolate.
My dignity and good television – they’ll never meet.
Remember kids, I have life insurance.
Isn’t television glamourous?
Let’s blow some stuff up.
The coolest toys don’t have to be bought; they can be built. In fact, sometimes the only way they’ll ever exist is if you make them yourself.
Lists are how I parse and manage the world.
The explosions, like the urban legends, are a great way of bringing people in to watch, because it’s really fun, and you know we’re always going to give you a satisfying ending.
After all those years of doing remote detonations, where we just push a button and something explodes, to actually see a nice big fat line of black smoke heading toward something that will blow up is very satisfying.
I find it’s too much for me to read endless critiques, even if we’re being well-defended, of exactly what we’re doing. When someone tells us something we’re doing wrong on the boards, we try to respond, we try to be responsive to the fan boards, but yeah, I can’t read them.
I find that your basic Internet chat board is way too vitriolic for my taste.
We cleared all traces of our occupation out of M6 and moved to M7, and it’s been quite smooth over there. We chose a place all the way at the end of an industrial park.
We’re allowed to explore the world at large on these things; the urban-legend aspect of it is just kind of an excuse.
Jack of all trades, master of none, though often better than a master of one.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a model maker, a potter, a dancer, a programmer, a writer, a political activist, a teacher, a musician, a milliner, whatever. It’s all the same. Making is making, and none of it is failure.
I have concluded through careful empirical analysis and much thought that somebody is looking out for me, keeping track of what I think about things, forgiving me when I do less than I ought. Giving me strength to shoot for more than I think I’m capable of. I believe they know everything that I do and think, and they still love me, and I’ve concluded, after careful consideration, that this person keeping score is me.
The best part of making a list is, you guessed it, crossing things off.
This is one of the main reasons I believe that adolescence can be so fraught for so many. Just as we start to catch the barest glimpses of our true selves and begin to understand what it is about the world that fascinates and intrigues us, we often run right into people who aren’t ready to be encouraging and can be downright hostile to someone being “different.
Wrong turns are part of every journey. They are, as Kurt Vonnegut was fond of saying, “dancing lessons from God,” and the last thing we want to do is give our kids two left feet.
When we say we need to teach kids how to “fail,” we aren’t really telling the full truth. What we mean when we say that is simply that creation is iteration and that we need to give ourselves the room to try things that might not work in the pursuit of something that will.
There is no skill in the world, I have since discovered, at which you get better the less sleep you have.