February 2085: The Snowflake Ball (Ruby)

February, 2085. Ruby McCullough is 17, Claude is 12. Kevin Pittman is 19. Lily is 12.


"Smile," Barbara said, holding the camera up at her son and his girlfriend.

Claude's grades were ridiculous, and it was a miracle his father was even letting him go to prom. But they knew it would only disappoint Lily if he didn't go, and she looked so lovely. Her parents were lovely, and rich, and had five children in the school district. Barbara knew it never hurt to have powerful connections when her husband going for school board president. Best not disappoint one of their daughters.

Claude and Lily smiled for the camera.

no, THIS one is not the Sim story...

As you'll see here in a minute, I've decided to separate the postings of my story Sims and my playing Sims. Because I'm flighty and indecisive like that, lol!

But really it's because the storylines for my play Sims are being held up by the lethargic storylines of my SSA sims. As Sims, they all live in the same world, but I'll be posting about the SSA bunch over there, with proper stories and stuff, and the Alt-LH set will get picspam and gameplay updates over here. The SSA Sims may get picspam updates over here too if they're not going to be used for the story. You'll likely see some of the Sims in the background of others too, since they technically all live in the same world, same universe, same timeline and stuff.

I just know that I want one of these neighborhoods to actually make some progress for once! So this time I'm keeping my book storylines vs. blog storylines tightly checked. No stray stories, no tangents, no added storylines. Because you know, I've got these other play Sims to blog about too. And I thought I'd work on bringing my nerdy resident databases over here too.

Anyway, so that's what's up! Carrying on! :)

TS3 Uni comes to Lakeside Heights

For the record, I am not supposed to have this yet, lol! But I was too brain-dead to write last night anyway, so I installed it!

In the real story, Nora is supposed to be about 25 in 1985 LH, but she's also supposed to be at the tail end of her Doctorate degree, so there's a lot of schooling she's missed. I don't have much of a history built up for her, and part of my reason for turning her into a Sim in the first place was that I wanted to get to know her better for Matt's novel, so I thought it would be fun to kind of "flash back" to her college years. (I'm far enough ahead in the real hood that I've got PLENTY of story material to keep me posting while I play with Nora at Uni.) So here's 18/19 year-old Nora, many years before she met Matt, just starting her first year of university in 1979.

She always looks a little terrified of something, lol!

on the play schedule of Alt-LH in TS3

I'm finally settling on playing 24 Sim-days per year, which gives me 2 days per story month. I started out trying to play with half of that (12 Sim-days per year), but my seasons ended up being SO short. This way, my season length is 6 days, and that feels perfect for me! Pregnancies will last 18 Sim-days, and my standard lifespan will be 1560 Sim-days. Also, now that I have about 18 households, two days per month was needed to visit everyone I wanted to, get story pics for the stories, and still do gameplay things like seasonal festivals and birthdays.

I do NOT want to go any slower than this though. I'm holding myself to that, lol! I'm writing and playing this story/neighborhood for fun this time, so I want the pace to be just fast enough that I don't get bogged down in the storytelling, but just slow enough that I can actually pay attention to the details of their little pixel lives.

Yearly play schedule (where "???" marks a not-yet-decided Sim or Household I'll follow):

LH stuff: replacement starry sky

Please note: There is now a revised version of this mod. Stretching is fixed. Go here instead. 

Did I not share these already? lol! I think I worked on this before my big laptop meltdown last spring, and forgot I even made it.

So these are my stars. I can't remember if I've even shared a picture of them before. When I made them, I wanted some that were smaller, more like TS2 stars were, and more realistic. These are a bit more plentiful than what you would see with your own naked eye, but they're a lot less plentiful than the default Sims 3 sky.

Depending on the angle though, sometimes they look more stretched out and skewed (see 2nd picture). The sky map mystifies me. It's not a solid texture like the TS2 sky map was. In TS3 it gets all segmented and thrown around randomly, like a kaleidoscope.

this is not LH, #1: I'm a hot firefighter

How this started was that I just wanted a family to play. Since my neighborhoods usually get so bogged down that I never get to see anyone actually grow up. And my stories get so heavy that I hardly get to really play. So here, I wanted a world I could just play.

I started with Micah and Mariah. I was going to play them fast and silly, and let them actually grow up. But my story-progression never immigrated any Sims to fill up the town, so I ended up needing to move some families in. Rather than spend time creating new families, I just tossed in a few more familiar faces from my family bin. And then I threw in a couple more. I tossed them in and I paid no mind to what they did, what jobs they took, or who they made friends with. Before I knew it, I had this alternate dimension LH, and what they ended up doing was more crazy and fun than I could have expected! They went crazy! And they started interacting and causing the most ridiculous drama that I just *had* to share.

I'm not sure how much of these episodes will make sense for those who have not followed Lakeside Heights. It's funny to me because I know who these people were, and how much that both relates and clashes with what they're doing here. But who knows? It might be amusing still.

There are not many rules here. There is no concrete time like there is in my other stories. I'm mostly leaving SP on in the background, as this is sort of an experiment in play. For some of the families, I've marked them for no moving though, because they move so fast it kind of makes my head spin! Otherwise, they'll just live and age and breed, and I think some of their offspring might be able to make townies for my new hood.

Disclaimer: please note that none of this has anything to do with any real stories, blogged, published, or otherwise. This is all alternate-dimension kind of stuff.

Onto the shenanigans.

this is not a new sim story :\

Really, it's not a new Sim story, but I might be going a little bit crazy, lol! Or maybe it's because I had so much time off Simming, I somehow feel like I need to make up for it or something. But, as some of you might have heard me babbling about my "play neighborhood", I thought I'd tell you a little about it. Especially since I may like to share some little mini "non-stories" that happen there.

This is truly not a Sim story though. Unlike my other soon-to-be Sim-illustrated story, which despite my very best efforts, is turning out to be a full-on Sim story no matter how hard I try to stop it, lol! I'm hopeless, folks.

But this one, for real, is not a Sim story. This is going to be ridiculousness. I am going to blog about it a bit, but it won't be very story-like. I'm not sure how many "episodes" there will be. I have three in the works to start. There might be more to tell, or there might not. We'll see how long it holds my attention.

This is Petaluma, which is a lovely downloadable world by Docsprock. In relation to Lakeside Heights, this is going to be a real place, just like some of my characters come from other real places. Petaluma is in California wine country. In relation to LH time, my Petaluma is going to be kind of unspecified. They're going to age faster in Petaluma than they do in LH, but there will still be some crossing over. Kids who grow up in Petaluma may decide to move to LH in adulthood, or likewise, kids who grow up in LH may decide to move to Petaluma.

I suppose I'm sort of missing the ability to create subhoods, and extend the reach of my little pixel world. But because TS3 Sims can take their memories and skills and most things with them, and their family relationships are easy enough to recreate, this sort of works out. I've got my mods to help me out as well, and beyond that, there will be a lot of "faking it".