lolabythebay

The ukulele from the World Music set at Around the Sims is nice, but I always wanted more recolors. The catalog descriptions explicitly allowed recolors, but only the one propped against the wall was recolor-enabled. So I fixed that and slaved them, because nobody needs 42 separate pixel ukuleles (and that's coming from somebody for whom Ukulele Acquisition Syndrome is an all-too-real thing.) The recolor-enabling took me so long to do right that I missed the end of April's GoS theme.

The soundhole decorations on the wooden ukuleles are either mother of pearl, green abalone, tortoiseshell or something vaguely like rope binding (as an homage to my own favorite Mainland soprano ). A swatch:


Many thanks to Sandy at ATS for kindly allowing me to distribute my alterations of her meshes. If you already have hers, you should replace them with these. These use her filenames plus "_MASTER" or "_SLAVE," so the originals shouldn't be too hard to find. Any existing recolors of the previously recolorable "againstwall" mesh should still work. As with virtually everything, my policy is "distribute at will," but please respect Sandy's terms and credit her.

Credit also goes to Goat for the wood textures (I think the wooden uke bodies are Sergeant and the fretboards are Biloxi). HugeLunatic's "Making Objects Recolorable" tutorial was helpful in diagnosing and fixing the recoloring problem. JWood's 2005 tutorial on the repository technique proved easier for me to follow than any other on the subject. 

For some dumb reason after installing FT, I decided I just had to default replace the hobby magazines with a mix of 1920s magazine images and in-game photos. A lot of the science-related stuff I had seemed more Tinkering than Science, so there was a blank interior page. Then I remembered I had a whole building full of science-related stuff in my main university, so I went in and took some photos to fill up the page. (Tangent: why is there such a lame selection of science stuff in the game?  "You like science? You're going to love looking through the telescope! Oh. You already have? Ah. Um... go stare at that ant farm, I guess." A TS1-style chemistry set would've been great.)

Community lots are hard for me, probably because I try to keep everything on the small side. The Hayes Science Building is a point of pride, though. It features a fancy marbled lobby and floor-to-ceiling windows throughout, the latter an homage to the science building at my alma mater. The zoology room and aquatic biology alcove in particular are influenced by my college days. 

I make stuff for The Sims 2 but I'm horrible about sharing my creations. This is my attempt to rectify that.

My game is centered around Arbordale, originally a late Victorian neighborhood that I started when I got the game in 2004. In the intervening years, between 5 computers and after one tragic but educational BFBVFS, Arbordale has lurched forward in time to the end of 1926. In just the last few months, I finally got a computer with a supported graphics card and went wild getting my simming shit together. After running TS2+UNI+NL for the better part of a decade, I upgraded to OFB+Pets and just recently installed Seasons and BV.

And I love simming again.

It's pretty nice, actually.