Some slightly spoilerish, never-before-seen extra stuff under the cut.

( w00t for pictures )

Please comment on the BFTAF thread to let me know what you think.

Please feel free to comment on the thread at BFTAF.

Also, I do intend to go through with this as a Legacy for points rather than a stand-alone Apoc.  I've added a couple of handicaps plus one non-Legacy rule.  The handicaps I'm trying are Free Roaming Ghosts (ghosts always must be able to freely roam the lot), True Love (reproduction is limited to 3-bolt partnerships), and One Way Street (aspiration reward Elixir may not be used).  That's a total of 10 handicap points with the Apoc.  The non-legacy rule is simple: only certain townies may join the Humble family.  You'll see what I mean by "certain townies" soon enough.

This is just part 2 of my revised Apoc rules.
( career restrictions under the cut )

These are what I like to call my Revised/Expanded/Mutilated rules for an Apocalypse Challenge. They're obviously based on Pinstar's original version, but since Pinstar hasn't actually updated his rules for the last EPs there were a lot of blanks to fill in. I've switched things up a bit, but the basic challenge is the same. These are the restrictions I'll be playtesting for my new Humble Apocalypse (the prologue of which should be posted shortly). They're pretty much finished, but I reserve the right to correct unacceptable oversights in the future.

( clicky for pre-apoc and general rules )

Hi folks! I'm back again with some more Strangetown goodies. As a sort of disclaimer, this is NOT supposed to be a coherent, plot-driven story. I'm just in the habit of taking pictures and making up little stories as I go along.  Sometimes I don't know when to quit talking, though.  At any rate, don't expect too much in the way of plot, but there are several funny little occasions.


Also, this bit of picspam is meant to be a follow-up of THIS entry. I actually posted that entry at the end of April but I had it accidentally set to private, so it just didn't show up on anyone's f-list. So I've changed the date on it and set it to public. Anyway, some of the things that are going on in THIS entry might not make much sense if you haven't read the previous one.

Enough chatter! On with the pictures! Off with their heads!

( warning: LOTS of pictures )

I've moved on from Belladonna Cove for the time being and now Strangetown is the new neighborhood du jour.  When I began this post (April 26, I can't believe it took me this long to finish it) I'd only played about one day in each family, except for the Specter, Grunt, and Smith families, who had been played through one whole season.  I've played a lot more since then, plus I'm working on a more structured challenge, but I guess I'll share all of that later.

( a boatload of pics behind the cut )

Hello again fellow Simmers. I've been playing Strangetown lately and I had just a few pictures to share with you. I've only been setting up houses and doing makeovers and things so far, but something pretty funny happened and I HAD to take pictures.


( falling apart to half time )

Hello everybody. I bring more random, pointless picspam from Belladonna Cove for you!

( LOTS of pictures that have nothing to do with anything behind the cut. )

Howdy everybody. Happy Friday! I didn't get anything done that I meant to do this week... but I did get some TS2 playtime in, so that's good, right? So I bring you some mostly pointless (OK pretty much ENTIRELY pointless) picspam with a side of inane blather.


( WARNING: road ahead may be incoherent in bad weather )

Anyway... that's all I've got for now folks. Sorry, but I did try to warn you it was incoherent at best. So what's everyone else doing this weekend? Anything fun?

Yeah, so, HELLO everybody. I'm not dead... yet, anyway. You know how RL can be sometimes. A deer hit my car a couple of days ago so I've been dealing with that. No major damage, it's just the bumper/grill that has to be replaced and a couple of dents. Even the deer got up and walked away, minus a patch of fur and probably with a major headache, but we're all OK. It's Spring Break :-) but I've been working like 8 hours a day :-( because school's not in session so we're allowed to work more than 20 hours a week.

I've been catching up on all of my favorite stories, plus I'm starting a couple of new ones. No comments yet (sorry) but I'm supposed to have this weekend off for my birthday (yay for cupcakes!) so hopefully I'll get some time to just sit down and blather at people some more. I'm on lunch break right now, and really I'm not supposed to be on the internet, but there is literally NO ONE here this week.

I've been playing a lot in the Maxis premade neighborhoods lately. And I have this habit of taking a bazillion pictures, so I'd like to share some of them, possibly in mini-story format, maybe soon-ish. But for now, a little pic spam from PV:

( slighty boring picspam after the cut )

Maybe the three base 'hoods are overplayed, but I just LOVE reading what other people have done with the premades and seeing their makeover pics. And it seems like the three expansion 'hoods don't get enough love, especially DV and BC just because they're so new. So, if any of y'all know some decent stories centered around the newer neighborhoods, or even the base ones, I'd be absolutely delighted if you'd share!

On another tangent, I've been wondering about Sim religions lately. Well, really I've been talking a lot about the subject with a friend of mine, and that kind of translates into me thinking about how Sims would deal with it. I've gotten into the habit of letting my Sims have a special "holiday" once a season. Everyone has some kind of play party in the summer, a Valentine's Day thing in the spring, Halloween (or, alternatively, Thanksgiving, depending on the family dynamic) in the fall, and some sort of Christmas or Hanukkah or other gift-giving festival in the winter. The winter holiday sometimes gives me trouble, because I'm never entirely sure how to pick which type of holiday any given family would celebrate. I never think of my Sims in terms of RL religions like Christianity or Judaism. So lately, to make picking holidays easier, I've been trying to equate some of the community-created Sims cults with these RL religions based on the stereotypes of those religions I have in my head.

Right now I'm thinking of the Church of Cheese as something similar to modern Protestant Christianity. Some of the followers are a little loopy, and there're several different denominations, but it's a good general opiate religion of the masses. I tend to think of Boolpropism as closer to the more traditional, mature, old-world religions like Judaism or Orthodox Catholic. And maybe the Pottyists are a bit more like the crazed cult/religions like Scientology. So I guess my question is: what do you think about holidays and religion in the Sims?

So, just when I thought the time was FINALLY right for an update to the not-yet-lost-but-probably-forgotten Apocachocolypse... my SimPage has been hidden.  Whiskey.  Tango.  Foxtrot.

I decided that I had put off writing long enough, so I got my act together over Christmas and churned out 2 and half chapter's worth of catch-up.  Plus I wanted to upload a short little story involving that creature asylum I did a while ago.  But when I tried to upload last night, I kept getting a connection error.  Well, the internet's been a bit wonky here lately anyway, so I figured I'd try again today.

But first I decide to make a visit to the past chapters just to make sure everything's OK.  Some of you may remember that one of my first chapters was hidden a while back, and I ended up having to re-upload it from another lot because I could never get a hold of a Maxoid to tell me why it was hidden and what I could do to fix it.  So when I checked my chapters earlier today, I discovered that ALL of them were hidden.  Cue hyperventilation.

So I storm down to the official TS2 site, only to find that my stories are all hidden because my SimPage itself is hidden.  The last time I checked it was around Christmas, so I have no idea how long it has been this way.

I have no idea WHY this happened or what I'm supposed to do about it.  It's not like I had teen sex or non-pixelated nudity in any story.  The worst words that I can remember using were along the lines of "crud" or "fracking".  I doubt I can get a Maxoid to help me this time.  I sent a complaint through the official EA help website but I can tell you right now I'll get nothing but a form letter telling me to just bend over and take it.  But my inclination right now is to just say "fuck it" and wash my hands of the whole thing.

I want to work on other projects, though I've been wishy-washy about them since (a) I wanted to finish writing the apoc and (b) TS3 is coming soon anyway, which I won't get, but a lot of other people will be moving on to that.  I thought about re-posting the whole thing to LJ, but seriously?  That is a whole lot of time and frustration that I just don't have the energy for right now.  And it wasn't just the apoc, it was my other legacies and challenges too.  Candy Mountain is sitting on my desktop right now.  I don't have the heart to just delete it, because I put a lot of work into that neighborhood, but I don't want to play with it right now, maybe never again.  Maybe I'll try uploading some things to LJ instead later... I dunno.  Yeah, it's just Sims crap, but it's really depressing to see about 3 and a half years of stuff just disappear like that.

EDIT:

Now my page is back up, but I see that there has been some suspicious activity on the account, and I suspect that someone has somehow stolen my password or hacked my account (how silly is that, it's a FREAKING SIMS site, lame).  So I'm changing my passwords on other sites to be safe.  I also got a message that the page is under review for inappropriate content. Whatever. Like I said, screw it. I'm done with the official website.

EDIT EDIT:

See update post below for more flailing about.

CAN I GET A HELLS YEAH?!

HOOK 'EM HORNS!

I emerge victorious from a house divided.  The SO is an Ohio State fan.  I, obviously, am not.  And, thanks to our little bet tonight, I don't have to clean up the dog's poo for the rest of the week.

That is all.

This is a public service announcement from your friendly neighborhood SnootCB: if you haven't recently, check your computer for malware ASAP.

I suspect that my computer has been infected by one or more fairly dangerous trojans.  I've tried several things to get rid of it/them, but this/these particular trojan/s sometimes use/s a rootkit to hide from the computer's standard security, so I don't know if I've succeeded or not yet.

Why am I posting this here?  Because I likely contracted this thing from some TS2-related download.  It is possible that I contracted it in some other way, but usually invasive trojans have to be directly downloaded from the internet.  Since almost everything that I download is just TS2 CC, it is probable that such was the culprit in this case, and it is possible that other people who have downloaded some of the same material (like yourselves) have been put at risk of infection.

I generally do a thorough clean-up of my computer once a month.  However, I've been too distracted for the last 3 months to do so, and obviously it was a mistake to think that my computer's security could sit on the back burner for a while.  Additionally, sweeps with my usual security programs did NOT find the problems; I was experiencing mysterious crashing/freezing of both individual programs (like IE) and the entire Windows OS... but Webroot, Norton, and Windows Washer all failed to pick up anything suspicious.  I ended up using another sweeping/cleaning program called Trend Micro HouseCall (which was recommended by a tech buddy of mine and is a free, web-browser-based scan).  This finally picked up on FIVE malware thingamajigs (in addition to several bits of adware) that my other programs had missed.  Besides that, my firewall warned me several times that another bit of malware was attempting to attack (whether from the outside coming in or from the inside going out, I'm not sure).

What was picked up and supposedly removed by Trend Micro:
TROJ_RENOS.EO
BKDR_TDSS.AV and .V and .AU and .T

I'm not sure what those actually DO and I'm having trouble finding good info on them.

What my firewall was freaking out about:
SINOWAL.trojan

This is particularly worrisome, because (a) this is known for being both particularly dangerous and difficult to get rid of due to rootkits and (b) Trend Micro did not pick it up.  I actually managed to get a system restore done in Safe Mode before the scan (couldn't get it done in normal mode, and couldn't keep the internet up long enough to scan without doing so), and the system restore point went back to the 1st of November, so I suspect that this particular bit of malware was contracted between then and now.  Whether the system restore actually got rid of it or just slowed it down, I've yet to discover.  SINOWAL is dangerous because it can take screenshots, log keystrokes, and dig through your personal files in search of important personal or financial information.  This fucking scares the crap out of me.

Anyway, the only things I've downloaded in the past three months have been TS2 CC packages/patches from various sites and official program updates/patches for WoW (Blizzard), Windows XP, iTunes, Java, and Webroot.  This is not a shared computer, so I know that those are the only things that have been downloaded.  I'll be happy to post a list of specific TS2 sites and creators if anyone wants to compare scars possible infection points.  I thought about posting this on BFTAF, but I don't want to cause mass panic.  I will consider posting this on MATY if I can narrow down the source, but I have a feeling there would be more P&L than help to be found there.

Yeah, I'm just "killing time", get it? Get it? OK, I know, that was lame, but that's how I roll.

So, I found some old weird pictures. Also, I have a funky graphical glitch that is probably not serious but is worth sharing.

( picspam yay )

I'm doing an asylum right now (when I am supposed to be writing up a Biochem paper... but, meh) and I wanted to try something a little different. It's a CREATURE asylum. All of the inmates, save the playable, are creatures: alien, zombie, vampire, servo, werewolf, plantsim, and witch. All of them were cheated to creature status, but of course I rolled for personality/aspiration and I haven't done anything else particularly special to them. I thought about doing a bigfoot instead of alien, but I didn't much feel like extracting one into Bodyshop. I don't know if that is even possible, though it probably is. Now that I think about it I could have just summoned one with Inge's summoning thingie, but I've already started so it is a bit late for that. Anyway, any bets on who kicks the bucket first?

EDIT: the LJ cuts, they kill me

( pics & stats behind the cut )

So... I should be doing my lab write-up for Cell Bio right now, or else studying for a monster Biochem test coming up... but, meh. I had to share a new trick my dog has learned. A bit of background: my friend just found out that her dog is allergic to practically everything except chicken and rice. This means that she had a lot of leftover expensive organic dog food that her poor pup can't have now. So, she gave it to me for my dog, Sneakers, to have. Sneakers has been living on bargain-brand dog food for the past couple of months because money has been sort of tight. He's OK with it, though he likes Beneful best. The cat's the one who has a problem with generic food, but that's another story entirely. Anyway, I started mixing my friend's dog's food with the generic today to sort of ease him into it to avoid tummy problems. Well, I looked down just a second ago (his food bowl is next to my desk because he refuses to eat unless one of us is in the room) and... there's all these little food pellets all over the carpet. Upon closer inspection, it appears that all of the rejected food bits are of the generic brand variety. I just watched Sneakers take a bite, and it goes like this: take a bite of 3 or 4 pellets, roll them around in the mouth for a second, spit out icky bits onto floor, swallow yummy bits whole. This kind of cracks me up, except that I already know he's gonna get the runs tomorrow. LOL, but also ew.

So... it bugs me that alien eyes can not be passed down to sims with normal skin. When I was using Maxis eyes I never noticed because the eyes just show up as Maxis brown (which is actually painted on the skintone). But with default replacements it is too obvious that several of my sims were SUPPOSED to inherit alien eyes but instead have no eye texture at all and the Maxis brown on the skintone shows up instead. I've heard a few people mention a fix for this that allows alien eyes to show on normal skins... but I can't for the life of me find it! Anyone know of such a thing and where it lives?

I'm looking into replacing most of the "creature" eyes with more colorful versions of my defaults. The default replacement eyes that I use are by spikesminx (originally from Yumedust), and they come in more colors here. Since vampires, werewolves, plantsims, bigfoots, and genies all use flat Maxis textures that look weird next to those shiney eyes, I am going to attempt to replace JUST the eyes on them. I like the look of the Maxis skin, and servos look OK to me with the more "cartoony" eyeballs. Problem is, I'm having trouble finding a good, easily understandable tutorial on how exactly to do this. I think the vampire and plantsim skins are overlays and I'm guessing the genie is actually an object (which is a whole 'nother can of worms) but I don't have the first clue about bigfoots or werewolves.  So, I guess I'm asking if anyone can point me in the direction of a decent tutorial for this kind of thing.

Also, assuming I can ever manage this, I would like some input on which eye colors I should pick for each creature.  I'm thinking "Clover" for the genie, and probably "Coals" for the werewolf and "Meadow" for bigfoots.  But I'm not sure about plantsims and vamps.  "Alice" looks sort of reddish, but maybe something different like "Twilight" or "Aurora" would go better with the blue skin.  I like "Poison" for plantsims, but do you think it's too weird?  "Chartreuse" is closer to the original but it is also too close to "Forest", my default green.  "Spring" is really pretty but it is more bluish than yellowish like the skin so it would probably clash.  Ideas?