Writer Tina's Sims LJ

script update and small snag

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 09:02:07 GMT

Okay, small delay in terms of lack of enough free time, sorry about that. We will hopefully have it done tomorrow night, at least for PC users.

One small snag: the Mac script bundler requires being run on a Mac because of the things it has to include to make it a stand-alone app. Not surprising but the original documentation made it sound like it was cross-platform, so we tried it anyhow.

Now, it turns out Mac OS X comes with a version of python, but not necessarily an up-to-date version, so the script might not work correctly. (I'm assuming the Mac users are generally using some version of OS X... anyone using something before that may be out of luck). To test this, if my Mac-using friends could open up a terminal window and type in 'python --version' and then let me know a) if it worked at all (it should), b) what version it reports, and c) what version of OS X you have, we can figure out what we might need to do from there.

One thing we possibly could do is walk someone through getting the bundling script set up and making a stand-alone version of the script, which would be far easier than me trying to write instructions on how to install and run a newer version of python on an OS I don't have personal access to. Alternately, if enough people are using a late enough version of python, we can just distribute the script as is. It also might be possible to make a version of the script that will work with earlier versions of python. So one way or another we should be able to do this, we just need to figure out the best way.

Feel free to point other Mac players here; the more info on what OS and python version people tend to have, the easier it will be to decide which solution to use.

Exchange Stories conversion

Sun, 27 Dec 2009 20:47:13 GMT

Hey, all. My SO and I are working on a way to take stories from the Exchange and turn them into the OpenOffice version of Powerpoint. Assuming this works (and we're pretty confident it will), we will distribute the script to anyone who needs it along with directions, which we think we can make as simple as "enter the asset ID, magically get powerpoint-like file", though obviously we can't test that yet. (Mac users might also need to download a script interpreter but we're looking into that, too. One safe download, though, if so.)

Slideshare will accept the OpenOffice format directly. Authorstream users would need to get OpenOffice and resave the files as ppt.

More as soon as we know if this will work, but I wanted to tell folks so they don't go crazy trying to figure out how to convert their old stuff... if this way doesn't work, we've got ideas for several other possibilities, including converting to PDF.

Edit ~9 PM Eastern Sunday

We have a working version of this that works on stories already saved off the Exchange. We'll need the Exchange to be up to test grabbing them directly from there, though.

holidayish

Fri, 25 Dec 2009 10:38:46 GMT

I was thinking of doing something vaguely interesting for a holiday greeting, but it would require two things I don't have: access to the offishul site of downness, and a working scanner. Maybe if I start now (or when the exchange comes back) I can have it done for next year tho. So I will just offer a lame textual wish for a Merry Christmas or a hope you had a happy holiday of otherness that already passed or a wish for a happy New Year as appropriate.

Random occasional post pointer

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 15:41:11 GMT

Pointer to post with pointer to post with pointers on how to avoid winter weather dangers. Useful thing. Read it. Yes, Californians too; the EMT who wrote many of the posts pointed to says that the 40-60°F range is actually one of the most dangerous.

[There's been a number of other posts over at Odds and Ends, too, some of which some of you may find amusing, but those aren't required reading. Though if you're bored, have at. :)]

Non-Sims humor

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 14:21:50 GMT

Um, yeah.

apropos of Twilight

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 18:35:20 GMT

While looking up something else entirely, I just discovered that Stephanie Meyers' agent is actually from a well-respected agency.

Without in any way necessarily agreeing with the taste of said agent, I do have to say: that's a really, really good agent.

[Cloned from P^4] ACR and other things

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 21:30:58 GMT

No, I don't have the game installed yet. In fact, I'm feeling like crap and I did say don't expect anything for a while, right? But I've been looking at my downloads and mods and stuff anyhow, trying to figure out what I want to keep, and ACR is on the "only maybe" list.

Don't get me wrong; ACR has given me plenty of lolz and thrown me some fun curveballs (unexpected third pregnancy resulting in twins, frex). But it really is pretty aggressive, and I've never been very apt at tuning it... and that becomes more important if I'm going to be doing the new plotty thing, what with the fact that I'm effectively going to be playing Strict Family Values with it even if it's not for score.

On the 'keep' side, there's really nothing else like it out there, and I don't know if I want to lose the features I do like. Moreover, TwoJeffs is working on v2.0, which if I can get FT running (yeah, sucks for Mac folks, 2.0 requires FT or AL, sigh), I might find better, as it's sounding like it will both be more easily tunable and have a lot more options.

On the 'drop' side, I don't think the timer's going to be any more adjustable, and the timer's aggressiveness bugs me. I know Sims' lives are short and days have a different meaning to them, but even when I was young and full of libido I wasn't doing the horizontal bop every single day. And while I like risky woohoo and autonomous try for baby, I'm not sure if those two are enough to be sure I want to keep it. I can always go back to choosing which type of Woohoo based on circumstance (Want panels/LTWs, mainly), or roll dice if I'm not sure, or whatever.

So, yeah. Not sure.

I'm also going to be carefully looking at my Awesomeware and possibly pruning it. Some things are definitely staying, and a couple things I might add (I'm at least going to try out harderjobs, though I don't know if I'll keep it), but I might lose a few too. I'm not sure about that either. I've got a handful of other TwoJeffs hacks, too, but I think all those are in the keep pile as they're mainly either actual fixes or same-gender things. Most of the rest of what I have is animation/story things, and obviously those I'm keeping, plus a couple miscellaneous hacks.

Speaking of change, and new EPs and such, I've decided that I will not be acquiring AL. Yeah, I wish I had ceilings, and yeah, some of the new interactions look awesome, and I regret that I can't have them, but I just don't want to mess with it. And honestly, the witches thing just doesn't do it for me. Not that I've ever been all that eager to play with the nonhumans, aliens excepted, but for some reason I just feel exceedingly bleh about the witches in particular. I just don't like the special Sim types that randomly show up that much anyhow. I can deal with vamps, but, frex, I hate Crumplebottom and the Charlatan. I briefly considered getting M&GS used, since I do really like landscaping, but I think I'm going to just skip that, too, and just go with what I have rather than risk... issues. Including added lag... my computer is actually quite good, but unfortunately it's good in a way the Sims doesn't take advantage of, as the game predates the widespread use of multicore systems.

On the CC front, I'm... probably not going to download a lot more than I ever did, but I actually grabbed a handful of clutter items, and I might get a few more things. We'll see.

So that's my random update for the week. And it probably will be 'for the week'. I'll try to update regularly even if I'm not making much progress, but I don't think I'll be getting much done this week.

[Cloned from P^4] Decisions, decisions

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 10:38:46 GMT

Okay, well, after thinking about it some more, since I'm still feeling iffy about the old projects, I think maybe I'd be better off just making a fresh start.

So, as soon as my back pain allows, I guess I'll go ahead and look for the disks and install. See if I can get FT working without hitches, or deal with the hitches, see if I can get that bodyshop compression workaround doing some good (and do some updates on my CC), do testing in the default neighborhoods, etc. I'm not planning on rushing; among other things I'd just as soon wait to start publishing until I at least get a little further into sorting out my health woes or, y'know, acquire a painkiller that works reliably. But when I get around to setting up custom 'hoods, it'll be for new projects.

I might eventually decide to try to finish up Twilight Dreams, although I'm leaning towards just prosing up the scripts and publishing them as text. S&S is rather less likely, as I do more and more think I probably shouldn't have tackled a 26-gen idea until I saw if I could ever frelling finish a 10-gen one (particularly with my history of having computer issues :/). I'm leaving my options open, of course: the S&S files are all still there (including the bits no one's seen), and I'll just archive them up and let them sit in case I change my mind at some point.

So, you might be wondering what I would like to do that makes it worth abandoning my other stories.

Well, first and foremost I want to do a plotty legacy. It'd use the framework of a typical 10-gen legacy with some handicaps, but with story trumping rules. I plan to write prose rather than commentary (though I may do out-takes or behind-the-scenes things). People who miss the Greenes and the Highwinds will probably like it, because it was conceived as a sort of spiritual successor to those.

I mentioned in my other post I have an outline. It's not a complete one, as I'm leaving plenty of room for in-game actions, but it does list one or two major events that should occur in each generation, with firm starting scenes and a relatively firm ending. My heirs will be the Sims whose aspirations and/or personality work best with the upcoming events... I've got notes on what I'm looking for for each generation, basically. Spares and side lines, well, they'll get played, but how much they figure into the story will vary.

Secondly, I'd like to do a non-major-plotty, character-driven, commentary-style legacy for points. And, y'know. Finish it.

Now... I will tell y'all straight up that while I would be playing and scoring as if everything is legacy-legal, I ain't giving up my mods and hacks, including a few that technically violate the spirit of the rules. Since I feel that they change things to the way the game was supposed to work, however, I'm going to just ignore that. :D Aside from that, though, I'd be doing my best to stick to the rules, excluding certain things I see as options (Legacy Tree, for instance, requires me to keep graves on the lot, which I don't know if I want to do; I don't know if I want to tackle Legacy Breed, etc.).

I'm still thinking about which handicaps I'd want to go with for that. I'm highly tempted to make it an Uglacy since I'm (probably) abandoning S&S and I enjoy genetic experiments. Which isn't technically a handicap, no, but it's a goal, so similar. If I do do that, I think it'd be lolzy to have one of the handicaps be Well-Dressed Sims, and I'll probably throw Storyteller in there as usual, too. I have a few other things I'm considering (some of which are mutually exclusive), and a few things I've ruled out... not sure what else I want. Anyone have any handicaps they've always wanted to see someone try? I might not use 'em but I wouldn't mind suggestions.

Oh, and I need to get an updated copy of OpenOffice and see how their version of Power Point feels to work with, since it looks like Slideshare is working out pretty well for people. Chances are I'm not going to find it any harder than the way I was doing things before. I still plan on using screen captures rather than the in-game camera, which should help with the resizing artifacting a few peple were getting (note to self: check size limits on uploads there), but overall it looks like a pretty good method. Maybe I'll throw together some scenes from S&S pics in the unpublished bin for lolz.

So... yeah. Don't expect to see anything for a while, but I am definitely planning on trying to get back into the Simworld. I may even start leaving comments again someday. :D

lj-email post = phail

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 06:01:11 GMT

Post-by-email automatically strips all html, even when starting with the tag that alleges to not do that. I was hoping to find a way to automagically clone blogger posts for my LJ friends (i.e., almost everyone who reads my blog) but it seems like it's not going to work correctly. So I'll just keep posting links, unless people would rather I manually clone posts, which isn't really any harder or more time-consuming.

Today's dilemma

Sat, 25 Jul 2009 08:53:36 GMT

New blogger post about plans, or lack thereof, regarding Simming.

link and stuff

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 21:49:17 GMT

Darn it, Pescado, you've gone and made TS3 look potentially interesting...

(PS: My computer is working again.)

link thingie

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 22:10:03 GMT

Long post about Sims 3 impressions

[link] Cleanly pulling Sims from Photos

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 04:18:21 GMT

Graphics editing for fun and profit (without the profit). Long post, lots of pics, hopefully clear. Let me know if you've got questions.

Commentary for prompt story

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 02:28:15 GMT

Before reading this, you'll want to go over to sim_spiration and read my entry for today's prompt if you haven't yet.

So, first, thanks so much to Marina and her last-minute photo staging skillz. I was originally going to try to find an appropriate picture or two and edit as necessary to make the portrait, but I could not for the life of me find something I could use, so I posted asking if anyone had something appropriate. She volunteered to stage and shoot something I could use. So, lo, the portrait in the story, more or less:

About the story... I don't know why, but actually the first thing that popped into my mind when I read the prompt was De and Rhys, and since it's De's birthday, it seemed awfully appropriate to go ahead and write it. You'll notice it's not a particularly upbeat story, and I don't think it should be. Whatever is between De and Rhys is complicated at best, and De's friendship with Marina cannot possibly help matters any. Rhys holds grudges a long time, after all.

The scene seemed pretty clear. De snags Rhys and of course gets pregnant. She wants something to commemorate that since G-d alone knows what will happen in the future. Who else would she ask to do the painting? And then there's Rhys, not being sure whether or not he even wants to be there, let alone with Marina around... and yet...

I think, maybe, he's not as unhappy there as he might want people to think. After all, for all that his feelings for De might be conflicted, they're certainly real, and whatever else you can say about Rhys, he does love his kids. And Marina? I think he's tired of fighting with her. I think he knows that she wouldn't have thrown him into the Apocalypse if she hadn't wanted him to learn something, that she's sorry about his early life turning out the way it did, and that she's happy he found Steia in that world. Deep down, he knows it's long past time to let it go.

But he can't quite say the words to her. Maybe, someday. But not yet.

5 things from the Prof

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 11:09:26 GMT

Actually there were only 4 things, but I'm going to take the two she mentioned as things she would've used if Marina hadn't gotten there first and do short comments on them for two halves. :D

1. SecuROM
2. Japanese culture
3. Legacy villains in general
4. Rain Greene

And Edgar and video gaming again.

SecuROM: Okay, first, what you need to know is that I really, really dislike programmatic copy protection and DRM. My experience with copy protection goes back to the beginnings of personal computing... back in the days of the C64 and Apple II computers there were already people putting in ways to prevent copying and people who got around it. There were also companies that skipped that and just went with things like code wheels and, later, serial numbers, both of which required you to at least have access to a legit copy of the game (preferably your own, and I am mostly anti-piracy, though not as staunchly as I used to be) and both of which still let you make backups of your game (media is impermanent, old-style disks especially so) and therefore remain my personal preference. Besides, I always prefer it when the gaming companies refrain from treating all their customers like criminals.

My first experiences with bad DRM/copy protection involved trying to make said backups and not being able to without a program created by crackers... back on the C64. I wasn't trying to pirate a game, I just wanted to not play off the original disk.

SecuROM loses on numerous counts. First, I dislike anything that forces you to keep the original disk in, even Safedisk, which I consider a better alternative only in the sense that it isn't as bad as SecuROM even though it still has features I detest. Secondly, there's the fact that it frequently refuses to validate the damn disk it's supposed to be limiting you to! This is a widespread problem, extending a lot further than the Sims, and I knew about it before the Sims added SecuROM with BV (well, a bit before that, really, but that was the first new EP with it) because when it came up (with Bioshock, if you're wondering) it was talked about on gaming blogs a LOT. Thirdly, it tries to work around people using pseudo-drives (which is used heavily in pirating, but also is used legitimately to try to get around the stupid disk-in requirement) by using a whitelist. A whitelist, for those of you who don't know, is a list that says "I recognize this particular thing as legtimate", the opposite of a blacklist, which tries to exclude things it knows are not. The problem with using a whitelist is that there are so many different drive models and they all report differently to the system, so it's inevitable (and this is also widespread) that some percentage of customers, particularly those with drives newer than the game, will have SecuROM either fail to work, or at least temporarily try to disable the unrecognized optical drive, and some people had bad luck getting those drives to work again after SecuROM did this. (In theory a reboot would fix it; in practice that wasn't always the case, and either way, if that's the drive you wanted to play on, you were out of luck.)

Those would be bad enough, but there's also security problems. Firstly, if you don't use an admin-privileged account to play on (and a lot of people don't), it will install a program that has admin privileges, which is one of those things that hackers just love to exploit. Secondly, and maybe they've fixed this, but one of the programs that failed to be on their whitelist was AVG's virus checker. SecuROM-protected programs flat-out would neither install nor run while AVG was active. Thirdly, originally you couldn't run Process Explorer, a popular task manager alternative for Windows, with SecuROM. Microsoft fixed this, but Sony's reply to people complaining about this was to issue boilerplate responses that basically said "We won't let you run a game while Process Explorer is running because you might use Process Explorer to figure out how SecuROM works." Let me stress that PE is a completely legitimate tool that Microsoft now owns (it was developed by someone else). Fourthly, the Sony corporation as a whole does not have a good record when it comes to DRM, having been busted both for over-doing the DRM on CDs (losing several lawsuits) and for putting a rootkit on a USB dongle. Technically these were separate divisions of Sony, but I really don't care. Fifthly, related to this, SecuROM puts in a munged registry entry that is impossible to delete normally, which is a trick that rootkits like to use and is completely unacceptable as it's well within a user's rights to refuse to have SecuROM on their machine if they're also getting rid of the SecuROM-containing software. (Incidentally, EA itself bungled the hell out of this when people were asking how to remove it and they refused, at first, to give instructions; this contributed to my EA disdain.)

And, of course, there's the newer versions that support limited installs and do constant updates of SecuROM and re-checking of the validity of the disk after install... urgh. Total overkill and total paranoia, and it doesn't even do anything but minorly reduce casual piracy and, as EA found out, reduce sales.

I've mentioned Stardock a few times in regards to this. Stardock, who makes one of my favorite turn-based strategy games, refuses to use programmatic copy protection. They have serial codes and if you're not registered (which requires a unique serial code) you can't get updates to the program. To me, that's sane. I'm sure their games have been pirated but after they publically announced this policy their sales DOUBLED, and there's a reason for that: gamers are getting sick of the ridiculous lengths to which big distribution companies are going to completely ineffectively combat piracy, which isn't doing them any good because a) what one person can lock, another can unlock and b) hardcore pirates weren't chosing between buying and pirating, they were chosing between pirating and playing a different game. So all it does is inconvenience (or worse) actual customers and add costs for no real results. Stupid.

I did mention the tl;dr, right? Sorry about that. The rest should be a bit shorter.

Japanese culture: I've been interested in Japan since one of my aunts went to Tokyo on a business trip and brought me back a book on it, waaaay back when I was in 8th grade. I got into James Clavell not long after that, and while I'm still not sure how accurate Shōgun really is, I have to say that it definitely made me more interested in the culture. (I've subsequently seen a few historical dramas from Japan and they're definitely similar, but I don't know if they're meant to be accurate, either, so...) And I did read books both set in Japan and actually about the history after that. But I didn't really have access to modern Japanese culture until after I moved to California. Chicago has a lot of different cultures but Japan was underepresented there (though we had pretty much all the rest of east Asia, not to mention India).

While in California I had three things: a lot more money than I'd ever had, letting me purchase as many books and anime series as I thought to; an Asian television station that showed Japanese programs on Saturday and Sunday, many of which were subtitled; local Japanese neighborhoods. I made use of these, the latter the least since I didn't have good transportation but I did spend time in the Japanese markets. I still don't feel I've got anything but an outsider's view of the culture, definitely, but those three things all helped. Watching TV shows and anime gives you a really good look at what I'd call the unconscious culture, the things people do no matter what their role because that's just What People Do. That's things like, oh, you call people by their last name or title unless you know them well, in which case you're at least as likely to use a nickname as their given name... the rules are different with kids, especially adult-to-kid, but even there last name is used*. Bowing... it's actually a fairly complex piece of body language, but if I had to sum it up, I'd say its main purpose is to indicate sincerity, politeness, or both. Families almost always say "I'm home" (Tadai ma!) and "Welcome home" when someone returns; there's formal phrases for those and a lot of other things, but they're done almost casually. "Hai!" means "Yes", but it also means "Okay", or "I get it" or "Ready" or any of a number of other basic agreements, which is why you hear it so often.

[*I don't do this in Twilight Dreams with Miho and Toki in part because they're peers and could reasonably be expected to use each others' given names, but also because, well, it's Westernized. But when Miho talks about her childhood friends, she uses nicknames, and she doesn't call the Noguchis by their first names.]

Legacy villains in general: Well, every story needs an antagonist, whether that's impersonal (weather, circumstance, bad luck, lack of money, whatever) or personal. Legacy villains are the personal. If you're going to do plotty bits, whether short arcs or whole stories, sooner or later a bad guy is going to come in handy.

Spurned-for-heir is the popular choice for legacies, and really, it's the perfect way to get a villain, because that shit happens all the time in the real world. Families fall apart arguing over inheritances of ridiculous shit like Aunt Mary's teapot, so why not? Of course, some people go different routes, and that can be fun, too, but honestly I'm fine with people who wanted to be heir but couldn't being so popular, because it makes so much sense.

What I like best is when I hate the character as a person but they're really well-developed as a character, so that I know things about them other than "hurr must destroy legacy hurr". Cecil's got a whole prissy personality that he'd have whether or not he had been eligible to be heir. Cypress is a psychopath who likes people to know he is. Kirstial, well, she's kinda a spoiled brat, and likes her power just a weeee bit (lots) too much. Rhys felt like an afterthought and wanted to matter to people, which is also where he gets his good points from. They might all have similar goals but they're very, very different people.

Which brings me to one of the halves:

Edgar was a bit different because he was a legacy villain who was the heir. Not that that's unique, but I did enjoy writing someone who theoretically had it all and yet for whom that wasn't enough. I mean, he'd hit his LTW already (I don't remember if that made it to the updates) and he had a hot wife (she was pretty gorgeous) and the big house and the money... but he wasn't happy with it. Maybe nothing would've made him happy; he was pretty screwed up.

I like the idea of a villain who should theoretically be fulfilled but isn't enough that I'm gonna do it again someday. :)

Video games: So, let's talk a bit about two of my favorite things: Final Fantasy and Silent Hill. They're very different. Final Fantasy is a series of mostly-unconnected (until recently) RPG games with mostly-fantasy settings. Silent Hill is action/adventure style survival horror. But they're my two favorite console series.

Final Fantasy has lots of things I like. First, I'm fond of fantasy RPGs in general. I like big swords and magic and fantastical creatures a lot. But the big thing about Final Fantasy is that the games produce characters and intricate storylines that I really, really enjoy, with gorgeous settings (even way back in the sprite days) and lovely music to boot. My two favorites are FF7 and its related things, and FFX/FFX-2, which have some great character development. I could go on a lot more about those but I said I'd keep the halves short, so...

Silent Hill, well, I haven't actually played all of them, but SH 1-3 are amongst my favorite games ever. I actually bought the first game, couldn't play it because I suck at action games, but then gave it another chance when another gamer I worked with kept talking about it. The SH games are... freaky is a good word. They've got super-convoluted plots with some really interesting and not always likeable characters that have some particularly freaky horror monsters to boot, not to mention some nasty puzzles to solve, especially on the harder puzzle levels. But the thing I like best is that each of those three games has a "real" world and a "dark" version of the world, and you flip back and forth between them. There's something really fascinating about the changes, as grotesque as some of the details are, between the regular world and the dark world... things in the dark world are in the same spot, but become rusty, bloody, broken-down versions of themselves. The atmosphere is just remarkably good.

Edited to add the one I forgot

The thing about villains flowed into Edgar and I forgot Rain! I'm sorry, Rain!

Rain Greene: I miss Rain. I really normally don't like to play Pleasure Sims, but she had a clear personality before she even got her Aspiration roll (I do them earlier now, but I was doing them at teen-time then) and I think that made a big difference. I was playing around with their voices in their diaries at that point, trying to establish the characters enough that it wouldn't all sound the same, and somehow I just sort of fell into the weird salutations with her... I think it just sort of came out that way and I decided it fit. She was certainly capable of being serious (especially when it came to Autumn) but for the most part she tried to have fun with everything, which meant her Aspiration was absolutely perfect for her. She did like her some pranks, but though her stats put her a bit on the mean side she actually really liked her friends and family and would roll up Wants for them (even if the Want she rolled most was to prank them, especially, for some reason, Julian)... and I always, always forgot she was technically Shy, because she never actually acted it. I wish I could've seen how she'd have been as a parent; I wasn't planning on having her have more than one but I also already had ACR in at that point so I was going to see what happened.

So, there ya go. Hopefully I didn't bore you to tears.

Edit: Oops, I forgot one the first time around, but it's there now!

memity

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 07:20:22 GMT

Comment to this post and I will give you 5 subjects/things I associate you with. Then post this in your LJ and elaborate on the subjects given. (And note I suck at coming up with things like this sometimes so your five things may be a little strange...)

5 things from Marina:
1. Anime
2. Bright colors
3. Video games
4. Phototaking
5. Edgar Highwind

Anime: The funny thing about anime is I've seen more I didn't like than I do like. This is because anime isn't a genre, even though a lot of people tend to think of it that way, but a medium. There's the girly stuff, aimed towards tweens and teens, and there's the action stuff, and there's horror, and there's sf and fantasy, and there's weird stuff like Prince of Tennis, and of course there's the, ahem, adult stuff, but people mostly seem to associate the word with the big-eyed short-skirted shoujo or mecha... both of which are genres I'm generally not fond of, Utena and Eva notwithstanding.

However, anime generally has one common thing, and that's symbolism. It's not restricted to anime, of course; the Japanese love to use symbolism in their games and their live-action shows as well. But it's one of the things I like. Hair colour and the way people dress can tell you a lot about them (of course, that's true to some extent in American media, too). Objects show up routinely to point out the signifance of scenes (something I haven't yet played with in Twilight Dreams except in a really subtle way, which someday I will explain). Sometimes a scene that shows one thing is actually telling a completely different story (something else I haven't experimented with). This leads some anime to be baffling, sadly (I'm looking at you, Serial Experiments Lain) but somehow it's still enjoyable. There still has to be a good story in there for me to like it, of course, but those things tends to make anime fun to analyze as well as watch. Twilight Dreams is really partly about my taking apart anime tropes and playing with them.

Bright Colours: Honestly, I'm not sure what to say about this. Do I seem to use a lot? I like playing colours off each other, and I guess a lot of the ones I picked for CC were high-saturation (at least the warm colours; the cool ones vary a lot more), but I actually tend towards darker shades and muted colours personally... I'm more into the hunter and lavender and olive and pale violet than I am any of the orange/red/yellow stuff on the list. I just wanted to make a representative group... I like matching colours to Sims' personality, or whatever they grow up in regularly, etc. But I also routinely change colours on my blogs (and desktop) to go with the season or my mood, so I'm sure I've cycled through bright stuff too. Dunno.

Video Games: Heh, well, yeah, I'm a gaming geek. Aside from The Sims, of course, there's also the various MMOs I've played with, which I mostly play as a way to play with my sweetie, and the fact that I'm a dedicated Final Fantasy fangirl, and there's Unreal Tournament, and there's Civilization and similar turn-based strategy games, and various time-waster type flash games from Popcap, and Soul Calibur as the only fighting game I've really been into, and SSX (not the one they picture in the Sims, btw, which is SSX3, but the one right before it). What can I say? I was a geeky teen when video games first existed, and it stuck with me. Or I stuck with it. I also used to play a lot of adventure games back when those were a popular genre (starting with text adventures and moving on to things like Myst or Journeyman Project), and sometimes will get action/adventures, including survival horror (<3 Silent Hill), and while Final Fantasy is these days by far my favorite cRPG, I think the first one I ever played was a game called Temple of Apshai for the Commodore 64, followed by the Ultima games and later, Bard's Tale.

Phototaking: I'm guessing this comes up in the context of the Sims. I love doing it. I love setting up shots or finding fun angles to take regular in-game shots at. I love getting those First Kiss pictures and the cute toddler pictures out the wazoo and pictures of the hilarious faces that the Sims make. I've got the GunMod camera hack so I can get better angles and closer shots, plus of course these days I get to crop stuff so it looks better. I also like real-world photography, which probably isn't a surprise. I own a lot of pictures of graveyards, fun fact. Also one of my favorite pictures ever (that I've taken personally) is in the game as a custom painting, which I really should have someone paint and throw on a wall somewhere. I also take screenshots in the other games I play, some of which are up on my gaming blog.

The scary thing is I take about a tenth the pictures my sweetie does. You want a photogeek, that's him.

Edgar Highwind: Ahh, Edgar. My first (and to date, only, though the Greenes were due to have one, too, sigh) real legacy villain, his time cut cruelly short.

I honestly am not sure where I got the ideas for Edgar. There was just something about him... I think it's the way he smiles. I'm sure I've got shots of him scowling and looking serious but never have I had a Sim with inappropriate smiling the way he had. I think what Locke said about him is really the essence of his character: he covets. He rolled that Criminal Mastermind LTW, he had bolts for his brothers' girls, I think he was jealous of Violet's popularity seeing as how he got shot down for his First Kiss... and naturally it was his Criminal Mastermind aunt he went after as his practice run for screwing up people; she had the job he wanted, and he wanted her out of it. And through it all, he just kept smiling! Seriously:

Is that the picture of a man whose daughter is about to die?

So, uh, yeah. Now I miss having a legacy villain. Maybe S&S can have some plotz...

(If I get other sets of 5 I'll do separate posts.)

Weird dreams

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 12:06:50 GMT

I just had a very vivid, very weird dream that ultimately ended with someone being literally pushed into another dimension to save them. I blame the Sims, and particularly the Round Robin project. I'd volunteer for one of the last spots but I'm avoiding it for the same reason I didn't volunteer in the first place: uncertainty about my health and its current effects on my own gameplay time. So, uh... maybe I'll use it on my own, or at some point suggest doing another one, dunno. But I thought I'd share that since I do think it was partly because I read Gin's update before sleeping.

<3

Sat, 14 Feb 2009 11:58:02 GMT

Four new Pixel Play posts

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 20:16:21 GMT

A rather long glossary of CoX terms, for when I forget I'm talking to people who don't play.

Probably more interesting, there's also several posts of screenshots:

Fun Screenshot Sequences
Scenes from Around the Villain Isles
Scenes from Around Paragon City

No character foo yet, but that'll probably be what I do next time I update.

Post Pointers

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 15:25:13 GMT

Over on PPPP: Blather about why I'm not buying Sims 3 (long)

I haven't updated the non-Sims gaming blog for a while but I plan to do another post or two, with funny or interesting screenshots, sometime this week probably. In the meantime, the first four posts I made, if anyone's interested:

What's This?
Gaming and Health
What's So Great about City of Heroes? (long)
What's So Great about Guild Wars? (long)

secondary blogspot blog

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 15:04:41 GMT

I've made a new blog for my non-Simming gaming blather, if anyone's interested. Incidentally, both PPPP and the new blog now have subscription links on the bottom if you want to use an RSS reader to keep up with them, though I'll continue to post links from here as well (and occasionally posts that are only here as usual).

Happy New Year!

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 21:06:26 GMT

Hopefully everyone else had a better New Year's Eve... Me, I got a bruise on my arm from an IV! I've had a bit of a sinus cold and some nasty headaches and nausea for a while and yesterday it got to be too much, so I went in to Urgent Care and they did a few neuro tests and then decided it was a tension headeache; no real surprise since the other problem I've had is neck and shoulder pain. They gave me a few good drugs via the IV. I still have signs of the headache today but it's definitely loads better, so I'm trying to relax and drink a lot of chamomile tea, and later I may have some Kahlua, which originally was for last night but obviously got put off. Spent some time logged into Guild Wars for the first time in ages to get the holiday stuff, and we just resubscribed to City of Heroes so we'll probably do more of that later. No Simming yet, sad to say. I miss it, but I still haven't gotten around to reinstalling. Soon, though, I think.

Happy New Year's to all!

Good morning, Californians. Don't despair yet.

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 16:34:08 GMT

I just heard that absentee ballots are estimated at about THREE MILLION, and those have decidedly not all been counted yet. I found this, from the LA Times:

OAKLAND, CA (KGO) -- We're just a week away from the November elections, and today is the last day to request absentee ballots. It's so popular, that nearly half of California is expected to vote by mail, with Northern California taking the lead.

The Los Angeles Times says nearly 69 percent of Santa Clara County voters mail in their ballots, in Marin county it is nearly 60 percent and in San Francisco, 40 percent.

It's also very popular in Alameda County with 46 percent of absentee ballots, and workers are already counting them.

And this, from the State of California:

The first results you are likely to hear reported on election night usually
reflect votes cast by vote-by-mail ballot. These, however, are not complete
totals and may reflect only those vote-by-mail ballots returned prior to
Election Day. Those ballots received prior to Election Day can be
“processed” (i.e., verify the signature, etc.) within the seven (7) days prior to
an election. Under no circumstance may a vote count be accessed or released
until the polls close on Election Day.
Election Code § 15101
A substantial number of additional vote-by-mail ballots are returned on
Election Day either to the polling place or to the elections office. These
ballots, because they require the extra handling of checking the voter’s
signature, and ensuring that the voter did not also vote at the polling place,
are usually the last ballots counted, and are not likely to be reported in the
vote totals until after the Election Day.
Elections Code §§ 3017, 3019

It's not out of the question that the Prop 8 could still fail by any means.

browsers, lack of simming, blather

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 16:17:42 GMT

So, okay. I got sick of sites telling me how horrible I was for not upgrading to IE7, and tired of Windows Update trying to suggest it, so I did.

Boy, was that a mistake. I now understand why so many people dislike IE these days. IE6 was fine. IE7 is a piece of crap.

Microsoft has Star Trek syndrome. For those of you who aren't geeks, Star Trek Syndrome is this thing where the Star Trek movies tend to alternate between good and bad releases. (You might find some argument about which is which, mind.) Microsoft has apparently developed the same problem. For instance: XP? Fine. Vista? Piece of crap. IE6? Pretty good. IE7? Piece of crap. Luckily that means chances are whatever's after Vista and IE8 will both be fine.

Anyhow, I am now using Firefox. Reluctantly, but I am.

You might wonder, why am I reluctant? Because I am sick of people telling me how fab00 and absolutely better than anything Firefox is. Because it's not magic. It still has CSS display issues (every browser does). It doesn't magically protect you from spyware and malware, despite what people claim. (Ask my sweetie.) It's not that I think it's a bad piece of software; there's definitely good points about it, and there are ways in which it is stronger than IE... but it's not magictabulous. (I've been infected by Miranda, I think.) And I'm sick of people who think that it's okay to code for one browser and not care about others. (That applies to people who do it for IE, too, yes.) And I'm sick of Microsoft bashing. They're not perfect, no, but they're astoundingly better than they used to be, and I think that some people refuse to even consider that. Their problem, I guess.

Anyhow. I'm keeping IE7 installed and using it for sites where I have multiple logins as my alternate (Neopets is the main one for that), but I'm setting Firefox to be my default for now.

I haven't even tried reinstalling Sims yet. I wanted a break. Part of the problem is if the reinstall doesn't fix my problems I'm still not sure what I want to do. The issue doesn't make the game unplayable. It just makes it laggy in certain circumstances. So, um. Yeah. That and I don't feel like digging out and reinstalling all 9000 discs. Next week, I think.

[Cloned from P^4.]

Brought to you by DUH Publications

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 07:06:45 GMT

Hey, Prof... maybe I could make you something like this:

see more pwn and owned pictures

Only reading "CAUTION | Please be aware that pussy is a word for felines."

(Don't ask me why I immediately thought of your students when I saw this. I just did. It's possible I may need to sleep.)