Alternate life: Pets

I'm due for an update on the story blog, but then Pets came out. I could not resist.

As I always do for a new EP, I made a new family from my story characters. This one stars Paula and Alex.


Aw, look at them out for their first ride together.

The animations for the horses are gorgeous. I took a couple of videos that I mean to put up somewhere (probably on Tumblr). The animations are just so awesome and smooth and realistic.

The first ride went okay. Both sims got a skill point in riding their first time out, so things were a little less awkward by the time they got home.

Well almost.


Oops. Rico was in a bad mood, so he tossed Alex. Yay, that's one for their memories.

Rico is supposed to be Alex's horse. Don't they look good together?


But at some point, things went all to hell and everyone ended up deciding who they were going to bond with. (Isn't that always the way?)



Beauty started running around the house, bringing up her racing skill, so Alex has started training her as a racing horse. She actually wants to race, and had a wish to join a beginner's racing competition. Who am I to say no to that?

She broke out into the lead on her first race and managed to stay there and bring home their first win.


They celebrated that night with a hug.

Rico also raced (actually, he entered a competition before Beauty), but he came in third. Still respectable, but he's taken to jumping. And Alex, being this is improbable sims world is doing both, racing and jumping. He's self employed as a horseman, so these shows get them money which they need. (Although I'm cheating up a storm for needs and stuff, I am not giving them money unless they need to take out a loan, which they'd have to pay back, plus interest.)

I also made sim versions of our cats.


They look pretty close, but Trouble, the gray cat, has his stripes backward. My trouble has dark fur and light stripes. Plus a white chin. I'm going to have to fix that soon.

This shot above had my boyfriend and I laughing. The animations looked exactly like the way our cats play. Even had one cat on the ground, swinging a paw as the other prepared to pounce. Such amazing animations!


Another shot of Trouble rolling around in the bathroom. (All that's missing is someone's unmentionables. My cat is a perv.)


Yep, I went there, lol. Alex and Danger.


Good kitty. (Perverted subtext? I don't think I know what you mean.)


Alex, of course, is very much in love with Paula. Try to keep these two apart. (Okay, it's not that hard, since after Alex's long day, he usually smells and is tired.)


I meant Beauty for Paula.

But she hasn't been riding as much as Alex has. She stays at home writing. (It was what she wanted to do on the first day along with ride.) I did make her make a little garden, so she could start growing treats for the animals and making fresh food for the family.

Also, I love this shot. The new world is beautiful!

After a while of keeping the horses locked up, I let them out so they could run around and be free. They stay near the house. The problem is that they get hungry.


Instead of going back into her little pasture and eating her hay, she chose to eat Paula's tomatoes. Bad Beauty!


Plant gone! Helpfully, a tool tip tells you, when you hover the mouse over the plant, who ate your plant. Later on, the other tomato plant got eaten by Rico.



I am in love with Appaloosa Plains! I think I'm going to have to move over the other alternate life families and have them join Paula and Alex here. Wild horses now roam all over the place, plus you're likely to run across dear. Have not see a racoon yet, but I'm waiting!

The Saga of the Two brothers

How better for me to play Generations than to create families of the sims of two of my favorite characters?

First up, Brandon and Pat.




And poor little Melissa in the cutest creepiest PJs ever.


Her parents are so cute it's gross. They're going to be embarrassing when she's older.

As in another incarnation of him, Brandon is a firefighter.


But this here is one of my favorite pictures of him. He got home after work and Pat and Melissa were gone. So what's he do? Start playing with Melissa's toys of course. Childish sims are so cute!


See? How cute! I should share video of him doing this. He starts making noises and everything while he plays.



Another gratuitous shot (as they all are). Brandon had just woken up and stepped into the living room and Pat went up to compliment him on his appearance. He's wearing boxer shorts here, so I guess she likes that. I love his thought bubble like he's thinking how lucky he is to be married to her. Awww!



The whole family out for a stroll. I love the stroller though they take it out at stupid times sometimes. Like I sent someone to teach their baby to walk on the front yard and after they stepped down the porch brought out the stroller to walk a few feet. Still it's so cute when I send the entire family shopping.




And of course we're dealing with both brothers. For some reason, I thought it'd be fun to give Jimmy glasses. Perhaps that's just a personal bias?



And if I'm dealing with Jimmy, then I'm dealing with Mary too.

But in this alternate reality, they already have kids. Remember the last one? Unfortunately, she went invisible, most likely due to some sort of corruption.



So let me introduce teen Kaya (v. 2.0) and Allison.

Kaya is not Mary's, she's only Jimmy's daughter. This is actually cannon. She's mentioned here (for those who read Ruin). Jimmy was a young dad. It wasn't his choice if you can believe it, he was jumped by the girl and Kaya was the result. He was only about 15, and I imagine that Kaya is now 15 here.

In the sims story in my head, she's just come to live with Jimmy and Mary. Right now she isn't sure how she feels about Mary or her little sister, as cute as her little sister is.

Here she sets up a prank just for Mary. Jimmy, with some crazy innate father second sense, came downstairs to scold her, but when he got to the bathroom...


Mary shooed him out and sealed her doom. He went off to go clean.


Oops. Sadly, she went back and washed it all out. It would've been awesome if she'd left her hair pink like that!

Kaya is actually a pretty good teen most of the time. She asked to go to a friend's house and they did homework together.


Kaya also has the very large master bedroom/study, which I think her father gave her partially out of guilt. It's her own space, plus because the other two rooms are on the other side of the house, Jimmy and Mary can be near the baby.

Kaya's room/the study:



I'm not great at decorating. I just wanted to have some fun, and Kaya strikes me as a girl with some personality who likes bright bold colors.

I left my sims alone while setting things up, and wouldn't you know it, both brothers knocked up their wives!


Mary and Pat ran into each other at the bookstore. Gah, I LOVE pregnant sims! Plus it's nice that in Sims 3, both women recognize each other as sisters in law. They're family, basically.

Mary announced her pregnancy to Pat.


And Pat looked appropriately excited for her. I just thought it was cute. Did she think Mary was just getting fat?


Then she threw this face. Like she's saying, "Those boys."


Next time on "As the Sims sim":



Brandon has a minor heart attack. Facing fires is nothing compared to his wife having a baby. (Also, he was asleep and it was three in the morning, why did he feel a need to hop out of bed and change into his work clothes to face this crisis? Training?)



Bonus-- bath time shots!



What? You thought I meant of the babies? ;) I'm just showing off the chest hair.

I don't know what she did...

...but Mary totally upset Brandon's family and got kicked out of his house. Oddly, between her and Jimmy, he's the mean spirited one that always insults people including his brother, yet she gets tossed out.


That's Melissa kicking her out. Before that it was Melissa's little sister who had an issue. I suppose it's a glitch, but still pretty funny. Sweet Mary causing a ruckus! Look out!


I just adore than an entire family can go for a visit. Here's Jimmy taking little Kaya over to Brandon's.


Here's the little family before Kaya aged up.


Here is Kaya aged up.

Still hard to tell who she looks like, but she has Mary's eye color, and it looks like Jimmy's nose.

Their life is a little too peaceful. It's very nice to play. Mary is an author, but she also takes a lot of photographs. I've been having a lot of fun with that, and she makes quite a bit of money at the consignment shop I've added to Coconut Island. She's the bread winner of the family, that's for sure. Jimmy comes in handy to fix stuff and cook.


I've been having the most fun with Ambitions starring:




Yep, Paula as...



...a ghost buster. Okay, this is the dramatic shot she asked me to use. Really, she spends a lot of time chatting up ghosts now-a-days, reassuring them that their loved ones are okay and then convincing them to move on. And every so often, she breaks out the zapper and zaps them or gets into a little fight. (So far she's won all her fights.)

Paula lives with Mitchell who's an inventor which means he gets to blow up stuff for scrap!



Blowing up toilets that clog constantly is so much more efficient than actually fixing them. It's also a great stress reliever. He often gets the urge to blow up plumbing that doesn't work perfectly, but he doesn't often get to blow them up. (Paula threatens to turn her zapper on him if he doesn't behave. Someone's gotta keep these inventors in line.)


So for fun, I sent them down to the salon where Paula got her first tattoos and Mitchell got a make over.


The neat part is that this actually unlocks some new clothes, so there is an actual incentive to do this other than the moodlet. I sort of wish we could choose their clothes though. Paula also got a make over, but we hated it so there are no pics of that. (Seriously, even she didn't seem impressed!)

Paula apparently got bored while Mitchell and the stylist were talking. So she autonomously grabbed someone and offered to do a make over.

Surprisingly this is the outfit she started out with, not the one Paula put on her.


I can't remember what Paula put her in, but it was comparable to this. She was not happy. I didn't see the problem personally. I also didn't get a picture.


This is the stylist. Who wouldn't want him to tell them how to dress?


Paula loved her tattoos so much, she had the want to get another one. Somehow, it seems she made Mitchell think he wanted one too. So I had them head to the salon again, but it was too late.



This was when I learned that after about 6pm or so, everyone goes home and the shops close. Well, they came all the way into town, so Paula was not about to leave without getting or giving a tattoo.


"Sit," she said.

"What? Oh no, no no."

"C'mon."

Some dealing must have gone on. I wonder if at this point she agreed to let him blow up one piece of plumbing. I think he's just much too nice to really say no convincingly.

Yeah; he didn't really stand a chance, I'm sure.


He got some tattoos all right. Nothing that he could really show off to anyone, of course. Then to add insult to injury, Paula broke the chair, and Mitchell fixed it.

He figured it was best to stay on the good side of the tattoo artist who he'd ask to remove Paula's work.

Here you can see some of her "work." I think Mitchell has learned a very valuable lesson in a very painful way.