What happens when you mix a Sci-Fi/Fantasy nerd with someone who loves to fix and build things?

Well, you get me. My name is Thomas Shankle. As stated in the title, I'm a bit of your typical high school nerd from the 80's and 90's, and a bit of a left-brained improviser. I played D&D in high school. I found my love of reading when I discovered Dragonlance Chronicals by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. All while growing up in rural western Pennsylvania, surrounded by nothing more than farms and amish. I got bored A LOT. This was not always the best thing for a child of the 80's who had undiagnosed ADHD and limited parental supervision. What could possibly go wrong?

My family is host to all kinds of blue collar experts. My maternal grandfather was a mechanic all his life. He owned his own shop for a time. He had loads of farm experience and all that entails. My paternal grandfather was in the army during WW2 and after the war he worked in the coal mines. From what I can remember, (I was 8 or so when he passed) he was one who believed in self-reliance. He hunted, fished, gardened, preserved their own food, fixed everything he could himself, and just lived a pretty simple life. My father worked in manufacturing. Mostly steel fabrication. And my maternal uncle drives dump truck for a living, but is also someone who is pretty self-reliant. He has had and restored classic cars, he learned a lot for his father and uncles about farm related skills. His current hobby is antique tractor pulling. He has two antique John Deere tractors, a John Deere A and a John Deere G. Which he maintains and repairs mostly himself.

So why am I telling you all that? Well that give you an idea of how my mind was molded at a young age. I took stuff apart constantly. I was bored and want to know how things worked or it was broken and I wanted to fix it or use it's parts for something else. I tried once when I was 13 or 14 to open my own "mechanic shop" in our basement to fix bicycles for the neighborhood kids. That lasted about two days, because at the time most of the kids around my age made fun of me. That didn't stop me from helping my friends thought. I had two really good friends around that time, Ronnie and Tim. I remember disassembling one of their bikes. I mean every last bolt, just to re-paint the frame. We would swap parts from broken bikes to make a new ones. Then came go-carts and dirt bikes. Tim and I even tried building our own go-cart at one point.

All of this tinkering and nerding out on Star Trek, and Star Wars, and D&D/Role-playing, Sci-fi/Fantasy TV and books, is what has made me what I am today. A wierd mash-up of blue-collar working stiff, Sci-fi/Fantasy nerd, ADHD fueled, chaos brained, middle-aged Gen-Xer. What could possibly go wrong?

This is just a little back story as to why I'm about to present to you some of the chaos that my mind comes up with sometime. This normally wouldn't be possible, but recently I have discovered AI and how it can take my chaotic thoughts on a subject or idea, that will bounce around my skull for days or even weeks, and organize them in a way that will make sense to everyone that isn't me. I can pour my rambling, out of order thoughts into AI and it will untangle them and present them in a way that doesn't sound like the ramblings of a schizophrenic time-traveler from an alien world, trapped on earth with brain damage. So enjoy or don't, I don't care. I'll forget about this after lunch... Mmm, lunch... I'm hungry.... What am I having for lunch today?...

(P.S. This is unaltered by AI, but took me like three hours to write, read, re-write, re-read, re-re-write, etc.... now I have to pee....)