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I just found myself putting this in my blog, but I thought I'd throw it
open for discussion here.
You know you're old when Christmas now provokes feelings of dread rather
than excitement and joy. I've been pondering on exactly why that is, and
I think I've figured out at least part of the reason: kids are so much
easier to please.
Think about this for a moment. You're 4 years old. Somebody gives you a
present. You unwrap it, and it's a toy dinosaur with flashing eyes.
Now, the adults in the room realise that this is just a lump of plastic
with a pair of LEDs strapped to it. It probably cost about 0.02p to
But *you* don't even care. It's a dinosaur! It is, by definition,
FRICKIN' AWESOME! This is, like, the coolest thing EVER! You spend the
next four hours driving everybody in the building insane by waving this
flashing dinosaur at them with a crazed look of uncontrollable glee on
your face. (At least, until the battery runs out. And in about 4 months'
time, you'll be bored of it, and no doubt the left foot has snapped off...)
When you're a kid, a silly lump of plastic with flashing LEDs on it is,
like, the most amazing thing imaginable. Deciding what you want for
Christmas is hard because there's just such an absurdly huge zoo of
possibilities to choose from, all of roughly similar awesomness. And
what are you going to give your little sister for Christmas this year?
Gee, where the hell do I even START with that?! So many options!
Let's sit down and enumerate our options here for a moment. There are
dinosaurs, fire trucks and robots with flashing lights and silly sound
effects. There are electric trains and cars. There's Spiragraph and
Etch-A-Sketch. Lego, Maccano, Construx. There are sets of brightly
coloured pens, crayons and pencils, even sparkly ones, or ones that glow
in the dark. One year I got pencils that turn into watercolours when
wet. There are toy (and not so toy) musical instruments. There are
short-range radios and pretend computers.
One year, we all got these gizmos that consist of a metal frame and
several boxes of plastic beads. You sprinkle the beads into the gaps in
the frame according to taste, and put the thing in the oven. The plastic
melts, and when it cools again you have a little stained "glass" window.
Another year, we got little plastic pegs that fit into a peg board. You
then iron the pegs, and they melt and stick together. Some of them had
bright neon colours, others glowed in the dark.
Another year, we got special paper that you draw on, and then bake in
the oven. The paper (really a kind of plastic) shrinks and becomes
keyrings or fridge magnets. A different year, we got a kind of
plastercine that sets rock hard in the oven.
And let's not forget, when you're a kid, if somebody buys you a video
about volcanoes or dinosaurs (or volcanoes AND dinosaurs!), you're happy
for hours!
One year, I got a chemistry set for Christmas. I mean, I guess it
doesn't really "do" a lot... but it's a *chemistry set*!! How
uncontrollably awesome is that?! It has *chemicals* in it! :-D
And then there's all the crazy little games we used to play. Stuff like
Averlanch, where you have different coloured marbles balanced on a grid
of levers, and you're supposed to tip out your opponent's marbles but
not knock out your own. Or a puzzle game somewhat similar to dominos,
but with square cards each bearing four symbols. Buy placing one of your
cards onto an existing card, you get more points the more symbols you match.
Kids are just so easy to please. (Any parents reading this can stop
laughing now. :-P ) Something as simple a remote controlled card is
endless ours of fun.
Now, have a think about this: As an adult, what the hell is *fun*
anymore? I'm struggling to think of anything. (Which probably just tells
you how fun my life currently is...) Even assuming you can think of a
few things, how many of these things require "things"? I mean, dancing
the night away can be quite fun, but you don't *need* anything special
to do that, just yourself and a suitable place to go. There's nothing
that you can wrap up in a box. (Except perhaps a ticket.)
So what *the hell* do you get an adult for Christmas? What do you ask to
receive? Let's face it, if you want something and it's cheap, you've
probably already bought it for yourself by now. So that leaves... stuff
that's so expensive that nobody else can afford it either. (And possibly
nobody else even understands what the hell it is - especially if you
happen to be a computer nerd or a rock climbing enthusiast or any other
sort of unusual technical pasute.)
And so, it seems, when you're an adult, it's extremely difficult to know
what to buy (or just to be able to buy) for anybody else, and it's
difficult to imagine that anything anybody else is going to buy for you
will actually be more exciting then a new wooly jumper.
Hmm, that's kind of sad actually. How about something more uplifting?
So what's the best gift you ever received as a kid? Can you actually
*remember* back when driving a plastic car with flashing lights on it
seemed like the pinacle of enjoyment? What neat stuff did you get?
I've never actually seen Maccano (though I gather it's popular) and I
never had much Lego, but one year myself and my (step)siblings received
a truckload of Contrux. The lot of us, the entire family, literally
spent hours and hours constructing huge structures which we then had to
take apart because they were simply too big to keep anywhere. But it was
great! Sometimes you built small stuff by yourself, sometimes you
followed the instructions with your siblings to construct huge
structures. And the system included a control box which could work
flashing lights and a few small electric motors, so you could (for
example) make a helicopter with spinning rotors. It was great! (Until
people started breaking all the bits... KEITH! >:-[ ) We even had a
folding tool chest which we used to store all the pieces - beams, knots,
cogs, drive shafts, deck plates...
I think I already mentioned the chemistry set. That one requires a lot
of supervision. While it doesn't contain anything deadly toxic, I'm
guessing that copper sulfate and cobalt chloride won't do you a lot of
good. There are instructions in the manual that describe the production
of ammonia gas, elemental chlorine gas, and mild explosives. The kit
also contains magnesium, who's main claim to fame is that it burns
stupidly brightly. Arguably the most astonishing thing in the kit is the
meths burner. I've never seen anything like it. You take a wick, SET IT
ON FIRE, and when you put it out, it's not burnt. Burning bush, eat your
heart out!! (Still, having your child play with fire is... hazardous?)
I also got more than one electronics kit. Now, granted, to some kids
that would probably be an increadibly boring thing. You can follow the
instructions, which are basically huge tables of numbers, and it
requires craploads of wiring to actually make anything. And when you've
done it, in spite of the electrical engineers' best efforts, the results
are less than spectacular - various kinds of sounds and flashing lights
as you press the assorted buttons. Possibly the most amusing one is the
"electronic birthday cake", where 5 LEDs light up, and then sequentially
go out as you blow into the speaker (which acts as a kind of inefficient
microphone and detects the windsound). But to me, it was great! I spent
endless years experimenting with it. It's how I first came to understand
how assorted electronic components work, including logic gates and
flip-flops. (I will admit, however, that I still have NO FREAKING IDEA
how an oscilator works, or why it must always contain 63,756,234
seperate resistors connected apparently at random...)
As for the best present *ever*... Well it could be when one Christmas,
everybody around me unwrapped RC cars or cuddly toys, and I unwrapped A
FRIGGIN AMIGA 1200! As in, like, an ACTUAL COMPUTER. I almost fell out
of my chair. I actually left guilty for getting a present so many
billion times better than everybody else. I was actually holding in my
hands the most powerful computer in the entire building. And it was
mine. All MINE! First computer I ever owned... and I still have it, by
Actually, there is one present I got which was even better. Not for
Christmas, but for my 18th birthday. My mother bought me a Yamaha AN1x
digital synthesizer. I know exactly what it cost, because I spent the
previous three months more or less *living* in the shop that sold it,
sweet-talked my mother into buying it. It still sits in my bedroom next
to my computer, and I use it almost every single day of my life. Indeed,
learning the Widor Toccata would hardly have been possible without a
keyboard to practice on. (In solomn truth, I don't use its synthesis
that [not that that's the price *I* paid]. But it's how I started with
synthesizers.)
So there you have it!
Other toys I never owned buy did get to look at... Well, Etch-A-Sketch
gets boring pretty rapidly. Spiragraph is much more fun, but ever
actually works anywhere near as perfectly as they how on the box. There
are billions of possible combinations you can draw, but actually they
all end up looking quite similar. And the pieces don't really work
terribly well, to be honest.
One guy had a gizmo called Dr Spell or something. It had several modes,
including where it would read out a word and you're supposed to type it
in. Trouble is, it would burble something like "fiyown", and you'd be
like "wuh? That's not even a WORD!"
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