[imported from livejournal and backdated]
[this post got a lot of interesting/amusing comments mostly about people apparently annoyed by my decision to use Lojban as the IAL (international auxiliary language) for AEfter Ragnarok - bit sad to lose them]
Catchup
No posts for a whole year. That might
have something to do with being slightly manic with what I calculated
was roughly the equivalent of a 24/7/365 on call full time job and two
contract/casuals. And I'm only getting paid for one of them, and only
if I can find contracts. Sprat and I have gotten down to srs bizness
and are now doing design and websites for money, along with the mass
plethora of other people doing the same. We're better than 90% of them
;) I am also still working on AR (formerly referred to as The Comic and
then The ComicAnimation, you know, that thing I've been plugging at
constantly and more or less consistantly for the last 8 years or so).
It's come a long, long way. It's also because I thought I'd try my hand
at this record keeping business. So I (very intermittently) kept
records in a Smiggle notebook.
I
once more fail at compartmentalising my life too much (which is why the
dual journal thing wasn't working), so more effort is currently being
made on a life/!schooling blogsite (once I can kick my sister into gear
as she owes me two site designs and I am using both IOUs on two
different websites), and then I will move over there from here, and will
probably end up deleting this one. Currently very slowly combing
through the posts on the offchance I'll want to download and backup the
parenting journey from self righteous warpath to mellowed out "why
bother going out to educate idiots when you can do what you do and
attract interesting and interested people". Some of the posts make me
cringe but on the whole I may just bother.
Copypasta this and then transcribing 2009 onto new website, good times.
Tapfish economics
I
downloaded a free game called Tapfish for my iPhone. Basically, you
have a tank (and can add another one for free, and after that you have
to pay game money for more). You can buy fish and plants and
decorations for your tank. The fish take anywhere between 4hrs and 2
weeks to grow (as far as I can tell from the ones we can currently
access, they need to be unlocked), you buy them for a certain amount and
sell t hem for higher.
That was more or less my explanation to
Tao when he asked about that game, and he immediately, by himself with
no prompting from me, came up with the idea/realisation that he could
buy a whole heap of the cheap fish, grow them and sell them to make
enough money to be able to buy the more expensive fish (which sell for a
lot more but take longer to grow) and more plants and decorations for
the tanks.
He's that interested that Tank 2 is now "his" tank. I
was going to save up game coins to buy a third tank so Ruan could have
one too but after she went and sold off a whole bunch of young fish
(thus making us make a loss) despite both Tao and I going "NUUUUUUU"
every time she pressed the button, she has been relegated to cleaning my
virtual tank and feeding my virtual fish.
He is impatiently waiting for the breeding tank to free up so he can "bweed" a new one.
Cartography
Tao
has been drawing maps. He has done a reasonable vaguely spatially (if
not quite artographically) accurate map showing Gosnells, Perth (I call
the CBD Perth even though I think Perth is technically the entire metro
area of which Gosnells is a suburb, even though Gosnells is apparently a
city too) and Christmas Island (labelled CI). Perth and Gosnells were
on one side, not too far from each other. Tao had drawn a line showing
how to get to Christmas Island on the other side of the page, because
it's a way away.
He has also drawn a map showing our house, the
houses of a couple of his friends from Perth Natural Learning Network
(which is not the same as Perth Homeschoolers aside from the fact we're
all homeschoolers - we can I suppose be considered an offshoot :),
relatively the right distances apart. Couldn't tell how he did on
direction though as there were no other references at all. He likes
drawing treasure maps as well, but they tend to be primarily composed of
winding trails ending at X marks the spot :)
Maybe I should take him orienteering or something.
Lojban
It
all started as I was worldbuilding, which is a fairly common acitivity
for me these days. I decided that the entire world should in fact have
an international auxilary language (which proponents of various conlangs
also postulate, though the candidates in question have yet to take off
and for one of them to become popular enough to be the IAL) and went
about picking one (didn't see the point making one when there's so many
well developed and well thought out ones kicking around).
The
first one I looked at was the blatantly obvious and highly popular
Esperanto. A bit of reading later and I decided that despite its
popularity, Esperanto was not the one. Esperanto however led me on to
looking at a couple of others and Interlingua and Lojban caught by
attention.
The two warred for about three days (in other words,
I did a lot of fairly intesne reading during my work hours). In the
end, Lojban prevailed. Why? Because while Interlingua sounded so much
prettier and so much more appropriate, it was basically a pan-European
language, all the natural languages it was based off were European. It
looked startlingly Latin, strangely. Lojban on the other hand looked
kind of vaguely related to everything, it's based on the 6 most spoken
languages at the time of its creation, which includes Mandarin and
Arabic. Good mix there, and "truly" international which the others
aren't. It does make it slightly harder for native English/European
language speakers to pick up. It managed to pass by 5min test, after
reading a few sentences I was recognising words and guessing
translations more or less accurately. So I'm working my way through the
grammar at the moment.
Going to teach the kids once I get a handle on it.
And
for a slightly more useful subsequent language, going to work through
Malay. It is more or less object oriented and also phonetic, so
easyish, or maybe I only feel that way as I grew up hearing it and
speaking Singlish.
The Other Two
My
babies are going good. LeonCaleb learned to walk recently, and even
more recently has completely abandoned the quadripedal mode of
locomotion. Babies walk very cutely. Today we bought him his first
pair of Stompers and thus continued The Tradition of buying the kids
Stompers as their first shoes. He is very pleased with himself, now he
too gets shoes just like his older siblings when we go out.
Ruan
is at that 3-4yo age where I want to kill them. Tao was unbearably
aggro and in everyone's face at this stage, not that you can really tell
now because he is a sweet, thoughtful, awesome little boy now. Ruan
just whinges, constantly, non-stop, and tantrums at the drop of a hat.
Still she is gorgeous and lovable and beautiful and sweet and I love her
very much.
Half an hour to the start of Earth Hour, prepping to
turn off all but the kitchen lights, as a hiccup in dinner planning
means Josh is still cooking and we prefer to be safe. We usually go
Dark Ages for the hour but yeh, might just be the lights and possibly
the computers just this once. I have a lot of other work that needs
catching up with.