As I was dropping my kids off to school this morning, it had dawned to me that I should chronicle one of our more fun activities we do on our long commute. It takes us a good 35 minutes to get to the school, so we have been doing some fun rituals to bide the time. We have "Trivia Tuesday", "Word Wednesday", and today was "Thought Thursday".
Basically, the kids get to ask me any question that they want to have answered. I can usually gather what they might have an interest in by what they ask and the level of detail they require. Anyway, for posterity sake, I'm going to try to log what they ask so I can always reference it in the future.
Bootykid2: "How do you make a video game? (I wanna make an Iron Man video game)"
(When he asked this question, that's when it dawned on me that I should start posting this stuff on my BYOND blog. Only fitting.)
"When people make a game, it always starts out as an idea. Usually, you have an idea of what the characters are, where they are, what they can do, and what they are supposed to do. Sometimes games are very simple, for example, your Yahtzee game. People drew pictures of dice, made a button push roll the dice, and then made rules for the result of the dice roll.
"It's very much like writing a story. Instead of writing English words or sketching a pictorial, you write in a computer language and you draw with a computer program.
"After the game has been completed, the 'computer language story' and the pictures are put on a DVD, Blu-Ray disc, on a small chip in a cartridge, or sometimes it just stays on the internet somewhere.
"I can show you some stuff tonight..."
http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/ making-a-video-game.htm
http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/ video-game-designer.htm
Bootykid1: "How did people start making sentences?"
"This is a tough question. There is a term for it that is escaping me [glottogony], but it's very hard to know exactly how sentence making began.
"Some animals have some form of communication with each other. You probably have seen Nick and Suri [our cats] paw at each other and glare when sharing the food bowl, and you know that the horses whinny collectively when they see each other. Bees have no voices, but they are able to communicate with each other through secreted chemicals and changing their wing speed. Macy Gray [our parrot] has the ability to mimic my voice and will repeat certain phrases depending on what I might be doing, but does not know what any of the words mean.
"Humans have a lot of things going for them, we have very advanced brains, we have tongues, lips, and a tone and vibration adjustable Adam's Apple. And we also have the simple needs that the animals do: like bees we work together as a society, like parrots we mimic, like dogs and horses we have person to person interactions and conflicts. We see very 'animal' like words in our language today like 'roar', 'meow', and 'sizzle' -- those are examples of onomatopoeia.
"Let's do more research tonight to find more stuff out..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language
Something that's bugging me ever so slightly: You should be using brackets when you're including the context, not parantheses. Paranthetical notes can still turn up in speech, so it's misleading, unless you are saying those things to your kids.
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Popisfizzy wrote:
Something that's bugging me ever so slightly: You should be using brackets when you're including the context, not parantheses. Paranthetical notes can still turn up in speech, so it's misleading, unless you are saying those things to your kids. Is that right? Time to break out the grammar book... Basic Prose Style and Mechanics 5. Parentheses 5.1 (a) Use parentheses to enclose parenthetical elements (words, phrases, or complete sentences that digress, amplify, or explain) (compare 1.3b) and 4.2). When APL is on (indicated by the letters APL appearing at the bottom of the screen), no lower-case characters are available. 5.2 Except in journalism, use square brackets [ ] to enclose a parenthetical element within a parenthetical element. Probably not worth being bugged about at all, eh? | |
The Bedford Handbook (sixth edition, ISBN 0-312-41280-0, I don't know if there's an online source) disagrees here.
Page 437: "Use parenthesis to enclose supplemental material, minor digressions, and afterthoughts." Page 438: "Use brackets to enclose any words or phrases that you have inserted into an otherwise word-for-word quotation." | |
Cinnom wrote:
The Bedford Handbook (sixth edition, ISBN 0-312-41280-0, I don't know if there's an online source) disagrees here. Ah okay, I think I see what PiF's point was. I was using first person narrative there, so yes, I'm quoting myself, and yes, I should put the clarifications in brackets. | |
Eh, guess I was wrong. I prefer to use brackets in a situation like that, and it wouldn't be the first time that what I prefer in writing doesn't match standards.
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Don't forget about the thromborax, without it we wouldn't have pirate-speak!