pajama party...

Please don't mind me, because I'm not sure if this is a worthy post, or just a chance to see Dallas and Lucy in their skivvies, lol! TS3 does them well!

Oh, but wait, what I wanted to talk about was SKINS! Yes, that's what it was. Skins. I found a new set of skin-shade sliders for my lovely alien family! So I thought I'd use Dallas to test them out. Of course, for comparing them to a normal human skin, we'll need Lucy to demonstrate the difference. That's what this is really about. Yes, that's right!... ;)

space wallpaper...

I just felt like making wallpapers! ;)



Another one based on the New Year's story, but with a different image and excerpt.

Sorry, I couldn't do a large screen size version this time, because the original was taken on my laptop (1280-screen), and I didn't want to stretch it and make it all gross. It does look nice centered on black though, if you want to do it that way.

LH Space Screen 1280 x 800
LH Space Screen 1024 x 768

Happy wallpapering! :D

life hack: how not to make your laptop spontaneously combust...

All of you playing games on your laptops - do you prop your laptop up off the desk?

I never thought about this before, because I'd also never used my laptop for anything but simple word processing and blog reading before. But now that I'm playing TS3 on it - a very demanding bitch, let me tell you - I noticed that as I was playing, as my game ran slower and slower, I could hear the fan just dying to cool the poor thing. I felt underneath and found that it was blazing hot - like, burn your hand hot!

Laptops are meant to be held on laps, I suppose, where they get much more space to ventilate on the bottom. But when you run a laptop on a desk, the bottom has no room to breathe.

So, simple problem, simple solution - I tucked a couple stacks of post-its under the corners of my laptop so it would have a half-inch of space to breathe better, and still get to use the laptop at a desk. The machine cooled down almost instantly, and my game ran much, much better!

(People will say it doesn't directly make the laptop perform better, but by freeing up resources that the cooling system was hogging, it kind of does.)

There are trays you can buy that serve this same purpose. Or, if you're lazy and/or cheap, you could just grab a couple stacks of post-its, lol!

ETA: or 10 more ways you can make your own laptop stand! Thanks to Blackcat for the link! :)

Stephanie and Justin, and on hearing voices in my head...

TS2 Justin and Stephanie.

TS3 Stephanie and Justin. (Pardon the bad lighting here. I hadn't planned on sharing these but then I decided I wanted to - don't you hate that, when you get a shot that you hadn't planned on sharing, so it's all unlit and with odd things in the background? lol!)

Ryanne v.2, and here's me *not* talking about the SimSecret...

TS2 Ryanne.

TS3 Ryanne. She's actually been ready since the same time I made TS3 Piper and Hayden, but I was waiting until after I'd posted the first part of the Phoenix family story to unveil her because I wanted the hair to be a surprise. ;)

on the beach

(click for bigger)

Updates on my LH world progress. The main Lake City areas of the map are mostly all plotted out now. That's on the left side there, the city grid you see between the two bridges. That will represent Lake City, West Washington, Old West End, and LCU.

And having finished up the bulk of work on Lake City's streets, I've just now begun work on the Lakeside Heights/Bluewater half of the map. I'm still pretty unsure about what I'll do with Bluewater. I hadn't wanted to erase all those lovely farm fields, but I also don't want Bluewater there in that spot either. And I don't need the farm fields to take up quite so much space. I suppose I better practice my terrain painting then ;)

university in Sims 3

*warning: this is about to be the dorkiest thing you've ever seen, lol!*

I've been spending far, FAR too much time in CAW this week. I need to stop. Like, seriously - I even took the disk out of my drive as a deterrent, lol!

But the good news is, the first segment of my world is plotted and ready to build on! It still needs finishing touches like street lamps 'n such, but I'm going to do those all together at the end, I think. And the district you see here is the future site of LCU!

22 lots already here on campus (planned for: 7 campus buildings, 4 residence lots, 1 science facility, 6 small courtyards or parks, 2 parking lots, 1 campus shops, 1 subway station), and I've even forgot four more lots I need! :o By the time I'm finished with this, my world is going to be so HUGE I can't even play it!!!

Which has gotten me thinking a lot (and getting a million new ideas in my head) about University in Sims 3. (But we have no University for TS3, you say?) No matter though! I'm picking up some old tricks I used to use back in the early TS2 days, before we had TS2 Uni - I faked it! Back in the day, I would just make up lists of classes they had to complete to earn a degree. (This is all outside the game, by the way - it won't make any difference one way or another to actual gameplay.)