I still intend to do a Behind-the-Scenes post on 4.13, but I may as well wait until I have both halves up. In addition to that, I've been working on getting Veronaville ready for me to take over the RRL. I already know who I'm going to use as my heir, but I'm waiting on Cait to wrap up her turn before I make the announcement. I'm going to get playing this weekend, which is exciting and nervewracking all in one.

One of the things I've spent quite a bit of time on over the last couple of days is a custom university. I decided that I didn't want to use any of the prebuilt unis for a number of reasons. First, we've already seen SSU in action with Marina's turn. Cait also just used LFT, and the very next turn after me is Pen who is going to be using ALT as her hood. None of them seemed right to use, so... I did the only insane thing and made my own.



May I introduce to you Stratford Globe College. The university is up on the hill overlooking the town below. Its a liberal arts college with an excellent arts program, but also a strong foundation in science and technology.

Mostly I just grabbed the Three Lakes hood template and stole buildings from the other three universities that I then redecorated the exteriors to match. If you look hard enough, you can recognize buildings from LFT and SSU. A few have seen extensive remodels, but there's also at least two lots in there that are basically just hood decorations.

So, that's what I'm up to. How are you all doing on this fine Thursday evening? I'm off to work and its slow, so entertain me. ;)

Note to self: Do not over nuke the steak you grilled last night. Over nuking turns it into rubber that makes you said because it was expensive and it no longer tastes as good as it did. Luckily, the remains of the salad still taste nummy.

My initial plan had been to spend Saturday evening working on scenes for the upcoming Pseudo update. I actually got so far as to load up the AGS dummy hood, but then I blanked. Part of my hope was to get another update out before I have to take over the RRL from Cait, but with Origins coming up very soon, I think that might be a little unrealistic. So, the shiny caught my attention and I started playing the Spring rotation through the hood.

So, you get some picspam!



( First, though, some man candy. Hi Ashley! )

Finally I came up with an idea for this week's scene challenge. I don't know why it didn't occur to me right away, but who else would I have star in a scene that's focused on dance!?

( STARRING STEVE MCQUEEN BIGFOOT! )

Hey! Look! It's Sunday Picspam and Behind The Scenes combined! Lucky you.

Since I put up an update last week, it means it's time for another Behind the Scenes babble fest. I think I enjoy doing these because I can share a fraction of the images I didn't get to use in the actual update, but also because I can blather on about why and what and when and all that. Obviously I can't give too much away about what's coming up, but still. Blathering for the win!



"Are you going to talk about me? About my birthday? Because I had a birthday in this update. I also got to talk to Uncle Dean and I met Parker Parker and Star and I made plans and..."

( Yes Louise, I'm going to talk about you a little bit. (+43 Images) )

This is obviously REALLY late and the only reason it's sneaking into the round up is because I'm the one that puts the round up together. The benefits of being me, I guess? :}

Anyway, this is my response to the Sim_Scenes prompt from this past week. I got the idea right away, but was only able to find the time to put it together today. This time, I'm using some Maxis sims.

( Click here for Surprise, Cheese, and TV! )

Everyone's doing it!

More seriously, Di and Lea's experiments with different methods for uploading stories made me want to try my hand at slideshare as well. Instead of creating a power point presentation, I instead dusted off PageMaker and played around with that. PageMaker has the ability to make PDFs right in it, and then I uploaded that to Slideshare. I'm curious what you guys think of the quality.

Hey look! Sunday picspam is back and it's actually Sunday!

I had hoped to have my update done by the end of May, but it's not quite there yet. It's close, but I've still got about 2/3 of it to write. Being that I'm easily distracted by shiny objects, I ended up doing a little bit of playing this weekend. While I wish I had finished the update, I'm not feeling too guilty about playing. It had been a long time since I'd cracked open the hood and just played.

Luckily, there were two houses that hadn't been played through winter yet, so I had something I could do without getting too much further ahead of myself.



( Chandler Platz will you please GO HOME!? )

Here's my response to the Sim_Scenes challenge prompt this week - Haunting * Acceptance * Money.

This one involves newly created sims just for this prompt. I thought about doing it with Maxis sims, but decided to stick with originals for now. This time I got hit pretty hard with the 10 picture limit. I got it trimmed down to 10 without losing too much, but there were definitely some little bits I miss.

( Haunting ... Acceptance... Money... )

... that the Sims1 Exchange is actually still up?

While I was poking around the technical part of the BBS to see if there were any updates on the Exchange issues, I saw a question about Sims1. Curious, I took a look and discovered that the Sims1 Exchange is indeed still available here.

Not that this information really helps any of us that upload stories to the Exchange considering its still down and inaccessible to uploads, but I think it does dispel any conspiracy theories that are going around about EA trying to do away with the Exchange to force people to buy Sims3. Admittedly, I can't tell when the last new thing was uploaded to the Sims1 Exchange because it is positively archaic compared to what we've got with Sims2, but it does look like there's still some relatively recent stuff up there.

So, my guess is that the Exchange will come back. Eventually. I still may look into alternatives for my stories, but we shall see.

In the meantime, I bring you more information. Did you know...

( ...that a sim must be friends with their grandkids to invite them on vacation? )

There's not too much to say, but I had a blast this weekend.

I got started a bit later than I would have liked. This is partially because I still have trouble judging time when I don't get up until noon. It's amazing how much of the day you lose when you wake up when most people are having lunch. Still, I got on the road around 6ish. This meant I didn't get down to Binghamton until after 8:30ish. Ah well, no one had started anything until I got there anyway.

Most nights there were enough people to split into two groups, while most of the afternoons were a little smaller so we had one game going on. Mostly we played Marvel Saga which is a low key super hero game using a deck of specialized cards rather than dice. A bunch of us had continuing characters we brought into that, so it was quite a bit of fun.

The other game system I played was the new(ish) Star Wars system that Wizards put out last year, I think. That was also great fun and I'm thinking I'm going to pick up the books. It seems like a system that I could actually get a handle on running.

All in all, it was a weekend of good people, good games, and better food than you usually eat at a convention. I'll be running into quite a few of these folks at Origins at the end of next month, so I'm looking forward to that.

Yay for geekdom. :)

Just as an FYI for those interested, I'll be out of town this weekend, starting tomorrow. I'm headed down to Binghamton for a weekend with some gaming and con friends. It's being referred to as 'KevinCon', in reference to the guy hosting it. It should be a good time. I'm expecting to get quite a bit of good gaming in.

I think they're also expecting me to run something, which is always nerve wracking for me. I do an okay job with running a roleplaying game, but I always get stage fright. On top of that, I have the tendency of trying to making everyone happy, so I spin a good yarn, but I'm not quite adversarial enough running the bad guys. Ah well. It should still be a good time.

At this point, I'm not sure if I'm coming back late Sunday night or Monday afternoon. I have to work Monday night, so I'd rather sleep in my own bed Sunday night/Monday morning, but if I'm too tired to come back on Sunday or having too good a time... We shall see.

Everyone in the US have a great Memorial Day, everyone else have a good weekend. :)

I'm flailing at this whole Dreamwidth thing, and as a result, I wanted to see if the cross posting thing works. From what I understand, there's also a way to import all my LJ posts to DW, but I didn't see that in a quick view of the account settings. What I did find was the thingy that enables cross posting.

Dreamwidth seems to be catching on. I don't know if it'll overtake LJ by any means, or really that it offers all that much that's different from LJ at the moment. Regardless, I'm clinging to the bandwagon and seeing what's what.

Okay, so I'm a little late to the party here. The initial episodes to the story were published back in 2005 before I even started playing Sims2. Regardless, I'm reading it now and if you haven't, you should be too.

What am I referring to? Aikea_Guinea and Rosewalker's story Deception Pass.

I'd heard of it, but never really followed up to find out what it was about. I knew that the models Aikea Guinea uses for Club Crimsyn were named. I heard people refer to them by name, so I guessed they probably came from the story, but my curiosity still wasn't piqued. Then the other night, Marina hit me over the head with a baseball bat and told me to freaking read it. Because it's good.

Much of the last twenty-four hours has been spent reading and reading and reading and getting quickly more and more caught up in the whole damn thing. It's good. It's VERY good. I give it very high recommendations. Because it's good. Should I say it again? It's exceptionally good.

The story revolves mainly about two sets of friends (Mary and Emily, then Tristan and James) and how their lives get intertwined in the town of Deception Pass. It's got a supernatural bent that is Buffy-esque. There's angst, there's humor, and there's some wonderfully crafted characters. There are some eminently quotable lines, but I decided not to repeat them here because they're a little spoilerific. Instead, I just quoted them back at Marina and squeeed. and she taunted me with hints of Episode Two. See, all the reading I've done, I've only gotten to the end of Season One. (I said it's Buffy-esque. It's even set up like a television show.)

They recently switched from Livejournal to Dreamwidth, so I'm going to explain a little bit on how best to follow it. I linked the main site above, but not all the links are showing up properly like they should. Probably a bug from the move. It was still worth it to deal with to follow the story. Anyway, the best way to follow the story is to use the archive system. That will get you the entire story from the get go and you won't miss any parts.

CLICK HERE
At the top of each entry is a 'next' button. Feel free to use it, but pay attention to which part you should be going to. I would say the next button only works about 65% of the time. I basically kept the archive open to the section I was on and just checked back to make sure I was in the right part of the episode I was on. The early episodes are only a couple of parts, but the later ones are up to 20-30 parts. It gets meaty and complex. Very yummy.

The beginning is a little rough with the pictures and pacing, but that's to be expected with any ongoing story. We're all learning as we go, and considering when this was started there were no animation hacks or freezer clocks or pose boxes, what was achieved was pretty impressive. Recently, they did a 'remastered' version of the prologue and the earlier parts of the story. I don't recommend reading that first because it's kind of confusing to try and figure out where you should pick back up on the story with the original episodes. Still, if you want, it's located here

That's enough babbling about that. In regards to my own update, any plans I had on writing this weekend went out the window. I've got about 10% of it written, so it's coming along. Hopefully by the time I'm actually done the Exchange will be working again.

Yeah, I'm not holding my breath. :)

Here's my response to this week's challenge over at sim_scene, Crime - Disappointment - Photograph. There have been some AMAZING responses so far and I'm really looking forward doing a compilation post on Sunday. Before that, though, I recommend checking them out.

For mine, I used characters from The Pseudo Legacy, but this isn't really canon. This is more based on the LTWs they got after the rebuild, which I haven't made a big deal out of but really amuse me. Still, when those words came up as the prompt, this is the idea that grabbed me and wouldn't let me go. You KNOW these two would do this.

So, without further distraction...

( My response... )

Check out the whole site: Playing for Change. It's got even more videos like this one. I particularly liked 'One Love'.

First off, for those who missed the last post, I highly suggest checking out sim_scenes. We just uploaded our first weekly challenge today and Jenn posted an awesome run through on different falling interactions the game provides. I've been too busy to contribute like I want to, but I'm really excited about this community. (And for those that aren't already aware of it, you should check out sim_spiration which might as well be the companion site for writing instead of picture taking. Both are quite awesome.)

I don't really have too much to share at this point, but I have been working on the next update. As a result, most of the pictures I've been taking are not sharable. Still, I've got a couple for you. Like my favorite picture of Moon so far:



( There's more, and a sneak peek inside. )

ndainye contacted me tonight with a very awesome idea. There are plenty of sites out there to help promote sim storytelling on the writing side of things, but there's not as much out there to help specifically with the visual side of things.

Most of us have detoured from straight game-play storytelling into trying to capture the scenes we come up with rather than just what our sims give us. Staging scenes can be incredibly frustrating, difficult, and also very rewarding. What hacks to use? How do you get your sims to behave? How do you get the scene to look just right? What's the best way to make it all look natural? How do you get the perfect picture to evoke the scene you're seeing in your head. Maybe you've got the words written down already and now you just want to get that translated into a visual.

Sim Storytelling is as much about the visuals as it is about the words, and now we've got a community where we can talk about just how to get those pretty pictures to make the story even better.

Go here: sim_scenes

Last night I was about to become very righteously indignant.

I was cruising my regular stops on the cc trail and saw a new house on Simcastic Designs that made me stop. It looked JUST like a house I had built. From what I could tell from the pictures, it was exactly my house, just remodeled with different paints and a gutted interior. I was ready to be pissed.


Theirs <--> Mine

Before making a fool of myself, though, I downloaded it to make sure. Once I got it in game, I realized that they were not the same lot. First off, theirs was built on a 3x3 lot while mine was on a 4x4 lot. This doesn't necessarily mean anything since the lot adjuster makes it easy to change a lot's size, but there were more differences than just that. Their foundation is obviously set up differently than mine.

Ultimately, their creator probably just found the exact same house plan I did. So much for my righteous indignation. Oh well. Theirs has really pretty landscaping, and I do like a couple of things they did, but I think mine is laid out better inside.

Anyway, in other simming news, I've been working on plotting out what I need for the next Pseudo update. I've got probably about 25% of the pictures I need, but before I start shooting or reshooting anything, I want to make sure I know where I'm going with it all. I know where I want to get for fifth gen college, but I've been floundering figuring out what I need before I get there.

In the mean time, here's some Behind the Scenes/Picspam on Isla Lostundo.

( Because I can't post anything without sharing additional picspam! )