The Bookacy Family Alphabet Journal

Not a bad week, this third one, when it comes to sims. I managed to get to my back up point in playing, take the back up and post picspam. And when it comes to CreMo, I'm almost there. I wrote the rest of the chapter, which turned out to be another 20 slides. Now all it needs is a re-read and a cover. So I should be well able to finish, and get a little bit done on my bonus goal too, which is nice.

Week 3 stats, as of March 23rd, 2014:

Bookacy chapter 39: all 135 slides shot and written (TO DO: re-read and make cover slide)
Bonus:
Bookacy chapter 40: all shot, 0 slides written

My second week wasn't as good as the first week; I've been a little distracted and perhaps less motivated. In any case, I did write 16 slides worth of the next chapter, which is still progress. If I keep this up, or try to improve a bit, I should still be able to get to my primary goal. There isn't so hugely much left in terms of scenes, insofar as my current more observational style contains anything that can be described as such. (Actually, I'm not entirely happy with my writing for that, I'd want to focus on individual moments more to get to know the sims better, rather than just flowing through everything, but I'm not sure what to do about that. Oh well.) Possibly I can even get something done on the secondary goal.

I also played a little the other day. That's been slow going too, but at least it moved on a tiny bit. It was sort of fun too, which is nice. When I get through the Thayer household, it's time to send a couple of sims to college, post picspam and take a backup. We'll see how long that takes, with my current speed quite a long time probably...

Hopefully next week will be a bit more productive again.

Week 2 stats, as of March 16th, 2014:

Bookacy chapter 39: all shot, 115 slides written
Bonus:
Bookacy chapter 40: all shot, 0 slides written

So I did decide to sign up for SimStoCreMo. It seems I'll be having some time in my hands, so I wanted to give it a shot. After all, all work I get done towards the goal is progress, and progress is good.

Quoted from my sign-up:

My goal is to finish chapter 39 of the Bookacies. It's currently 70 slides written, and *should* be all shot for all I know. I don't know how long it'll end up being, but knowing my writing style, I estimate it'll be at least 50 more slides, probably more than that.

Bonus goal: if I'm feeling super productive and finish my goal early (not that likely, but just in case), my bonus goal is chapter 40. It's a recap chapter, which has the few necessary glue scenes shot but nothing written. The main task is to dig through, like, 6,5 years worth of pictures and finding the relevant ones, plus writing. Likely somewhere between 100 and 200 slides.

So, starting stats as of today, March 1st:

Bookacy chapter 39: all shot, 70 slides written
Bonus:
Bookacy chapter 40: all shot, 0 slides written

Fingers crossed this'll be a productive month!

Oh, and if you feel like joining in, but haven't yet signed up, hurry up and do so! Good luck, everyone!

So... It's 2014, then. Happy this year, all! I hope it's started well for you.

For me, 2013 didn't turn out to be all that great, here's hoping that 2014 will be better. In real life matters, I don't tend to make resolutions really, since I'd feel bad if they were something serious and I ended up breaking them. If that makes any sense. But, in sims, I like to state a few goals, so I have something to aim for. So, what were my goals for 2013?

( 2013 )

So, all in all, not terrible considering real life being what it's been. But enough about last year, how about this year?

( 2014 )

I think that's enough for this year, we'll see how well I will fare. Now, maybe I should go and get a head start. :) Once again, happy this year!

Yes, I'm still alive. It's been over a month, whoops. There are kind of several reasons.

( Real life ramblings and picspam pointers under the cut )

Okay, so, here's the deal. I was talking in my new year's simming resolutions how I should find a way to post picspam without having to tear my hair out. Quite frankly, I have so many families at this point (I just counted and there are 18 houses in my rotation) that these huge picspam posts of the past aren't really feasible anymore. The whole picking out the pictures I want to show, resizing them, posting them on photobucket, copying codes to LJ, writing captions, moving captions when I accidentally place them between the wrong pictures, etc. can easily take me several hours, which is not really very nice, and I've been in picspam-avoidance mode for a while because of that. Sure, I can do it if it's a big behind the scenes post or meta or something that I await almost as eagerly as posting a new chapter. But for posting random pictures, mostly of those families that are no longer featured in the story? Not so much.

So, I needed an alternative way to do it. I've been hearing people say that Tumblr would be a much simpler way to post few pictures here and there than LJ is, so after a bit of pondering, I decided to try it out. I made an account a couple of days ago; here it is if you'd like to see. I just tried posting for the first time, and apparently, since you can just directly select the pictures from your hard drive and skip the whole resize-upload-and-paste-links-around phase, it does feel a lot simpler, and quicker. I suppose it also helps that there's a limit of 10 pictures per post: I have to pick and choose the most interesting ones and really be strict with it, instead of posting 50+ pictures per family (and then wondering why my picspam posts take forever to write...).

I think I'm gonna try this out. Rather than compose huge posts of general day to day picspam here, I may try to post a few pictures per family on there, whenever I feel like it. Hopefully that'd get me into the habit of picspamming again. *crosses fingers* I'll try to post reminders to say "hey, there's picspam for you here" occasionally here too, since I don't suppose my f-list has Tumblrs necessarily. (Feel free to shout if you do, I've likely missed it, then. :) )

Here's hoping that this works! If not, I'll then have to figure out something else. Now, back to my regularly scheduled simming.

First of all, I'm not dead. I've been pretty quiet lately, as work is getting sort of crazy towards the end of the year. It's likely to stay that way until X-mas, as we're determined to get submitted a paper that we've been working on for... way, way too long. If it doesn't happen within two weeks, I'm not going to be a happy camper. So I really hope it does. Today is a rare treat as in I have actually had the whole day off. I haven't really felt like doing anything reasonable or productive, just relaxing has been enough.

Anyway, when I've had time, I've been playing slowly but surely, and I'm working on arranging the next Bookacy chapter. Seeing to my current workload and that the holidays are approaching, I think it's quite unlikely that I'd get a chapter out yet this year. Slightly disappointing, but oh well, life happens.

Anyway, I thought, since I've started the long-awaited teenings finally, that I could show off my teens. I know you haven't probably even seen some of these sims because I've been so terrible at picspamming lately, but... *ahem* yay teens?

(If my die could decide, I'd still have nothing but Pleasure sims, with the occasional Fortune sim thrown in, but gladly, outside the main house, I get to roll again if what I get doesn't please me. Nyah nyah.)

Here they are, in the order in which they've grown up, mostly gen D but there are a few gen Cs who are a generation behind. Only five sims so far, but I'll update this post when more of my kids teenify.

( Generation D teen crew )

Yes, it's September 2nd again. Five years ago today, Author Bookacy walked out of CAS and started her alphabetacy. Can you believe it's been five years? I sure can't. I just calculated the other day that if I keep going at my current pace (about a generation per year on average, or actually a little less), I'll be close to retirement age by the time I finish this challenge. Umm... Well maybe I can then pick up a new hobby when I retire or something?

I was hoping I'd have something for you today, but alas, it turned out I wouldn't. I guess I could have posted the brief interlude, but since it's kind of tightly bound to the spinoff, I want to be absolutely sure I won't be miserably failing with it at least right away before I post that. And I can't be absolutely sure yet. So instead of an update, you get ramblings. Yay?

All in all, I suppose it's going okay on the sims front. I've been working on the side project (you never realize how much work something is before you actually start doing it, do you?) and playing the rotation forward in Alphabetia. I've got about 60 slides written and about 100 arranged for the prologue, so that's something. But there's a long way to go still, and I'm not terribly happy with what I've written so far, it needs work. As for Alphabetia, I've got five more houses to go before I'm done with the spring. In the summer, I'll get to my first teenings of gen. D, which makes me pretty excited. So, not bad progress, actually. Maybe I should post picspam or something, but I haven't felt up for it yet; I'm definitely not posting as many pictures as I have in the rotational picspam, it'd drive us all nuts.

As for real life, well, that's been okay too. Work's work, thankfully that hasn't been utterly crazy lately. And what I'm quite happy about is I've been able to stick to my excercise still. Actually, I took part in a sports event last weekend, a mini-triathlon (about half of the sprint distance competition distances, so nicely fit for a newbie), and didn't die, faint or throw up. So I quite think I deserved a medal - and in fact, I got one. Very nice thinking from the organizers on that one, you wouldn't think receiving a medal for crossing the finish line makes a difference for an adult person, but apparently it does. I was pretty pleased. Me and my sister are already pondering which similar event we'll partake next year, since this one was definitely a success. It was both fun and managed to keep us both motivated and make us stick to practising.

So such is going on here. Slow and steady.

Oh, before I forget: has anyone been having trouble with Boolprop lately? My antivirus has been blocking the site as "harmful" for the past week or so, and I haven't dared to go there despite the warning since I don't know what's up. Just wondering if anyone knows anything.

Okay, so. As I'm currently back on track with my simming stuff, caught up with comments and replies or just about, playing the Alphabetia rotation and actually getting started with the sekrit project, I thought I should maybe post a bit of BTS. It's not a huge thing this go around, for the most part I used actual gameplay pictures and used most of what I took, but I hope you enjoy this mini-BTS anyway.

( BTS this way, spoilery for chapter 37, plus a random piece of awesome at the end )

Okay, back to our regularly scheduled simming, and for me, back to working on the sekrit project!

Finally! I went to exchange the graphics card today. The store was very friendly, they only asked me for five euros more when I exchanged the card that was not broken in any way into a different one, for basically it was all my fault I didn't get it right the first time. Well, my friend plugged the card in, we downloaded the driver, restarted the computer and tried the game - it works! And this time, no blockiness, no grayed out smooth edges, no nothing. And it is pretty and fast, yay!

So, now unless anything else breaks (*knocks on wood* Some bad luck I've had with it, but now it finally looks to be fine. *knocks again*), I should be all set. I think I know what I'm doing this weekend. :)