Strangetown, Here We Come.

Is anyone else thinking about participating in Maxis Taste Dare No. 26: Second Chances? The idea of this one appeals to me, though I'm struggling with who to focus on. My recent playing of the entire uberhood has given pretty much everyone a chance, though I guess the point of the exercise would be to find something more to like in a character that you're not too fond of. So maybe Gunnar Roque? Haha. But disliking Gunnar is a fanon tradition, right? I sort of like him the way he is, in a love to hate sort of way.

I think part of what I'm struggling with is that some of my unfavourites actually get quite a lot of attention from other simmers, and I think this is a significant factor in my dislike of them. I honestly don't get it and I resist giving them any more of the spotlight. (Come on, admit it. I know I'm not alone in this.) Ajay Loner comes immediately to mind, with his boring Face One (or very slight variation, if you insist) and lack of storyline (beyond counting grains of sand for fun in his bio) and relationships, and yet he's pretty much universally adored in the fandom. I guess in the spirit of the dare, I should definitely give him a second third fourth chance. Or maybe I can keep digging for someone I truly ignore entirely. I'm sure there are others I'm not thinking of right now.

Then there's the issue of my computer refusing to start up at all, so playing is sort of out for the next little while, and I can't even access any of my files until I either get it repaired again (throwing good money at bad?) or the new computer arrives. I finally ordered a new one, but I need to wait a few weeks for it to get here.

So I bought the Generations EP. Exciting, right? I brought it home and plopped it in the DVD drive tray, sent it back in, and waited for it to load.

It didn't.

I took it out and tried it again. And again. And then tried accessing it through the control panel.

Nada.

So then I took it to work with me to see if it would load there (when my boss wasn't looking, obviously :P). It did! So it seems my DVD drive is shot. And now I have a game sitting here, unable to play it. *sighs* I was so looking forward to seeing if I could have my sims have a same sex bachelorette party.

Just wanted to share my sad tale. You may resume your regularly scheduled activities now.

I think the thing that really stands out for me now that I'm seriously considering my Maxis character shipping preferences is how I do not see either Dirk/Lilith or Angela/Dustin working out in the end. I never really have. Well, actually, I did have an early notion, when I first started to sim in Pleasantview, that Angela WOULD marry Dustin and live a terribly dissatisfying life of semi-poverty (Broke-style), with a criminal husband and a yard full of scary domerman pincers. (Have I mentioned my active imagination? This was way before I had any concept of sim storytelling for others. Just myself.) But now I just see Angela moving on to greener pastures, leaving Dustin to find someone else (Ginger Newson being my favourite contender at this point, given her parallel to Brandi, which is a life he knows all too well.)

I can't ever stop seeing Dirk eventually cheating on Lilith with Angela, causing a huge rift there. In my game, he always, always cheats on her, in fact. Usually with Angela, but sometimes with someone else, and often without any input from me. I don't know if he ends up with Angela, or if he eventually reconciles with Lilith, but somehow that HAS to happen for me. Lilith is all over the place for me. She nearly always gets tangled up with Don Lothario at some point in my game (*lowers voice* sometimes even while still a teen... Oh Don, you're just... yeah), and then I just see her as this amazing free spirit who maybe stays single forever. You know those amazing old ladies who were movie stars or artists or musicians, who were lovers to many famous people over the years (mostly men, but there were some exceptions, if you believe the rumours), but always stayed true to themselves and didn't settle down? Yeah, that's how I see Lilith Pleasant.

Also, Tara Kat/Chester Gieke is the nerdiest couple EVER, by far. Geeky nerds trump bookish nerds any day of the week. (That's one of mine, by the way, from my uberhood. The red hair is a bonus, but they also remind me of my cousin and her husband in an uncanny way, right down to the cat lady-ness and the too geeky/socially awkward to live hardcore videogame geek factors. I am so sold on that pairing. I've seen its proven results in RL, people! XD)

So, I'm opening the floor to other shipping chit-chat here. Please try not engage in any full-on shipping brawls, but if you feel the need to pen an impromptu shipping manifesto, then who are we to stop you? :D Go on and share your insights, amusing pairing stories from your game, and so on.

I originally prepared this entry on June 19, 2008, but didn't ever get around to posting it. I think I wasn't quite satisfied with it, and was planning to rework it before sharing. There also appear to be spots where I planned to add text and/or images. At any rate, I never got around to it, so I thought I'd finally share it as-is.

I've always loved the cheeky art historical references in the Sims 2 wall hangings category (the sculpture category has some too, but I didn't get to those in this entry), so I decided to highlight a few of them for those who might not be as familiar with the source material. This post really only scratches the surface, so feel free to chime in with your own favourites in the comments. (Sidenote: This curator sim was an original character who no longer exists, named Wavey Oleander. She finally gets her one chance to shine now.)

I'm struggling with this rebuild. At first I was going to package up all the sims that have been born in the those neighborhoods and share them and then do the same for my edited lots, but every time I load the game to do so, I lose steam fast. I've now settled on only packaging up characters and lots that I absolutely can't do without. So that means any story characters that have already been featured (and one that hasn't — Phi's mystery baby), and maybe some lots (the Summerdream place comes to mind), but everything else will be played through and made over again. That'll take some time, but it'll be far less tedious than piecing it together bit by bit.

I think I'm going to start by playing the fresh megahood to give myself a chance to see what I truly miss from my other game. I'm going to keep my cc (though I'm paring that down quite liberally), but I want to try to use the bare minimum of hacks and things like that. That brings me to my question of the day (and it's a classic one):

If you were going to start over with only a handful of hacks, which ones would you consider essential?

Inspired by simgaroop's recent cleaning of her downloads folder, and also by some sweet new cc I've been finding, I've decided to take on the ridiculous task of reorgnizing my own downloads folder. It's organized, but huge, and there are WAY too many folders and subfolders. I'm going to stick to broad categories like buy mode, bodyshop, sims, hacks, etc., and then organize by creator, with no subfolders. I've started already, with the hacks and bodyshop content (well, except for hair! *sweats* I'm working my way up to the hair, clothing and buy modes). I'm finding duplicates and things I don't really use anymore and all that good stuff. Spring cleaning! ^_^

I'm also going to give some serious thought to FINALLY creating a resource post. I've been planning to do it for years, but have never gotten around to it. I often find great things from other simmer's resource lists, so it's only fair to give back and spread the info to others.

And I finally added ACR 2.0! I really don't know why I didn't do that already. Let the fun begin!

I'd post this to wcif_sims, but I've already posted once today, so I thought I'd ask here (though I'll post there tommorrow if this doesn't work out). I'm looking for an extracted version of the Nervous Subject "clone" found in the data of Strangetown. He's one of those unlinked dead characters, so I'm also open to advice on how to extract him myself. I have no idea, and I'm a bit wary of messing around with SimPE.



As someone who's already using the idea of cloning Nervous in a story, you can see how I'd like to use him in a wink and nod sort of way, right?