Diorama Wamma Jamma!

It’s been a while since I worked on diorama projects. They are so fun to work on although I’d rather create something on a larger scale as shoe boxes are a bit limiting. My young ones are doing it now and I know I’ll be finding my way back into hobby shops. When I say hobby shops I’m talking more on the smaller shops vs. the larger commercial ones like “Hobby Lobby” and “Michaels”. I’ve missed going into them and walking around to see what cool things are available and doing a bit of shop talk with the sales people. Having kids is great especially when we as adults are nostalgic for things that we did in our younger days.

This video that I found on “YouTube” with Adam Savage was so inspiring that I decided to include it with this post. I love fantasy and have always wanted to learn how to play Dungeons and Dragons (the board game) but the closest thing that I played back then was on the computer. It was during my Commodore 64 days and I was in early Freshman/Junior year of high school. It was in my Electronic’s class with Mr. Ching that I was introduced to the game “Ultima III”. I drew out maps on graph paper and wrote a ton of notes on where to find items for my spells. Those were the early days of the first usage of cloud of war in games where certain parts of the map weren’t view-able until you traveled through it.

My friend Gary Payne hooked me up with a pirated copy of the game. It was during those days that I was introduced to the underground world of pirated games and to world of software pirating and cracking copy protection algorithms. I’ll talk about this more in a future post. Time to get back to hobby shops and dioramas.

Growing up in Hawaii, I was introduced to electronic race tracks, hot wheels, and train sets that even blew smoke from it’s smoke stacks. I used to see these amazing train layouts in my hay day and some of these new ones are off the chain. I’d love to see what my son finds an interest in building. He’s already a builder. Mainly in Legos and in the digital game Minecraft.