thessalian | Entries tagged with sims

I am not in a great mood. There are multiple reasons for this. One of the main ones, however, is EA, who have once again gone out of their way to prove that they are more than willing to annoy the living shit out of their customers.

So this weekend, I thought that Sims 3 might be feeling a little neglected, so I switched it on as something to do in between bouts of WRITE ALL THE THINGS (which didn't happen as much as I'd have liked due to lingering bad mood). There was a patch. I installed the patch, then played. It loaded slow, as always, but eventually I got to the Create-a-Sim screen and set to work. All was going fine - I'd fixed the face so that it didn't look quite so ... um ... malformed - and then I went to pick a hairstyle.

At the very top, where you couldn't miss it, were the Sims Store's top three buys of the week or month or whatever. Outlined in gold so that they'd catch the eye. Buttons were gold too, and basically screaming, "CLICK HERE TO SPEND MONEY! LOOK! WE MADE IT EASIER FOR YOU TO BUY OUR STUFF AND THIS ANNOYING GOLD EYE-CATCHING STUFF-YOU-DON'T-HAVE IS JUST GOING TO SIT HERE AND PISS YOU OFF EVERY TIME YOU SWITCH ON THE GAME UNLESS YOU BUY IT!"

I ... was not impressed.

It wasn't just the hair, either. Every. Single. Category of clothing, with the exception of accessories, had three big gold "BUY ME!" button-items at the top of the screen. I was more or less livid. I have spent enough money on this game - on the base game and the expansions and the stuff packs and the occasional splurge on Sims points - that I expect to be allowed to play the damn game in peace without being asked to spend money while I'm playing.

But I got through it with a relative minimum of teeth-grinding and made my Sim and her pet cats. Then I moved them into a house and proceeded to redecorate.

...This "SPEND REAL MONEY!" shit? It's in the Buy Mode too. So now you can spend real money on the fake furniture while you're playing, too. And are, in fact, strongly encouraged (nay, even badgered) to do so while just trying to play the game you've already spent a fair wodge of real cash to enjoy in the first place. I didn't even have the heart to see if that held true for wallpapers and things. I just ragequit.

I also notice that the patch notes don't say a damn thing about them saddling us with this shit. I AM DISPLEASED. At least be up-front about your utterly arrogant intrusive cash-grab, you toffee-nosed, shit-eating babbons' backsides!

The worst part about all this is that I cannot actually get away with not ever supporting EA ever again. Look, they own Bioware. I want to support Bioware. Bioware has provided me with endless entertainment and gave me a fandom again, if indirectly. But if I support Bioware, I am supporting EA too. This displeases me. I don't want EA to have my money. I want Bioware to have my money. But I can't give my money to Bioware without benefitting EA and it sucks.

It's like EA cannot bear anyone else having any money ever in the entire world; they must have ALL THE MONEY ... at the expense of the people giving them ALL THE MONEY. I mean, the game's not there to be played by the people who actually bought it already - oh no. The game is there to make money. So why not dig into the source code and, under the guise of making the game less buggy, add in a little bonus intrusive marketing bullshit? Because you know people are going to click those buttons by accident. Maybe they can't spend money unwittingly, but it'll annoy them enough that they might just buy the crappy custom content to make it go away ... which it will until the next patch, if not sooner.

I love Sims, but the one thing I play it for - the creation of custom characters and living spaces - has become more irritating than I like. So I honestly don't know what to do anymore. I wish they'd just knock it the hell off already.

Crossposts: http://thessalian.livejournal.com/1007876.html

The banks, they make me livid.

Look, here's the thing. Letters from Inland Revenue are scary ... usually. So when I opened up my mail earlier this week, including the scary letters from Inland Revenue, imagine my utter shock when it turned out that they were giving me money. And I don't just mean 'I won ten quid on the lottery; let's get fish and chips with it' money, either. I'm talking a little over £450, 'Fuck's sake, be sensible and don't buy that iPod classic you've been drooling over for a year' money. So I get my nice shiny cheque/postal order thing from Inland Revenue, huzzah!

So I take this money to my bank. My bank puts it in my account. Ostensibly, anyway. I check my balance next day - because this is a postal order, not a cheque per se, and should clear pretty quickly, and if it doesn't ... well, no harm in looking, right? It says MONEY. So I go to use said money. Except that the cash machine tells me that I cannot access this money. Apparently, despite the fact that the bank is saying that this money is in my account, I can't have it. Apparently it hasn't cleared yet.

Then why the fuck are you telling me that it's in my account?

...Oh right; you want the interest, you fuckers.

Look, I get that they want to make sure that the money that is going to happen is ... y'know, going to happen before they give it to me. I understand that; I really do. But to say that this money is in my account when it isn't is absolutely fucking ludicrous. If my cheque has not cleared, do not tell me that my account has the funds that it would have if my cheque has cleared. If you are telling me that I have this money, let me have this fucking money, okay? It's not rocket science.

This is probably one of those first world problem things, but I don't actually care. Half the problem with this economy seems to be that people are finding ways to make imaginary money for themselves, and holding on to someone else's money to gain a piddling few pence worth of interest is part of that. Can we just have a clear-cut system whereby things move in a logical way? Like, people are not told that they have funds until those funds are available? Is that so hard?

It doesn't actually help that the staff at the bank branch I visited to check on this matter on Thursday were ... well, okay, the greeters at the door were nice, but I think that's because that's what they're there for; the friendly smiling icing on the turd cupcake that is over-the-counter banking. Because the guy I talked to about this a) didn't crack a smile, b) talked to me like I was about six and c) basically said, "Yes, it says you have this money but you don't; try on Tuesday" without so much as a 'sorry for the confusion'. Even if it's not meant, you could at least say it. I have to apologise for shit that isn't my fault and I'm not genuinely sorry for because it's company (read: NHS) policy all the time! A certain consultant only wants my co-admin to handle appointment bookings and I'm on the phones because it's Friday and some patient is screaming at me to book them an appointment RightThisSecondNow? Maybe I'm not sorry because the patient (or, more often, the patient's relative) is being an arsehole, but I'll say it. Gods, is a little tiiiiiiny bit of politeness too much to ask for? It's not like I was asking for the moon; I was asking for clarification on a matter, nothing more. And the question of "How do I know when these funds have actually reached my account so that if I do decide to make a purchase for an amount greater than the funds that are currently in my account, taking into consideration that it says these funds are in my account but apparently aren't, I don't get horrifically embarrassed" should not be met with a sullen shrug and no response at all. Apparently it's perfectly reasonable to have someone check their available balance on a local ATM every day until it states that they have X money available, because of course no one hates it when people waste time faffing about on the ATM ahead of them when they just want to take out a tenner to buy lunch with the half-hour they've got for their lunch break. Apparently it's reasonable to let customers not know how much money they really have available in their accounts because their actual balance says one thing and the ATM says another. It's a damn good thing I didn't need that money particularly or I'd have been fucked.

Anyway, that said, it looks like Tuesday was pushing things a bit. Maybe. I have a habit of sticking most available funds into my flexi-saver account and transferring out what bits I need week to week, so that I don't spend too much. So I didn't actually have the funds necessary to, in this case, buy Sims 3 Pets without that cheque clearing. I decided to try the card purchase again (I download these things via Origin these days; it's easier, and this way I don't have even potential embarrassment of 'your card has been declined' from a human being, and as a way to ensure that there is money it beats the hell out of yomping down the road in the cold and grey for what might be a total waste of time) and it actually went through. So ... I maybe have my awesome tax rebate money. It certainly likes my card now, which it didn't on Thursday. I probably will have to go to the ATM and double-check this later, but that can double with my trek out for supplies (for which I have cash money) so it won't be a wasted trip even if I can't get cash out from the ATM. Which would be really stupid, seeing as Origin likes my debit card, but I am putting nothing past my bank right now.

Soooooo ... anyway, Sims 3 Pets! I'll stop bitching now...

Crossposts: http://thessalian.livejournal.com/999037.html

I seem to have gone more to a video game place these days.

Sims 3: I decided to try actually playing this over the weekend, as

courtcat was telling me about how your Sims-kid can have imaginary friends. I somehow ended up with a family of eight - three sets of twins. I will eventually go back to that family to actually complete the mother's lifetime goal of 'raise five kids to teenager' but right now it just scares me. Looking very forward to Sims 3 Pets, the new expansion coming out in mid-October. (UNIVERSAL RELEASE DATES, FUCKERS!) Cats in particular. I am a cat person; it happens. Plus their animations are adorable.

Dragon Age: I'll end up picking up Mark of the Assassin when it comes out on these shores, but I have to admit that I'm not really all that thrilled by the sound of it. Mostly I'm just getting it to see what it's about and so they don't take away my Dragon Age Fangeek membership card. I also went back to Origins recently, and had a bit of a play with the graphics settings, since this was the first time I had really played it on Morrigan. (I feel a little remiss about this, but I did mainly spec Morrigan for DA2, so I suppose it's not terribly surprising.) I ... frankly had no idea the graphics could be that clear. See, Morrigan's graphics card and processor can handle 'very high' detail rather than the 'medium' I'd been running on, and I remembered to tweak my screen resolution. Damn, that game looks good. Anyway, I'm looking forward to having Origins endgames to import to DA2 that I didn't make with someone else's mod-hack-thing and aren't kind of buggy as a result. Y'know, the ones where my Warden dies.

Warcrack: Not been on as much as I could be, but noodle around with it now and again, mostly to find a quest that is simply 'Kill X Number of Specific Mob/Mob Type' to vent some aggravation. I did do a quest clear-out recently, though ... and, of course, got more quests. Bloody quest chains. Anyway, point is that I hit level 74 on my Belf Pally. I've got a few other characters to occasionally level (Gnomelock, Dwarf Pally, Goblin Shaman who's now discovered the not-so-gentle art of alchemy, a couple of others that are probably destined for the bin and I'm only counting characters I've played to level 10 and up) but it's vaguely important that I keep the Belf Pally active because she's the one in a guild. Of course, my guild is notoriously inactive and I think someone whose first language is definitively not English is trying to take it over and turn it into a PvP guild, so I may have to bail out, but for now, I enjoy the minor benefits of being with a guild - namely, the fact that my hearthstone recharges in half the time. *shrug* It's a thing.

Plants vs Zombies: I am remarkably unsure as to how the hell I got into this game. It ... seemed like a good idea at the time? It's a fun game, if unutterably nuts. Maybe I ought to check and see if Worms World Party and Lemmings work on my computer. If I can ever remember how to work the controls on the former, at least.

Actually, being able to actually work the games via the keyboard is an issue with a few of my games, not least of which being the Mass Effect games and the American McGee's Alice in Wonderland games. Then again, I've been practicing with the WASD keyboard configuration ... sort of. It's one of those situation where I basically keep holding down the W key while I angle the camera, and thus the character, in the direction I want to take. It works for the DA games and Warcrack; should hopefully work in Mass Effect too. And if it does, maybe it'll work for others as well. And in that case ... well, the world is my mollusc! At least as far as video games are concerned.

I'm not really sure why I got into this stuff so late. I honestly didn't care that much past age thirteen, and now all of a sudden, it's twenty-one years later and I'm hooked. The response I got to the question of why I suddenly have more video games now than I did when I was a teenager was 'money', but ... what happened to blowing it on sourcebooks? Or books in general? ...I mean, besides the fact that a RPG sourcebook costs nearly as much as the average computer game these days and I haven't actually got that much space to put books and I'm really not up for getting a Kindle and... Yeah. Well. I suppose it's at least keeping my brain busier than watching TV or whatever.

...Speaking of, I haven't watched the last two episodes of Who yet. I've seen comments though, and now I'm a little afraid to watch. I probably will, but ... maybe on Friday. See, Friday is going to be treat day and I will probably need gummies to ease the pain. Or possibly liquor, but ... gummies are good.

There may be more ranting about the workplace when I'm not actually in it, but right now I'm going to polish off one last letter and then go home, because I still feel miserable (yay flu) and I can't take much more of today. And then I will probably go home and beat on things for awhile. That'll be fun.

Crossposts: http://thessalian.livejournal.com/996041.html

It always amuses the hell out of me when Sim imitates RP.

Okay, look, I have moments where I feel a need to Sim. And so I do. So I have spent the day (after faffing about trying to get everything nicely organised as regards my custom content) raising a Sim!Molly up from childhood. For those of you who don't know, Molly's my current main Mage on Chicago. Dissonance Society Cultist, bit of a show-off, wants to be the Doctor when she grows up, and specialises in hacking, vehicle repair and basically messing about with anything geeky.

This one ... oh dear gods. Started out with Adventurous, Rebellious and Genius at the start (utterly random, thank you). Spent her childhood pranking the parents and poking around on Daddy's inventing table. Spent her high school years pranking the school, hacking and poking around on Daddy's inventing table. Then she graduated valedictorian, with the award of "Most Likely to Hack a Military Facility".

That's when I started laughing. I went into hysterics when this Sim's initial response to a low Energy bar on High Free Will setting was not 'go to bed' but 'coffee machiiiiiiiiine!' Ye gods. Sim imitates my RP character way too closely. I need to go get her some tats, now...

Yeah, I know, the posting has fallen by the wayside. Again. You should be pleased as hell that I have decided not to bore you all with the tiny minutiae about my life (DOCTORS WHO CAN'T SPEAK OR SPELL OMG). Still, it's been awhile since I checked in, so here's the news that doesn't involve rampant bitchery about my workplace (not that such doesn't have its place but I like to save it for the real arsehaberdashery and lately it's just been mundane 'jobs in general tend to suck' whingeing) and the like.

So I have now been in my flat for two months and I am still very pleased with it, despite a serious issue with storage space. There is noplace to put my clothes. Like, anywhere. At all. I have a wardrobe and an end table with drawers, but since most of my clothes fold and I have few clothes hangers anyway, this becomes an issue when I want to keep the place tidy. Which, and I realise how out of character this may seem, I actually do. I think I have a couple of storage space solutions that might do the trick but I have to go out and purchase the things, which I have had not really had the time to do, though at least now I have the money. So that's probably today's chore once I finally get my arse in gear.

So I was chatting to a friend of mine from my current online oWoD RP and she just picked up the Sims 3 base game for Christmas. I don't entirely remember how it came up but I started poking around again to see if maybe, finally, some enterprising soul had managed to crack that draconian "NO CUSTOM CONTENT BUT OURS!!!" thing that EA set up back in the day. And lo and behold ... several enterprising souls have. So my big news of the day is SIMS 3 CUSTOM CONTENT! Finally, I can ignore the ugly hair and pudding-like complexions and boring furniture! Finally I can build decent-looking Sims! That's the only damn reason I liked the games in the first place, and now I can do it again! So pleased. My hard drive ... is less pleased, as now there is far less space on it. Ah well. Shit happens. I'm also enjoying the last couple of expansion packs more than I thought I would. There's actually a reason to play the game again, and I'm thrilled to bits.

Of course, it's not all shiny awesome on Hardison, my poor abused PC. There is something up with the disc drive, I'm convinced. I don't think it's a huge deal - I think what I need is a drive cleaner. It's just that when I'm playing anything that requires the disc drive in any serious way, the game randomly slows down. This is really annoying when trying to work in Create-a-Sim, and beyond annoying when you're trying to fight your way through the Tower of Ishal and everything starts going grindingly slow when a half-dozen genlocks are firing arrows at you.

Yes, I still play Dragon Age Origins. I like it. I don't like much of the DLC and I hate Awakening but I still like the game. And I still repeat Elven Mage as often as I can. Don't judge me. :P

Seriously, I'm actually really looking forward to Dragon Age 2 when it comes out. I didn't preorder it for the same reason that most people who haven't pre-ordered it decided to wait - I want to make sure my computer will run the bastard thing. It looks cool and I don't have to play it like a console game, or so say the previews - I can continue with my pause-and-play strategy and tactics set-up, which I really liked about the first game, and while it's a damn shame that there's no option for different character races in game, I think it'll be pretty cool. But I want to wait until I can hold the box in my hands and read the back for exactly what my computer will need to be able to run it. I've already got two games I can't play because I can't for the life of me find a decent USB controller that'll work with bloody Vista so I can play the stinking things and the keyboard controls are a nightmare on wheels. Those I don't mind overly because they were cheap, but to buy a brand new game and then not be able to play it because it won't run on Hardison would simply suck. And I don't really care about all the optional extras one could get for pre-ordering the 'deluxe edition', mostly because I imagine that they'll unlock those for people anyway at some stage.

Right. I really need to get my arse in gear. For some reason I was awake at 7 this morning but refused to get out of bed until 10am on general principles - it's Sunday, for fuck's sake! But now it's midday and if I want to get anything done (clean out the fridge, travelcard renewal, grocery shopping, pick up some storage things so my clothes aren't all over everywhere), I'd best get moving. I don't want to, but needs must. Off I go!

Happy New Year, y'all! May the worst day of 2011 be no worse than the best day of 2010, yeah?

The evening did not go exactly as I planned. It never does. For one thing, while I knew there were going to be leftovers from the Chinese, I did rather expect to at least finish the starters. But my appetite went on strike and now I've got prawn toast leftover along with all the main course dishes. I'm going to be eating leftover Chinese until Wednesday, I'm telling you. I'm not actually complaining about this, mind; leftover Chinese is food of the gods as far as I'm concerned. Still, I do find myself peckish again so I'm going to go finish the starters and then see how I feel.

Sims 3 Late Night is ... actually kind of cool. It's nice to have a reason to go out and ... y'know, socialise, as the last few expansions, beyond a few missions in various holiday spots, really didn't focus much on that. Of course, my luck being as it is, I was just finally getting the hang of stuff when the whole thing crashed on me. And of course, I hadn't saved. Oh well. We'll call that a trial run. Like my first elven mage in Dragon Age. I'll probably give it a bit more of a prod before I go to bed tonight.

So less food than I thought, crashed game ... but there is liiiiiittle bit of alcohol and leftovers and now there'll be a bit more Sims 3-ing and then there'll be bed, hopefully to get some decent sleep. That'd be nice.

And for those of you still lingering in 2010 ... welcome to the future. We'll keep it tidy for you. *g*

I'm actually almost ashamed of my glee at the fact that Sims 3 is currently being installed on Hardison. Not because of the game, or any sort of thinking that I should be too old for this shit - I'm ashamed because this means I have in some small way given money to a bunch of greedy tits who have turned the game into even more of a cash cow for EA than it already was, to the detriment of the game at large.

Okay, the history. We had the Sims. Graphics not so hot to look at now, but pretty good for the time. People who were good at 3D meshes and so forth made some lovely custom content for the games so that they could have the look they wanted for the Sim homes. Then they passed it around online, this custom content. Cue a wonderful custom content creation community spread far and wide, making requests and doing more and more interesting things with game hacks and generally turning the game into exactly what they wanted it to be. Awesome.

Sims 2 came along, and the same thing happened - just with better graphics and a better, more comprehensive base game to work with. There was some wank about people not only putting donation buttons on their custom content sites to help pay for their bandwidth and ISP, but as an actual earner. Which went against the usage agreement set into place by EA Maxis, which basically went along the lines of "No one can make money off this shit but us". Meanwhile, EA put out "Stuff Packs" and the Sims store: basically putting out their own 'custom' content. People tended to make improvements on those things because no one really wanted the cartoony look that most Sims have. They wanted realism, and when they weren't given realism, they made realism. And the community spirit and general artistic endeavour of the Sims 2 custom content creators was more or less of the awesome, wank notwithstanding. I mean, you've got to have wank; it's The Internet.

Then came Sims 3. First off, they made everything customisable ... which isn't as helpful as you'd think. Sure, changing the colours and patterns and so forth of all the little bits and pieces of clothes and furniture and what have you is pretty nifty, but the fact remains that you're stuck with a certain number of designs for said furniture and clothing, and usually said design is fairly ugly. Plus customising all the colours is fiddly and annoying, particularly if you don't want to just change one thing. But of course, this is the sort of situation that custom content used to solve. You didn't like the cut of that skirt or the style of any of the hair? You poked around on websites until you found something that suited and then you downloaded it. Simple, no?

Except you can't do that anymore. See, because of the ability to customise everything's colour in Sims 3, it has to be designed not only in mesh tools and so forth, but in a special sort of programme. And who are the only people who have access to those? The EA team responsible for Sims 3. They did get a design team together with various of the BNFs in the Sims 2 custom content creation circuit, but those were the ones who got caught up in a serious brouhaha of untrustworthiness - something about using Paypal details of donators for dodgy purposes, I don't really remember. I mean, I never went to that site because of its poor reputation. In any case, there are limits to what one can do with custom content at the moment, and it's not in the hands of the populace the way it used to be.

But of course, you can get other content. I mean, you can go to the Sims 3 shop on the EA site and ... oh yeah. Apparently they kicked off the Sims 2 shop specifically to see if they could make money out of it, and then all but entirely closed off the avenues for amateur custom content creation so that they could be sure of making money off it. So if you want some halfway decent hairstyles or clothes, just ... go pay EA some more money. But I thought at first that perhaps that wouldn't be so bad. I mean, as replacements for Stuff Packs go, it's a pretty good use of the 'buy online' model and...

Wait. Except they're selling Stuff Pack discs too. So to get the full complement of Sims 3 content, we not only have to buy the stuff off the Sims 3 store, but we also have to buy stuff packs? I've said it before and I'll say it again - I am sick of being treated like a money-stuffed pinata.

However, annoyed as I am, I still plan to enjoy Sims 3 and the World Adventures expansion pack. If nothing else, it's still ... reasonable for set design, if not as comprehensive as Sims 2 used to be. You know, because of the awesome custom content. Which Sims 3 won't let me have. As for the EA extra content (I can hardly call it 'custom' at this point) ... well, I'll work something out.

Leaving aside my ... shall we say 'issues' with Sims 3 and this SecuROM thing, I still have my moments of enjoyment with Sims 2, and will probably continue to. We'll have to see if EA wises up about this crippling SRM they seem to be putting on Sims 3, and that's not for another year, so I'll just keep an eye on that and see how it goes.

I woke up earlier than is entirely reasonable for a weekend today - partly due to being so exhausted yesterday that I actually went to bed around midnight, and partly because when I woke up, I couldn't get back to sleep thanks to yon snorebeast. I therefore settled in to check on my little Ikariam city (damn you,

courtcat79, and your hubby too, for getting me hooked on yet another online waste of time) and Sims 2 downloads.

Hence the reason for this post. Awhile ago, I pointed

courtcat79 at some of my favourite download sites and she's been downloading ever since. And it occurred to me that it's really interesting to compare and contrast what we each get particularly enthusiastic about as per downloads, and what that may or may not say about us.

For instance,

courtcat79 gets most enthused over Harry Potter stuff, pretty realistic skin tones and pointy ears. Also was on the hunt for Victorian houses for awhile. Which, you know, I can relate to, particularly if you want to make a Sidhe household or neighbourhood. And I can certainly relate to the search for good Victorian houses as designed in Sims 2. Thing is ... my reasons for wanting Victorian houses are very, very different to hers. She likes them because she wants the pretty grandeur of the Victorian design for Sidhe-like households.

...I want to turn them into rundown haunted horrors with various Lovecraft-inspired furniture sets.

Seriously -

courtcat79 gets enthused about the pretty, whereas I get most excited about anything that would really fit well in a Silent Hill neighbourhood. I like the pretty as well, more or less, but there's just something about designing creepshow houses etc that just appeals to me. So I download Lovecraft-themed sets and the 'Sleep Like The Dead Morgue Bedroom Collection' and decrepit walls and things of that nature, and then I design neighbourhoods that, if I could add things like fog, could be Silent Hill. Or Innsmouth. Or any other haunted little decrepit abandoned town crawling with supernatural horror.

I'm sure this says something about my personality. I really am. I'm not sure what, mind you, but I am positive it says something about me. Probably a worrisome something. But then again, given that I glee over "Deadly Doses: a Writer's Guide to Poisons", a very high percentage of my book collection is horror of one stripe or another and I've been a WoD devotee for the last few years (not to mention the small but reasonably comprehensive horror movie collection, including the freaky Japanese and Korean stuff, and the fact that while I don't play Silent Hill, I love to watch

dodgyhoodoo doing so) ... well, we already knew I was disturbed.

And on that note, back to downloading.

And so I spoke to

trishiekaty about what happened with the gift voucher whojamaflip. And she fixed it - more than, as a matter of fact. So instead of paying for half of it (which I'd have been more than happy to do), I paid just under three quid towards postage, and now must think of something awesome to send her for her birthday / Christmas / whatever. (Do you reckon they do War-Dancing Weasels on eBay?)

Additionally, I had a much-needed vent that's been building for weeks now, so I can only really thank

ilyena_sylph (via AIM) and

dodgyhoodoo (via RL) for listening. I think I have a lot clearer an idea of what to do as far as that situation goes now, whereas prior to the venting I really was just foaming at the mouth.

And of course, there's

courtcat79, who kindly showed me how to set up Sims 2 so it shows up in a window rather than just taking up the whole screen, so now I can play Sims 2 and do other things at the same time. Vaguely distracting, but makes the detail work when I want to build, say, hotels and what have you so much less infuriating because I can take breaks more easily.

Sometimes, there's an awful lot of suck. Job suck, financial suck, occasional family suck, hobby-related suck, transport and travel suck, and so it goes. But between the friends (and fiance, obviously) mentioned above and the ones I have given so many kudos to previously (particularly

yshala and her help with getting me to Brighton Below), there's really no excuse for forgetting that life isn't so bad after all.

I don't think I'm ever going to be truly happy on anything but Eastern Standard Time. Sad, but true. I can about pretend I can go to bed at a reasonable hour in my own time zone, but for the most part ... my body clock is set to the place I was born and I'll just have to learn to live with it.

There hasn't been a terrible lot to say this week, mostly on the grounds of it being one of the weirdest work weeks ever. There was almost nothing to do, and I never had a damn office (and when I did, I seldom had a transcription machine so I couldn't type anyway), so I wound up going home early a lot and really ... blech. Still, the next couple of weeks are guaranteed stuff-filled because one of the girls is away for two weeks and I'm doing all her admin work as well as the bog-standard typing. I could actually have squeezed an hour or so more out of Thursday, probably, but I'd already filled out my timesheet and Tipp-Exing it into oblivion didn't sound like a great idea, on the whole. So the admin duties fortnight will have to make up for it. Four and five days of actual work (though how I'm going to manage without access to various office computer systems I have no damn idea, but I'll work something out - maybe Tina will leave me her login codes) and there'll be more cash and all will be good. Yay!

This is predominantly of the win because we seriously need a new DVD player. My five-year-old one with the awesome 5.1 sound system has started making some downright evil noises and I'm thinking that maybe we shouldn't be using it for awile. I know these things are relatively inexpensive nowadays but all the same, there's whether we ought to be future-proofing or the possibility of something region-free (so I can watch my Haibane Renmei burns) and anyway, cash is still a little tight at home for buying electronic equipment. Plus

dodgyhoodoo's birthday does come first. But I'll be pricing things over the next couple of weeks because seriously - *clunk* is not a noise a DVD player should make. Ever.

We had snow today! Okay, it was only a couple of flurries and none of it stuck but I got to see snowfall, so will have to content myself with that for another year. Seems odd to be having snow on Easter, but there you go. Never look a gift-flurry in the mouth.

I'm home on my own tonight, and not sure what to do with myself. I suppose first thing is to pick up some dinner fixings, take the boneless pork shoulder out of the freezer for tomorrow's Easter dinner and stick on some laundry. After that ... I dunno. Probably Sims 2, as that is always fun. I'm really amused at the upcoming Sims 3, though (though I sense that there will be need for some kind of computer upgrade before I use that one, somehow - still, it's next year). The Sims look yet more human, there's a variety of body shapes (rather than just Fit, Fat and Normal - they've been paying attention to the fan content again) and customisation is easier. Of course, after blowing ... *counts* about £200, give or take the bits I got as gifts, on Sims 2 EPs and Stuff Packs, I don't believe I'm going to have to upgrade again. However, I suppose as it is a year away, Sims 3, this won't stop me from buying Kitchen and Bathroom stuff when it comes out.

Right. First thing's first - dinner-food shopping. Ooh, look, it's snowing again!

Mute. Nightingale. Pooka. With Appearance 4.

...*flails*

Look, Pookas lie. It's what they do. It's their Kith Frailty. You are not going to get around your Kith Frailty. No. Nice try, but no. Particularly not if you're doing it as much for the angst of "Oh, woe, I can no longer express myself, WOE!" (quoted nearly verbatim from the background) as to get around what your Kith is supposed to do.

Not to mention? NIGHTINGALE! Nightingales are plain, dull-looking birds whose claim to fame is pleasing noises. So explain to me how a nightingale Pooka loses her voice at Chrysalis. Mute would be denying her Fae Nature and she'd have died of Banality by the time she hit Wilder. That just can't work.

And let's not even get into "Oh, poor me, I spent my former life locked in a cage because of a wicked, wicked Fiona and now I'm frightened of all Sidhe but I don't really know why..."

Thankfully, when I explained that the background had to be rewritten and that I don't take more than one Attribute at 4 without a very good background reason, I got a message back simply saying, "The character has been deleted". I hate to say it that way, but ... well, it's true. Maybe she'll come back with something a bit more sensible, maybe not. Either way, I suppose we're better off.

I just want one decent Pooka. Another Quentin, or a Dot, or a Virgil, or something totally different but equally of coolness. Is that too much to ask?

In other news, Eshu ate all my Sims 2 downloads. So now I'm weeding through trying to get all the vital stuff back. Augh. So frustrating...

We now bring you live to a 7th Sea Simville Update, brought to you by someone who knows you don't give a damn, actually, but doesn't care because when you signed up to my friendslist, you brought it on yourself.

Alejandro and Idunn were started as a couple in the same house, but it took no time at all to fall in love. Alejandro tried dropping by the Villanova household but Pietro didn't like him very much.

Viola has made friends with Aidan, but so far doesn't seem to be interested in much more than that. Sim imitates life.

Sir Oswald basically acted as the town welcome wagon, being the first to show up as a visitor whenever I started playing any particular family. He then never visits anyone again.

Now, the Smith household is a funny thing. Alison moved in, soon got visited by Sir Oswald, they got on well but didn't get to "family friend" stage. She also got on well with Fiora, but again, not "family friend" stage yet. Then Pietro came over. There was actually a dinner at which Alison, Fiora and Pietro were in attendance (again, Sim imitates life) and then it got late and they both had to go home. Next thing you know, Alison and Pietro have shot through "family friend", into little-red-heart territory, and next thing you know, they're married. Since it was Alison did the proposing, they're the Smith household (the 'real' Pietro must be loving that), but that's okay, since Alison has the nicer house. Alison has since garnered "family friend" status with Fiora, but that's not as good as it sounds. Pietro came home from work, found Alison and Fiora chatting, walked in and slapped Fiora. She went off crying. Jeez.

Well, now that I've got the Smith and Villanova families all sewn up (even if it's partly by combining the two -- both Alison and Pietro have received a fair few promotions and Pietro brought a lot of money in from the sale of his house to move in with her), perhaps it's time to focus on someone else.

But for the time being, I'm going to throw on the DoomBoots and go off to catch my bus. It'd be nice to have some window-shopping time before I get to O'Neill's. Now, let's see, have I got everything? Toos'll want to borrow the next two Battle Royale mangas, so best bring those. I don't think

cholten99 is quite done with Dogwitch yet, but I should bring his Euthanatos books back even if I can't return his Technocracy book just yet (NPCs, hello?).

Gah, this all gets complicated. We've got to this point now where we barely know who actually owns what, or who lent what to whom and who's borrowing it next. "Neither a borrower nor a lender be" is all very well and good, but it doesn't really work when just about everything has turned into community property.

Okay, so this week started manic. It is now Thursday. And there is nothing -- and I mean nothing -- to do.

I've been a good girl. All the work is done. I rushed through filing hell this morning. I set up my standing order for paying my bit of the household expenses (must check that this evening when I get home). I even booked my holiday. Ooh, there's a task; tell Violet that I'm going on holiday and work out how to book annual leave.

I have a few tasks this weekend. Looking over my finances, I can stretch to the Boots of Doom this month, so I'll have to go out shopping for those -- my Docs are pretty well dead. That'll be Saturday, probably, and that's when I'll decide whether I want to buy the Sims and/or the expansion packs. Why, when I already have the Sims at home? Well, as

cholten99 says about music, if you get something on the Net that you actually enjoy, it's only fair that you give the creator something back. For instance, he's going to be ordering a copy of Bargainville from Amazon despite the fact that he has access to my burned copy because he just loves the album. Fair enough. Besides, the expansion packs are part of HMV's summer sale. Not to mention the fact that my copy of the original is as buggy as fuck and the expansion packs I downloaded won't work.

If I do that, I can either save the downloads I've already done and just stick them back in the appropriate folders in the new install, or I can ditch the entire mess and start over. I'd rather not do that because I haven't kept all my links, but on the other hand the new search could be fun when I don't have to restrict object, skin and miscellaneous downloads to stuff that only works with the original. Besides, there's a whole lot of crap in there that keeps crashing my system when I try to use it and I'd probably rather make a clean sweep.

Then I can have my 7th Sea Sims. I've been trying to set up my Sims as the characters from our 7th Sea game (like

cholten99 did in his Worms World Party) and it'd be a lot more fun with Hot Date, I'm pretty sure. ^_^

It was supposed to be such a nice thing, a long weekend. Didn't entirely work out that way, though I suppose it wasn't bad per se.

Saturday: Learned tweakage of the Sims variety (skins etc) and did the whole "Interior Design in Simville" deal while

cholten99 slept. He was obviously extremely tired and conked out until half-six. In the evening. Kind of dull, but a necessary wind-down.

Sunday: My God, I was such a girl! First of all,

cholten99 found this Hamtaro toy for £2, which he thought he'd buy to freak Toos out. Toos was not freaked; in a rare moment of girliedom, she actually thought it was cute. So did everyone apart from

cholten99, so he was the only one distressed by the big eye/small mouth cutesiness.

Then there was the game itself. Masqueraded as a courtesan (which I'm going to do for as long as we're in Vodacce -- no one's going to ask too many questions about the courtesan of Prince Villanova's cousin), got questioned by Vodacce bounty hunters at knifepoint in the middle of the night. Best way of sending questioners away without getting hurt or giving anything away? Particularly when they're Vodacce? Act stupid and girlie. A few days later, we get shipped off to this island to retrieve a few Syrneth artefacts before the Caligari get their hands on them. We split up, I find journals, notes and a glowing globe-thing, then get fumigated by a destroyed chemical store, pass out and wake up tied to a chair with Caligari men throwing water at me and threatening to cut off my fingers if I don't talk. Missed all the combat rounds, and was only alerted to the presence of my compatriots near the room in which I was held by the sound of Pietro pulling a Legolas. (Oh, and that was stupid -- Pietro slides down the stairs on his shield, notices someone as he passes a corridor, fires off a shot ... and just before the shield comes to a crashing halt, throwing him in the midst of five Caligari bruisers, he realises the person he just shot at -- and dealt a dramatic wound to -- was Viola. This should teach us to split up ... but won't.) Basically, I was the damsel in distress for most of it. Arse.

Monday: Three-hour walk through London, ceiling-staring, appetite loss and mild to moderate anhedonia. Was not helped by the accusation, "See, this is what you get for reading books about depressed people" (referring to my copy of "Prozac Nation", which was a leftover book from last week).

Today, there isn't much going on. I should do some writing, presuming I remembered to bring that floppy with me (which I doubt). I was trying not to be annoyed about something, but I can't be arsed -- I'll be annoyed if I damn well please.

Okay;

cholten99's hard disc died the other day. Since the Frankenbox is the only working computer in the house, he's using mine to check e-mail and so forth. Which isn't a problem -- it's annoying having to reset and relogin every time I come back to the Frankenbox, but I can live with it. What really, really hacks me off is the editing of my buddylist on Trillian. Why do I want Shaun and Amy on my buddylist? Why the bloody fuck do I want his father or sister on there? Half of these people I'm not even sure I know! And it's a simple operation to log me off Trillian and log himself on, so why? Why add all manner of people who I don't necessarily want to talk to onto my buddy list? If you're going to use someone else's computer, at least have the common courtesy not to monkey around too much with other people's settings without asking them first. And if you lack the manners to do that, then at least tell the person what you've done.

I was very, very tempted to just delete all the names that were added to my buddylist this morning. I didn't. I'm not sure if I'm doing the right thing, but I'm going to ~~let~~ okay, not let it go, precisely, but I'm going to at least fume in the privacy of my own head after this. I wouldn't be this mad if he hadn't done this without asking, but maybe he was going to tell me. He was on the Frankenbox incredibly late last night, and I was asleep. I just don't understand why he didn't log on as himself instead of doing it this way. Can anyone think of any reason why adding names onto the buddylist of another person is in any way easier than just logging them off and logging yourself on?

I've been Simming. And there is some real amusement value.

I had a Lane household (Jane and Trent), and a Morgendorffer household (Daria and Quinn).

Daria and Jane hit it off really well. Next thing you know, Daria and Jane have fallen in love and have moved into the Lane house together.

It's the stuff slashfics are made of.

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Money-Grubbing Parasites
Money, Money, Money?
Age of the Geek
Freaky...
Generalised Geekery and the War for Tidiness
The First Minutes of 2011
Greed Is...
Hobbies Speak Louder Than Words
The 'My Friends Are Awesome' Chronicles
A Week In Review
PUNT the Pooka!
Sim-patico
To do lists
Buddy call
Art imitates ... more art.

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The Thessaliad Redux

Abracadabra, Bitch

Entries tagged with sims

Money-Grubbing Parasites

Money, Money, Money?

Age of the Geek

Freaky...

Generalised Geekery and the War for Tidiness

The First Minutes of 2011

Greed Is...

Hobbies Speak Louder Than Words

The 'My Friends Are Awesome' Chronicles

A Week In Review

PUNT the Pooka!

Sim-patico

To do lists

Buddy call

Art imitates ... more art.