I wish my dad had an interest so I could get him a Christmas present based on it
Get him a sword
I'm a scifi writer what makes you think I have sword money
You could check in your area, or online, and see if there is a liquidation shop near you. Up in my part of Canada we have a liquidation chain (Bianca Amor) where you can get liquidation swords for very affordable prices.
If your shop don't have cheap swords, you never know what other weird/neat gift ideas they may hold.
I GUARANTEE THAT MY AUSTRALIAN COUNTRY TOWN DOES NOT HAVE SWORD WAREHOUSES WITH EXCESS SWORDS ON SALE
IF PEOPLE WANT SWORDS THEY GO ONLINE OR DRIVE SIX HOURS TO THE CITY
what about learn how to make them, are there any hobbyist blacksmiths do you think
I need you to understand that all the nerds in my town move to the cities after high school. There's me, a few guys who run the comic shop, and a legion of Warhammer-playing teenagers waiting out the last few years of high school so they can move to the cities. The medieval fair happens once a year here and that's the one day a year that the women all get excited to put on longer-than-normal dresses that they wouldn't wear otherwise (that's be weird, people would stare!) and buy knockoff versions of Disney products sold by vendors who drove here from the cities.
I was stage manager for one of my dad's plays a couple of years ago and I had to explain to the theatre group what larp was. To the theatre group. The THEATRE GROUP didn't know what larp was.
I explained and they DIDN'T GET IT. I then had to explain the basics of a tabletop rpg (I just said 'dungeons and dragons' because most of them recognised those words) and didn't get particularly far.
The "nerdy" girl in the theatre group asked me if I'd ever heard of this new thing going around called "superwholock". (This would've been around 2020 or 2021). My only response to Superwholock being called this new thing was a sort of stunned "uh, yes, I'm on Tumblr." She then asked me what Tumblr was.
Do you live in the smurf village
Non-Australians literally have no concept of how much of Australia outside the main cities is just four-fifths of fuck all as far as human stuff is concerned.
I grew up in a place that was so small and regional that it had a "welcome to" and a "now leaving" sign on either end of the one street that went through town. The distance between the two was short enough that if you were driving the speed limit and held your breath when you drove past "welcome to" you wouldn't be struggling for breath when you got to "now leaving".
It was a big deal when they got a roundabout for fucks sake because it meant they'd put another road in. For a grand total of TWO ROADS.
Australian towns are great, they're like those low-nutrient-density extremophiles in the ocean except it's for low population. The "town" I grew up in was a primary school and a town hall in the middle of a bunch of farms. The town hall was used one time a year for a market where the farmers sold potted plants to each other and the kids got their faces painted and stuff. The school had 31 students; when my brother and I left that school to attend the one in the next town over (was so fancy that they had a primary school AND a high school and the high school had an actual library, an entire room of books that I think also counted as the town library although I only ever got to go there like twice so I might be wrong) then they had to fire a teacher because the school could no longer support 2 full time and 1 part time teachers.
The fired teacher (the part-timer) was everyone's favourite. She came to work at our new school. We stole a teacher.
Ah yes, the good old "sneeze and you've missed it" Australian country towns.
My personal favourite is Lake King here in WA, which for most of my childhood consisted of a petrol station with a single bowser on one side of the road, a primary school and a large shed which was the "town hall" on the other, and a sign dropping the speed limit from 110km/h to 60km/h about five km up the road from the pair of them. The main reason you were reducing speed is because if you didn't, you'd be moving too fast when you hit the turn off from the road between Lake Grace and Norseman onto the road to Ravensthorpe (and the bitumen on the Lake Grace - Norseman road cut out over the other side of the junction, so you'd be on gravel).
Since then, I understand the place has grown a bit - there's been a pub built north of the intersection, there's a few road signs added here and there, maybe a mailbox or two, and they've bitumenised the road between Lake King and Norseman (which means you have to pay more attention in order to make the Ravensthorpe turn-off now).
I love when you can measure the prominence of an area by the quality of the roads
(Sorry about your fucking disaster roads England and the USA I know this doesn't apply to you)