A few years ago I found a “talking Eeyore” at Target while we were shopping for birthday or Xmas gifts for the grandkids, and I probably spent a good five minutes pushing his “talk” button and listening to him repeat the same phrase over and over before my wife finally dragged me away.
I haven’t been able hear this lately since they’re all gone from the thrift stores now, but the “I’m a pig” on old See-and-Say talking toys always cracks me up. All the other animal voices sound fairly good, but the pig is just some guy saying oink …oink oink …oink. I find it hilarious.
I had so many ideas for this post, someone should probably revoke my adult card!
The only pleasure I actually feel guilty about is eating raw dough/batter while cooking. Doesn’t have to be sweet, although that helps. I was making pasta yesterday and the ball of dough looked so delicious and just begged me to tear off a chunk and stuff it in my face!
The most childish thing I do is probably collecting rocks. Again, they don’t have to be special or beautiful. I tend to look at the ground when hiking, so I can spot interesting plants or animals, and if I notice a nice rock (or seashell, or a feather, or a piece of wood, or a pinecone), it goes in my pocket. The trick to appear adult again to anyone watching is to mention what type of rock it is, so they think I’m an expert, but I’m actually guessing most of the time.
A friend and I used to go cruising on the Great Lakes and some of the connecting waterways. One summer I brought along a bunch of Hardy Boys books that I had read as a kid. It was absolutely silly reading but it was somehow pleasurable in the idyllic setting of a boat cruise, either when it was his turn to steer the boat and I was responsible for snacks and drinks, or when it was his turn to make our dinner and I got to laze about. Not something I’d ever waste time on as an adult in normal life, but man, there’s something about the great open outdoors, especially the nautical version, that somehow changes your perspective and connects you back to your childhood.
I still play video games and board games quite heavily, and anybody that looks at my video games as being “childish” can fuck right off 
I’ve never understood the mindset among some that “passively watching costumed men run a ball back and forth on a field on TV” is somehow more mature than “actively making simulated armies clash in battle on a monitor (or insert your preferred game style here instead)”.
When you said “base-building simulation on an airless, hostile moon, where physics plays a strong role” I assumed you were talking about a game like Oxygen Not Included or Space Engineers,
I was referring to “Stationeers.” A very impressive game. Every item in the base has to be structurally sound, powered, and often, have pressurized gas or water piped to it. Like in real life. If you download a completed base (you can via Steam workshop), and start examining things closely, you’ll be awestruck at how complex it is. Truly blows my mind.
To see it in action, you might want to view some of the YT videos made by “Splitsie” (aka “Flipsie” in a different YT channel–same guy) who often plays multiplayer with his friend “Capac.” They have a bit of a schlemiel / schlimazel humor vibe going the whole time, but in Australian accents.
FWIW they also play Space Engineers, which I also enjoy.
I was looking through the YA section at a bookstore, and a fellow senior browser (in a nice suit) glanced over and said “It’s refreshing to read literature where Things Happen!”
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You (and everyone here) MUST See Paddington 2.
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I posted last week about how I took my wife to the airport for a trip to see her mom, and stopped on my way home… and bought a Big G Snack Pack! Had some Lucky Charms tonight (after a healthy dinner, of course).
When I turned 60, I bought myself a teddy bear. He sits at the dining room table with us when my husband and I have dinner, and I sleep with him every night.
I had a rotten childhood, so the teddy bear is my way of giving myself the feelings of comfort and emotional security that I didn’t get when I was young.
When I was a bit younger, I bought a new Chevy Caprice, which was the high end of the line, and I really loved that car. The interior was a sort of baby blue, and I either already had or bought a teddy bear that was blue and white, with the blue pretty much exactly matching the plush fabric of the car seats. It honestly looked like it came with the car. I called him Chevy Bear and had him more or less permanently strapped in to the middle of the rear seat. One thing I didn’t expect was that Chevy Bear would be noticed in the parking lot and considerably commented on in my workplace. 
I’m in my 60s, and I’ve bought many teddy bears. Most are named after the places I’ve bought them. So, for example, I’ve got Denver Blue (a blue-furred bear that I got in Denver, Colorado), Marky Bear (a prize I won at Markham Fair in Ontario), and Reggie (a bear from Regina, Saskatchewan). Some, I don’t know where I got them, so they just get ordinary names–except for the one who is named “Somewhere Bear,” which, obviously, came from somewhere, though I cannot remember where.
To make up for that, Somewhere Bear goes with me everywhere on trips, and wears a vest sporting souvenir pins of all the places he’s been: Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Denver, Las Vegas, Seattle, Chicago, Halifax, Edmonton, Calgary, and so many more. He’s been a lot of places, so that vest is pretty heavy, as it is weighed down with pins. He seems to be able to handle it.
I have Bullwinkle in my car. He a stuffed toy moose, and he’s ridden with me for over twenty years, and likely has at least a hundred thousand kilometers under his belt. Given my love of road trips, Bullwinkle has visited nine Canadian provinces, and about 12 American states. He just sits in the centre console, but it’s not a real road trip unless Bullwinkle is there.
We have several teddy bears in the house. They’re a good thing.
Oh yes, I’ve seen it many times and I agree, I think anyone would get a kick out of. I’m delighted to say everything seems tickey boo.
I’m going to say Lego. I enjoyed playing with Lego as a kid. But my 7 year old son and to a lesser extent his 4 year old sister are obsessed with Lego. My wife and I have “allowed” them to occupy half our apartment with a massive Legoscape. And by “allow”, I mean not only do I help them build their various constructs, I often find myself building things I think their Lego city “needs”. Like a few more cars, a 4 story condo, and maybe this tower crane so we can gentrify this block between Avengers Tower and a Ninjago temple. I’ve sort of become Will Farrell from The Lego Movie, sweeping through every few days to put sets back together after my kids combine them into their mad experiments. Even my wife has become our sort of “head of sourcing”, scouring Bricklinks.com and negotiating with sellers for the best prices on sets our kids want.
Kind of a funny related story - My team spent a week prepping for a sales pitch with some big bank. I think we ultimately won the deal because their VP of Technology noticed one of our Practice Leaders had a bunch of “mecha” toys on the shelf behind him and the two spent half the call talking about Robotech and Gundum and whatnot.
Me too. And generally not the expert sets for grown ups. If it’s got something to do with camping in a mini-figure scaled camper, I’ve probably bought it. I also like lighthouses, cabins, tree houses (including both this set and this one), and I love mini figures. I’m very bummed I never got the old fishing store before it went up to $400+
Also, when I’m particularly stressed, I like to bid on lots of random Lego pieces sold by the pound on ebay, which once I’ve won them, I sort by color. I never build anything with them. Yes, I know I could just unbin the ones I own and sort them again, but…
You know, I am a creature of comfort. I take bubble baths on the regular. I have a security blanket. One full sized, one travel sized. I find the silk borders soothing. I have had my own “silky blanky” since I was a toddler.
I occasionally sleep with my stuffed animals. I’m a fan of the jellyfish and starfish but occasionally I’ll pull out all the stops and cuddle my giant octopus.
Our primary kitchen glasses are tumblers full of Marvel characters. So whenever we have guests, they get to decide if they want to be Spider-Man, The Hulk, Wolverine, etc. We have about 15 options. I get the biggest kick out of grown-ass adults announcing, “I’ll be Iron Man!”
My husband’s childish pleasures are all things Marvel and especially X-Men. We have four large Marvel prints framed in our living room, and my husband stages elaborate action figure scenarios. He has at least 200 action figures. He recently bought two giant Sentinels that stand about waist high. (Sentinels are an X-Men thing.)
Some people may find it weird, but the cool thing about being an adult is you don’t have to give a shit.
Nothing weird about it at all. In some ways we never really “grow up” (whatever that means), we just change the toys we like to play with – and sometimes, not even that. The main thing about being a grownup is the ability to buy your own toys instead of bugging somebody else and having to wait until Christmas.
I’ve been reading with interest the thread about model trains somewhere else on the SDMB, and it reminded me of the N-scale model train setup I had when I was younger. That was years ago, and that set is long gone. But that thread reminded me about how much fun I had with it, and got me thinking about getting a new set.
Even if it does nothing more than run in an oval on the living room floor, and needs to be taken apart after playing with it, it would be fun. Such a set might be a nice Christmas gift to myself.
I mentioned in that thread about going to the other extreme in size, with a G-scale (1:22) train set that I got my son for Christmas when he was quite young. We both played with it and it’s arguable who had the more fun! Being large scale, we had it laid out on the floor, running around his room, under his bed, and out into the hallway, and back again.
There was (still is, but they seem to have considerably wound down their operations after several takeovers) a German company called LGB that made/makes gorgeously detailed but quite expensive G-scale equipment. That’s not what I got him; the actual train set was Playmobil (another German company, BTW) basically an electric train toy for younger kids, but it was designed to be fully compatible with LGB track and LGB rolling stock. I gradually built up the Playmobil “toy” set with LGB cars and accessories and it became a sort of hybrid toy + grownup train set – beautifully symbolic of the fact that there’s no real fundamental difference between the two!
Speaking of grownups, I think deep down we’ve all had moments like this:
