Back when I was in college, I spent a lot of time in the Engineering building's computer lab. For reasons that escape me (this was certainly not a deliberate thing), four consecutive boyfriends were engineers of some kind--if I wanted to see any of them during the week, they'd be in the lab programming or working on problem sets or some such craziness. I'd grab a free Sparc workstation (yes, I know I'm dating myself) and get my own work done while hanging out.
Anyway, senior year, the engineer I was seeing at the time was actually working part time in the computer lab as well, so I was there often enough to enjoy watching the progress a mutual friend of ours was making on a project for a programming class he was taking. The assignment was to recreate a classic video game, and he'd chosen Defender, which is a 2D game involving a spaceship that shoots at various things while trying to avoid enemy projectiles.
He didn't appreciate that we nicknamed his version of the game "Duck-fender," but his spaceship really did look like a duck. The final straw, however, came when he started programming the enemy projectiles into the game and they looked for all the world like flying sperm! He got good-natured grief about that from the guys for weeks. It was funny at the time, but over the years I'd completely forgotten about it.
Thing One has been taking a programming elective once a week after school for the last couple of weeks. They are using Scratch to create a computer game, and he's loving every minute of it. Yesterday, he came home with a preliminary version of his game, which he very proudly showed me. And which immediately took me back umpteen years to good ol' Duck-fender!
All I am going to say about his game is that the object shooting the projectiles is supposed to be a rocket and the projectiles are supposed to be bombs of some kind. And that my mind went somewhere else entirely based on their actual appearances, although fortunately I had the presence of mind and self-control to keep my mouth shut and not laugh out loud. Good thing, too, because the explanations could have been seriously awkward!
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