Awesome Leisure

Ring in the holidays with the best craft beers of 2022. GiveThemBeer’s annual advent calendar comes loaded with a dozen great cans from breweries like Lagunitas, Cigar City Brewing, Oskar Blues, and Bell’s. If your gift recipient prefers something a little stronger, they also sell whiskey, tequila, and vodka calendars.

If you’ve played with K’nex construction toys, you know they they’re especially good for marble mazes and roller coasters. K’nex builder Venomeater123 shows off his epic roller coaster based on Steel Vengeance from Cedar Point. It took nearly a year to build the working replica of the world’s longest hybrid coaster.

Living Colour is one of those great bands that doesn’t get the kind of retro love that they deserve. The genre-defying group gave us songs like Love Rears Its Ugly Head, Glamour Boys, and their biggest hit Cult of Personality. 8 Bit Universe created this chiptune cover which gives the track a totally different and unexpected sound.

If there’s one game that took over phones this year, it was Wordle. Now you can pay tribute to 2022’s popular word game every year with this Word Game Xmas Ornament from Urban Outfitters. Unlike Wordle, this unofficial ornament only has five rows, so you’ve got one less try to guess, but someone already solved it anyway.

Because Leo Moracchioli needs to turn every possible song into a heavy metal version of itself, here’s his absolutely explosive cover of the Sir Mix-a-Lot track Baby Got Back. Next time you have a workplace party, be sure to crank this one up to 11.

Every film fanatic needs Taschen’s Horror Cinema on their bookshelf. This 640-page book catalogs some of the most notable horror movies of all time, along with common themes, tropes, and mythologies of the genre. Whether you’re into zombies, psychopaths, or other kinds of monsters, there’s something for every horror fan.

Vocalist Jared Halley has wowed us before with his one-man a cappella songs. This time, he took on the 1992 Green Day track Boulevard of Broken Dreams, using his voice to layer together every track of the recording. Also, we can’t get that one a nunna, one a nunna, one a nunna out of our heads now.

Concrete seems like a strange material to build a boat out of. But apparently, they are a thing and can float if they displace enough water to keep them buoyant. Peter Sripol and his pals attempted to build a remote-controlled boat out of the material with the goal of making the fastest concrete jet boat ever.

The Dick Dale track Misirlou is known for its genre-defining surf rock sound. Musician Bloxsy transformed the track into something you might hear walking through a crowded market in India. He used the simplistic Ostritch tuning used by Lou Reed during his time with The Velvet Underground to create the mystical sound.

JLaserVideo has been trying for years to build a version of Iron Man’s armor that could actually fly. After a major failure, he’s finally achieved that dream. He started out with a pair of custom electric jets but settled on a ridiculous number of smaller electric motors. And when the suit isn’t being worn, its parts fly to him.

Inspired by the official LEGO Mario kits, builder Brandon Jones wanted to build a display that looked like a full level from the Nintendo game. At BrickCon 2022, Beyond the Brick’s Joshua Hanlon got an up-close look at the impressive 12,000-piece mechanical diorama, which uses 14 motors to bring the Mushroom Kingdom to life.

This unique keyboard has LEGO-compatible studs all over it so that you can attach building blocks and Minifigures. Even its mechanical keys are studded, so you can mix and match its 8-bit style keycaps or LEGO parts. It’s got RGB backlighting and both wired and wireless modes. Early bird pre-orders can save $70 off the MSRP.

We’ve all found ourselves tossing wadded-up paper into the garbage to show off our hoop skills. Why not make it official with this basketball-inspired wastebasket? It features a woven metal net that sits on a wooden base and a small backboard for bank shots and for keeping missed shots from landing on the floor behind it.

The best gins lean in with a strong juniper core. Junipero Gin does this in spades, blending 12 botanicals for an intense herbal and citrus concoction. Master distiller Bruce Joseph sources ingredients from around the world for small gin batches made in a copper pot still and bottled at an unfiltered 98.6 proof.

Guitarist Lucas Imbiriba brings his warm and soulful style to the Eagles classic Hotel California. His fingerstyle skills are truly impressive, and the track sounds fantastic in this stripped-down acoustic version. Check out his covers of Stairway to Heaven, Sultans of Swing, and Classical Gas for more delightful ear candy.

More than 70,000 bohemians, hippies, punks, and outsiders descended on Nevada’s Black Rock Desert for Burning Man 2022. Filmmaker Jesse Chandler forgot he had applied for a permit to fly a drone at the festival, but we’re glad he got a reminder, or we wouldn’t get to enjoy his amazing aerial time-lapse footage.