Saturday, March 05, 2011

toys and the end of childhood

a (really) long time ago at summer camp, i had some friends who came to the camp from syracuse. well, not exactly syracuse; they came from fayetteville-manlius, a suburb of syracuse, and one where i ended up doing my senior student teaching, at their old high school. cute coincidence.

anyway, this one girl said that when she was asked what she would do under imminent threat of nuclear strikes, where she would go to be safe, she picked burlington, vermont, which is where i was from (i still live pretty close to there).

you have to remember it was along time ago, and "where would you go if you thought there was going to be a nuclear war?" was the kind of question that people thought was perfectly reasonable to ask children and the sort of question that children asked each other.

you've got to be kidding, i told her. burlington? that's one of the places that will be vaporized in the first strike.

"my childhood is over!" she exclaimed.

anyway, this week i saw a map showing the target areas of soviet-era nuclear strikes in the US and their fallout zones.

(source)

that little red dot up there in new england? burlington, vt. new hampshire didn't have its own strike zone. we were IMPORTANT, boo-yah, important enough to kill first.








so. completely unrelated: i promised you toys.

here's a fun little evolution simulator you can run, and a screen shot of my game running.



oooh! it looks like they've updated the program! awesome. now i have something else to wast prodigious amounts of time doing!

and here's an awesome little flash game to play, as if you don't have enough time to waste. oh! and this little thing is awesome. it's kind of like the tone generator i posted about earlier, but it's more kid friendly and comes in brighter colors. it also has different timbres, so that's fun to play with.

maybe i'll make you a little list of the toys i've recommended to you over time so you can find them easier. maybe i'll put it in the sidebar, or on a side page or something. while i'm at it, maybe i'll make a list of the recipes i've posted about, too.

yeah. on a day when i have nothing else to do, right?

i gotta go.

1 comment:

this one girl said...

I am deeply moved by this post.

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