R.I.P. BookyGirl13 Branding (kind of)

Fuck it, I joined the new official forums.

I'm so fuck glad I got to pick a new username. On one hand I had resigned myself to leaning into the old brand, but on the other hand... I made that username when I was 13. I am not 13 any more, I do not ready as many books (unfortunately), and most importantly, I am not a girl. Strictly speaking, I am genderqueer. I started using that term specifically about three or four years ago but I just never did the formal coming out thing on here before? Eh, here it is I guess. It's been on my Tumblr for as long, so if you follow me over there this is very old news.

My new username is gardenGothic. I'll still be going by Booky as a nickname because I've grown attached to it and it's still something special for me. I have yet to post anything because I need to read about how that fucking point system works before I get started but you may start seeing my face around there soon ;)

R.I.P. BookyGirl[age] formula, you will not be missed but may be fondly regarded as a bygone era.

Renovations: Complete (barely)

The renovations are complete! They will be detailed below. I'm getting much more back into the swing of things now, with all the shortcuts and little cheats coming back to be. I'm getting comfortable enough with the camera that I'm tempted to look for some modelling competitions! I know there are still some running for Sims 3, I've seen them around. I can't get too deep into anything right now because I won't be around for the month of August, but I might start hanging around those corners of the internet again :)

Before I could start into the renos, Caitlin needed to finish their sculpture so I could move the sculpting station into the family inventory, so while she did that, Lucy made a small painting, as one of her first wishes as a child was to learn how to paint.

Renovations!! Here is my remodel of the first floor. I added some new furniture, but not a lot. Pretty empty but I didn't want to overspend on furniture since I tend to go wild with frilly details. The puddle there is because the sink broke right before I started renovating and I just said fuck it and renovated around it. The biggest changes are of course the new wall placement with the bigger kitchen and bathroom, each with new floor and wall patterns because fuck the teeny-tiled monstrosities they were before. I also changed the carpet colour to blue and made the couch pink, bringing some new colours into the general scheme of the house.

Here is the second floor, complete with three bedrooms, a bathroom, and an activity room! Still very very bare bones, but again, I was being cautious with myself on the details. The bathroom I just decided to keep the same on both floors for simplicity, but I do intend to make them nicer and different from each other with further changes. The bedrooms are noticeably very empty, but I will add move furniture and decorations as more funds are built to buy nice things from the get-go instead of wasting money on cheap crap because it's cheap. The foosball table near the stairs was a wedding gift, as are the two pieces of wall art downstairs.

All in all I think I did okay? This was certainly a much more ambitious project than I've ever take on in live mode with an actual household and limited budget, as opposed to building a random lot for the fun of it. I tend to only modify premade houses in terms of furniture placement and decor. Building is not my strong suit. It was a good experience to toy around with the structure of the place as well as the decorating in creating their new home!

Living Room

Dining Room (high chair seat pattern)

Dining Room (other angle)

Kitchen (wall tile)

This room could probably use the most work out of all of them. I didn't CASt the counters or appliances because I was kinda tired of CASt-ing things by this point but they're pretty clashy and definitely need to be changed :/ Maybe next time I play.

Downstairs Bathroom

Second Floor Landing

Activity Room

Lucy's Room (border pattern)

Upstairs bathroom

Rita's Room (wallpaper, border pattern, crib fabric pattern)

 Master Bedroom

There's not a heck of a lot to say about most of the upcoming photos. I just took a lot of family moments type pics that I thought were cute and there they are!!

Plates!! I downloaded default replacement plates to spice things up.

Rita's birthday!! She looks just like Caitlin, whereas Lucy looks just like Suzy.

I won't do a run down of her outfits because I wasn't in the mood to CASt something special so Rita just got Lucy's hand-me-downs lol

Her becoming a toddler obviously means the traditional skills montage.

Other than preparing Rita to face the world, the household was pretty calm.

This is a default replacement to make the bottle and formula white instead of green, because if milk is green it is very bad.

And that's all I got for today! The house still looks a bit empty, I know, but they're in super-saving mode right now, aiming to save up for really nice things to replace all the junk and fill all that empty space. I already busted 3600 Simoleons for them to replace both ever-breaking toilets with top of the line models lol, so they're basically back to no cash after that plus purchasing the activity table to satisfy Lucy's wish. They won't have any more kids 'cause I don't think I could possibly make any more space for them, as much as I love playing with large households. Third floor? Basement? Maybe one day, but right now all I'm seeing is dollar signs. More family pictures tomorrow!

One More Wee One

Good evening/morning! It is ass o'clock in the morning and I should have gone to bed hours ago but here we are. The update for today is small because I spent half of the damn time fussing and fiddling with renovation plans in a separate game file so as not to accidentally fuck up my main file. There are no pictures of the renovations yet and I will explain more about where all that's going later on. For now, there is a new addition to the household to address.

 Caitlin is pregnant again! Their sleep was interrupted to get that baby bump.

While they were sculpting with stone, they got a notification that hot damn, the stone crumbled around some precious ore! I've never had that happen before. I'm kinda pissed though, because that fucking stone cost 500 Simoleons and the ore only sold for 137 :/ (And yes I do now realize I could have sent it to get smelted, but they need that money now, there's no waiting a few days for the mail when Lucy's almost a child and they need reno money fast.)

Later down the line, there was the colliding of two events in a hilarious fashion: Lucy aging up and Caitlin going into labour. As Caitlin stood by their bed puffing and moaning, Suzy calmly removed Lucy from her crib, and would have gone off to watch TV if I hadn't stopped her lol

Again with the glitchy hair. I sent Lucy off to fix that while Caitlin and Suzy headed for the hospital.

I just realized, I never mentioned Lucy's traits! She was born with virtuoso and clumsy, and gained dog lover on aging into a child.

Here are her outfits!

Everyday: shirt, shorts, glasses, earrings

Formal: shoes, glasses, earrings

Sleepwear: n/a

Athletic: shirt + pattern, glasses

Swimwear: swimsuit + pattern

I will admit, it is not my best work. It is really not my best work! In my defence, it was just turning to ass o'clock when I was making these outfits, and my brain was mush (as it continues to be while writing this post). I tried to fit the whole dog lover animal thing into her style and make her breezy, light, kinda masculine but with a good balance of feminine touches. In the end.... eh. She's only gonna be a kid for a week anyway. I'm not too concerned. The hair is really nice though! I like that hair, especially for kids. I have it for teen-elder too but it's just got this playfulness to it that works really well on the lil' fellows.

Welcome home, little Rita. Her traits are perceptive and athletic.

That's all for today. Given Lucy's aging up and the new addition of Rita, I will be completing as much of the renovations as I can right when I get into the game next time. I'm a little worried about their budget but I can do a bare bones job to start with and add from there if need be. Technically the only furniture I absolutely need to buy at this point is a bed for Lucy, so if other details fall to the wayside in favour of structural costs it's not the end of the world. More update to come!

Birthdays for All!

I played for another four hours without stop today, god damn. Made about two weeks of in-game progress! Lots of birthdays this time around.

I felt a little rusty taking photos last time, but I think I'm getting a good feel for it again. Aside from practice, it helps that I got a new mouse. I discovered that the jitteryness of the camera motions when using the right mouse button were not a game glitch but my mouse crapping out on me and intermittently dropping the click. I switched out my mouse and now I am enjoying sharp solid camera motions :) Still a bit peeved with the tab function though, I remember it being more precise. When I try to zoom in and out it's either exactly the same as without tab but a pinch closer, practically right up in their goddamn anuses, or the view from outer space. Despite that I think I managed to get some nice shots this time!

First, a fulfilled promise: I said in the last post that I would show you all of Suzy's new outfits in CAS, so here they are.

Everyday: shirt, skirt, shoes, earrings, piercing

Formal: skirt, shoes, hosiery, earrings, piercing

Sleepwear: piercing

Athletic: shirt, shoes, socks, piercing

 Swimwear: shirt, piercing

Another outfit update: I did indeed end up removing those earrings from my game and changing up the way I was using the piercing set. I have replaced the earrings with the lip piercing as left earring and the nose piercing as right earring so I can now use bracelets again, and have added my white spiked bracelet (as mentioned in my simself rundown) to Caitlin's everyday and formal.

I got that pregnancy mod working!! I noticed in the MTS comments that someone had got it to work by just deleting it and redownloading it so I tried that and I am back in business :D Caitlin is pregnant with their first child!! Here's Suzy giving the new baby some love.

Before the baby was born, I used some surplus funds to add a second floor to the house (Back to the Fushia pre-made lot in Bridgeport)! Maybe one day I will save up the funds and move the whole operation to a much bigger house on a much bigger lot, but for the moment they need more space right now, and since this house is already kissing the edges of this lot, the only way to go is up. It is presently unfinished and completely empty, not even any dividing walls. They almost ran out of funds just doing this; there was absolutely no wiggle room for anything else. I need to make a plan for how I'm organizing both floors before I play again tomorrow, because I'm thinking of changing some of the walls on the first floor too.

So far my vague plans include adding more bedrooms, adding a play room for the kids, adding a music room for Suzy and an art room for Caitlin, revamping the kitchen and dining and living room and downstairs bathroom, and adding a bathroom upstairs. The master bed currently on the first floor will be moved upstairs to free up some space down there, kitchen and dining will stay on the first floor, and there will be one bathroom on each floor. Otherwise I'm not sure which floor the other rooms will go on, but I'll play around with some ideas.

I also want to start adding furniture CC to my game before I start this project moving. I concentrated on CAS CC for the first little bit because I didn't have a lot to test things on, but now that I've got a file to check things in easily I want to get some of that good shit in there so I can use it in their house.

For now, I just shuffled a few things around on the first floor to make room for the stairs. The dresser also ended up by the front door after the baby was born to make room for the crib in their bedroom.

Speaking of the baby, here she is!! Her name is Lucy. This is Caitlin right after getting back from the hospital.

Suzy giving Lucy a warm welcome into the world :) As an aside, her elbow is really fucky in this picture :/ This shirt had proven to be not entirely functional, as will be seen in a few other photos.

The next day was Caitlin's birthday, but I forgot about it by the end of the day and consequently forgot to buy a cake, so they aged up in the middle of sculpting and I wasn't able to get any decent pictures. Another aside: I believe their face in this photo is the perfect combination of excitement and abject terror often associated with one's birthday.

That post-age-up knowing look. I fixed their hair immediately.

Y'know what really fuckin' freaked me out about this? In this photo and in CAS, this adult simself has an eerily strong resemblance to my mother, who all of my extended relatives say I look just like (and I have seen the pictures, the resemblance especially in childhood is indeed uncanny). I guess I made a decent representation of myself lol

Suzy playing guitar! I had her quit being a grocery clerk and join the music career as soon as their honeymoon ended. She got to start at level three because she apparently has a degree in fine arts! Despite not having any of the skills one would expect? Fuckin' NPCs, whatever. She immediately started earning three times more per hour than she was earning per three hour shift before.

I also had Caitlin take a new job the moment their maternity leave ended. They registered as a self-employed sculptor, which is what I wanted them to do in the first place, but they couldn't even afford a sculpting station when they first moved in so I had them take a job to get some funds going first. Now they stay at home with the little one while Suzy works her music career :)

Also forgot about Lucy's birthday until the end of the day, whoops. Here she is aging up! Don't you just love the glitched hair? :/

Everyday: outfit, shoes, shirt pattern, shoes pattern

Formal: outfit, shoes

Sleepwear: outfit, shoes

Also, here is her hair!

Below is the obligatory cute skill-learning montage lol

I had them blitz through the first few days so she learned all her skills - including maxing out the peg box and the xylophone - in three days! She's all set for aging up.

Some miscellaneous cutie pie shots :) (Of course I bought her Moe P. Cuddlebones, what self-respecting gothic parents wouldn't?!)

Family meal time!

Suzy aged up too but again, saw the pop-up, clicked the checkmark, and forgot about it for the rest of the day. Consequently, I couldn't get any good pictures of her because she kept clipping lol (I fixed her hair immediately, same as before)

Here is where I left them: Suzy sleeping, Caitlin sculpting, and Lucy wandering the house.

Suzy is going to age up in two or three days, and as soon as that happens I'm going to complete the construction on the second floor to the best their current funding can finish. I want to at least move the master bed to the second floor, make a bedroom for Lucy, and have all floors and walls covered with something. Might leave a few doorless rooms if I can't get that flooring and wall stuff done. However! They had around 6000 in funds thanks to wedding benefits when they did the first addition and that knocked them down to under 1000, and now they have about that much to work with again thanks to Suzy's new job and Caitlin's sculpting, so hopefully I'll be able to do a lot with that, especially since I'll have a few more days' worth of income to work with and I'm knocking a few walls down on the first floor.

I might not play tomorrow. That time will most likely be spent CC downloading and testing, as well as making floor plans for both floors.

Bonus photo: I was trying to find good angles to take a pic of Caitlin with baby Lucy home from the hospital, and this happened. It feels evocative of horror movies to me, like they're about to eat her.