It's 4:00 a.m. Do you know where your Sims are?

My body is still on California time. So I've been playing with The Sims. But not in the way you'd think.

See, in my ever-lovin' Mage campaign, there are various settings -- Bokugo, the house they live in; The King's Nose, the pub Molly's parents used to run; Llandeilo in general, with its shops and markets and things. And while I used some house layout software to give me a general idea of where the furniture is supposed to go, I wanted something more.

You guessed it -- I'm using The Sims to actually make Bokugo, one room at a time. I would just make the whole damn house, but it doesn't let you go higher than two floors and Bokugo's six or so at its highest point. So far, I've made the cellar and the common room -- after taking a number of screencaps and cropping them appropriately, I deleted them both. No one's going to be able to afford to live in those as a starter character, and no one would want to. Next step is the kitchen and a typical bedroom for both the Weaving Tower and the Stack. I might get fancy and do some of the NPCs' bedrooms, but I doubt it.

Boy, are the guys in for a surprise when I show them the next Mage site update -- that's if it's not live by then. I still need a domain name. I swear I will do it next week, when I get paid. And no, I'm not posting what I've done so far on Geoshitties. I'm not even sure I have room, and even if I did I'm not putting up at least two new coded pages and about fifteen images on there; it'd take too long.

There's also Molly's journal, which has now been typed but not yet coded. I did get around to Lucius' letter to mentor and the reply he got, as well as adding kuo_li's latest entry to what I have online at the moment. My next full-text codes have got to be the rest of Carl's correspondence file; then I can think about Molly's journal and a page for Jeremiah. But of course, that last has to wait until I have a picture. But I suppose I can at least do the generic coding and editing of his background. Do the donkeywork first and then throw in images as and when necessary.

So yeah. I stayed up until 4 a.m. coding and fucking about with The Sims. And I still insist that I am not a geek! What I am is tired. Finally.

Chez Freak

I've been alt-tabbing between Sims, PhotoShop, WordPad and Avant for the last six hours. I mean it. Six hours. I am such a freak.

However, I got done all the things I wanted to do. I downloaded Sims tombstones and made up the Bokugo graveyard. I cheated on the garden and screencapped the garden centre in the Old Town Simsville, but I did make the car-shed and distillery ... at least the outsides. I designed a floor of both the Tower and the Stack, and even went so far as to decorate some of the bedrooms to conform with the personalities of the NPCs that live in them (or lived, in the case of the two elder) -- Dawn's, and the room that Brenna and Hoshikuro share. I also did the kitchen, PhotoShopping the chemistry set from whichever Sims expansion so that it actually looks like it's running coffee ... sort of. There wasn't a lot I could do about the look of the nuker, but in some ways, that's scarier.

There's still a lot of other stuff to do -- the apothecary, some screencaps of the King's Nose, a few market stalls -- but some of them require further downloads and yet others require more effort than I'm prepared to expend without a break in between. Plus there's more text coding to do. I'd like to get it done by Wednesday so I can show the gang the full site, but then I'd also like to get a domain and get it uploaded by then, but that's not going to happen. Besides, it's good that I have to burn it to disc. Not having a backup of the site after all the goddamn effort I've put into it thus far would really, truly piss me off.

I have all day tomorrow, too -- cholten99 is going to be at Immortal and since there isn't any Exalted tomorrow, it'll just be me and the cat. And the computer, which is eating my life lately. Ah well, as the man says, "It's creative". Maybe that saves me from geekdom.

Speaking of whom, did you know he'd never tried Pocky? Never even heard of it, in fact. I was sure I'd bought Pocky when I went to Oriental City with him and Kat that one time but either I didn't or he forgot. Both are equally likely -- that was about a year ago now. Wow, the time flies.