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Every time I hear someone talking about fidget toys and sensory toys and kids these days and their neurodiversity and how in *my* day (or I catch myself self-talking that way about my own fidgets) I remember that we have in the attic five boxes full of twiddle puzzles inherited from previous generations of my family.
Anyway since I was up the attic yesterday anyway, as my reward for having made serious progress on the sitting room I pulled down the box with all the Rubik's/'twisty puzzle' variants and filled up my twiddle toys shelf (There are still four more boxes of puzzle/twiddle toys up there I didn't tackle, but that one had most of the 'twisty puzzle' style ones.)
1. Skewb/Pyraminx Cube
2. Meffert's Gear Ball
3. The Barrel/The Magic Octagonal Prism
4. 2x2 (Pocket Cube)
5. Pyraminx
6. A standard cube hand-modified with electrical tape to make it easier, almost certainly done by my dad based on something in Scientific American in the '80s
7. Kilominx
8. Spectra (the linear one)
9. Circus 7
10. Alexander's Star
(Also a teleidoscope, a tesseract, and a very old sandscape.)
11. Megaminx
12. The Orb
13. Rubik's Magic Star
14. Rubik's Revolution
(also a top, two gyroscopes, a stack of yo-yos, two slinkies and three transforming lotus spheres.)
14. Impossiball
15. Rubik's Cube
16. Mini Missing Link
17. (In case) 3 mini Rubik's Cubes + 1 mini Magic Ball
18. Magic Puzzle 6
19. old offbrand Rubik's Cube (mostly hidden)
20. Whirligig
21. Magic Ball
22. Disco Puzzle/Octo
23. Missing Link
24. Small Pyraminx
25. Eitan's Twist
26. Square-1/ Cube-21
As you can probably tell, I have not *super* prioritized solving them, because once they are solved you can't twiddle them anymore. (Also figuring out how to solve them on your own is half the fun, but I do it in a solely tactile way - my fingers and spatial brain, do all the thinking, there's no verbal or visual part - that is *also* half the fun because there are very few intellectual things I process that way. But it means that unless I then immediately sit down and keep doing it until it's in muscle memory I forget.)
(In my middle school original fantasy world, one of the princesses was 'autistic', although this being the early '90s I didn't really understand much about what that meant except what was in Young Wizards and Three of a Kind, but I remember thinking that most of the stereotypical 'autistic' interests didn't make sense for someone living in 14th century Doggerland, so instead she always had a puzzle toy at hand, just like in Dad's collection. In retrospect....)
Anyway now I now longer have an excuse to keep wanting to buy new fidget toys, I have plenty of my ancestral ones readily accessible <_< (we won't talk about all the fiddly handcraft tools I inherited from the other side ok)
Anyway since I was up the attic yesterday anyway, as my reward for having made serious progress on the sitting room I pulled down the box with all the Rubik's/'twisty puzzle' variants and filled up my twiddle toys shelf (There are still four more boxes of puzzle/twiddle toys up there I didn't tackle, but that one had most of the 'twisty puzzle' style ones.)
1. Skewb/Pyraminx Cube
2. Meffert's Gear Ball
3. The Barrel/The Magic Octagonal Prism
4. 2x2 (Pocket Cube)
5. Pyraminx
6. A standard cube hand-modified with electrical tape to make it easier, almost certainly done by my dad based on something in Scientific American in the '80s
7. Kilominx
8. Spectra (the linear one)
9. Circus 7
10. Alexander's Star
(Also a teleidoscope, a tesseract, and a very old sandscape.)
11. Megaminx
12. The Orb
13. Rubik's Magic Star
14. Rubik's Revolution
(also a top, two gyroscopes, a stack of yo-yos, two slinkies and three transforming lotus spheres.)
14. Impossiball
15. Rubik's Cube
16. Mini Missing Link
17. (In case) 3 mini Rubik's Cubes + 1 mini Magic Ball
18. Magic Puzzle 6
19. old offbrand Rubik's Cube (mostly hidden)
20. Whirligig
21. Magic Ball
22. Disco Puzzle/Octo
23. Missing Link
24. Small Pyraminx
25. Eitan's Twist
26. Square-1/ Cube-21
As you can probably tell, I have not *super* prioritized solving them, because once they are solved you can't twiddle them anymore. (Also figuring out how to solve them on your own is half the fun, but I do it in a solely tactile way - my fingers and spatial brain, do all the thinking, there's no verbal or visual part - that is *also* half the fun because there are very few intellectual things I process that way. But it means that unless I then immediately sit down and keep doing it until it's in muscle memory I forget.)
(In my middle school original fantasy world, one of the princesses was 'autistic', although this being the early '90s I didn't really understand much about what that meant except what was in Young Wizards and Three of a Kind, but I remember thinking that most of the stereotypical 'autistic' interests didn't make sense for someone living in 14th century Doggerland, so instead she always had a puzzle toy at hand, just like in Dad's collection. In retrospect....)
Anyway now I now longer have an excuse to keep wanting to buy new fidget toys, I have plenty of my ancestral ones readily accessible <_< (we won't talk about all the fiddly handcraft tools I inherited from the other side ok)