Happy Valicertine's Day!

And even though I didn't quite get everything done the way I intended, I still had a pretty nice day! My parents got me a nice card (I quickly went and sent them an e-card in thanks); Dad got Mom Scrabble as a present, so we played that for game night (it's harder than it looks! Especially when you get lousy letters); and Mom made cupcakes for the holiday, and I got one for a snack AND one for dessert. :D As for the usual to-do list, here's the write-up:

Tumblr: Accomplished maybe not as much as I would have liked, but more than I usually get done on these two blogs –

Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) – Had a reasonably productive day over here, getting some stuff done in my drafts –

A) Spent the time before lunch working on the Mega Ghostbusters BTTF/Corpse Bride/American McGee’s Alice/The Smiler AU (aka The Valicer Ghostbusters AU, aka “Busting Makes Me Feel Good”), getting that partially cleaned up and some of the various events I’ve pinned down into a timeline – dunno how long it’ll take to completely finish it, but felt good to make a start!

B) And after lunch, I reblogged into my drafts a post from my friend Newt’s tumblr archives that I missed the first time around, about how I am not okay because fictional bitches (Valicer) are in my head, kissing. Because, well, mood. XD

Valice Multiverse – Had one ask for the queue tonight over here, from TheCovenWars, featuring Charlotte (described as a “teenage gremlin” with psychic powers) telling the locals that she totally wasn’t trying to read their minds or anything *innocent smile* I had Forgotten Vows Alice respond with “Good, that’s rude and can lead to bad things down the line,” with her shoving Bumby in front of a train front and center in her mind. She doesn’t plan to do the same to a teenager, but she is making her stance on mindfuckery of this sort clear!

Sims 4: Did a double dose of both some Valicer CAS and a little more work on the Polyheart OT3 House today in honor of it being Valicertine’s Day – let me tell you about it:

A) CAS – Well, I’m sorry to say that I made a sad discovery today during my Valicer funtimes over here –

I. Okay, first things first – before I even fired up the game, I went ahead and put a bit of my custom content back into the Mods folder. Specifically, the “Saurus Rainbow Collection” merged file (with all the pride clothing I downloaded back in the day); the folder of all my Crypt-O-Club stuff; the folder of the underwear made by Nucrest; the folder with my Pumbella CC (so I could have that one “cherries” hat for Alice that I really like); and the folder with the Smiler-themed clothes by NightmarePoison. I wasn’t sure if I was going to use any of them or not, but I wanted to have them around, just in case! I also stuck in the most updated version of the “More CAS Columns” mod (four columns version; just makes it SOO much easier to go through all the stuff in CAS) –

And another mod I found by someone named Crilender while poking around online, that purported to unlock various CAS pieces for all Sims, not just the various life states/occults they were tied to. The last one hadn’t worked quite like I’d hoped, but I figured there was no harm in trying again with this one! With all that installed, I then loaded into the game, headed into Building Save Numero Dos (that’s the save I’ve been working on the Polyheart OT3 House in), grabbed the Valicer family living there, chose to edit them in CAS, then hopped on Smiler to see if things were working as expected. The “More CAS Columns” mod was working fine, hooray – and when I checked the various “face” categories, I was pleased to see some that wouldn’t normally show up if you weren’t playing a vampire, like certain eye detail and mouth detail categories. (Which led to me clicking on Smiler’s teeth to see what was showing up in there, and discovering that they’d somehow been given the “buck teeth with extra long weird canines” set, when they’re only supposed to have the “buck teeth” set. O.o Game, what the hell – I quickly fixed that!) But when I tried clicking on their eyes to check what eye colors were available –

I only saw the normal human eye colors available to normal humans. Meaning that CAS Unlocks mod was NOT working as intended. *grumbles* I don’t know why I keep trying with these…

II. With the mod not working, it was back to Plan A for Mission Get Smiler’s Right Eye Color Back – save the current Valicer family to my Library; exit CAS; go to the “Create A New Household To Move In” button in the corner of the map screen; replace the random Sim there with the Valicer family from my Library, and use the fact that I could now swap everyone’s occult status if I so wished to turn Smiler back into a vampire. I may not want them to be one when I play them now, but I figured that it would be fine for CAS (even if it meant putting up with those annoying “hissing” idles that still fire off WAAAAY too often, EA). Anything to get their proper eye color back! So, with their fangy status restored, I headed to the eye color section and picked the bright yellow vampire eyes –

And stared. Because no telltale shadows had appeared around Smiler’s eye sockets. Even though I wasn’t using a mod to unlock the eyes this time. Even though I’d gone ahead and changed their occult status to pick them legitimately. I tried cycling through some of the other eyes too, and – nothing. What I’d thought was a problem with the first CAS unlocks mod I was using...is just a problem with the game itself. The vampire eyes just don’t glow anymore.

...Well, THAT’S fucking annoying! >( Smiler just doesn’t look quite right if they don’t have those few extra shadows from the glow! I mean, they look MORE right than when they have green eyes, but – come on! I want them to have their proper cool glowing eyes back, damn it! :( Meeeeeh… I even tried, at the very end of my session, re-enabling DirectX 11.1 for my game, in case the glow was somehow tied to that – no dice. I am most annoyed. >(

III. Well, there was nothing I could do about the situation – and a little testing revealed that, if nothing else, having Smiler as a vampire meant that the yellow eyes didn’t immediately go bye-bye when I swapped to someone else in CAS. So I decided to go on the hunt for some of the new CAS items that were supposedly added with one of the latest updates and maybe take a few pictures of the gang in them. This was complicated by the fact that I wasn’t entirely sure what most of the new clothes even looked like – I had some reference pictures from Sims Community on my phone, but I couldn’t always be sure if every part of an outfit was new or not, and, well, I’ve never been the most observant when it comes to CAS, frankly – but I did my best! My poking around yielded the following looks for everyone:

( Under Here Because Long Entry Is Already Long )

B) Polyheart OT3 House – Having accidentally fulfilled a goal I didn’t even realize I was working on with my new “dress-up” Valicer family, I decided I wasn’t quite done with the Building Save Numero Dos yet and – after exiting out of CAS – decided to go and visit the Polyheart OT3 house and see if I could do anything to the outside. Now that I’d finished the interior, the yard was looking pretty plain! I pondered my options for a bit, wondering what I wanted to do – just some plants? Some sort of outdoor patio? Maybe a pool? I opened up the “Pools & Fountains” section of Build/Buy to see what was on offer –

And spotted that there were now rounded pool edges available to plop down. Making me wonder – could I do a heart-shaped pool to match the house?

I most certainly could! :D It took a little doing to get right, fiddling around with various shapes (and freehanding the bottom point), but in the end I successfully made a heart-shaped pool to go with their heart-shaped house! :D I lined it in the new Lovestruck pool lining tiles in the pink/yellow/pale blue swatch (seriously, Lovestruck understood the assignment when it came to having stuff with yellow/blue/red swatches), then painted the walls in the matching wall tile (this time in the darker rainbow swatch) and floor in the matching floor tile (in a nice light blue, as I thought that looked good on the bottom of a pool). For the water itself, I went with that light blue really sparkly water from Get Together, as I thought that looked like the nicest option (though I was tempted by the flower petal water!). Some base game large oblong wall lights then went up around the edges to help keep the pool lit for late-night swims, followed by me tiling the area around the pool in Lovestruck terracotta tiles with little fancy mosaic piece in the middle (looked nice, and the middle bit had the required blue-red-yellow colors scheme). Once we had our patio, I set up some Island Living loungers by the top of the pool (one with a yellow cushion printed with blue and orange geometric shapes; one with a white-and-black spiral cushion; and one with a light blue cushion printed with pink, white, and dark blue triangles); added a base-game ladder on the side of the right-hand bump; stuck a Backyard Stuff frog fountain (in the purple and yellow swatch, matching the one in Smiler’s room) at the intersection of the two bumps; and stuck some fun turtle decals (one big mommy turtle and four little baby turtles, all in different colors) and a Get Together steamer on the bottom. And then, after a lot of hemming and hawing and going “does this look too big? I think it looks too big,” I ended up adding in the simple rainbow-colored Island Living pool lounger floatie, because I wanted them to have a floatie and that was the one that looked like it actually fit on the fairly small pool. XD Gotta make sure the floatie doesn’t actually stop people from swimming around a bit! And, along the way, I added to the other side of the lot a Lovestruck bench with a heart-shaped back that had a whole “pride flag” color scheme (I figured these three would definitely have something like that); a Lovestruck lounging blanket; and a Cottage Living picnic basket atop said blanket, to make it look like prime picnicking time. :p Oh, and some Cottage Living “rocks and flowers” pathway in front of the front door, since I wanted them to have some sort of path to the outdoor areas. Everything is still very much a work in progress, but I’m happy with what I’ve gone done so far! :) Here, have a picture of that too:



I do love my Polyheart OT3 House. :) Hopefully I can make the outside look as nice as the inside!

Writing: Welp, my PLAN was to get working again on “A Murder Shared Is A Murder Thirded” – but what with Game Night running long tonight because we were all pondering our woods a lot during Scrabble, and me having a rather long video to watch in my Subs (see the YouTube section below), I never really got a chance to get going on that tonight. So instead I decided to start on a different project I’ve been pondering for a while – Multiamory March! This is a month-long celebration of polyamorous ships in fandom, hosted by Polyamships on tumblr, with a ton of prompts for people to work with. I’d been pondering maybe doing some flash fics (nothing longer than about 300 words) for at least some of the prompts earlier, but hadn’t really decided if I was gonna go for it or not –

And then, as above, my planned writing project for today fell through. And with the clock ticking and me really wanting to write some Valicer for Valicertine’s Day, I went “fuck it” and whipped up a short fic for the first prompt on the list, “First Kiss(es)!” Which ended up being an “I Owe My Soul To The Company Store” fic about Victor and Alice’s (and at the end, Victor and Smiler’s) first kiss in that AU, during their “picnic” in the lunch room. I guess I was inspired by finding those outfits for them in Sims 4 earlier. :p So yeah, guess now I have a side project going to do more mini-fics for those prompts – perhaps I’ll work on some more tomorrow? Or there’s some editing I’ve really wanted to do on the first VITD story, “Start At The Beginning...Sort Of” – we’ll see what happens!

YouTube: Didn’t get in as much video-watching as I hoped, but I got in the most necessary stuff –

A) Only got to – well, it feels weird to say “half” my Subs today, because we had two videos, but one was 33 minutes, and the other five. XD But I watched the 33 minute one because I figured it would be easier to catch up on the shorter one tomorrow. And so tonight we had GrayStillPlays and “I literally just dug a hole and this happened,” aka Gray plays A Game About Digging A Hole! As the game suggests, it is a game about digging a hole – specifically, you’re digging a hole in your backyard after buying a surprisingly cheap house that claims to have buried treasure in said backyard. You start out with an automatic digging spade, a dream, and a small backpack that can hold up to three rocks to sell on rock e-Bay. :p The goal of the game is go deeper and deeper, picking up better and better ores (ranging from regular rocks, to copper and iron, to silver and gold, to straight up diamond) to sell so you can upgrade your shovel’s size and battery life (and keep it charged, because if the battery drains, it and you explode), buy bigger backpacks, lamps to light your way, dynamite to blow up the tougher rocks, and a jetpack so you can, you know, get out of the damn hole. XD Gray had a lovely time digging down and down and down, comparing the action to scooping ice cream and admiring how you could leave little chunks of dirt just levitating in the air. XD And eventually he got down to the level where you could find the treasure...only to discover that maybe, just maybe, that too-good-to-be-true flyer may have lied to him. XD Fun, weird little game – I like when he plays unusual titles like these, they’re pretty much always a good time. :)

B) And then, after that, I made sure to watch my Required Valicertine’s Day Corpse Bride, Alice: Madness Returns, and The Smiler videos, going through:

I. “The Vow || Tim Burton's CORPSE BRIDE ||” by แดง – two minutes of Victor and Emily exchanging their vows near the end of the movie, complete with Emily having her guilt attack and stopping Victor from drinking the poison, before letting him know this is all wrong and reuniting him with Victoria. Not the best quality, but a good moment!

II. “Alice: Madness Returns Cutscenes | Chapter 1 - Meeting Mrs Witless” by MrsBubbless – just over a minute of the cutscene where Alice hallucinates the weird Jabberwock-headed people before meeting Nurse Witless and being coaxed into going with her back to her house. Took me a bit to settle on this one, as I wanted to watch a clip different from the ones I usually find on her!

III. “Smiler Alton Towers” by King 99 – a minute and a half of them filming some people going on the roller coaster itself – presumably friends of theirs. Featuring some trippy footage from the Marmaliser screen in the corner at one point of optical illusion balls coming up an optical illusion tunnel~
So that’s good! And then I followed up by listening to my “Valicer Reading Music” playlist (three videos of instrumental tracks from A:MR, CB, and The Smiler’s OST), so that was even better. :)

Workout: Last night on the bike this week saw me pedaling my way through –

A) The end of “Reacting to The Sims 4 Businesses & Hobbies Expansion Trailer” by James Turner! With James, having finished the blog post, going through the trailer for other things to react to (and not finding much); spending ages trying to find the look at the map screen in said trailer so he could show off the world again and talk about how yes, it’s small, but if the whole “residential/business combined” lot system ACTUALLY WORKS, you could do all sorts of combined lots and effectively double your space; and sum up his thoughts as, essentially, “this pack has the potential to be my favorite pack ever because of all the cross-pack integration, but that REALLY DEPENDS on it not being a buggy mess on par with For Rent. Also the name of the pack is extremely dumb.” I agree on all counts, James! We’ll just have to wait and see what happens when the gameplay trailer comes out after the long weekend…

B) The entirety of “Should you buy The Sims 1 and 2 Legacy Collection? (Review)” by onlyabidoang! A video where he shows off his experience playing the rereleases of the beloved first and second entry in the franchises, both on release and after the patches that the Sims team has been hastily releasing, in an effort to answer the question in the title. And said answer is – “no, or at least not yet.” Mostly because the games are still rather glitchy and unstable, even after the patches. I mean, they have gotten better – Abi wasn’t even able to LAUNCH The Sims Legacy Collection when he first got it because it objected to his graphics card (he had to switch to “integrated graphics”) – but they’re still not great. Abi personally had a good time and was able to make progress with his families despite all the bugginess, but as a reviewer, he simply cannot recommend buying the games in their present state. They were released broken, and that’s the bottom line. *sigh* EA, man...when will they learn. (Never, because people, including me, keep buying their shit.)

And okay, I have officially stayed up later than I intended -- doing that Sims 4 write-up took longer than anticipated! Probably should have just done CAS or Build/Buy, not both...oh, but I'm glad that I accomplished what I wanted to accomplish in there. But now I really have to get to bed -- tomorrow is a Cleaning Saturday, so I don't want to sleep too late! As for the rest of it -- well, I actually haven't decided yet between playing Baldur's Gate III or doing a YouTube Marathon, or what writing project I want to focus on. But I know writing will happen, along with keeping up with my Subs at the very least. The rest of it, we'll see. Night all!