We had several huge tubs full of Legos, but we would sort them. We built huge multi-room mansions, capitol buildings, and all the rest of cities. We also built lots of castles. We once built a big dam after going on vacation to the Columbia River. Vacation is where most of our ideas came from.
We also used our big sofa cushions to build forts and spacecraft. And we played our equivalent of Calvinball.
I'd have to say most of my childhood toys involved a lot of imagination. We would build the actually set of Legos only once, then go build something bigger and better. We also had model railroads when we were in high school. So I spent a lot of time building things without instructions.
I was a pretty voracious reader as a kid. I don't remember any huge favorites, but I read all kinds of things.
Well, I sold my horse... So if the above two don't count, I'd have to say my car. Or Fractiles (http://www.fatbraintoys.com/toy_companies/fractiles/fractiles_7.cfm). I could spend hours with those.
Then: My stuffed ET, dog puzzle, a handful of books that I read so often I memorized, and I suppose it's not strictly a toy but I remember many happy hours on the playground bars.
at great risk for sounding rehistoric, I don't know if legoes were invented back then. We played outside and invented submarines, Indian wigwams, etc. We climbed trees and rode bikes. In the house we built things out of blocks, tinker-toys. and lincoln logs. Mostly I liked to read but my mother felt I wasted too much time doing that and sent me out to play.
>What were your favourite toys when growing up? GI Joes, blocks, a tape recorder, a stuffed doggie, Nintendo
>(Now?) Turntables, synthesizer
>(How did they influence you?) I can't say that I see an influence from the toys. I think my toy preferences were influenced by my personality more than the other way around.
>Which were your favourite books? _The Magician and the Sourcerer_, _My Father's Dragon_, _The Nightgown of the Sullen Moon_
>Legos? What did you make? I was more into the blocks and I made cities with them. When I played with legos, I liked to make cars and play demolition derby with friends.
It's lego for the foreigners ;). I think I was not the typical scientist prototype. We used to stay up all night building intricate cities. I also had a very battered pink panther that I adored.
I had a barbie stage (yes, I know this may mean you never speak to me again), but it was mostly about using them to act out stories. Sometimes fairly graphic stories.
Nowadays - my computer.
I can't really say that me toys influenced me much at all. Books, on the other hand, are another story.
Ah, books, I'd have to write a very long entry to do it justice. I adored reading as a kid (and still do) but I generally ended up reading books long before I was ready for them. I skipped the introduction to Animal Farm and was quite perplexed by the story of pigs and animals attacking humans. I ran out of Roald Dahl's children's books quickly and moved onto his adult ones. Had I ever suffered from nightmares, I think that Kiss Kiss would have caused a few. I think the reading thing is genetic as I have a cousin who actually read every book in the children's library! (Perhaps, it wasn't an enormous library, but still!)
I read absolutely everything I could get my hands on- lots of fantasy, Lord of the Rings, Lloyd Alexander (especially the Prydain series and The Arkadians). Also Redwall, I liked Redwall. That was from about age eight to twelve, I learned to read on Dr. Seuss, Roald Dahl, and EB White.
I didn't play with toys that often after I was about seven, my sister and I played with our stuffed animals and those plastic people (I think they are called playmobils?) when we were very young.
my favourite toys: my little ponys, color-changing cars (those little matchbox cars that would change colors when you put them in hot water), a stuffed brotosaurus with a floppy neck (poor dead thing...), and my remote controlled monster truck. it's a fun image - me in my very frilly very pink fancy dresses, aged five, running people's feet over with my monster truck.
favourite books: roald dahl of course. dr. seuss. i liked the imagery in the cs lewis series, but wasn't impressed by the prose. also - i had a thing for biographies of long-dead musicians like mozart. did book reports of them when other kids were reading the babysitter's club.
ah, legos. i only ever remember making one thing: a machine gun. i'd pass up meals to work on this. my best one was nearly 3 feet long, and could shoot legos! (i had some rubber band thingy set up inside it.)
I only had one set of legos as a kid. I think I would have been more in to them except my father let me play around with an arc welder and I had much more fun building things with that. I think I must have gradually worked up to that...I remember being allowed to play with a soldering iron at a fairly early age. I built scuptures out of wire and solder. I would also use the soldering iron to burn pictures into wood.
The kitchen was my favorite place to "play" really...knives and fire are two things that a young boy enjoy most and I found out really early that by "helping out" I could play around with those two as much as I liked. We had a stove that wouldn't self light...so I got to play with matches too!
Mostly I was given lots of art supplies and electronics kits (the types with springs that you bend and insert precut lenths of wire to make radio transmitters that work on a nearby radio set to static or lie detectors that measure the conductivity of your skin). I didn't always understand or try to work out why the electronics kits worked...I mostly just followed the diagrams.
I read a lot of science fiction. Madeline L'Engle (A Wrinkle in Time, Arm of the Starfish, Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting planet) and The Hobbit and The Never Ending Story were some of the first books I read. In third grade I read the LOTR trilogy...that changed my life. I tried to read the Narnia series after that and was totally let down, so I stopped after the second book. I had fond memories of it being read to me when I was really young but found the plot totally one dimensional after LOTR. Fourth grade was all about David Edding's Guardians of the West series. I loved that series. I read everything our library system had to offer that was fantasy and had a cool cover...not sure if that was the best policy but it kept me from reading too much 70's pulp fiction as I didn't care for the old school Conan style covers. I did end up reading quite a bit of trashy stuff though...and a lot that was way over my head. Gene Wolfe's The Shadow of the Torturor had the coolest cover I'd ever seen but was a bit much for a grade schooler to take.
My dad helped me make a lot of things. One day he came home with a huge transformer and put together a Jacob's Ladder. That was perhaps the most impressive toy while it lasted...about an hour later he told me that I would probably kill myself if he let me keep it and proceeded to dismantle it. He also made me fix up a couple of mini bikes which I road the hell out of with one of the neighbor kids.
For my first and last science fair project (5th grade) I tried to make a perpetual motion machine. I had a electric motor connected to a generator that I had made out of ceramic magnets glued to the shaft of the motor around which I wound bell wire that I routed back to the terminals of the electric motor. I connected up a switch between the motor and a bank of batteries. Unfortunately I had no idea about diodes so when I turned on the switch the batteries shorted out in the "generator" and of course the minute amount of power produced from the ten or so windings did nothing to help out the situation. To make matters worse I just stuck up a sign that read "Perpetual Motion Machine" and didn't explain anything about efficiencies or why exactly the experiment would never work (even though I was well aware of the impossibility of my situation).
"Friction," I would yell out, "what am I going to do about FRICTION!". In hindsight the whole situation was quite funny if not dramatic, as I really thought that the judges would be more impressed by the grandeur of the project's intentions. Sadly they were not...
Legos and the Commodore 64. I liked to build spaceships of increasing complexity, throw them down the stairs, and rebuild them. I learned to make them more and more durable as time went on, reusing the designs that lasted and recycling the ones that did not.
Ender's Game and Frederik Pohl's Gateway series. I read each of them at least a dozen times. Usually just see one out of the corner of my eye, open it somewhere in the middle, read through to the end and then from the beginning to where I started.
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Rapiers, now. :)
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We also used our big sofa cushions to build forts and spacecraft. And we played our equivalent of Calvinball.
I'd have to say most of my childhood toys involved a lot of imagination. We would build the actually set of Legos only once, then go build something bigger and better. We also had model railroads when we were in high school. So I spent a lot of time building things without instructions.
I was a pretty voracious reader as a kid. I don't remember any huge favorites, but I read all kinds of things.
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Now: do computers count? How about books?
Well, I sold my horse... So if the above two don't count, I'd have to say my car. Or Fractiles (http://www.fatbraintoys.com/toy_companies/fractiles/fractiles_7.cfm). I could spend hours with those.
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Then: My stuffed ET, dog puzzle, a handful of books that I read so often I memorized, and I suppose it's not strictly a toy but I remember many happy hours on the playground bars.
Now: Hmm... boys?
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GI Joes, blocks, a tape recorder, a stuffed doggie, Nintendo
>(Now?)
Turntables, synthesizer
>(How did they influence you?)
I can't say that I see an influence from the toys. I think my toy preferences were influenced by my personality more than the other way around.
>Which were your favourite books?
_The Magician and the Sourcerer_, _My Father's Dragon_, _The Nightgown of the Sullen Moon_
>Legos? What did you make?
I was more into the blocks and I made cities with them. When I played with legos, I liked to make cars and play demolition derby with friends.
Lego!
I had a barbie stage (yes, I know this may mean you never speak to me again), but it was mostly about using them to act out stories. Sometimes fairly graphic stories.
Nowadays - my computer.
I can't really say that me toys influenced me much at all. Books, on the other hand, are another story.
Ah, books, I'd have to write a very long entry to do it justice. I adored reading as a kid (and still do) but I generally ended up reading books long before I was ready for them. I skipped the introduction to Animal Farm and was quite perplexed by the story of pigs and animals attacking humans. I ran out of Roald Dahl's children's books quickly and moved onto his adult ones. Had I ever suffered from nightmares, I think that Kiss Kiss would have caused a few. I think the reading thing is genetic as I have a cousin who actually read every book in the children's library! (Perhaps, it wasn't an enormous library, but still!)
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choose your own adventures
spaceships, droids
This is mostly a list of books
I didn't play with toys that often after I was about seven, my sister and I played with our stuffed animals and those plastic people (I think they are called playmobils?) when we were very young.
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favourite books: roald dahl of course. dr. seuss. i liked the imagery in the cs lewis series, but wasn't impressed by the prose. also - i had a thing for biographies of long-dead musicians like mozart. did book reports of them when other kids were reading the babysitter's club.
ah, legos. i only ever remember making one thing: a machine gun. i'd pass up meals to work on this. my best one was nearly 3 feet long, and could shoot legos! (i had some rubber band thingy set up inside it.)
no subject
The kitchen was my favorite place to "play" really...knives and fire are two things that a young boy enjoy most and I found out really early that by "helping out" I could play around with those two as much as I liked. We had a stove that wouldn't self light...so I got to play with matches too!
Mostly I was given lots of art supplies and electronics kits (the types with springs that you bend and insert precut lenths of wire to make radio transmitters that work on a nearby radio set to static or lie detectors that measure the conductivity of your skin). I didn't always understand or try to work out why the electronics kits worked...I mostly just followed the diagrams.
I read a lot of science fiction. Madeline L'Engle (A Wrinkle in Time, Arm of the Starfish, Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting planet) and The Hobbit and The Never Ending Story were some of the first books I read. In third grade I read the LOTR trilogy...that changed my life. I tried to read the Narnia series after that and was totally let down, so I stopped after the second book. I had fond memories of it being read to me when I was really young but found the plot totally one dimensional after LOTR. Fourth grade was all about David Edding's Guardians of the West series. I loved that series. I read everything our library system had to offer that was fantasy and had a cool cover...not sure if that was the best policy but it kept me from reading too much 70's pulp fiction as I didn't care for the old school Conan style covers. I did end up reading quite a bit of trashy stuff though...and a lot that was way over my head. Gene Wolfe's The Shadow of the Torturor had the coolest cover I'd ever seen but was a bit much for a grade schooler to take.
My dad helped me make a lot of things. One day he came home with a huge transformer and put together a Jacob's Ladder. That was perhaps the most impressive toy while it lasted...about an hour later he told me that I would probably kill myself if he let me keep it and proceeded to dismantle it. He also made me fix up a couple of mini bikes which I road the hell out of with one of the neighbor kids.
For my first and last science fair project (5th grade) I tried to make a perpetual motion machine. I had a electric motor connected to a generator that I had made out of ceramic magnets glued to the shaft of the motor around which I wound bell wire that I routed back to the terminals of the electric motor. I connected up a switch between the motor and a bank of batteries. Unfortunately I had no idea about diodes so when I turned on the switch the batteries shorted out in the "generator" and of course the minute amount of power produced from the ten or so windings did nothing to help out the situation. To make matters worse I just stuck up a sign that read "Perpetual Motion Machine" and didn't explain anything about efficiencies or why exactly the experiment would never work (even though I was well aware of the impossibility of my situation).
"Friction," I would yell out, "what am I going to do about FRICTION!". In hindsight the whole situation was quite funny if not dramatic, as I really thought that the judges would be more impressed by the grandeur of the project's intentions. Sadly they were not...
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Favorite thing to make out of legos? homemade tranformers
Favorite books: Apprentice Adept series by Piers Anthony
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Favorite thing to make out of legos? homemade tranformers
Ha Ha! Me too!
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Ender's Game and Frederik Pohl's Gateway series. I read each of them at least a dozen times. Usually just see one out of the corner of my eye, open it somewhere in the middle, read through to the end and then from the beginning to where I started.
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they influenced me to break furniture and to build algorithms for bridges, and an accute sense of symmetry
books would have been every comic I could read, except Doonesbury
now? oh, I'm just a deviant child now
no "legos" had miniture farm sets