The Bookacy Family Alphabet Journal

*waves*

Ummm... Yeah. I thought I'd peek in to note, I'm, you know, still alive and around.

( I'm actually not as un-cheerful as my avatar there, but... )

So, that's what's going on. As a final note, I know I also haven't been commenting on LJ, I've been reading but haven't felt up to posting anything. When I get my butt in gear I'll have some catching up to do with story comments. Just to let you know, I have been reading and I have been enjoying, but I'll get to the commenting later. Promise. :)

Alright. Sorry about rambling so long and rather aimlessly, getting that off my chest sure felt good. Now I think I'll go try to write today's half a slide, and then I'd better head to bed. G'night!

Happy birthday from me and this power-duo of girls! I hope you have a great one!

This is my first sim_scenes entry ever. If anyone is unfamiliar with it, the idea is to tell a small story using at most ten pictures and no words, from a given prompt of three words. This time the prompt was "haunting - pain - vampires". I felt inspired so here goes. I'm of course not completely happy with it, but hopefully the story is clear. :)

( A little ghost story )

Happy this year, all!

I thought I'd start the year with the little funny story about what happened when Elias Terrano got married. Just for fun.

( So, what happened when Elias Terrano got married? )

As for the Bookacies, I've now gone back to Alphabetia and started with the growing up and making over the oldest of generation C. Chip grew up yesterday with his girlfriend Sunny, and Sunny grew up in the most unfortunate outfit so far. With that, I also discovered that I should probably do a CC cull soonish. Apparently I've now got so much that my computer is starting to have a hard time with it. I managed to crash it twice by going shopping on a community lot and trying to buy clothes for two sims at a time. That was too much for the poor computer. But surely I can find stuff there that I don't really use.

Anyway, next up is the growing up of Corinna, I believe. And because I'm anxious to get going, I won't do a short rotation in the main hood but will go directly into growing up the main bunch of the generation after only giving the older ones a few days' head start. Then, there will be weddings and babies, hooray! (So far, two generation C sims are pregnant. Cho has been since before the hard drive switch, and yesterday Sunny and Chip got themselves riskied up on their first woohoo as adults. That makes my first risky.) So I believe the next picspam I need to do will be on some growing ups and makeovers. :)

Looking at the preview of this post, it looks like I need to do something about my pictures yet. It seems that the resized versions get a little unclear on the details, like the text. Sorry about that, I'll need to work on this.

Edit: It was the settings of my resize program, I turned up the quality option and now they're much clearer. Pictures are now replaced by better quality ones. Apparently the text is really so tiny that it's hard to read even if it's not blurry, I will have to try to remember this when doing future picspams.

So, I've got good news and bad news.

The good news is: my game is up, I've downloaded SimPE, Clean Installer and CEP, checked my hack situation, re-downloaded some floors and walls that were installed before I got Clean Installer, and placed empty neighborhood templates. The game runs, and my sims seem to be safe and happy, and so far I haven't even noticed CC oddities. So after all the installation and careful tuning, my game works. Hooray!

The bad news is, my picturetaking isn't doing so good. I don't seem to get Gadwin to work. Or more precisely, I can't get it to work with my sims. Here's the thing: if I press the PrintScreen button when I'm in Windows, possibly with different programs open and so on, I get a picture just fine. If I launch my game in full screen mode as I usually do, and while in the game, take a picture, that doesn't work. When I go back to Windows to see the picture, I find that Gadwin has taken a picture of my Desktop, and not TS2. Only the game icon shows in the toolbar, so the picture I get is as if I'd alt-tabbed out of the game and then gotten the screenshot.

I've tried tuning the Gadwin settings, tried different "source" options but with no luck. I've tried changing the in-game setting for "screen size" (a friend suggested it might have to do with resolution differences), and while some settings looked better than others, none of them helped Gadwin. The only way I found I could get Gadwin pictures from my game was to run it in windowed mode. And otherwise I might be fine with playing so, but apparently the game then opens itself in a window which is maybe one fourth of the size of my screen and the size of which I haven't been able to change.

Has anyone had the same problem with Gadwin? I'm suspecting that it might be that now, after the hard drive change, I got Windows 7 for this computer, while previously it was running Vista - and perhaps Gadwin somehow doesn't like that. Or maybe it's something simple that I'm overlooking? If anyone has an idea what I'm doing wrong, help would be much appreciated. Thanks. :)

If nothing else, I suppose I will just have to fall back on the in-game camera, as I didn't particularly like Fraps. It's a little disappointing after just having gotten used to the nicer picture quality and all, and not having finished the painting recolor project yet. (Well that's one eternity project anyhow.) On the other hand, I would not particularly miss having to edit out action queues from every other picture just because I'm forgetful. Oh well.

... happy holidays, whichever one you may wish to celebrate! And if you don't, then happy weekend! I hope you have a very nice and relaxing time.

It's a little early perhaps, but I wanted to post this before I go (mostly) offline for a few days. Will be having some well-earned rest & relaxation.

So yeah. Happy holidays, hope you have a good one! See you afterwards!

Well, hello there. I've again been quiet a little while. Partly I've been busy in real life (returned from a work trip on Saturday night), and partly I've been working on chapter 32.

And, speaking of chapter 32, I proudly present... chapter 32!



It took a little longer than I had hoped (when doesn't it?) but now it's time to finally resolve that nasty cliffhanger! And yes, I believe it's time for me to do a little bit cave-hiding again...

Also, now that I'm done with this update, I am to the point where I need to declare a hiatus. Not a terribly long one, fortunately. If you've read my previous ramblings, you'll know that I had some computer trouble earlier. That's now all fixed, but as a result, I don't have TS2 installed on either my desktop or my laptop, and have to wait until I get the rest of my disks back. Which should be over Christmas. Until then, the Bookacies will remain on my external hard drive and wait for their time.

Thanks to the help from my computer-savvy friend, my simming computer is back up and running since yesterday evening. Beautifully, I might add. It's way faster and doesn't make the distressing "crunch crunch" noises it used to. I'm only now installing software and whatnot, but I'm feeling so relieved that the old hard drive didn't blow up and I didn't lose anything. *knocks on wood*

For now my beloved simmies are packed up on my external hard drive and will stay there until I get the rest of my disks back and can install TS2 again. Meanwhile, I think I have everything I need for the next Bookacy chapter, so I should be able to write it without my game. I hope I haven't forgotten anything essential.

So, now I think off I go to write some more of chapter 32 - after I've gotten to the comments I owe.

Now this was going to be a happy post about how I had a good, long play session today and how my heiress is permaplat and on top of it pregnant. How interesting plotzy things happened. How I only have one small scene to shoot before I have everything I need for the next chapter. Until I found out that I don't have a single picture of any of it.

Yeah, apparently Gadwin turned itself off without warning (or possibly I forgot to check that it's on before I started playing), and I didn't get a single picture of today's play session. And that only included my heiress getting permaplat and a major event related to plot. Excuse my French but this fucking sucks.

I suppose the upside is that since I've been fearing a blowup of the computer, I've been making frequent backups, so I can go back to backup taken before today's play and replay the events to get the pictures. I'm not going to leave a gap of this size and this much importance in the story because of lost pictures, dammit! But it does mean more work, in principle futile work, and it's not going to feel authentic because it's not really how it happened. I do, all the time, shoot scenes that actually then never happened, but having to fake major legacy events like these just sucks.

And I thought I only had one more scene to shoot before I can just back everything up and ask my friend to come over and switch the sucky hard drive with a properly functioning one. And tomorrow, instead of shooting that one final scene and backing up the computer, I'm going to be replaying today's work. I accomplished a lot, several sims reached careertops and all these minor things happened too, I can't even remember what everything happened without the pictures. Great.

Man, I was going to go to bed so happy for a little while.

Late last night, this happened:

( Fresh happenings (minor spoiler included) under the cut )