...in the last week before NaNoWriMo a couple of totally new characters popped into my head. Don't even have names for them, but they're being very insistent that I tell their story. It's a fantasy piece (well, of course!) and the two main characters are an oversized human mercenary and an elf he inadvertently rescues after a mission he's on falls through. They form an unlikely friendship (unlikely because elves and humans are pretty much enemies - these are NOT Tolkien's elves) and eventually end up becoming a team and having some big adventure together that saves both the human and elven kingdoms from an evil mage/demon/whatever.

( More about Muscles and his Shadow... )

Okay, so I finally gritted my teeth this week and sat down with my notes on how to do the snowflake-method-thing and started fleshing out my novel idea. I'm liking the method so far, it was a bit disconcerting at first to sit down and actually, you know, plan out a story instead of doing the by-the-seat-of-my-pants stuff (with occasional planned story arcs) that I've done for the Soups and the Fishers. But it's definitely helping as far as having any sort of organzied plan for the novel. It's like I used to have a nebulous cloud of ideas for it - some characters, the odd specific scene or fragment of key dialog - and the showflake method is sorting some order out of the chaos.

Mind you my mind still goes "durrrrrr....." when I try to think up some of the specific details, like, oh, say, actual character names, so things like my character sheets are still a mess of placeholders like "Miffy", "Chad", "Uncle", "enemy commander", and so forth, but at least I have a better idea of what's going to happen with (and between) Miffy and Chad in the course of their adventure - and what their adventure is! Chad is still insisting his real name is something simple and plebian like Peter, or at least it's equivalent in the naming structure of the still-somewhat-hazy society he and Miffy are members of.

( A little more about the two main characters... )

Yes, I'm signing up for it again.

( My mission, if I choose to accept it... )

I like making tiny houses, which means a lot of the time there isn't room for more then a very small staircase. Marvine's ladder stairs from MTS2 frequently come into play as a result. I've recently recoloured them to match my Victorian build mode items, and since Marvine has "no paysite" terms of use, am posting the results here.

Enjoy!

I love the stair cutouts from Simlogical, and recently did up a bunch of recolours of them to match my Victorian build mode items. Since as far as I know their creator has "no paysite" terms of use, I'm posting the recolours here.

Enjoy!

The job search is going reasonably well so far - at least I have a lot of job applications circulating now and hope I'll actually get at least a phone interview some time soon.

And I've finally found the time to resume cross-posting my "A Fisher's Tale" from TSR to here. Be a long while yet until it's caught up to the original thread and I start posting in parallel, but at least it's no longer languishing!

Apart from the job search not really much happening right now.

I think I'll spend this week working on an environmental piece for my portfolio; there's a partially completed decrepit industrial hallway scene I worked on for a class project that just needs a little more work to become something decent.

And maybe I can salvage the window and door meshes to make something for TS2 out of...

Handed in my last couple of assignments just a bit over an hour before the Sunday midnight deadline that our teachers had given us.

( Cut to protect the indifferent... babbling and pictures! )

So it started when my sister linked a video on Facebook, of some guy playing violin... it was a bit odd, starts slow, it's the middle of the video before it really gets going... but it intrigued me enough to start following sidebar links, and eventually read up on the performer, Owen Pallet, on Wikipedia, who turns out to be a local Toronto boy working under the name "Final Fantasy" - yes, a nod to the game series of the same name.

Just about did a spit-take all over my monitor when I saw the name of his second album, "He Poos Clouds", hahaha!



Some really nice work out there by him. And he's performed with Patrick Wolf, too, though all the footage I've seen of that so far seems to be crappy cell phone camera work.

So I gave it another shot on the weekend. Decided to grow up and move out Octavian's daughters and see how their personalities and the "storytelling mode" stuff works out. The insane evil inappropriate neat sister sounded the more fun of the two...

( Some pictures... )

The game still rates a big fat "meh!" overall from me.

So I gave in and pre-ordered The Sims 3 last week after my student loan money finally came through, I even popped for the collector's edition so i could have the nifty plumbbob USB key thing, to make my inner geek happy.

I've played the game several times now, and overall... overall... well, I wasn't particularly excited about it even before it came out, and now that it has, I'm still not excited.

Oh, it has a few nice features, and as you might guess from my love of the repository technique in TS2 I kind of like some of the flexibility of the pattern tools, but... geez... it's just SO damn fugly. Every time I look at it, it just strikes me as such a giant step backwards from the graphic quality of TS2.

( Blabbering on about things that bug me in TS3... )

I like Marvine & BeOSBoxBoy's bodybuilder meshes, since it's nice to have a little variety in body shape in my game. My favourite line of them is the "Slim" bodybuilder. Just one problem... not nearly enough variety in what's available to dress my boys up in! Thanks to the generosity of aikea_guinea , who has given me permission to fold, spindle, and mutilate her textures, I'm hoping to (slowly!) remedy that.

Here's my first offering, several recolours of the SlimBB Turtleneck mesh (by Marvine and FourTSeven)



Click here to download the recolours.

Mesh can be found here on Male-Order Bride.
Warning - Male-Order Bride contains adult content!

I'm increasingly pleased with how a_fishers_tale  looks - the weird blip yesterday that changed the initial AFT blue colour scheme to a green one I was trying out on my personal journal had serendipitous results, since I then decided to try out a sepia colour scheme instead, to go along with the nostalgic feel I'm aiming for in a lot of the story. I'm really liking how it's turning out now, for just a customized version of one of Dreamwidth's standard templates.

Though I do wish I knew enough about style sheets to fix some things with this particular style that are bugging the crap out of me, mainly in that right hand sidebar, like how one of the titles doesn't match the rest. I also want to get rid of the kerning on the text (which I don't mind on the subsection titles but loathe on the entries and tag cloud), remove the indent on those bulleted entries so they move over to the left, fix how understated and over-look-able the "a_fishers_tale" line is, and a few other odds and ends that make me frown and grrrrr mentally every time I see them.

But like I say, overall, I'm happy with it for now :)

Now if only I could find something I was happy with for my personal journal!

Scraped up another $5 I could spare and popped for a separate paid journal for A Fisher's Tale. Should be able to throw more money at it before that expires :)

So I've moved what I had posted in my personal DW journal over to there instead. Now I'm playing with style sheets again to find a style and colour set I like more then my first atttempt! Still need to play with the style of AFT a bit more as well, but no rush on it.

Okay, so after all the TSR server outages recently I decided to start cross-posting A Fisher's Tale off site... I find it very difficult to write if I can't post as I get bits finished, it makes me all twitchy. Plus the paranoia of, yes, yes, I know the guys have backups, but that still doesn't stop me feeling paranoid about "what if the forum server decided to commit seppuku and they couldn't restore from backup - I'd lose everything!".

( Just a mini-rant and some grumbling... )

Not much to say yet, really... just that I'm here on Dreamwidth and getting things set up :)

I know, it was actually Day 8 several days ago. I have a good excuse though... bloody homework!


( Ranting about homework followed by (eventually) the 8th thing that makes me happy... )

The seventh thing that makes me happy... creating objects for games, especially when said objects turn out to look even better then I'd imagined when they were just in my head and not in the computer yet.



( Creation past, present, and future... )

Posting this a wee bit post-deadline, been a busy, busy day with homework and then class. Keeping this one brief! The sixth thing that makes me happy is... playing computer games! Been happily addicted to gaming for far too long now. They're fun, and their entertainment value is pretty good compared to, say, going to a movie or similar. I've thoroughly enjoyed too many games to even begin listing them here, suffice to say that my current biggest addictions are The Sims 2 and Lord of the Rings Online, and I still like to load up Everquest and raid something when I can.

The fifth thing that makes me happy is writing. It's just some pretty soap-opera-ish fan fiction, based on the characters I control the lives of in a game called The Sims 2, and is posted on the storytelling forums of a sims-related website, The Sims Resource.

( Blither blather... )