#tales from irl

[worms-in-my-head]

Guys, I cannot stop talking about worm, it has infected my brain

From an over night school trip for seniors (I’m the one in a pink shirt)

[nezu-mi]

"you shouldn't be listening to music so loud" i want it to literally break my skull thanjks

[vannyduo]

heeeey talestumblr, I bring sketches of gay people

[angelbitezzz]

He didn't speak English. I had to gently herd him out with gestures. His sister grabbed him as soon as he was out of the print area-

[buds-and-baubles]

after all the comments about midnighter's trench coat i've seen in canon, my mind has been taunting me with this:

apollo: *holding midnighter upside down by his boots and shaking him like a ketchup bottle in their living room*

midnighter: *drops out 80 different types of knives and swords including a zweihander* *drops out his bo staff* *drops out his night (escrima) sticks* *drops out throwing stars* *drops out toolbox* *drops out first aid kit* *drops out wallet full of pictures of his family* *drops out sticker book* *drops out packaged foods like fruit snacks and water bottles* *drops out flip phone* *drops out mint life savers* *drops ou–*

jenny quantum: *has been standing in the doorway the entire time* ...dads?

both: *look at jenny but midnighter's is from upside down* yeah, kiddo/moppet?

jenny quantum: what are you doing to dad midnighter?

midnighter: he's hoping candy will pop out.

jenny quantum: what?

apollo: your father claims he hasn't stolen my chocolate bar even though i could smell it on his breath. he dared me i wouldn't be able to find it even if i shook him like a magic mid ball. *shakes him again and a half-eaten chocolate bar drops out, which makes him smile a smug smile*

midnighter: *frowns but it's more like a pout as he crosses his arms* get that look off your face, this isn't the lottery. i ate it because i liked it and i'd do it again. i will do it again now just to piss you off. i didn't tell you because you eat all the chocolate in the apartment and don't even share with me.

apollo: it's my favorite chocolate. we already share everything, and i would've shared if you asked but you didn't so now you can kiss that chance goodbye.

both: *further lighthearted bickering*

jenny quantum: *watches them with a deadpanned expression as she still stands in the doorway* are you both done? i'd like to go to the movies before the next decade begins and ends.

apollo: *sets midnighter gently on the couch* sure, jenny q. you ready to go? i'm ready but we'll have to wait for midnighter to get out of his uniform and dressed in everyday clothes after he puts all his stuff back in his pockets.

midnighter: *grumbles as he starts picking up his stuff and putting it away* no thanks to you. also jenny, i'd go with your actual fall jacket. it's pretty cold out.

jenny quantum: ugh, you're both terrible. i'll eat all the chocolate in the house and watch your minds explode as you blame eachother. *she puts on her fall jacket anyways but ties it around her waist as a form of protest*

[arealtrashact]

-California Dreamin' intensifies-

[skipitty-bop]

i dont think ive made a post about it but i should so

half orcs reach adulthood at 14. so gum gum is quite young for a half orc, but he is NOT a child. do not treat him like so.

as an autistic person im sick and tired of stereotypically dumb characters being infantilized constantly. just treat him like any other character. thank you, thats all

[tales-from-a-little-witch]

Tales from the red house

The baby under the cherry tree

Part 2:

tw: child loss + sa + child abuse

I told my sister about it the next day. Everyone in the house heard the crying—even the damned neighbours. But they were used to it, I guess, unlike us.

We confronted our father, with great hesitation since he always seems so upset, when we brought it up. Of course, he denied it.

"There's no baby..."

" I don't wanna hear about this again.."

" just stop"

He'd growl at us over and over while he'd avoid eye contact.

" There was no fucking baby crying. Leave it alone......"

The more we asked questions and pushed, the more mad the old man got.

"I said to leave it the fuck alone!!"

Dad bellowed until his face turned red. It was only my mom who was able to pull the truth out of him.

"Please, just tell us the truth. All of us have heard it, even you...." Mom continued to whisper as she rubbed Dad's arm. Then, slowly, the truth began to surface. And I really, really wished it hadn’t. I desperately wished I hadn't asked, and I longed to go back in time and unhear the truth.

One of the young girls in our family had been raped...,

She had become pregnant, but sadly, she lost the baby. The family wanted to keep it a secret because they were so worried about their reputation and the church's expectations, they knew how to church treated victims rape... They knew how people would look at her..

The matriarch of the family had told her that she could not bury her baby in the church graveyard since then people would know. she wasn’t even allowed to name her baby, nobody was allowed to know it, the matriarch offered to burn the miscarried child's body in the fireplace after church the next day.

The young mama, She wanted to give her baby a proper burial, so she waited until everyone was asleep and went outside to the cherry tree. She dug through the frozen earth until she was able to create a little hole. She wrapped the baby up in her handkerchief, she used a coffee can as coffin and buried it under the cherry tree. She never gave the baby a name and didn't tell a soul. Despite the secrecy, the younger kids somehow knew what had happened. They had all been hurt by that same adult in some way, so it was easy for them to connect the dots.

We all sat at the table listening in horror and my dad, my poor father looked like he was reliving a nightmare as he spoke.

After that, the crying wasn't as frequent. It was as if the baby just wanted to be acknowledged. All it wanted was to be remembered.

I'm not sure if it was the baby's real spirit or just the echoes left behind from the pain and sorrow.

Sometimes, we would go out to the cherry tree and talk to the spot where the baby had been buried. We would talk about our lives, share stories, and leave flowers.

The crying fully stopped when we named the baby Willow, named after the giant willow tree that had been planted in the backyard so many generations ago.

I hoped that baby Willow's spirit was able to move on, or that the painful echo of its existence had been broken. Even to this day, I still hoped that baby Willow was at peace.

[multi-lefaiye]

whoa multi-lefaiye voice reveal??? i think i did that already wait

[foxsartdump]

the moment i type tottmnt instead or rottmnt is gonna be my downfall (gay and too lazy to correct)

(mini-rant in tags if youre curious </3)

[simulation-machine]

SIMS RELATED PROJECTS/UPDATES

My spring break is coming up in a week and holy crap do I have plans on plans on plans, especially since my summer is gonna be full of school + internship + HOPEFULLY friggin' graduating with a BA in Psychology so that I can start applying to grad schools.

Read more iffin' you'd like! It's long! Here's a picture of my golden retriever napping on her brother's food bowl to entice/entertain you:

god she is so precious i would literally kill for her

GOAL 1: MASTER GSHADE/ReSHADE

I know that some people are sticklers for this but my thing is that I had no gee-dee clue what I was doing with ReShade, whereas Gshade just kinda clicked and worked for me? That said I have a bunch of resources for learning ReShade so I might end up moving back to it at some point.

My main issue is figuring out the order of all the different effects. It obviously matters, I'm sure people smarter than me have tried to use presets only to be like "why tf does this look absolutely nothing like the baller screenshots this one cool Simblr has?" Annnd it turns out it's order + remembering to turn off certain graphic settings. Also photoshop, but that's gonna take a lot longer for me to figure out lol.

Like I'd been struggling to figure out why @gunthermunch's gorgeous Lithium preset wasn't looking as sexy as it did before annnnd it's because I forgot to turn Edge Smoothing off when switching to it. Jesus wept at how dippy I am sometimes.

Eventually, what I would like to do is maybe make my own preset at some point? I would be kind enough to show the effect order too if I did so. But this requires so, so much more shader knowledge than I currently have.

FUN FACT: My first ever degree was in art, I even went to a very fancy and private art school (School of the Art Institute of Chicago if you're curious)- I dropped out after one semester because uhhh that shit is expensive. Ended up finishing my degree at a much cheaper location in MN. That said, my art was 100% analog and 2D, and it turns out it did not translate super well into trying my hand at graphic art.

It's funny because I've been gifted really neat stuff for graphic art (like a really nice Wacom tablet and Adobe subscriptions), like people just expected my mixed-media ass would know what to do with it. NOPE! But yeah, Sims is sort of my excuse to try my hand at this stuff again, especially since I have a bit more energy now that my soul is not regularly being drained out of my body by customer service and tech support jobs.

GOAL 2: GET CRACKIN' ON ANOTHER DOOR

This one is hard because I am only on Gen 2 of the Orsons and it's sort of hard to justify starting up another story while that one is less than 1/5 of the way done.

THAT SAID, I don't plan on posting Another Door until I have a decent chunk of it done. Since it's not a casual gameplay story nor a legacy challenge, I plan on editing the bajeez out of the screenshots for it, really honing in on the aesthetic. I want it to look and feel very different from my random legacy challenge.

Fortunately, this story has been fucking up my sleep schedule for *months* now and I have a lot of the writing for it done. The hard part is translating that into the Sims, making sure I get the right poses and stuff, maybe even learning how to make some super easy CC (like, posters and stuff), and stuff related to GOAL 1 above.

What I'm saying is that it's going to take a bit. But I'm super serious about sharing it because it's my obsession and honestly the first time a story of my own design has possessed me in literal years.

Also, I want to make sure I have a significant backlog of the Orsons before I start seriously simming for it, because I don't want to screw over my favorite little pixel babies. This legacy challenge is going to be the one, I have done so much to keep my save files to keep it safe from harm (ask me how many backups I have of the save files. JK don't, the number is frankly silly).

GOAL 3: START YET ANOTHER MASSIVE CC PURGE

Y'all, my CC folder for this game is honestly an embarrassment. I go so hard on CC shopping because this community is stupid-talented and I like giving my pixel babies nice things and cool looks. When I'm bored and not quite in the mood for gameplay, I just like making neat-looking sims that I do absolutely nothing with because I love fucking around in CAS.

I have built my own PCs since I was 17 years old, and when I first built COMPUTERMACHINE (current rig) back in the autumn of 2018, it was with the goal that it would run Sims 4 flawlessly no matter what I did to it. It's got ridiculous amounts of RAM, I religiously update parts for it. And to be fair, even with the current 6,907,907,890 TB of CC I have atm it runs better than Sims 3 ever had with a measly 50 GB of CC.

But for me, it comes down to finding all the stuff I wanna use. Making myself get rid of the stuff I don't wanna use. Straight up yeeting the CC that I thought was going to look incredible that uh, didn't deliver.

I do CAS CC purges about once a year but have literally never done it for Build & Buy stuff, because OMG some of this shit I've had since 2014. Like when Sims 4 first came out. YIKES. My CAS CC obsession is notable but it's honestly nothing compared to my Build & Buy. Even before For Rent made building lots slow af, my PC was starting to take a solid minute to switch to different buy categories.

It would take a long af time so I want to make sure I have a bunch of content in the queue before I do it. It's gonna be a whole ass thing and be so, so boring to do. So I'm putting it off for when I have a ton of time to do it. Like, oh, my entire Spring Break?

GOAL 4: MAKE A FRIGGIN' RESOURCES LIST ALREADY

This would obviously need to wait until after GOAL 3 is completed, but I wanna make sure the awesome creators whose stuff I use get credit, and that people know where they can grab neat stuff. It would include not only CC but mods, Gshade/ReShade presets, and maybe even lots and sims I've downloaded from the gallery?

(Since I am super anti-paywall and very unapologetic and rude about it, I will also share where one could perhaps get some of these CCs without paying some dip a Trenta Starbucks Unicorn Frappucino amount of $$$)

It's ambitious as hell because *gestures vaguely at GOAL 3* but it would make things like doing WCIF asks and lookbooks so much easier.

Somewhat relatedly, I wanna make a navigation post, especially once Another Door starts getting posted. That story is gonna be a bit huge with multiple arcs that take place over the course of like, 14 years. Plus once the Orsons get to the 4th+ generation, it would be easier to track things down.

IN CONCLUSION...

I have been having so much fun sharing my silly little Sim adventures on Tumblr, so much more than I ever thought I would! You all have been so great to me, and all of this stuff is sort of a way for me to repay that. Ever since I stopped being able to be artistically creative ever since a really nasty depressive spell in 2017, Sims has been my #1 artistic outlet. And having people who are even somewhat entertained by my pixels is incredibly motivating.

Basically, if you read all of this, DAMN would you have been a rad livejournal follower of mine circa 2007. On the seriousness, however, thank you all so much for being rad and encouraging and sweet. I promise to do you all, if not proud, then at the very least not disappointed.

Time to hit the bong and take some pictures of Lou and Tatertot before taking my IRL doggos on a walk~

[worms-in-my-head]

I’m constantly telling my friends to read Worm but recently I started up a DnD campaign based on Worm so I told them to not read it for spoilers

Ofc one of the players just told me yesterday that they started reading it lol

[kikiwhora]

Day two of trying to get my boss to do a Barbie Movie inspired special and all he said was “Margot Robbie” and nothing else.

[freddyspizzaheroes]

Not sure if anyone’s pointed this out already, but this design was likely based on Chuck E Cheese’s character The King, an Elvis parody. Just thought that was neat!

[willczek-art]

TFTBL Rhysie sticker! or a button! or just a doodle!!

[haunting-hari]

darkrai just like me fr.... angsty boyfail serving cunt that should be dead

if darkrai was REAL