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.

Pose Boxes

It's been a while since I've posted here! But I haven't really been playing the game. It's a lot of work to get a story chapter out every week with pictures. Which is a shame because one of the fun parts of TS3 happens to be getting the pictures, and I've been breezing through that part to just be sure I have something up every week.

So I have started testing out the pose player. I've got the updated version now, and it's pretty awesome. You can add poses to a list to be used again and again. And instead of looking for a specific box like in TS2, you just have the one box and you type in the name of the pose you need. Sometimes this can be really handy or really not handy. Many poses do not have any sort of description, so it's hard to know what pose it is until you use it.

Many artists include the picture of a pose with the name beside it, so I've been keeping the pictures that come with the pose files. I've also got a notepad file where I'm putting in the names of poses. If I can, I put in the description too just to help me out.


The other day, I saw this pose pack and I had to use it. (I knew exactly who for too.)





I've been wishing to pose them forever on the floor of the meadow. In my head, they used to meet on the meadow and then just lay side by side. The closet I could imagine were the TS2 animations of sky watching (and later on cuddling under the clouds/stars). Nothing like that at ALL in TS3. Why would they take that detail out among the ones they did take out? Maybe Generations will put it back in?

Anyway, this is what I came up with.

Using the earlier link floor pack from Club Crimsyn. It's not bad, but here's the thing- the artist can mold the faces. And since there is no over lay yet, the face that goes with the pose is just the face with the pose. This isn't really Brandon's face. So that's the main issue I've got with the poses on pose boxes. Even if the pose looks great and natural because of the care an artist took (and these poses were pretty neat), they will still look stiff and unnatural because of the faces.

And I really deal with faces.

So I decided to give is another shot with a different pose pack from My Blue Book. Pose Set 003- Couple Poses. She says she worked hard on them, and it really shows. I think she did a great job with it considering how difficult it must be to pose one sim, let alone two and get them to line up!


My favorite picture:



It's adorable, but still those faces frozen like that.

But then I suppose my own attempts at couple posing like this have been the same for the most part. It's why I end up having weird camera angles to hide strange eyes or the fact that two sims may be going through one another. Like the first couple of pictures in this chapter.


But still, my favorite pictures of Pat and Brandon happen to be the standard EA animations. Catch them between animations, move them around a little and you have unique poses with unique faces and they will generally turn their heads to face each other. The Pose Player will also play those standard animations, so I still need to do even more experimenting.

I guess I just don't see myself becoming a major poses downloading whore. Though I do note the good ones I like and see possibility for future reference.

Test pictures

So I've mentioned before that after I create a character, I give them a test run in the sim world to see how well they match up with the character I see in my head. Some come out perfectly the first time, and some I have to edit quite a bit.

Pat is one of those that came out fully formed, perfectly. While looking for pictures of her body, I ran across the original test shots I ran her through after I made her. These were also Brandon's test shots as an adult.






But, of course, it wasn't until these pictures below that I was absolutely SURE I had them down perfectly.



Love LOVE this shot, because it looks like he's trying to cajole her into doing something. I would bet he does this to her from time to time when they're alone, just the two of them. They aren't often alone, not if Pat has her way. But if he stops by when they're cleaning up or closing, I can see Rita (Pat's mom) excusing herself and taking Melissa with her. (I think she'd make it very obvious that she was leaving them alone, and she'd invite Melissa in on this very obvious not so secret secret. I can imagine Melissa giggling about it even if she isn't completely sure what is going on and needs her grandmother to explain it to her which would bring up some awkward questions from Melissa later I'm sure.)







And of course, he wins here. Did she ever really have a chance?


Kyrene was made at the same time, and so Brandon was also used for her test shots.


Kyrene's first try. So not her. It was her eyes, so I sent her back to CAS.








What I love about Kyrene's sim is how expressive her face is. She can look dangerous, sultry, and sad with very little facial movements.

The Village's First Fire Fighter

To those who know Alex, this is appropriate, right? How cute is he?

Thanks to Laura, I've been in a mood to build something. So I revisited my village. There are things that I don't like about it, plus I happen to now have some really neat hacks by Ani_ at MTS that I want to start using.

Now that we can actually put down lots and do some minor editing in game, I've been tearing up lots, and replacing some of the buildings I put in as place holders. So one of the first new buildings I put in was the fire station that came with Ambitions.


When I first popped in on Alex, things weren't going too well. Apparently while I was playing someone else, Alex got robbed. When I found him standing around in the park, he was not very happy. Stuff of his got stolen, and he was mad at some woman named Malinda Maroof who is apparently one of the homeless NPCs that wander around, because I don't know her.

The man clearly needed a change of pace. So he quit his job.


And flirted with the girl who sells food in the park. Apparently he's the town cassanova. (No seriously, it's a plug in that comes with Twallan's Story progression.)

He reported in for a half day of work as a fire fighter.


And he spent that half day working out because he has no athletic skill. Who knew? Some sims I cheated and gave skill points to. Not him though. Somehow he was missed completely. Poor guy.

So he jogged home.


The woman in the truck is another one of the town firefighters.



But in the park we found Malina Maroof that he was so mad at. She just looks sneaky, doesn't she? Didn't bother stopping to talk to her, but it's interesting to see her around town.

I didn't get pics of it, but Alex lives in a shack by himself with a single bed. It's a small house that didn't even have a bathroom. I added an outhouse in the back.


Alex lives completely alone, very much in the woods. Nearest to him is another run down house that's full of the local prostitutes. So I guess though he's lonely, he's not really alone. Though they're not the ones we want for him, right?

Doesn't he just seem lonely?



So for right now, Ruin saps pretty much all of my extra energy. Well, you know the energy I choose to give to it. It's not like I am always working on it. So I'm just exploring the village and the game and all my mods. As I'm playing, I'm taking notes of what is going on around town, just to test out the story progression.

So right now, using Speechless' method, each day is a month, age wise. With things on high free will, a lot of stuff happens! But I like that. I think part of my problem with TS2 became I slowed down too much. It is fun to play the same sims and develop their character, watch them grow. But that's why I write. To develop characters that I can play with and watch grow, who have secrets to impart to me when the time is right.

So then I figure I play sims to see stuff move forward. I like change, and the game still makes me laugh. Especially some of these pop ups. I'm not good at organizing, so I think I'm going to be a little all over the place because I don't have any set method right now. I'm just hopping around when I see someone I want to catch up on or when I get some particularly juicy notice about someone.

This play session actually started out with someone else.


On the 17th play day of my village, Paula and her mother moved into a more fitting home. I also found out that Paula hadn't been doing her homework, so she had to stay up very late to finish.

She had a few things on her mind. She wants to write a science fiction novel. They don't have a computer at the moment, so she has to do that at the library right now. She also wants to learn to paint.

And lastly, she wants to be friends with somebody. Right now she's enrolled in art school. (This is part of Twallan's Career Mod which allows for some interesting custom careers.) I don't think there are a lot of other kids in her school. So she's probably lonely right now. It's just her and her mother.

Oh, and Henri. But she rarely gets to see him. He is a great adventurer after all.



A couple other interesting notes: Kyrene got married. She became Kyrene Black, but the town bike (Audrey, who also happens to be one of the town prostitutes) seemed to get in the middle of that quick union. They were only married for a couple of months, and they divorced last night. Kyrene had been living with Henri (nothing funny, just staying there while she was getting her feet on the ground in town), and her husband moved in with them.

Well, last night, after divorcing her husband, she moved out and moved in with Jimmy and Aaron! Jimmy had been a romantic interest of hers before she up and got married. This Kyrene is very flighty apparently. And she's now left Henri with a strange house guest.



Last but not least:


I really am not quite sure what services he was offering, but it can't be good. I'm making a note to check on him and Henri next time I pop in.