Doug Moe's Blog, page 20
October 21, 2016
October 10, 2016
whatdowedonowmomcast:
New episode with our first DAD guest, the...
My pals had me talk to them on their great parenting podcast! Subscribe and see how truly wise I am!
September 23, 2016
Roblox: Rated RWell, we ruined our daughter’s life again...
Roblox: Rated R
Well, we ruined our daughter’s life again by banning another online game that is populated by cretins (teenagers).
She’d been playing Roblox for about a week and was really loving it. On its face, it seems like a harmless Lego/Minecraft kind of a platform where kids can create their own games. So far, so good.
It’s user-generate content, so kids create their own games. Predictably, it’s a mixed bag. Right off the bat, you know some of them are not going to be good for a 10 year old: Murder Mystery 2, Roblox High School, Escape From a Natural Disaster. So fine, okay, we have to trust that she’ll avoid those. Maybe Roblox could have provided a mechanism to filter such games out, but they didn’t. Let’s rely on her good judgment: if she avoids inappropriate games, should be fine!
OH, but there’s a chat. Cool, cool. But if she entered her birthday correctly, it’s a filtered chat to ferret out the dirtiest skeezeball smut-talk. That’s okay, I guess. I’m no prude and I’ve been known to throw a curse-word in there myself. "Fuck.“ See? If especially naughty things are filtered out, great. Sure, people can probably still write f*ck or sh@t or something, but geesh what cheap thrills. No biggee.
So we allowed her to play it, with some misgivings. But wow can teenagers ruin things. The thing that finally got it banned was when my daughter roped my wife into playing Roblox Mad-Libs with her. Mad-Libs! What could be more wholesome? What could ruin Mad-Libs?
The feral teenagers of the internet then chose to fill in two of the Mad-Libs slots with "orgasm” and “cum.” Um. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but whatever happened to the time-honored tradition of putting “fart” and “stinky” in every slot? Let’s get a little less disgusting and a little more creative, cretins.
Anyway, those are some words that I don’t need my daughter to deal with just now, thanks. And I don’t even blame teenagers. They can’t be trusted to behave when left to their own devices! Come on. Roblox should provide some minimal amount of filtering and control or parents can’t trust them. And if they won’t provide it, they shouldn’t allow younger kids on there. Bye Roblox. Thanks for making us ruin our kid’s life.
September 20, 2016
House of Cards
Today was “National Dads in School Day” or something and in my daughter’s class we were assisting in building index card structures.
This was all part of a lesson on planning and execution, so the students were supposed to come up with a hypothesis on how to build a structure, then execute on that plan.
Of course, the fun part of it was building the index card houses, so it seemed like a lot of these dads were just skipping ahead to that and building huge houses while I tried to explain what a “hypothesis” was to my daughter. You get no prize for skipping steps, dads! Nobody is impressed by the giant house of cards you built!
Okay fine, everyone’s impressed, but it’s not the point. We’re supposed to be learning, not showing off! You don’t think I could build a huge house of cards if I wanted to? Of course I could. I have half a mind to go to school tomorrow and make a house of cards so high you’ll wish you hadn’t given me a stack of index cards. Just watch me.
But that isn’t the point. The point was to execute on a hypothesis, not build a really pretty fucking amazing house of cards.
