After the Calling

Oy. I’m just so out of it. I have some pretty outrageous food allergies, and I let my sister buy me some gluten-free, dairy-free, ice cream a few days ago. But I was a jackass and didn’t read the label. Turns out it had soy and processed sugar in it, and about 30 other things that I’m also allergic to. So I’m pretty much down and out for the count. And I’ll probably be feeling like poo for a few more days. For that reason, I’m kind of iffy about updating, because I really couldn’t pay as much attention to this as I wanted to. I seriously phoned it in. I was too busy cursing the ice cream heavens.

<complaining>It’s really long. I know I said I’d be sticking to shorts, but I lied to myself. It’s also very sit-and-talky. Sit-and-talky things always suck. It’s a law. 

Not to mention, I hate stretch skeleton, so I’ve been using alternative methods to make some of my guys look enormous, but apparently I haven’t been using the same methods during all my picture-taking sessions, because Chauncey goes back and forth between being a pipsqueak and a humungoid.

To make matters worse, Lacuna Coil and Depeche Mode both released their albums this week, and I couldn’t be more unimpressed. Especially Depeche. I mean, I could really smack them. Hard. Don’t disappear for 3 years and then pop back in just to say hello, you technotronic-abusing buttbags. Dammit Depeche, you’re worse than ice cream. </complaining>

On the other hand, the idea of working on this later is sooooo unappetizing, so I’m just gonna post what I have and deal. Sorry.

Hello there. So… I had never really thought about doing this, but a few weeks ago, I sat and gave a full, in-depth tutorial to my friend about how I posed some of my more recent story shots. She turned to me and said: “Too bad I’m not a sim story writer, or else that would have been really useful”. For some reason her snark didn’t tell me that I was talking to the wrong audience, and I just called her a jerk and kicked her out of my house… although she didn’t leave, she just sat in my den and ate all my hummus… >:(

Anyhoo, the sim secret (still don’t know what the balls a sim secret is) this past weekend really had me tweaking out, and since it seemed to be geared towards my poses (?) I decided I’d post a “basics” tutorial. I’ve lately been avoiding poseboxes like the plague. Whenever they come out, I download them, test them, and then despise them. I really prefer in-game animations to find my poses, but it is a bit challenging at times, and I do have to put aside about 24+ hours every week to maintain this story. But if others want to try, I figured it can’t hurt to help.

I’ve never written a tutorial and I don’t know how this will come across, but I just hope that it’s helpful. So… yah. This tutorial can also be found over at livejournal’s We Heart Overlays, and if S2WA Exchange wants it, I can put over there too.

Dudes! You guys ripped open the comments this weekend! Sorry, I disappeared. My cable went out in my house of Saturday, and the company can’t send someone over until today. I just about DIED. But then the bof and my dogs ganged up on me and dragged me away to this faraway land known only as “outside”.  I came to work early today (poo), so that I could upload Part V of The Lie. I also got around to the comments, which have been particularly hilarious lately.

On an extra random note, I don’t know much about live journal.  I’m not good with social networks and there are just too many things to click and just too much going on, so in general, I don’t really hang around over there. However, thank you aching_maserati (please come back and tell me what an aching maserati is.) for instilling a new obsession in me. There is a life and death, heaven and hell, love and hate surrounding the sims 2 over there, and I had NO IDEA. There is violence and angst and wank (???). I don’t know what the hell a sims secret is, or how something can be a secret if everyone knows about it, but whoever left the secret about my story over on that lj forum last week… I’m floored. You made me tweak out so hard. I’m just so glad you’re even reading, so thank you, but really next time, you don’t have to go through all that. You could just… leave a comment. I’ll appreciate just as much .

Anyhoo, Part V. There are some superior levels of background/setting/deco discontinuity from previous chapters in some places, fyi. My downloads folder and I are having some artistic differences. I just want it to be smaller. It just wants to piss me off. Update below!

Hey hey hey! Soooooooooooooooo, it is my pleasure to inform you that the cool beans over at the Sims 2 Writers’ Alliance have adopted me into their awesome little family. I just want to thank them for reaching out, because it’s the community that really makes the sims 2 worthwhile.  This should be really cool .

I’m about to sidebar the mess out of them as soon as I can figure out how to sidebar the mess out of something. AND big thank you to S.B. for making me realize that there is no easy way to contact me. So, now, if you glance over to your right… behold an easy way to contact me.

And on a less cool, random note, if you’re interested, I finally put up Salem Beckett in the character power profiles. I had a flashback somewhere of this scene in one of my updates, and you may notice a few differences, but they’re not enormous. Cool Beans.

I finally got to linking all my pages together. At 3 am. I work best during the uncivilized hours of the day (LIES).

Anyhoo, you can now find previous (<<) links at the top of all my pages, and next (>>) links at the bottom. I recently went through the story myself, and had to do a lot of clicking and link bullpucky. It was like… slap me, this is tedious. (BTW, people who have read my story from the beginning… thank you… you are a real trooper. I had some crazy annoying quirks)

So the links should make it easier to move through the story. I also cut some of my longer parts in half. This is moreso for the newbies, but it should now be super easy to find your place if you’re behind or ahead, or whatever.

In general news, I’ve decided I’m going to try going back to shorts. My updates are really, really long, and I think some of the story is getting lost in the length. But then again, my definition of “short” is like, seven pages worth of text as opposed to around fifteen. We’ll see what happens.

I hate, hate, hate making plans, because they never work out. So, I know I was supposed to post IV yesterday and V today and Salem’s power profile sometime among those days, but I fail. Mainly because I was putting the pictures up and something told me to reread some of my earlier chapters. Turns out I’m writing myself into one huge, enormous, stupid contradiction that can negate half the story. Mainly everything in the beginning. So I had to revise some stuff. A lot of stuff. Everything from this chapter on, pretty much.

In one way, this is good, because this chapter, and possibly all subsequent chapters, will be significantly shorter. Happy times! Right? Right.

Salem isn’t going up just because I haven’t had a chance to edit her due to all of the screaming at the computer and tweaking out I’ve been doing. She’ll be up within the week though.

Warnings: Profanity.

OKAY! Sorry I disappeared from the interwebs. I just got slammed at work kind of unexpectedly (It’s 6 am. I’m going to work in 20 minutes. I could stab something.). It didn’t help that my computer was being a jackass. BUT NOW IT’S A FIXED JACKASS. I got it back last night and I’m under strict directions to “Leave it alone.” I have a registry editor installed, and I may or may not have caused this whole thing… by editing my registry while not knowing what the shit I was doing… but we’re going to pretend that I did know what the shit I was doing and continue to blame the computer for being a jackass. And I now officially need to make a clear distinction between my home comp and my work comp… like officially.

In more important news: I found a program that converts my pics from the lovely but abrasive PNGs to less offensive JPEGs without much quality loss. At least I think I did. The program is kind of confusing and has the worst user interface… and there are no directions. “Help” takes you… nowhere.

But whatever, the pics are jpegs… I think… and are saved for web… I think. I’ll try to keep up with this method if it continues to work… or works at all… because I didn’t realize that PNGs are bastards. Even after you compress them. Compressed bastards. Let me know about the pics.

I put myself on a schedule that I want to maintain because this chapter is kind of long, so I’m going to put up III B today. IV sometime tommorrow. And V on Sun. I’m also going to put up Salem’s power profile sometime this weekend. So basically I’m going to inudate you with this stuff until you can’t stand it anymore.

Graphics are schizophrenic, at best.

Yes, bad stuff. Computer did not respond to the usual boyfriend cooing. The bof even took off his shirt, which is like a last resort, and even perctorals didn’t work. I mean it worked on me, but I’m not the one who it was geared towards. XD. The damn thing isn’t letting me transfer anything to anything else, preferring to bogard all it’s information and make me want to smack it. This is actually affecting my work life too… not by much… but enough for me to take tomorrow off because I just can’t get anything done *dramatically fans self*. Actually, it’s so I can pick it up after the bof takes it to work with him (he’s a techie, computering, programming, geekazoid… my fav) and lets his “fix-it” dept. take a look. Hopefully, they fix it immediately so I can go home, plug it in, and pretend none of this ever happened.

Yeah. That’s what we’re going to do.

My computer is jerking my chain, and I’m having some issues uploading. My plan was to put up Part III (B) today, and Part IV tommorrow, but at this point, I’m just going to post whatever this piece of plastic and metal lets me. Will keep you updated.

Edit: Okay, I originally thought my hard drive was shot, but I’m staring at it, and it frickin’ fine. I don’t know what’s wrong but I was trying to transfer my photos to my laptop so I could throw them online using a less evil machine, and my desktop basically kicked me in the face. Really flipped out. So the comp wizard, aka the boyfriend, is on his way to do what he does best. What he does best usually involves pressing two random keys on the keyboard while cooing sweet nothings to the moniter and subsequently fixing everything. Afterwards he’ll fuss at me with some mumbo jumbo about not messing around with the registry, and not deleting hidden folders from my C: drive, and not throwing my computer out the window… you know technical stuff that I don’t understand. All this while the computer looks on, gloating. They’re having an affair, those two. I know it.