The Bookacy Family Alphabet Journal

I've taken a bit of a break from my procastrination, and was able to finish another piece for Poker Face, so here it is. For Villains or Heroes? this time, a tiny bit into the future but I wouldn't call it spoilery. It's canon-ish, don't bite me if I change a detail. A part of this may make it into the next chapter.

( On a Tuesday )

I signed up for the Poker Face summer event over at Simspiration, and now that the challenge is officially starting, I thought I could post my hand of cards. I have been given five randomized restrictions, "cards" and my task is to write five pieces each according to one of them, and if I get all five done before Aug. 15, well then I win.

My hand of cards is as follows:

Dialogue-only
Future tense
Diary/journal
1000 words or less
Pictures-only

So I hope you'll be seeing some of these soonish. :)

I'm also playing Alphabetia and posting picspam again, and slowly writing the apocalypse chapter. Progress has been slower than I had hoped (isn't it always?) but it's progress anyway. I'm currently on a little under 60 slides. New text comes out fairly easily, but I'm not sure if I'm happy with it; the beginning of an apocalypse is actually pretty booooring to write/read. Go to work, cross fingers for promotion, eat once a day, wash hands like a maniac, greet everyone who comes over (and try to explain to the reader why there's a horde of sims marching on the lawn, it's supposed to be the end of the world and it's supposed to be dangerous to move about), rinse and repeat. And then again, I don't want to squeeze it onto one slide with "and then he got five more promotions on successive days, washed his hands some more, met some more townies who weren't supposed to be there, and lifted the restriction, the end". And I'm a bit unsure on how the plot, insofar as there is one, should go, too. Oh well, I guess I'll figure it out as I go. The way I always do.

I've got a week of vacation left, and I doubt the apocalypse chapter will be out before it ends. I try to stick to remembering that I've made progress, and stick to trying to make a bit of progress every day. I'll get it done eventually.

Time for the traditional outtakes and BTS post! Not terribly much to talk about, as this chapter has been more towards observational, but I figured we could still have some fun outtakes and babble a bit.

( About 30 pictures )

Alright, I think that's about it for today's BTS. Now it's back to playing the main house and arranging the first actual apocalypse chapter. Happy simming!

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 )

So, umm... Last night, I was playing, and had one of my newly teened sims, David, call the matchmaker for a date. He got the paper girl as his date drop, and they got along pretty well, except wants-wise, they both sort of lost interest pretty soon. Well that's not the problem. The problem is what I saw in the paper girl's want panel after she lost interest:



I thought I took a good picture, but apparently I ingeniously managed to cover the alarming part with the cursor. Well done, Katri. Anyway, yes, the paper girl wants to be friends with one of my cats. Only, the want doesn't have the usual paw icon on it, but the smiley face icon, as if the cat was a human sim. Oops. Also, she seems to have the fear of becoming enemies with the cat, and I suspect that's not entirely right either.

My feeling is that this is probably Not Good, but I don't know How Bad excactly this would be. I haven't seen other signs of doom, such as LTWs on kiddies and toddlers or missing sims or such. I googled a bit, found Mootilda's Hood checker and used it to check Alphabetia. It seems to find sims with no character files, relationships between non-existent sims (probably those same sims), invalid relationships with self, and "Incorrect subject instances" in memories. Especially the relationships issues list is kind of long. Some of those things could probably be fixed with SimPE, but unfortunately I don't think I'm proficient enough with it to try. I suppose I could take a backup and let the hood checker try to remove the things that are not right, to possibly at least delay the doom.

Anyway, there was a question hidden in here somewhere... If you've experienced something like this, how bad would you say this is? Am I in immediate trouble, or only in trouble in the long run? Any insights or advice would be appreciated. :)

Seeing that this is an alphabetacy, it's only expected that I'll need a rebuild at one point or another, quite possibly several. Actually, I've been wondering when the original hood will start to display signs of doom, seeing that I've been playing it since 2007. And I've been tossing around the idea of rebuilding "just in case" when gen. D graduates from college, that is, roughly the first downgrade point. Now I'm wondering if I should do it sooner... I suppose unless I get advice to rebuild Right Now or start seeing clear signs of DOOM, the plan would be to keep playing, and backup early and often, and see how far I get.

Tl;dr: we're DOOMED. Possibly.

I've been trying out this Tumblr thing for my picspams, and well, so far I like it. I've posted picspam on four families now, and instead of the usual 2-3 hours, it has taken me, like, 30 minutes in total, tops. So, there's picspam for you here.

Or, entry by entry:

Phillips 1 2
Riley 1
Thayer 1
Bruenig 1

It's not as much as I used to post, but that's probably for the best. Also, it's substantially more than I have been posting lately. I haven't yet caught up with my playing, but at this rate, I should be able to, and in a reasonable time too. I hope having picspams elsewhere is not terribly inconvienient for you; for me it seems pretty nice so far. The experiment continues.

Also, I've updated the teen crew post with a whopping two teens! Progress, we have some.

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.

*runs by and waves*

Okay, real life in quick summary: I've been working my various bodyparts off on that big paper I mentioned earlier, and not doing much else really. I felt like I might die from that, but as it turns out, I didn't. The thing (FINALLY) got submitted yesterday evening. So now I'm just quickly running by before I disappear for X-mas again. I know I'm terribly behind on all the good stuff, but since I'm keeping the "in-between days", as we call them here, off, I'll get to catch up soon. Yay!

Anyway, the original point of this entry was:



I hope everyone has a nice, relaxing, warm and fuzzy holiday, whichever one it may be! And if you don't celebrate, happy long weekend!

Alright, see you in a few days! *runs off again*

Slightly early just in case, since tomorrow may be a pretty busy day for me.



Happy Birthday, Esme, from me and the Bookacy youngsters! I hope you have a great one!

I'm not sure how much you're around theses days, but in any case, I wanted to post birthday wishes:



Happy Birthday, Jenn, I hope it's a great one!