A good chunk of my time during the pandemic has been spent making music with good friends, and I’m excited to finally share it with you!
We’re The Very Fine Gentlemen. We currently have two songs currently streaming everywhere, and a whole lot more in post-production that we’ll be releasing each month. Please follow us on all of your favorite music streaming platforms!
I’m also sitting on a backlog of great Secret Dad Society content that I plan to post soon, so stay tuned!
I bought an inflatable Godzilla Halloween costume for my son because he loved the Godzilla movies. The thing is, he isn’t a fan of trick-or-treating, even with the candy! In fact, he couldn’t be convinced to go at all this year. There must be a lot of kids who are shy about approaching the doors of strangers, for good reason. We didn’t want to force him to go, but I felt bad for him.
I was pondering this while assembling some office bookshelves, and realized I could use the styrofoam packaging to make some buildings for him to trounce on in his costume. I set to work and soon realized that buildings are like potato chips—you can’t have just one.
A trip to Lowe’s, and the obligatory Dunkin’ Donuts drive-thru, yielded several few packs of styrofoam. Over the next few days I went nuts with hot glue and craft paint until our garage was overrun by an entire city. I hung a city backdrop, turned on the fog machine, and unleashed my son on the entire city. Not a normal Halloween night, but one we’ll never forget!
If you have some old rain gutters and golf balls lying around, your kids will love making up games with them. They love the sound that it makes. Matchbox cars work too!
I recently started playing Hero Kids with my own little heros. Hero Kids is a role-playing game like D&D (Dungeons and Dragons), but much less complicated and geared towards kids. They love it!
I bought a bundle of Hero Kids downloadable adventures via DriveThruRPG.com. I like that you can print out pre-designed maps and paper miniatures for all of the adventures, making game prep very easy. Sometimes I’ll color the printouts to give them an extra bit of zing, though it isn’t necessary.
After having a few sessions under our belts, I decided to create something personalized to play on besides the printed maps. The Wizard’s Tower adventure features a tower with three floors, so I decided to make a 3D, modular tower with stackable parts, complete with a rickety roof.
It started as a simple idea, but as usual, I very quickly got carried away.
I used Amazon boxes and lots of hot glue to make the main structure. The pieces were sized and shaped to the printable playing mats of the tower floors.
Save those Amazon boxes!
For the rickety roof, I used a cereal box, painted and cut up into small squares, and tiled over rafters comprised of heavily glued cardboard strips.
Painted cereal box for roof tiles.
My favorite part of this project was making the stone walls. I blended a sludge of water and newspaper, drained off most of the water, and baked it into thin sheets, using this really cool method found here. I then cut the sheets into stone blocks and glued them all over the box with Aleene’s Tacky Glue. This was the most time consuming part, but I really like the way the stone walls turned out.
Finally, I painted the printable playing mats in watercolor and glued them to the tower pieces. I still have some finishing touches to add, such as balcony doors, railings, a crooked chimney, and a grand staircase, but my kids (and I) were really eager to play, so I postponed some of these details so we could finally begin to battle our way up to the top of the tower. I do plan to add them later for use in other adventures. I’m thinking that my little players will be become caretakers of the tower while the wizard is off wizarding somewhere.
Keep in mind you don’t need any special props to run Hero Kids, just some standard six-sided dice and downloadable content at DriveThruRPG. If you or your kids want an easy entry into the world of tabletop RPGs, then stop what you’re doing, download some content, and start an adventure!
One of our family traditions is visiting Hershey’s Chocolate World over the holidays to take the free chocolate tour, gawk at the huge holiday chocolate house, and generally overdose on cocoa. We visited very early this year while the house was still under construction. This bad boy is being decked out with over a ton of chocolate!
“Building supplies”
Unfortunately, we never made it back again to see the final build. We’ll have to settle for some Instagram pics and a time-lapse video of construction. I like to imagine that they let the Hersheypark’s ZooAmerica animals feast on the chocolate after deconstruction, but I’m sure it goes against their diets.
I love 35 drum majors caught in the moment, a Drum Corps International (DCI) photo gallery of drum majors in moments of extreme focus, glory, and raw emotion. The drum major uniforms are fantastic, and the shots are perfectly timed to capture some really intense musical moments. Some of these young band leaders look rather like superheroes, evil villians, or full-blown rock stars. I was fortunate to be a drum major in my own high school band, many years ago. My uniform had a red Power Ranger concept art vibe to it.
I cherish the experiences I had on the field and can totally relate to the excitement captured in 35 drum majors caught in the moment. Even if you were never involved in marching band, you’ll still enjoy these great photos.
I just entered to win a Zero G experience giveaway from Tim Ferriss and Huckberry. How cool would it be to experience weightlessness and float around like an astronaut?!?
For your chance to win, enter here.
If I win, I’ll be sure to bring along some astro ice cream from Maker Dad.
I am very excited to announce my guest appearance on the latest episode of Gweek, one of my long-time favorite podcasts from boingboing.net, hosted by Mark Frauenfelder and Dean Putney. My morning routine isn’t complete until I’ve had a few cups of coffee while perusing the latest posts on Boing Boing, and I never miss an episode of Gweek.
As an avid listener, I’ve often been compelled to run out and explore many a gadget, website, book, movie, graphic novel, or various other neat stuff recommended by Mark, Dean, or any of their interesting guests. It was a thrill to be a guest myself and share some of my own favorite things with them. I’d like to thank Mark and Dean for having me on the podcast. It was such a blast! You can read more details about it and listen here.
So much for using the right tool for the job! In this short, stop motion parody video, Thor attempts to help Belle with some home improvements. It was shot using an iPhone 5 and iStopMotion 3.6.
Secret Dad Society 