Yay Christmas! So I participated in the GoS Secret Santa exchange and it was a lot of fun. Lots of people received many wonderful presents which I am coveting from afar, hands clasped in pained envy. The present I made was for simperfect. My present from Steerpike/rage_rage was one of the really sweet Asian Fusion outfits from the Sims 2 store with boots, as boots make everything better. Everything. I have retexturing plans, oh yes (can there be retexturing plans, Anna?). So I decided to take a few minutes to boot up my game in the midst of waiting for cakes to cool and snap some screenshots. One sim is Pepper Tremaine's uh... granddaughter or daughter, I can't quite remember anymore and the extremely cute alien is xel_squirgle_ox's Amy who is the daughter of her Bunker and my Fritz. rage_rage is going to be sharing the outfit over on GoS maybeprobablyIsuspect because that's the righteous thing to do, man.







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I canceled the automatic payments on my LJ account because LJ is full of fecal matter. I'll probably have to change my layout (again) and all my icons once it expires because visual OCD is terrible. Does anyone actually use the tags? Just asking as I've been having a time trying to find sidebar-friendly CSS that I actually like. I do have a wordpress blog which I originally meant to be a little more sparse and more visually oriented as opposed to here where I have the tendency to ramble unnecessarily. The only deal is that Wordpress isn't very social. But then again, I'm not very social!

Below are previews of some of the Sarhra recolors I've done so far; twenty in total with at least two new defaults for brown (including a warmer dark brown based on "Tereza And Thomas"), green (including a darker deeper green based on "Arienette"), grey, light blue, and dark blue, new vampire-red eyes, and five alienish fantasy eyes because people asked for them and I thought they might be interesting.

I might do a few more, I'm not sure. The inherent nature of Sarhra's eyes makes them hard to fiddle with without making them a) into something that is completely different and unlike Sarhra's eyes at all and b) muddy. They're also not high-res which is limiting. Excuses, excuses. Sorry, I stayed up till five this morning in some sort of mad fit recoloring eyes because sleep is an unkind mistress and now I'm a Grumpy Gus.


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So I actually worked on the story today and finished that silly computer punch card recolor. I guess I just wanted to avoid having to make all the little holes, I don't know. It looks pretty good to me, so I might actually start taking pictures tonight. Also, in case anyone was curious, I'm not using my Maxis match CC for the story. I can see the look of utter surprise on all your faces. Gasp! It just doesn't make any sense for me to do so, since this story isn't the Sims 2. Plus, I need an excuse to use all that wonderful Nouked hair sixtylilies constantly taunts me with. So I had a bit of a genetics test shoot today to see what I'm going to use in the end. Below are pictures of dear Lucille with non-Maxisish CC! As both a man AND as a girl! She makes a pretty fine looking gentleman, I must say, if a bit soft. Oh yeah, and that damn punchcard. I've been meaning to make a brief tutorial outlining how I edit screenshots as I really don't do much. At least not in my mind. If there are outtake type shots I suppose I'll do it with those as examples.


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We live in a magical world where sim puke can now actually look like real puke, for those of you who either desire that extra touch of realism and/or write stories about college parties and all-night binges. Exciting things are happening or might be happening which is nice because however cavalier I may be about things like the Sims or the internet it's nice to have projects and better if those projects involve your friends. For no reason here are some spam-y type pictures of the citizens of Happy Valley, my test 'hood which I use to make previews and ensure that things that look slightly crummy in Bodyshop look less crummy in-game. Everyone lives in trailers and there are a zillion clones running about, but it's still kind of fun.


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I've been having a weird crisis of faith regarding my current set of genetics. This is probably because I'm finding I use a metric crapton of makeup in order to get anyone to look quite the way I want them to. It's not really the fault of Kiki's skintones, as they're perfect for how they were intended, but I keep wishing I had a (audible gasp) blend of Pooklet's Ephemera blends and the Maxis skintones. It would be nice to use non-opaque lip stuff, have nipples, slightly more defined collarbones, etc etc, but still have it be Maxis (I like the little plantsim curly-cues). This isn't the intro to actual blends, sorry to be a tease, but it's something I'm considering. What the hell is a blend of two blends? It's all because I offered to do previews for chokelate's latest (awesome) set of hair re-textures. In making random sims in Bodyshop by turning boys into girls plus tweaking I accidentally fell in love with this redhead, Lucille (shut up, I like redheads):


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This is the model from my Easy/Lucky/Free post and one of my favorite sims, Trick Puzzle. A bald, bouncy alien, she's loud, sloppy, painfully cute, and more than a little childish. She loves to eat junk food, jump on couches, and torture flat-faced fat cats. Trick collects bright red wigs to cover her baldness and so smells faintly of wig glue and artificial grape flavoring. She comes packaged with Maxis hair (or lack thereof) and Maxis clothing. Buyer beware, her eyes are geneticized/townified so if you don't want them popping up, I suggest you install her using CleanInstaller. Her skintone is also geneticized (but not townified). If you want her hairstyle featured in the screenshots, check out Pooklet's sweet edits/retextures of Peggy 0028. I don't care if you turn her into a bloke, dress her in a hula skirt, age her up or down, whatever, long as you don't claim her as your own or upload her anywhere. She breeds reasonably well, too. Lots of picture spam ahead plus summin' extra! And by extra, I mean extra lame!


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First of all: Say Anything is so good. The movie and the band! Second: I got distracted from all other things by the idea of recoloring Sarhra's eyes which every Maxis-match loving simmer and their mother seems to use or want to use or beg for defaults for on the S2C forums. And whatever, I like Maxis-match stuff. And really long sentences. I even really like Maxis-ish skintones, I just can't deal with not having genetic variety and/or the weird lips. I'm experiencing a lot of frustration however, as I'm doing all these colors by hand, one by one, with no hue/saturation slider madness and heavy abuse of overlay layers so they're all slightly different. It's the only way I know how to recolor really (basically), so I'm trying not to succumb to the inevitable disgust with something I've made, causing me to chuck it in the bin and pretend I never contrived to be so ambitious. I'll still finish them however--because I want them for myself--but an actual release of these is looking kinda sketchy.

If you wanna see the originals in action go stalk every picture thread here, seriously or peruse through Keely and BP's sims. Here's some spam of the colors I've done so far along with some sims I keep in my bin who usually never see daylight because I never play! None of the screenshots are edited really, just brightened.

PS - Someone edit Louis' facemasks so the darker versions aren't so damn shiny around the forehead and cheeks. I will give you cookies. Really. I will mail you a dozen vegan cookies of your choice. Poor Gabe down there is looking extra oily.


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Because I cba to shuffle downloads to and fro while trying to test recolors, I've been trying to play with a severe minimum of CC. This means some custom floors and walls, stuff I've done, and otherwise all Maxis stuff. Challenging, but fun. I have a house in Strangetown which I use to set up all my backgrounds for preview shots and what-have-you which is now currently occupied by the Puzzle family, guinea pigs for my horrible clothing experiments and my less horrible hair recolor experiments. They don't seem to mind though.


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Man, I love colors. And I missed just how much color there was to play with in the Sims. Burnt oranges, sickly bright aquas, saturated purples. Everything is one big, wonderful color/texture fuck. Thanks to a lot of wonderful CC from pooklet yesterday, my head is brimming with tiddles on things to do. Probably starting with simple things like posters and walls and moving on back to recoloring objects. I have an entire backlog of images I've saved merely for putting on poster and framed meshes. I have yet to try hair or clothing, mainly because hair intimidates me and I can't feign an interest in sim fashion aside from the occasional ironic t-shirt, brightly colored hi-top, and stylish pair of glasses.


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