Catchup, Tapfish economics, cartography and Lojban
posted on: Saturday, 27 March 2010 @ 7:52pm in[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]
[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 5yo 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 3yo 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 5yo 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
5yo has been drawing maps. He has done a reasonable vaguely spatially (if not quite artographically) accurate map showing our suburb, Perth (I call the CBD Perth even though I think Perth is technically the entire metro area of which our suburb is one of, even though our suburb is apparently a city too) and Christmas Island (labelled CI). Perth and our suburb were on one side, not too far from each other. 5yo 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. 1yo 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.
3yo is at that 3-4yo age where I want to kill them. 5yo 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. 3yo 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.
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