Reminiscing

[kinkng]

There was a thread where someone posted a question about whether a piece of plastic on a keyboard case was a defect. It turned out to be just a sprue that was not cut. This got me to thinking that a lot of things that we used to do as a kid are no longer very popular now-a-days (such as building plastic model replicas of planes, tanks and ships). I thought it would be interesting if folks share some of the fun things that they did as a kid. So, let me lead off:

1) Shoot, blow up or burn your plastic models. I liked to build model tanks and one of the fun things to do was to shoot them with a BB gun. The sloping plastic actually defected the BBs better than the straight pieces just like real armour. We cutted the caps from the paper caps that you used in your cap guns and fixed them on to the flat face of a pellet. When you shot that pellet at the tank, you can actually see some sparks when it hit. We also burned some models (re-enacting the battle of Midway) and tried to blow up some model tanks with firecrackers.

2) I had an AFX racing set and I tried to simulate the 24 hours of LeMan by taping the controls so that the slot car would move just slow enough to not spin out on the curve. I was interested to see if the car would crap out similar to an actual race car getting a blown engine. I forgot why, but I was never able to get it to run for 24 hours. Since we had a lot of roaches in the apartment, we would try to run over any of them them crossed the tracks.

[Hydroid]

Haha sounds like a lot of fun you had there.

When I was a lot younger my family spent a few years on my grandparent's farm while my father was building a new house for my grandfather and they had a lot of boulders there. To a 4-6 year old this was just the greatest thing to be able to climb around on them. To this day I love rock climbing despite those same boulders mostly being slightly shorter than me, they seemed a good challenge back then and I learned a lot about my limits in climbing. Then there was a particular beach we used to go on holiday to that had much larger boulders (2-3 stories high) and I'd enjoy coming back each year and trying to find new climbs and successfully getting higher on old climbs than I had managed the year before.

One of my other interests was locks and lockpicking in particular. It first started when I learned how to pick those little suitcase locks when I was about 5 or something and then I worked my way up to picking the lock on my brother's safe using a somewhat modded (read: butchered) watch screwdriver set. I wouldn't mind picking that back up again if I can get my hands on a beginner set of picks.

Then comes electrical components. I loved pulling things appart. Even though I never really understood what I was doing, I did manage to successfully pull apart a laptop and put it back together without breaking anything when I was 10. Before that I'd taken apart R/C cars and anything I could get my hands on that had motors or lights. I didn't really understand voltages and power and whatnot so I'd load up 9 volt motors with 36 volts and they'd start smoking after a while. Or else I'd blow LEDs with too much power. Never damaged anything I shouldn't have so that's all good, but never really accomplished much either.

[Quarzac]

As a child of the digital age, my youth is far less interesting than yours. The most I can say is going out to a state park with a bucket and some nets with my Dad and sisters and seeing what we could collect in the way of aquatic or semi-aquatic wildlife. If you caught a frog or a toad, you were basically champion of the stream.

[awardsnight]

My childhood consisted of lots of bickering over the computer whether it was the eldest or the youngest child that has the right to the extended use of the computer, for playing games of course.