real life

All posts tagged real life

I’m back to playing the Wonderlands again! There will be posts popping up here in a day or two (or three).

I’ve already played to the passing of the torch, and I have to say I’m rather impressed with how Franklin aged up.

I realize that I lost track of my blogroll here and fell behind on reading some great ISBIs. I’ll be catching up as fast as I can. I really need to sit down and organize my Sims reading list.

If you’re curious where I’ve been, feel free to drop by Sample a Brave Legacy, which has just entered Generation 7.

If you tried to load my venerable Blogspot blog and found yourself here, apologies for the confusion.

Over the last…. year? Maybe? It might not be that long… my Sims blogging friends have been referencing comments they left on my blog that I’d never seen. Then I started getting a handful of test comments of the flavor, “Hey, is it working this time?”

The straw on the camel’s back was chat on Gryffindork’s blog, where she mentioned that she’d tried to leave several comments that didn’t seem to have appeared. She did some testing at my request and it looks like there was a MAJOR problem with comments being dropped. I don’t know how many comments failed to make it to my blog(s), but the implications are staggering (where “staggering” must be defined as a factor of the number of comments you’d expect on a fiction blog about a video game).

I spent this week converting all three of my Sims challenge blogs to self-hosted WordPress. This has been a surprisingly emotional transition. I started Sims blogging on Blogspot at the beginning of 2010. I like Blogger. Plus, I was really afraid of losing my absurdly long archive or even one precious comment. I was super cautious, but it turns out there are very good plugins for this.

So, if you’ve tried to comment in the past and couldn’t figure out what happened to your comment, please try again.

Thanks, folks.

I’m still here

Just wanted to apologize for the long silence on the Wonderlands. Gameplay got pretty intense over on my traditional legacy, the Samples, and I gave them an extra long shift of play. I ran all the way up to Branden’s birthday before posting the heir poll, so I don’t have any backlog at all to post.

I think I will be back to the Wonderlands in another week or so, but I have to be careful about making schedule promises because I’m always wrong.

At any rate, I haven’t forgotten the Wonderlands. Far from it! Stay tuned, and there will be updates as soon as I can get chance to play them.

If you’re interested, please give a look at the story that’s unfolding on Sample a Brave Legacy.

Karma catches up

I lost an entire week of gameplay for the Wonderlands.

I guess I was kind of asking for it. The game has been running way too smooth for too long.

I’d been casting about for a cheap fixer-upper lot for the Wonderlands to move to — something with enough space, but not a luxury home. Also, I liked the idea of them moving into a real dump or a double-wide trailer or somesuch.

(Full disclosure: I actually feel really bad for the horrible stereotype mobile/prefab homes get. Lots of them are very nice, and many friends have lived in them who were not total losers. But I am weak — the stereotype is just too much fun to give up. If you give up ALL your unreasonable categorical judgements, you run out of subtext to express what total losers your fictional characters are. It also helps that none of these friends are currently living in a trailer, so I’m not insulting by subtext anyone I know. ANYWAY.)

But it’s been hard to find something suitably shabby and trashed for this vision. House creators like smooth, polished luxury, even in their starter homes.

Then a builder on ModtheSims started posting delightfully disastrous fixer-upper houses, and his newest release was this 2 Bed 1 Bath sheriff sale. I fell in love. It was, quite simply, perfect. Two bedrooms and a loft of the most scuzzy living possible. This lot was created with love — every surface from the walls to the appliances to the furniture was rusted, stained, or dingy. The overgrown brambles were epic. Plus, considering Allison’s do-it-yourself background and high handiness skill, I could run a little thread about her fixing up the place to make it livable, then actually nice.

So, when I got back to the Wonderlands after playing the Samples for so long, I moved them to this lot pretty quickly. And it was exactly as delightful as I expected. I had a ton of fun remodeling it bit by bit, yet leaving lots of scuzz around to serve as a backdrop for screenshots.

About two sim days in, however, it became clear that there was something seriously wrong with this lot. Sims were convinced that, in addition to the staircase, there was an additional route from the first to the second floor that involved sinking through the upstairs bathroom floor into the living room. I wish I could have captured this in screenshots somehow because it was disturbingly hilarious. I looked and looked, and I couldn’t find anything wrong or any evidence that the builder had used a funky cheat anywhere near the spot. The only thing even noteworthy was that he had a woodburning fireplace in that area with a chimney running up through the middle of the upstairs bedroom. It wasn’t even placed using moveobjects. It seemed to be a totally innocent EA fireplace placed in exactly the way EA intended.

I had put so much effort into the house at this point, and the story was moving along, so I decided I’d just live with it and screensnap it if I could for entertainment value. Then members of the household started disappearing into some unroutable, invisible hole. Resetsim didn’t bring them back. They stayed on the portrait panel, and I could hear them complaining faintly about their routefails, but I couldn’t find them or rescue them in any way. Even saving and reloading didn’t help. I backed up and played from previous saves several times, only to have the same thing happen.

When the house ate Allison, I finally gave up.

The whole week of moving in and playing along seemed pretty much unsalvageable, so I went back to my save right before they moved to the new house. The sad thing is that I only played 2 sim-days during that time. Most of the week was taken up with remodeling, troubleshooting, and playing the same sequences over and over.

And this, dear friends, is why Allison’s generation is probably going to finish up in that townhouse.

I stayed up until 1am out of self-destructive frustration and played about halfway through the lost time, so I probably have enough stuff for a couple of updates fairly soon.

Stop me before I blog again

Because I must be clinically insane, I’m starting up another Sims challenge. I TRIED to talk myself out of it, I swear to you, but the idea just wouldn’t go away.

Blog is here: Waypoint.

This is a Nothing Is Free challenge, which starts with an empty unpopulated world with no rabbitholes and requires you to both populate it (from service sims and the like) and build it. I’m also going to do Buckygirl’s Six Degrees of Separation story, so “heirs” are going to be unrelated sims in the town. It seems like a really fun combination to me.

The theme is going to be a shipwreck on a desert island — how’s that for cliche? Heh. It was that or a colony on Lunar Lakes. It was hard to decide between them. In the end, the shipwreck won out on account of the story idea. Also, I don’t have Lunar Lakes, it hasn’t gone on sale in forever, and I’m already forking over the dough for Island Paradise.

I have another fairly serious, plotty story in mind, something closer in style to the Samples, where I build a retroactive plot over gameplay. That is, of course, a more labor-intense way to blog it. It’s going to somewhat center around Island Paradise, so I won’t be kicking anything off until it is released.

It’s probably going to move verrrry slooowly because I already have two friggin’ challenges.

I’ll probably drop a note here again when I have an actual game post up.

BTW: Never fear that I’ve forgotten my Wonderlands. They are currently up on the rotation after a long stint playing ahead on the Samples, so there will be updates here presently.

Turning off anonymous comments

OK, the comment spammers have found both my blogs. If you subscribe to post comments, you’ve probably gotten them in email, though Blogger has already deleted them when I show up to check. The comment spam is so entertaining that I’ve been tempted to leave them alone, but there’s always the chance that they’re linking to malware or something scary, and I don’t think any of us want to mess with that.

I believe one person here has posted legitimate comments without an account. I don’t think it’s a terribly big deal to create one, so if you are still around, anonymous commenter, I hope you’ll consider making an account. My only other alternative is to turn the Captcha back on, and that thing is just dreadful.

The Good News and the Bad News

The good news is: I got the job!

The bad news is: I have no idea what it will do to my playing and posting schedules :).

This really is the perfect arrangement for me, but they want to be start fast, and it’s a telecommuting position, so I’ll need to set up my office.

But I am here and reading other people’s blogs even if posting slows down. Or it might not. My posting has slowed down anyway just due to the pressure of the job hunt, so who knows?