helen-louise's journal

Yarg. On the basis that my computer has become unusably slow, I'm trying to clean it up. 2.52 GB free on D: and a mere 0.99 GB free on C: might go some way towards explaining the lag. The cleaning process is itself laboriously slow and involves a number of steps. I'm clearing off a load of crap, backing up everything that I care about to our storage box (called Earth, because that's where we keep our stuff), and eventually will defragment my hard drive, each partition separately.

First, I have to figure out what the crap is. I've acquired a huge amount of dubious software lately, and I don't know why. I think it all came on the "free" CD with my digital voice recorder. Some of it is essential - others, less so. Then, I have to fight with my obsessive hoarding tendencies (which are genetic). I've spent the night on irc saying things like "someone please tell me that I don't need Sims 2 neighbourhood backups from 2006". And I apparently have 4.84 GB of Sims 2 custom content that I downloaded but haven't got round to installing! Seems like I continued to compulsively download stuff even after I was bored with playing the game. Ye gods. Then, I have to decide whether I'm keeping it or not, and if so, where I'm keeping it. It is debatable whether I need all the original .zip or .rar files for Sims 2 and other downloads, but it's definitely true that, except for the most important programs, I don't need to carry them around on the laptop.

I've also discovered that my AVG antivirus program somehow got broken or corrupted, and hasn't been checking the hard drive at regular intervals like it should. Having fixed it the hard way (*complete* uninstall, delete and reinstall - then booting up avgui.exe manually), I have downloaded all the updates and have it scanning for spyware and viruses. Various people have recommended other antivirus/antispyware programs, which I will look into once the computer's running at a sensible speed again.

This is so boring, and I want to go to bed. At least, I will as soon as everything's on the network drive. Then I can set defrag running overnight.

I haven't written anything in livejournal in a week or so because I haven't had enough spare energy. I've been less dead since I read a post by wispfox reminding me that SAD season is starting in the Northern Hemisphere. The first day that I set my lightbox alarm clock, I managed to get up after 10 hours sleep and half an hour lying in bed awakeish, rather than the 12 hours sleep followed by an hour lying in bed going "eurgh" that I'd needed for the whole of the previous week. However, I am clearly still suffering from chronic fatigue, because if I can only get 8 hours sleep I spend the entire day exhausted, and if I get less than 8 hours I'm like a zombie. It's not much fun.

Sometimes when people have chronic fatigue they have to stop working for a while. The thing is, if I stopped working, I probably wouldn't recover any better. I enjoy the work I do and it gives me a reason to get out of bed and get on with life. I know from experience that when I don't have work, I get depressed - which is a particular problem if some aspect of the chronic fatigue is seasonal depression. The best thing for me is to keep going and just make sure that I look after myself. However, it means that I run out what I think of as "brain spoons" before the end of the day.

One of the interesting aspects of spoon management isn't just the idea that we have a limited amount of energy available, but also that there are different types of energy. I notice myself that I have general "physical spoons", "leg & back spoons", "brain spoons" (for thinking with) and "emotional spoons". (Some people think that time is a spoon quantity, but I use "spoon" to mean a quantity of energy. It doesn't mean that I'm right and other people are wrong, just that different people use different terminology.) Sometimes it's necessary to spend one kind of spoon in order to gain others - like when I drag myself into London to see friends. It means that I end up spending some physical spoons and possibly some of my leg spoons depending on how much of a crip I'm being on that particular day, but in return I gain energy from being around other people. But it takes a certain amount of calculation to figure out whether something is going to help or hinder me overall.

So the past few days, I've been working for a few hours, then coming home and sitting in front of the computer doing things that don't need much brain - like sorting out my Sims 2 downloads and hacks ready to install Pets. (It's taken me about 15 hours to update hacks and make backups - I cannot play the game the way it's sold because it's broken in so many ways.) Last night I actually got round to installing the Expansion Pack, so this means that my sim-Ludy will be able to have a sim-Sylvia, and sim-h-l will get to live with a big wolfy. I still have 101 plans for stories that I need to write and videos that I want to shoot, but I simply do not have enough energy :/

Updated my last post with 11 more icons, making a total of 8 geeky, 6 university/college, 8 sexuality and 1 illness-related. Go & have a look! Not doing any more for now because I have a Sims photo story to finish (which was the whole reason I was looking at the icons in the first place!). But they're reasonably trivial to create, so I can theoretically take requests if you're not fussed about timescale.

It's official. Maxis *ahem* EA have spent so much time producing simulated games that they've lost the ability to distinguish between reality and fiction.

According to MaxoidSam, items were hidden in the Sims 2 Glamour Life pack on purpose. It wasn't a mistake, or a half-finished buggy item tucked away out of sight to "finish" the game on time, oh no - it was to give the modding community something to do! Yeah, right.

My friend rohina got banned from the official Sims 2 BBS for calling him on it, though uh, the reasoning leaves a lot to be desired. But I agree. Two words, one of them being "bull", the total describing excrement of a male bovine.

*rolls eyes*

[16:27]
baratron: why is organising bisexuals like herding cats?
baratron: i am trying to come up with a plan for getting me, my girlfriend, her boyfriend, _his_ boyfriend, my psuedo-girlfriend/tocotox-thingy, her boyfriend and two other friends from five different towns to manchester
baratron: next saturday
baratron: starting in different places and travelling on different days
baratron: ARGH!
baratron: did i already mention that none of us have much money at all (I'm probably the most flush with spare cash of the lot of us, which is quite scary really) so we all want to do it as cheaply as possible?
baratron: we're trying to arrange car-sharing and trains and all sorts of argh

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[17:45]
* baratron is really tired and brain-dead
baratron i got woken up by parcelfarce [1] banging on the door
baratron: i can't complain about that - more usually, they knock ONCE then stick a card through the door saying "we tried to deliver this but you were out", and then one of us has to go to bloody mitcham to try to collect it
baratron: but i was absolutely sound asleep, and also naked
baratron: so i had to try to get dressed and get downstairs without tripping on my pyjama legs and killing myself

( Footnote [1]. )

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[17:57]
* baratron dies of the CUTENESS that is her two lovely boys getting engaged in the sims
baratron: i went for the surprise engagement this time. so one of them sorta sneaked the ring box onto the table, and grimaced a little.
baratron: and the other one saw it and started bouncing on his seat, and he opened the box and saw the ring, held it up to the light, and bounced on his seat some more and grinned a lot and put it on.
baratron: SO CUTE!
baratron: and, um - how come every other gay man in the neighbourhood is eating in that restaurant today?

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[19:00]
baratron: random ludyism: "when i was young, i thought everyone had their own personal church. because my dad had his church that he was minister of, and my mum had her meeting house, which doesn't have a minister because they're quakers, so she might as well be in charge of it. and all the grown-up people i knew had their own church."
baratron: she rang me up to ask whether i had any ideas for brighton bifest because she's going to the committee meeting about it now, and mentioned that they'e looking for a new venue, and i asked if they'd considered the quaker not-a-church, as they happily hosted the dykes for the dyke modern day of indulgence, and it's MUCH bigger than the bifest venue last year
baratron: so, there was context :)

Dear h-l,

For future reference, your password for The Sims 2 site is the password you'd expect it to be, minus the HYPHEN, as the EA site doesn't let you have punctuation in passwords even though that's the normal way of obfuscating them for security porpoises. Don't waste another 15 minutes of your life trying every single variant of the password. Bah.

Anyway, having found the correct variant to enter the site, I've just posted a new chapter of my evil Ethiopian Challenge story online at the Sims 2 Exchange: Tormented Family Chapter 4 - Profoundly Gets His Man! In which the founder's son, Profoundly Tormented, grows up and picks his partner, and the third generation of Tormented sims are brought into the world. It is very, very silly - as might be expected for any Sims challenge where you're not allowed a kitchen or bathroom or any electrical appliances in the house, yet somehow you have to keep the sims alive and happy. It takes me forever to play this family because I'm always running someone or other Downtown so they can use the facilities - but taking chances is so, so fun ;)

Enjoy! A non-Exchange version will be posted when I get home & have sufficient motivation to do so. But it seems the Exchange isn't being the laggiest thing ever in the history of the universe tonight (at least, I'm seeing it fine even though I'm connected through slow hotel wifi), so you might actually be able to read the story even though it's there.

Reasons I love The Sims part 814:
You get to ask questions like "if I have 6 clones, and I get every clone to Family Kiss every other clone, how many kisses will there be in total?"

( The answer... )

I do love Family Kiss - and it's especially cute when it's clones kissing each other :)

My sims are crazy.

I have these sims that I've been denying romantic relationships to for a while, because I wasn't sure who should get together with whom. Eventually figured it out, and yesterday I let two of them get together.

So, it's pretty obvious that the poor things were desperate. They were already Best Friends, with maxed-out relationship. (100 in both Short Term and Long Term relationship). This means it took one romantic interaction for them to fall instantly in love with each other. Just a Flirt --> Caress, and they were In Love. Not a Crush, straight to In Love. (The pink hearts floated above their heads followed immediately by the red hearts followed immediately by the big red heart with an arrow through it.) Then, the girl's Wants changed to Talk to Boy, Dance With Boy and Get Engaged to Boy, while the boy's changed to Entertain Girl, Dance With Girl and Get Engaged to Girl.

Flirt --> Caress is a light touch on the side of the face - stroking the other person's cheek. They hadn't even kissed at this point, and they wanted to Get Engaged! Okaaaaay. Y'know, even in my wildest teenage girliehood, I don't think I ever wanted to get engaged to someone I hadn't even kissed! I don't even think I wanted to get engaged to the first guy who ever kissed me "properly" (who was, btw, the bass player in my favourite band at the time - true story!). Poor little sims. I've clearly been neglecting their emotional needs.

Then the boy took the girl out on a date (as I was in his house at the time), and I ignored the Want to Get Engaged. And some more sensible Wants spun up. They wanted to Dine Out together, then they wanted to Hug each other, then Kiss and Make Out. (They made out in the middle of the road, with cars hooting at them - something that would be rather dangerous in real life.) After that, both of them had 3 Want slots clogged up with Have First Ever Woohoo With (the other), Woohoo With (the other) and Woohoo In Bed with (the other). So I relented and had him ask her home. She autonomously ran up the stairs to the bedroom, in front of him (!), and they had fantastic sex as only sims can (lots of giggling under the blankets, strange acrobatics with random hands and feet coming out of the bed, and fireworks going off overhead). When they got up again, the Get Engaged Want was back.

Who am I to ignore what is clearly Meant To Be? :D

Update: They've now been on four dates, all Dream Dates, and as a result are both walking around with permanent Get Engaged and Get Married wants. I didn't even realise Get Married could spin up as a Want for sims who aren't engaged yet!

What better to do the night after seeing Freezepop than to play Guitar Hero? :)

I can't share the "Emotions & Photos" video with you yet because we have to sort out the copyright messages and re-encode it to be less dark (even on full screen brightness the colours aren't great), but I can share the outtakes. There's no audio for the outtakes, but I think you'll enjoy them :)

Right-click and select "Save as...". They're designed to be downloaded and played locally, not streamed.
640x480 resolution. 10.2MB. Recommended, as you can actually see the sims' expressions properly.
320x240 resolution. 2.5MB. Better for people with slow connections, but less clear.

They're Windows Media format - we have to figure out what's wrong with the Quicktime installation on this PC before we can convert them. Sorry Mac-people :/ Hopefully we'll be able to do that soon.

Update: Richard is playing along to Guitar Hero with a real guitar. We are such geeks.