History: February 2008 Archive Page

Aardvarchaeology has a fascinating piece on abandoned suburban treehouses.

These sites and their formation processes reflect children's psychological characteristics. Kids have little sense of order, short memories and strange rationality. They also have no idea that childhood is brief and transient. They will happily fill their treehouses with junk without any thought that they might one day stop coming there. When adolescence strikes and the hormones get going, old childish haunts like these suddenly become the last places they want to visit. So everything is left wherever it dropped the last time someone came to play in the house.

Grownups hardly ever leave their sites that way: we keep any useful stuff and tidy up the place before we leave. Often we will even tear the house down and bring the building materials to our next place of habitation. The grownup type of site most similar to abandoned treehouses is the homeless substance-abuser camp, which is also inhabited by people with thinking impairments. Such sites may be abruptly abandoned when their inhabitants die of overdoses, get thrown into jail or find someone with an apartment who's willing to take them in.

And the treehouse sites are hardly ever cleaned up. In fact, the children's parents often have only a vague notion of where the treehouse is. They may help to build it, but they don't feel responsible for it. It's out in the woods where only children and mushroom pickers see it: out of sight and out of mind. The mess there would never be tolerated in the back yard, just as most Westerners of today feel really uncomfortable in the stench and litter of Third World villages.

Boing Boing interviews Bjarne P. Tveskov, a Lego designer who created many of the classic Space sets from the 80s.  I still have all my space legos, and my kids and I regularly play with them.

My LEGO career started when I was 17 years old; I saw an ad in the Sunday newspaper, they were looking for designers for the Space product line. No formal qualifications were required so just for fun I applied. They sent me a big box of LEGO bricks and asked me to create a Space model from imagination. Still got the model I made back then. (image coming later). At the interview I realized that the job was a full-time position in Billund, initially I thought that maybe it could be a freelance gig, but no. So when suddenly I was offered the job I had to ask my parents if it was OK if I quit high-school to become a Spaceship designer. They said it was fine, thinking I could always return to school later when I was done with the toy adventure. (But it never happened)

Gettysburg College:

Students create text-based "interactive fiction" games that are rigorously derived from archaeological data and filled with references to Viking and other cultures. The games describe a scene or object in detail, then ask players to make a choice, such as "go east" or "take sword." Each decision leads to a new set of possibilities. "From an English professor's point of view, this is really creative writing," said Fee.

Don't forget the red lutkefish puzzle.