#ts2 bach it up

[ms-artzy-gurl]

Justinian: "We should have another baby soon."

Zoey: "Umm.. let's wait until they all age up to teens. They will help then."

Justinian: "Right... we'll wait a little bit more. I don't want to be an elder to raise a baby though."

[dramallamadingdang]

Time for replies!

These be for @princesspiratecat, @jennamaxon, @criquette-was-here, @nimitwinklesims, @eulaliasims, @greatcheesecakepersona, @alienbirthqueen, and @niamh-sims...

princesspiratecat replied to your photoset “Tree’ing a bit. :) Mostly to break up the monolithic terrain texture...”

This actually reminds me of where I live, Lake Arrowhead in Southern California when it's dry. Except I don't see a lake.

alienbirthqueen replied to your photoset “Houston, we have a terrain. :D FINALLY! OMG, what a ginormous pain in...”

this is so gorgeous!! it reminds me a lot of northeast california/nw nevada, which is where i grew up of course haha

Yeah, it’ll work pretty much for any desert-y place in North America. Like, anywhere from the Okanagan Desert in Canada, to the less mountainous parts of Montana down to New Mexico and west to the more interior parts of California, Oregon, and Washington in the US, and then down into interior northern Mexico. Mostly my inspiration for the look of the place is the Great Basin (so Alienbirthqueen is right on!) and Chihuahuan Deserts, though. Not so much the Mojave or the Sonoran because those are generally flatter (and lower in elevation and therefore much hotter/drier) and the vegetation is different. Like, there’re no saguaro cacti, which is the signature plant of the Sonoran, of course. But the Lake Arrowhead area (or the Lake Tahoe area) can work, too, given that I’m adding pines to break up lot-view textures. :) In that, it resembles my home turf in SW Colorado, as well.  

Except yeah, no water. The place may or may not have some on-lot water, though, which wouldn’t be big enough to be a lake. I’ll imagine it/them to be springs magically stocked with fish. But I haven’t decided on that yet. I mean, I DO like to build my fishing spots, but I’m trying to go for some authenticity here, trees notwithstanding. ;)

Anyway, basically any higher desert area that’s not a “sandy” place will do, at least with the season set-up I’m giving the place. (Which of course can be changed to make it whatever anyone wants.) It has spring and autumn...mostly because I like to use season-enabled trees/shrubs so that there’s a visual change with the seasons. I get kinda visually bored, if you will, otherwise. :) 

jennamaxon replied to your photoset “Tree’ing a bit. :) Mostly to break up the monolithic terrain texture...”

Rest rather green - much better in the second pic. For a moment, I thought you were frowning at the rubbish cart

Well, if we’re being all green and environmentally-conscious, rubbish is bad, right? :) But no, just frowning at the uber-green trees, I’m afraid. 

criquette-was-here replied to your photoset “Tree’ing a bit. :) Mostly to break up the monolithic terrain texture...”

Oh, this neighborhood makes me want to create this type of climate setting too! Somehow it feels like a place from a good old 90's road movie. Love the new texture for the pines. Looks way better!

Well, that would certainly be different for you! All your neighborhoods and pics are so green and European and pretty. Which isn’t a bad thing, of course, but I’d be very interested to see what you’d do with a more desert/wasteland sort of environment....

nimitwinklesims replied to your photoset “Houston, we have a terrain. :D FINALLY! OMG, what a ginormous pain in...”

Cool cool cool! It looks so much like your photo!

That’s what I was shooting for. But I tell you what, it was hard! I couldn’t figure out how TS2 decided which terrain images from the terrain default to paint where. It just seemed kind of random, and in some of my attempts, when put into TS2, the terrain was only using 2 (of the four) images in the terrain default, which looked really weird. So in the end, I put in an existing terrain, and then redid the road structure and resculpted most of the hills and such. Then, I still had to edit the terrain default to rearrange the images to suit this particular terrain to get it to look how I wanted. So it was more complicated than I’d envisioned. I could’ve probably put more time into figuring out what was going on with all that, but I just wanted to get ‘er done so I could start building.

eulaliasims replied to your photoset “Aw, c’mon, you didn’t really think I wouldn’t do rocks, did you? :)”

oh, this looks fantastic. I love the scrub--that's always something I've felt some desert neighborhoods need. it adds a lot!

niamh-sims replied to your photoset “Houston, we have a terrain. :D FINALLY! OMG, what a ginormous pain in...”

That looks fantastic! I love the scrubby scrubs- perfect for that environment!

Yeah, for this kind of desert -- the American kind, as in all of North and South America  -- there’s gotta be scrub. Pretty much the only American desert that doesn’t have scrub is the Atacama in S. America, since it’s like the driest place in the Americas. :) But even it has some scrub in places. I mean, this ain’t the Sahara or Arabian deserts! 

The lack of scrub really, REALLY bothers me in Strangetown, since that’s obviously supposed to be inspired by Roswell, NM. I am still going to play that neighborhood one of these days, but it has to undergo major terrain/deco renovation before I’ll be able to look at it without screaming bloody murder. :)

greatcheesecakepersona replied to your photoset “Houston, we have a terrain. :D FINALLY! OMG, what a ginormous pain in...”

Lovely! Now all that's missing is the Breaking Bad van :)

HAH!. Yeah, I’ve never watched that show (though it’s on our list to watch), but I know that it’s set in New Mexico, though I don’t know if it’s actually filmed there, so...yeah. :)

nimitwinklesims replied to your post “You sound like such a cool person! It's really nice to hear about...”

I often have a hard time keeping the classical composers apart (I'm embarrassed to admit), but Smetana's Ma Vlast always makes me cry -- it was played at my Czech grandfather's funeral... It's heartwarming to read that you like the Czech composers a lot. I'm Dutch but because of my děda I have a fondness for Czech things as well. Also, sort of related, I have played Händel's Harp Concerto at one point (when I was still taking harp lessons).

Yes, Ma Vlast is one of the best pieces of music ever written. IMO, at least. :) I’m not a person who’s into patriotism/nationalism, but I do tend to love music that has a concrete feeling for place, both physically and emotionally, and Ma Vlast has both. It’s why I love stuff that incorporates folk music from a particular country or area, because of that sense of place and time, and the Eastern European composers tend to do that really, really well, which is why I find myself drawn to them. Aaron Copland did that well, too, for American themes. Appalachian Spring (with its incorporation the Shaker “Simple Gifts” song) and the Billy the Kid and Rodeo ballet music and whatnot. Great stuff. I think that this is why I was ultimately drawn to film/TV scores, both in terms of performance and my own compositions. Film scores are designed to have a sense of place and character and sometimes history about them. So I guess it’s not surprising that that’s where I ended up spending more time, professionally speaking.

That said, for all that I am a classical musician, I’m not a walking compendium of knowledge about all of classical music. Certainly not now that I’ve been away from school/academia for *cough* like 30 years now! I have forgotten much of what I did once know, but frankly my knowledge was always pretty specialized. I know much about the body of work of specific composers in whom I have an interest, but much of the rest...I don’t care to know about it, frankly. All the baroque stuff? Meh. I mean, there’s bits of it that I like -- Handel wrote lots of good stuff, for instance -- but much of it just sounds all the same to me, and I’m just not interested enough to know more. Like, while I appreciate his technique and innovations and all that, I just don’t much like Bach’s music, for instance, and I took/take a lot of ribbing for that, but...I like what I like, and the rest of it I’m content to ignore. Which is pretty much my attitude in general, when it comes to music. *laugh*

jennamaxon replied to your post “You sound like such a cool person! It's really nice to hear about...”

The Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis is an outstanding piece of music. Real hair on the back of your neck stuff. If you like 20th C English choral - my recommendation would be Holst's The Evening Watch. I heard (and sung) it first at college. I was breathless after the first listen.

You know, Holst has a lot of good stuff that no one seems to know about. :) If the average person knows any Holst at all, their knowledge tends to begin and end with Mars and Jupiter from The Planets. Which is a shame. I need to listen to more of his stuff, myself, now that you mention it.

[didilysims]

Yet another meme! I found this in my drafts folder when I was looking for something else today. I don’t even remember who tagged me...sorry! I started it a while ago and had nearly finished, so I’ll just answer the last question or two and post it, even though some of the questions are “right now” questions and are no longer accurate for right now. But they were, back when then was now. Okay, I’ll stop waxing nonsense now. There’s enough of that under the cut. ;) 

Nickname(s): Didily

Gender: Female

Sign:

Height: 5'8-ish, which is about 170 cm

Time: Lunch time! Or it was when I started doing this. Probably won’t be when I get around to posting it.

Birthday: It’s in May.

Favorite Bands: I’ve been very into Bela Fleck and the Flecktones recently, but I like almost every type of music and my “favourite” changes as frequently as the weather.

Favorite Solo Artists: Ralph McQuarrie’s pretty great. ;)

Just kidding. Similar to the previous, Paul Simon is my pop music go-to these days, but there are so many musicians that I admire and enjoy listening to, it’s impossible to pick a favourite.

Song stuck in my head: A Bach cantata. Gotta love the classics!

Last movie I watched: The Parent Trap (1998 version).

Last show I watched: Probably an episode of Planet Earth. It was a long time ago, however, so I could be wrong. I don’t watch a lot of TV or movies. (Though I did watch The Parent Trap more recently than the 90s. :P )

When did I create this blog:  According to the archive, August 2012. (Wow, that’s longer ago than I’d thought!)

What do I post: Pictures of my TS2 game, and sometimes…memes!

What did I last google: The Parent Trap. :P I wanted to check to make sure I had the year right...and grabbed the image while I was at it. 

Other blogs: Just my dusty old LJ. I tried resurrecting it a bit during the Great Tumblr Replies Drought, but it didn’t last.

Do I get asks: Now and then. They seem to come in batches lately.

Why did I choose this URL: The classic “nickname + sims = name” formula. The nickname came from the LJ days when I wanted to come up with a clever username but came up with diddily-squat. (For those with a non-English mother tongue, and those unfamiliar with antique colloquialisms, diddly-squat is slang for nothing--similar to “zip” and “nadda.”) The misspelling is deliberate because I didn’t want any numbers or special characters in my username, and the “proper” spelling was already taken. It’s a terrible pun, but it’s become my silly internet name. :)

Speaking of terrible puns… 

I have a friend (who has no idea of my interest in Sims, let alone my online persona) who has this picture framed in her living room and it makes me giggle every time I see it…and not just because it’s a terrible pun.

Following: 286 Weird, I thought it was much higher. Guess it feels like a lot when I’m still trying to catch up. And yet there are so many more I should be following! 

Followers:  Yep.

Average hours of sleep: Not enough! Every night I tell myself I need to get to bed early, and every night I somehow am still busy at bedtime. Remember when you were a kid and so excited to grow up so you could stay up as late as you want? Now I wish I had a grown-up to tell me to go to bed on time. :( 

Lucky number: Nope.

Instrument: I’m trying to get back into playing piano because I used to be pretty good, but once I stopped taking lessons, I virtually stopped playing. I’m toying with the idea of starting lessons again, but I’m also toying with the idea of moving, so…

What am I wearing: Jeans, shirt, and a cardigan. The exact same style I was wearing last time I answered this kind of meme question, ha ha. The individual clothing items are probably different, however.

Dream job: Right now I think it would be cool to be a bush pilot. As soon as someone tells me how much work that is and/or there’s a lot of math involved in getting the job, I’ll probably lose interest.

Favorite Food: Homemade potato salad, mm mmm!

3 favorite fandoms: TS2 is the only one I’ve really been involved in, if you can call it a fandom. (I’ve never been entirely certain of the definition.) I have peeked a bit into the TES Oblivion (quite possibly my #2 favourite video game of all time) tags on tumblr now and then, but it’s 90% Lucien Lachance glorification, and that’s pretty weird. I mean, he’s a murderer for one, he’s not that prominent of a character, and that “purification” quest? Yeah, that’s all his idea. Anyway...

Basically fandoms aren’t really my thing, but I do like posting pictures of my TS2 game, and following others who like doing the same. :) 

[ms-artzy-gurl]

The fight between Julien and Zerina. Zerina won of course. Julien cried about the fight to Patch.

After the birthdays between the boys, they came from school and were disappointed.

[ms-artzy-gurl]

I was testing the Bach kids for the Carnival Life along with Justinian Bach, their dad.

[ms-artzy-gurl]

It was also Zackery and Julien's birthdays too. Julien was bragging that he won the fight against their sister, Zerina, finally. (Zerina won against Julien two different times before.)

[ms-artzy-gurl]

The Bachs went to Serena Spa to lose weight.

[ms-artzy-gurl]

Zerina: "I love the fact that you two are still in love. I appreciate love."

Zoey: "Yes, it is."

Justinian: "Sweetie, are you worried that we will get a divorce because that is never going to happen. I love your mom with all my heart."

Zoey: "Yes, but woohoo is awesome especially because of you, Babe."

Justinian: "Why is this topic is coming up?"

Zackery: "What's Woohoo? It sounds fun."

Justinian: "My love, do you see what you started?"

Simself aka Jenni Hull: "So much tmi.... I'm trying to watch a movie here!"

[short-sim-wayz]

Tess being a good vampire doctor. :)

[short-sim-wayz]

Justinian: "Hey little bean, I'm your daddy that helped your mommy bring you into the world and I can't wait to see you."

Zoey: "Aww that was cute, I guess."

[short-sim-wayz]

[short-sim-wayz]

[short-sim-wayz]

The abandoned fixer upper from MTS is where Justinian and the rest of the family are living. It has changed from this. Justinian made this into a two story home. All three kids sleep upstairs. Justinian and Zoey have the room downstairs so they can make love all they want.

[short-sim-wayz]

Sure enough, Zoey discovered a growing bulge.

[short-sim-wayz]

Tess: "You perv!! How dare you!! You blasted creep!"

Justinian: "What? I'm sorry.. you looked hot."

Tess: "You creep!"

Oh Justinian.... I think you might regret what you did.

[short-sim-wayz]