technonaturalist

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AR notes: conscript to go with the conlang

Thursday, 17 October 2013 @ 1:13pm

Once upon a time I decided to pick Lojban as AR’s international auxiliary language because it was not Euro-specific and hadn’t been created for someone else’s work of fiction (not that there’s anything wrong with those things, I just wanted something international that was actually “international” and I didn’t want to poach someone else’s conlang that had been done for their thing, but one that was constructed just for fun/to use was okay :P). I was also rather lazy had lots of stuff to think about and Lojban had the easiest alphabet to deal with (ascii which is not exactly “neutral” but is a standard).

Drupal 7 install profile stuff that everyone else magically knows

Wednesday, 9 October 2013 @ 11:38pm

Seeing as I found little to nothing when searching for how to configure individual role permissions, editor settings and enabling contrib filters with an install profile, I made something on the off-chance it helps some other poor sap like me who doesn’t automagically know where to look for these things.

Enabling filters provided by contrib modules

Search in the .module files for _filter_info. Some modules use the same format as Drupal filters of $filters['modulename_filter'], others don’t. Typogrify doesn’t:

Home ed program 2014

Saturday, 5 October 2013 @ 10:46pm

Weekly-ish

All

  • library
  • 2x kung fu
  • visit great-grandmother
  • music lessons if finances allow
  • doco/music video/cooking show (every night)

9yo

  • 1x Khan Academy
  • 1x Reading Eggspress
  • 1x written bookwork
  • 1x extra any of the above
  • 1x roleplaying (followed by session writeup)
  • AFL Juniors (1x training, 1x game)
  • gym/circus iff finances allow

7yo

  • 1x Khan Academy
  • 1x Reading Eggs
  • 1x Maths Seeds
  • 1x written bookwork
  • 1x roleplaying (followed by session writeup)
  • gym

5yo

  • 1x Reading Eggs
  • 1x Maths Seeds
  • 1x written bookwork
  • 2x optional extra any of the above
  • Auskick (1x training, 1x game)

Bookwork is for $5/week pocket money. A bookwork “session” is two pages of a book, one set of exercises in Reading Eggs/Reading Eggspress/Maths Seeds (usually 10 short exercises, with Reading Eggspress it depends on what 8yo chooses to do at the time), one “stack” of problems or one video in Khan Academy. The rules for earning extra have changed, rather than doing extra bookwork the bigs can now embark on a research project of their own choosing. They get an extra $5 for a relatively simple thing like a poster, $10-15 for essays/reports with diagrams, $20 for a fairly detailed book (appropriate to age obviously).

Booklist 2014

Saturday, 5 October 2013 @ 5:23pm

Everyone

  • textas
  • coloured pencils
  • crayons (big ones)
  • street chalk
  • paint (acrylic, water, if Ru wants oil or something complicated get a small set and keep it out of the way)
  • pastels
  • oil pastels
  • one of those huge arse dangerous sharpeners with a handle that is impossible to lose

9yo

English

Maths

7yo

English

  • Reading Eggs 5-8
  • renew Reading Eggs sub

Maths

Science

5yo

English

  • renew Reading Eggs sub
  • Reading Eggs 1-4

Maths

  • renew Maths Seeds sub
  • Maths Seeds 1-4

!schooling from whenever til now

Friday, 4 October 2013 @ 4:11pm

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]

Due to stuff (some it was the parents coming up to visit for a couple of weeks, some is that business has picked up dramatically), I haven’t been keeping track of the homeschooly stuff. Also we’ve been finding better things to do than sitting and doing bookwork, so it’s a really good thing that’s not the core of our homeschooling program (I need to write one of those for next year by the way, and also a booklist). So here’s some photos of things it occurred to me to point a camera at.

Random keys

Friday, 27 September 2013 @ 7:43pm

8yo (watching me touch type): how do you tap random keys and come up with words?

Freo heave ho...

Friday, 20 September 2013 @ 2:40pm

So once upon a time (not really so very long ago, only a handful of years), JJ’s favourite AFL team the Fremantle Dockers made it into a qualifying final (and then got knocked out). I said that if they ever made it into the finals again, I would do the anchor in my hair.

They’re currently up for a semi.

So…

Hair bleaching

I wonder if whoever it was got the idea for the Minbari horn crests while waiting for their hair to bleach

Calling horns done

Wednesday, 18 September 2013 @ 10:31am

Though I’m sure I’ll find more things to clean up and refine while I’m doing the rest of the body.

Anyway I tried to reflect nature somewhat with some horizontal bands like what’s found in kudu (what I based Red’s horns off):

Kudu style twisty horns

Horizontal banding - can’t make it look twisty enough!

After spending a ridiculous 6 months on the horns (lots of chaos and confusion with the guides and my general ineptitude) this really wasn’t looking twisty enough for my liking. I couldn’t work out how to sharpen the corners to make it look ike it was twisting and also discovered issues with how the horns connected to the horn crest (seeing as my Dragonkin have a horn crest instead of the horns just poking out the top of their skulls like normal horned animals.

!schooling 0000I18c - I22n

Friday, 23 August 2013 @ 4:00pm

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]

We spent most of the last week recovering from whatever plague we had and trying to get back into the bookwork. What this meant was that we stayed home all week and I let the kids do whatever books they wanted which meant 6yo only did Reading Eggs books all week when they are supposed to pick different subjects.

Sculpty goodness and pipeline change

Tuesday, 20 August 2013 @ 9:10pm

While sculpting horns I was quite sure I was going to use Blender for all the sculpty goodness seeing as it had actually imported the mesh to begin with. I think I’m going to have to accept the fact that my brain is never going to play nicely with Blender because even though I have been doing so much better than I ever have, I still don’t understand it.

Blender sculpt

Very roughly positioned front, side and three-quarter view of the character in a window on the 21in monitor. The actual work was being done on the Cintiq at close range. The multiscreening is one seriously cool thing about Blender and I do miss it a little bit in Sculptris