Sakura of DOOM

So thanks to reruns on Discovery and Netflix Instant, I have watched a truly embarrassing number of Mythbusters episodes in the past few days.

Mythbusters is a show that's been running on Discovery since 2003 or so, about a team of people who work in the special effects industry attempting to bust myths. Myths vary from things like "Can you outrun a crocodile by zig-zagging?" or "Is yawning contagious?" to "Can a villain really make a ring of gasoline flame up by dropping a cigarette in it?" or "Can you really use cosmetic powder to make laser lines in a security system visible?" The most fun myths to bust, of course, are the ones that involve things like crocodiles, flaming Christmas trees, bullets, and (at least for me) duct tape.

I, uh, actually started watching a while back because of this not-Mythbusters Shousetsu Bang*Bang fic and got curious about the thinly veiled references. The first few episodes in Collection 1 (Wiki tells me the collections are not organized by season) bored me, so I stopped until I caught a marathon on Discovery a few days after my sister left. Luckily, the episodes in Collection 1 improve fairly quickly. The problem in the beginning is that it's just Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage hosting. While Adam is hilarious and tries to put on weird hats, Jamie is more the straight man to his jokiness, which I feel works better when there's a higher than 1:1 ratio of jokes:seriousness. When they add the Build Team (Kari Byron, Grant Imahara, Tory Bellici), I got much more interested. In fact, the episode that got me hooked was the one in which the Build Team attempts to test the phrase "slap sense into someone" by making a gelatin hand, building a machine to administer slaps (force of all three of their slaps averaged), and then filming the slapping of each of them in slow motion.

Basically, each episode consists of Jamie&Adam and the Build Team each working on separate myths. The myth gets explained, the team figures out how to test parts of it (relatively) safely, then they work up to testing the whole myth. Usually if the myth is busted in a boring, non-dramatic fashion, or if they just want to, they conclude by blowing something up.

I love it because it combines bits of Maker Faire and kludging things together, along with explosions, questions I actually want to know the answer to, and some really funny people. Also, you get scenes like testing how to open a car door underwater by actually sticking the hosts in a car underwater, Tory actually attempting to slide down a pirate sail with only a knife slowing him down a la Douglas Fairbanks, Adam accidentally burning off his eyebrow and some hair right before a date, or Grant falling off his chair because it looks like an anti-gravity device is flying right at him.

Sadly, the cast is mostly white and male (and I'm guessing het and cis and abled and middle class), with Kari as the token woman and Grant as the token Asian (which also plays into the geekery as a white guy with the occasional Asian thing), but mostly I enjoy it for the geek hijinks. And it's set in the Bay Area, which makes it sort of homey. Also, I have seen nearly every episode of Good Eats at least three times, and I need something else to fill that niche because new episodes don't come out that often!

... also, I may have wee geek!crushes on all of the Build Team, especially Grant.

Anyway, not deep, but really fun entertainment, and I enjoy anything that has me going, "OMG I can't believe you're trying to do that!!" And this refrigerator sign is made of win.

Transcription of sign:
HUMAN FOOD ONLY
- No Ballistics Gel
- (underlined) No Experiments
- No Infectious Materials, Pathogens, Cytotoxins
- No Broken Glass
- (handwritten) No Rancid Pig Tongues
- (handwritten) No Human Body Parts Filled With Noodles