Awesome Leisure

Just because you’re outdoors doesn’t mean you have to keep your stuff on the ground. This lightweight, portable table provides a heavy-duty ripstop nylon tabletop, set atop a folding aluminum structure. Four built-in cupholder baskets ensure your drinks won’t tip over.

When Mark Rober isn’t taking down thieves and melting stuff with lava, he likes to play around in his CrunchLabs space. To kick off his 2024 Camp CrunchLabs series, he taught kids about friction and the slippery properties of spheres. After an intro about his STEM toy system, he poured 3.5 million Airsoft BBs onto his warehouse floor and went for a ride.

Alanis Morissette and Joan Jett are two of the most badass women of music. They’re even touring together. Now, DJ Cummerbund brought the collab to a new level. Crank the volume up to 11 and get ready to rock out to this perfectly angry mashup of I Hate Myself for Loving You and You Oughta Know.

The world’s most visited zipline park just got even more wet and wild. Xcaret Resort’s all-inclusive Xplor in Riviera Maya, Mexico, now has the world’s only 5-in-1 waterslide: Toboganxote. Set in a very real Mayan jungle, the ride combines four types of descents into one route before its final wave pool splashdown.

Vicious Gardens is a deviously fun card game in which you try to grow the best garden while sabotaging others. Plant your favorite fruits, veggies, flowers, and herbs and use Specialist cards to help your garden grow, or send a pestilence to your neighbors. Collect groups of plants and harvest them to win Victory Cards – the first to achieve three victories wins!

Artist Chet Phillips is back with more wonderfully illustrated playing cards. His latest deck is a must-have for any cat lover. These unique cards feature 58 kitties inspired by pop culture, historical figures, and other colorful characters. Some of our faves are Frida Khalico, Catsquatch, and Cathulhu. There’s an original image on every card, not just the face cards.

Crafted in sunny Barbados by master blender Trudiann Branker, Eclipse Navy Strength is a limited-edition rum from Mount Gay, the world’s oldest-running rum distillery. Matured longer than the distillery’s core Eclipse expression — and with a higher portion of older, pot-still rum — the result is a potent, high strength 57.1% ABV.

(PG-13) With a title like that, you know you’re in for a bloody treat. Inspired by the modern action classic The Raid, Kill is about an Indian army man who secretly follows the love of his life aboard a train to try and stop her arranged marriage. But things go from tense to all-out mayhem when bandits hijack the train. Premieres 7.4.24.

Finally, a genuinely symbiotic relationship in sports: a pickle company sponsoring a pickleball tournament. The 2024 Vlasic Classic is a wrap, but the merch line of Sprints paddles, visors, caps, sling bags, and towels lives on. The Vlasic stork suggests adding pickle juice to the Tervis Vlasic Classic water bottle.

Time travel back to the 1970s at The Dive Motel in East Nashville, Tennessee, where good vibes and disco balls beckon road trippers along US-41. More than retro, it’s wacko with 23 unique themed rooms, including a spaceship, jungle, mountain cabin, and something that looks like a pink powderpuff.

The fastest production NERF blasters fire around 15 darts per second. It’ll Probably Work set his sights a little higher when he built a spring-loaded NERF weapon that can blast out hundreds of projectiles at once. By switching from foam darts to balls, he packed in 6x as much ammo. Fully loaded, it’ll hold up to 288 balls and launch them all in about a second.

Maybe the reason that the ED-209 robot from RoboCop needed to kill people is because it didn’t get enough hugs growing up. Now you have the chance to right that wrong with this 12″ tall plush version of the deadly robot, courtesy of Toynk Toys. You have 20 seconds to comply with huggies!

Earthy and herbaceous Revivalist Garden Gin gets its flavor from plant-based gin botanicals besides the usual juniper: ashwagandha, lemon verbena, hemp seed, rose hips, rose petals, and plum, to be precise. It’s the brainchild of NYC mixologist Brendan Bartley, but the unsung genius is whoever came up with the bottle’s outdoor faucet bib handle.

An ordinary Rubik’s Cube has a 3×3 grid of squares on each side. Mark Bahner’s overpowered cube has 34×34 sides. This satisfying build video shows the 6939-piece, 3D-printed cube coming together throughout its three-month assembly period. Afterward, its maker shows off how it works. Mark also posted a time-lapse video focused up close on the cube.

We’ve heard a zillion and one covers of Toto’s 1982 hit Africa, but we couldn’t resist posting this buzzworthy arrangement by musician Charles Berthoud. To create the looped and layered track, he performed various parts of the song using different acoustic bass-playing techniques, from thumping on its body to rapid-fire strumming to fingerstyle plucking.

You know that soothing, ambient music they play when you’re getting a massage? Musician Daniel “RootFlute” Hansen’s performance shows how meditative music like that gets made. His self-made instruments include custom flutes, a shell harp, a clarinet made from antlers, a mammoth tusk, and ten Tibetan bells he plays with foot pedals.