More like a six foot turkey.

June 10, 2015 4:03 PM

"I rediscovered my Jurassic Park dossier when cleaning out a cupboard... At around 14 years old, I tried to charm a girl by saying if she ever wanted to know anything about dinosaurs, she could come to me." (via)
posted by roomthreeseventeen (37 comments total)

I started laughing at the air balloon ride (model), but it's the back and forth memos at the end that really take this to the next level of truly obsessive nerdy kid worldbuilding.
posted by deludingmyself at 4:21 PM on June 10, 2015 [8 favorites]

Oh god, obsessive kid world building, It Hapoened To Me, I can still recite the amazingly intricate system of magic I developed (with FLOW CHARTS AND SPREADHSEETS) for a board game I invented. I never got past the doodling on grid paper stage cause I was bogged down with explaining every. Single. Thing.
posted by The Whelk at 4:33 PM on June 10, 2015 [9 favorites]

This is absolutely delightful, positively the best thing I've seen in years. Thanks for the post!
posted by dialetheia at 4:36 PM on June 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

(1) Blades which enable the helicopter to fly.

This deserves to be read in a deep, authoritative voice. I'm not sure Morgan Freeman could do it justice.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 4:47 PM on June 10, 2015 [3 favorites]

Can we stop doing this thing where 1993 was a really long time ago and full-grown adults are talking about being kids back then? It's really getting old. (Or I am, at least.) For you younger folks, imagine waking up one day and being surrounded by 30-year-olds who were all talking about their fond childhood memories of Wall-E. It will happen to you. Any day now...

All crabbing aside, it does blow my mind that that movie is 23 freaking years old. It doesn't help that it's on TV like every weekend, and the special effects look a hell of a lot better than the ones in this new movie. (Also, how the hell do you make a Jurassic Park movie without Sam Neill or Jeff Goldblum? It's not like either of those guys are unavailable. Or hell, bring Laura Dern back! The other guys got their own Jurassic Park movies! Where's Laura Dern's Jurassic Park movie, damn it?)
posted by Ursula Hitler at 4:48 PM on June 10, 2015 [13 favorites]

My god. This could totally have been me.
posted by brundlefly at 5:02 PM on June 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

I want a Jurassic Park movie starring Laura Dern where the antagonist is just plants. Straight up vegetation. Variety can call it "Universal's new Dern'n'Fern flick." Everybody's happy.
posted by No-sword at 5:03 PM on June 10, 2015 [8 favorites]

Spielberg could buy the rights to "The Day of the Triffids" and totally do that. Don't taunt the Spielberg.
posted by w0mbat at 5:10 PM on June 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

If nothing else, it's a fascinating insight into the mind of the type of pubescent idiot who never had a suntan.

I suspect many of the members of this site can relate to that sentence. I never had that obsessive need to create notebooks full of imaginary worlds (or imaginary friends, say) but I definitely lived too much in my own head.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:14 PM on June 10, 2015 [2 favorites]

It is my sincere belief that anyone who makes a film without Laura Dern in it has committed a crime.
posted by shakespeherian at 5:14 PM on June 10, 2015 [6 favorites]

Where's Laura Dern's Jurassic Park movie, damn it?

Honestly, she's got much better things to do.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 5:18 PM on June 10, 2015

(1) Blades which enable the helicopter to fly.

This deserves to be read in a deep, authoritative voice. I'm not sure Morgan Freeman could do it justice.

Yeah for that one I think you need James Earl Jones.
posted by rifflesby at 5:18 PM on June 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

The part where he builds his own POSIX compliant OS is worth reading, especially the section on chroot jails.
posted by benzenedream at 5:19 PM on June 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

Honestly, she's got much better things to do.

Dammit why isn't that a trailer to a new season of Enlightened.
posted by shakespeherian at 5:23 PM on June 10, 2015 [2 favorites]

I did tons of world-building as a kid and as a teenager. I aspired to be a writer for most of my adolescence for all of my short stories were interconnected in some way, characters knew each other, or knew of each other, or they would pass through the story of whatever character I was writing about at the time. This guy gets mad props from one kid who lived inside their head to another.
posted by Kitteh at 5:26 PM on June 10, 2015 [3 favorites]

Well, I am no longer embarrassed about my "Dr. McCoy" style air injector that I drew plans for.
posted by AGameOfMoans at 5:35 PM on June 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

I love this to bits. I think the first movie I ever got truly obsessed about was Tim Burton's Batman, and this is precisely the sort of stuff I put together for that (I had a special 'Batman' file that was literally just full of every stupid sticker and propaganda postcard and newspaper cutting of movie times and, like, Popper cover or Batman-branded chip bag), so I totally know where this kid is coming from and applaud his efforts.
posted by turbid dahlia at 5:41 PM on June 10, 2015

Well, I am no longer embarrassed about my "Dr. McCoy" style air injector that I drew plans for.

Pics or it didn't happen!?!?!
posted by Fizz at 5:44 PM on June 10, 2015

Honestly, she's got much better things to do.

She was great in movie although a little under-used. But note that Dern is now playing grandmothers.
posted by octothorpe at 5:54 PM on June 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

I used to have a folder packed with hand-drawn material for a Pokémon game that my friend and I wanted to make with RPG Maker. There were a few attempts at maps to incorporate all the official regions as well as one of our own design; lists of new Gym Leaders, Pokémon species, attack types; more things than I can remember. At some point it was left at somebody's house and got lost. I wish I still had it; looking back on this sort of childhood obsession is kind of embarassing, but still fun to remember. It's nice to see evidence that other people were just as passionate/crazy.

(Japanese has a word for this kind of behavior: chuunibyou. Literally, "eighth grader syndrome," because 14-year-old middle schoolers are typically the ones who act like this. There's at least one anime featuring realistic chuunibyou protagonists, who vividly remind me of myself and people I knew at 14.) ("Realistic" as in "don't actually have the fantasy lives they imagine, and sometimes want to forget that they ever behaved like that once they grow older." There are plenty of wish-fulfillment anime where middle schoolers actually do have special powers.)
posted by Rangi at 6:01 PM on June 10, 2015 [3 favorites]

Well, I am no longer embarrassed about my "Dr. McCoy" style air injector that I drew plans for.

Hyposprays are quite real. (aka Jet Injectors)
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 6:05 PM on June 10, 2015

I may or may not have notebooks full of the manic scribbles of a 10-12 year old boy that thinks too much about Sonic the Hedgehog and his good friend, "Mach the Hedgehog". These notebooks are actually quite fantastic and amusing to me since there is otherwise little physical evidence remaining of this young man who has yet to figure out why girls are so interesting.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 6:35 PM on June 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

Spielberg could buy the rights to "The Day of the Triffids" and totally do that.

If Spielberg did a remake of "The Day of the Triffids" starring Laura Dern it would at worst be a fun Netflix rental and it would at best be flippin' fantastic.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 6:42 PM on June 10, 2015

Did you all know that you can get free hex graph paper online?
posted by thelonius at 7:36 PM on June 10, 2015 [1 favorite]

Uh, I still live in my head. Some of us never grew out of the obsessive worldbuilding stage.
posted by naju at 7:46 PM on June 10, 2015 [3 favorites]

Oh god. Laughing until tears were streaming down my face. Thank you for sharing this!!
posted by easter queen at 8:17 PM on June 10, 2015

"Nothing horrific should happen" is a phrase I use frequently, mostly in my test plans.
posted by um at 8:41 PM on June 10, 2015 [6 favorites]

Gen X Star Trek fans may remember a couple of the slicker works of Franz Joseph Studios in the seventies, the USS Enterprise blueprints, and the Star Fleet Technical Manual, which offered a dizzying glimpse of other types of ships beside the heavy cruiser (of which the Enterprise was an example): the scout/destroyer, the transport/tug, and the dreadnought.

My friend John and I met in school in 1978, bonded instantly over a shared love of science fiction, and sometime between then and the release of Star Trek: the Motion Picture in late 1979 drew blueprints for the other types of ships depicted in the Technical Manual. Seriously, imagine this drawing rendered painstakingly by hand as only a couple of nerdy tweens could undertake. (This is actually pretty close to what we drew.)

I figured the things were long since lost around 1980 or so, but John surprised me with them as a housewarming gift about five years ago. The decades-old paper is yellowed, and they are a little bit brittle, but we both agreed that with the best will in the world there is no way we could produce work by hand a tenth as good now; we lack the patience, probably the hand-eye coordination and certainly the obsessive attention to detail. One of these days I am going to scan the things and clean them up a bit digitally (the tape we used to hold the sheets together is distinctly amber-coloured now), then print out a couple of full-size copies and mount them: one for him, and one for me.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 10:10 PM on June 10, 2015 [6 favorites]

Why did I not buy that Star Fleet Technical Manual, when I had the chance? There it was! In mall bookstores.
posted by thelonius at 1:59 AM on June 11, 2015

My howls of laughter are disturbing the cats. I thank you for the post; they do not.
posted by Stacey at 2:55 AM on June 11, 2015

That's fantastic. I had tons of very similar notebooks and C64 floppy disks full of the same kind of stuff. I tossed it all one day in 9th grade. I was bored in biology class so I was writing a sci-fi story in a little notebook and the teacher took it away and then read the first two lines to the class. The lines weren't that terrible but she was so mocking and the whole class laughed and laughed. Within hours the whole school had heard about how the nerdy kid was even nerdier than we had thought! I was mortified. Nobody was ever going to do that to me again, so out it all went when I got home. For years I thought that was a mistake and wished I had kept it until I joined Facebook 20 years after 'the incident' and one of the first things old classmates brought up was my horrible stupid short story. Nobody ever heard or read more than the first 15 or so words, but it didn't matter because it was obviously terrible and a joke. The only thing I never gave up on for some reason was designing pinball machines which I now actually build, sometimes using ideas from many years ago. I still don't let anybody see them though.

It's so cool that this kid kept this and shared it. I feel like I'm in his and my shared middle-school head. I never got into Jurassic Park, but I sure get it instantly when I see these.

I went with my son to the Twin Cities Maker Faire two weeks ago and it was so cool to see all of the various types of makers and like minded people showing interest in what is basically the 2015 version of this notebook instead of pointing and laughing. I'm so glad my kids aren't trapped in a suburb alone with their various passions and instead get to find people on the internet and IRL to share this kind of thing with who will get it.
posted by Clinging to the Wreckage at 6:26 AM on June 11, 2015 [3 favorites]

I feel bad for any teachers who had to deal with YOUNG DUNGEON MASTER Parasite Unseen in their classes. I mean, I wasn't disruptive or anything, but I can imagine how disheartening it must have felt to get five minutes into a lesson, seeing me pull the graph paper out of my backpack, and knowing that they'd lost me for the day.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 8:31 AM on June 11, 2015 [1 favorite]

I need to look for the many photos I took of all my Jurassic Park merchandise laid out neatly on my bed.
posted by Richard Holden at 9:22 AM on June 11, 2015

If you are interested in a "kid who lives in his head" story, I just finished John Darnielle's novel Wolf In White Van is very much this. It's kind of dark, but shies away from being graphic. The writing is lovely and the structure of the novel masterful.

I loved the Jurassic Park dossier. Kids are so awesome.
posted by not that girl at 9:53 AM on June 11, 2015 [1 favorite]

I think "Adult person has sarcastic & baffled yet affectionate conversation with his imagined childhood self" is one of my favorite forms of humor. Stuff like this invariably makes me grin like a idiot. I wonder if the greatest hits of this particular genre are collected anywhere in particular?
posted by pretentious illiterate at 9:57 AM on June 11, 2015 [4 favorites]

I went with my son to the Twin Cities Maker Faire two weeks ago and it was so cool to see all of the various types of makers and like minded people showing interest in what is basically the 2015 version of this notebook instead of pointing and laughing

I feel this way, too. I heard the time we're living in called the Age of Enthusiasm, and it rang true.
posted by not that girl at 9:59 AM on June 11, 2015 [3 favorites]

You know, this gives me a crapload of verguenza ajena, which roughly translates as 'embarrassment for others', like a visceral reaction making me cringe from the laptop screen and not letting me read all the way through, and I think it's because even though I never did anything this nerdy, it's because I was lazy, not because I wasn't nerdy enough, and I might have if I'd gotten around to it, and boy would I be embarrassed if somebody, even myself, posted it online, like really, really, that dream where you're naked in high school embarrassed, which in a way is what happened, so I'm just going to back away from this like Homer when he catches Apu being unfaithful,ok?
posted by signal at 11:52 AM on June 11, 2015