#mvasks

[pollination-tech]

I hope this is okay for me to ask, but do you have any tips for someone who wants to start writing a Sims story with many characters? With MV you have many storylines but they are all so well-developed and interesting. Do you let the sims’ in-game actions drive the story at all or do you have everything plotted out in advance? Thanks for your time & excellent stories!

Ohh my gosh, this is absolutely more than okay to ask, and I hope I can give you a helpful answer!! Thank you so much for reading my silly little sims story!!

I got kind of long-winded, so my answer is below the cut -- if I didn’t quite answer your question, please feel free to send another ask or IM me!! (Or if you’re on Discord you can always send me a DM there!!)

I joke a lot that I mostly fly by the seat of my pants -- and that’s really only half a joke. When I started MV, I had four characters in mind -- Taz, Adia, Gretta, and Sforz. They were the four main characters from a story I’d written 8 years before, and when I set out, I’d intended on just kind of playing TS4 and seeing what happened (with a loose framework for the story I wanted to tell in mind -- that is, Taz having a romance with both Gretta and Adia, and having a baby with Gretta).

About a month or so later, I’d given up on actually “playing the game” and started staging screenshots and telling the story. (Obviously Sforz didn’t make the cut to stay relevant; whoops!) Cadence and Nick’s romance in Gen 2 was as far as I’d planned “ahead” -- which is to say, I knew I wanted Cadence and Nick to have a romance, but not exactly sure how I’d wanted it to play out. Since about January 2017, I’ve been just kind of “planning” what I want to happen in fragments, jotting down ideas or snippets of dialogue, and going from there. So, to answer part of your question -- I plan things out and write them rather than letting my sims drive the story. I honestly don’t remember the last time I just opened my game to play it -- a lot of what you see on my blog is staged and posed screenshots. Even if I’m using in-game animations, I’ve learned which animations will give me the facial expressions/reactions I want to use in my screenshots.

As far as organizing the story and keeping track of the different plot lines -- THIS (Google Sheets) is how I organized my timeline towards the beginning. It’s sort of an interpretation of how JK Rowling organized her outline for Order of the Phoenix that worked for me -- that is, each character has their own personal column/timeline, so I could keep track of how everyone’s story lined up with everyone else’s.

Obviously in some time periods I got very detailed with what was happening (generally the points where lots of people were together at the same time and lots of things were happening at once), and other places were more vague -- ultimately this system got overwhelming for me (and Google Drive) as I continued adding characters, so I switched to a much more streamlined method to keep track of things.

(I’m always on the lookout for other ways to keep track of various characters, their plot lines, and the passage of time -- currently Plotist seems to be a fairly decent way of keeping track of things? There’s a bit of a learning curve, but it’s free and definitely worth a look -- I’m still learning it myself, but I’m definitely willing to share what I’ve learned if you’re interested!)

My new system (Google Sheets) relies a lot on me knowing or remembering when certain events that aren’t births or deaths happen -- and a little bit of retroactive guess-timation. I have a few notes off to the side about particular (recent) events, but generally I retroactively fill in the dates of things in my head, and I won’t lie -- the ambiguous TS4 seasons helps a lot with this. (I’m more than happy to talk about this some more -- just send another ask!!)

Most of my plots tend to be more “sequential” than “simultaneous” (that is, Character A’s plot happens before Character B’s plot, rather than Character A and Character B’s plots happening at the same time), so I tend to keep up with “milestones” to keep track of time -- specifically births, weddings, deaths, and maybe a few others, depending on context. But if you want to talk strategy about planning out some simultaneous plots, hit me up and we can chit-chat!!

I feel like I don’t have anything else to add other than that without getting horribly off-topic and rambling!! But basically -- I wouldn’t say I plot everything out “in advance,” but everything you see is “scripted.” Anything posted on my blog is typically “planned” approximately 48-72 hours in advance on my morning/afternoon commute to/from work -- enough time for me to get in-game, take screenshots, batch edit them, and queue them.

Every now and then inspiration will strike and I’ll get enough screenshots/plot to write out enough posts to queue for more than a few days at a time (especially since my queue only posts 3/day) -- but that hasn’t happened in a while!!

Anyway, I hope this answered your question and helped at least a little!!

TL;DR -- figure out a system for yourself that lets you keep track of where everyone is and what they’re doing!!

[hidekigogo]

昨日の月曜日のランチは、中華九麗瑠さんでランチメニューの中から麻婆豆腐定食、750円。相変わらずまた人気のこのお店はランチは時間をずらして。変わらぬお味だが今日は辛味が薄かったかなーと。でも満足。店頭ではわらびが並んでいました。 . #中華九麗瑠 #九麗瑠 #大崎 #大崎ランチ #町中華で飲ろうぜ #町中華 #麻婆豆腐定食 #lunch #750円 (at 九麗瑠) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cdn-J-MvASK/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[btsqualityy]

💛 #MVasks

💛: Most insane MV (but good because its bad)

I’d say Idol lol 😂I love the song but I’ve always been a little iffy about the mv 😭🤷🏽‍♀️

[pollination-tech]

WHY IS NICK SO CUTE

this is the question that keeps me up at night

[pollination-tech]

Is it wrong that I lowkey also think Taz and Adia are cute?! *hides*

honestly my perfect au is taz and adia and gretta having a devoted polyamorous relationship and all living happily ever after

[pollination-tech]

"And what better place to get to know each other than a library? Because I’m an open book, get it?" MADI, NO.

MADI, YES.

[pollination-tech]

MADI WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME I THOUGHT WE WERE FRIENDS.

why do people keep sending me asks like this??? it’s like you’re all upset about something??? 🤔 🤔 🤔

[pollination-tech]

How come all of your sims are bright colors and have long pointy ears? I’m not trying to be mean or anything I like your sims! I was just curious. :D

Short answer - because I think the bright colors and long ears are cute and fun and I like them! (It’s my ~Aesthetic(TM)~)

There are kind of a couple of parts to the long answer (I’m so sorry I can’t ever give a simple answer to anything oml) --

My current sims specifically are bright colors and have long pointy ears because they’re based on characters from a story I wrote about ten years ago, where the majority of the characters were brightly colored demons with things like wings and horns and tails. (The other characters were boring and vanilla, and I’ve had a few of those too from time to time.) I was too lazy to track down wings and horns and tails for my TS4 game when I created the characters as sims, but I did stumble across some really cool pointy years, and the rest is history. :)

Custom alien skins in TS2 were my “gateway skins” into the world of berry cc, and I’ve never been able to go back. I just knew I wanted to populate my game with lots of colorful alien babies, and didn’t want them to all be plain old EA green!

In the TS3 era, one of my friends and I liked to do “genetic experiments” (essentially a reverse 100 baby challenge), where we would start with one “alien”/“mutant”/berry sim and see how long it would take to have him disperse his genes throughout the entire town.

Somewhere along the line, I discovered the online simming community and learned that “Berry Sweets” were a thing, and I’ve never looked back! I stray a little from the more traditional berry sweet world in that I don’t use food/sweet treat names or have elements like color shifters and dream walkers, but berry simmers are a wonderful part of this community, and I’m proud to include myself in their ranks!

(PS - You can find the skins I use here and here, and the ears I use here, here, here, and here, if you’re interested, and Berry has a ton of other resources on her blog here!)