Can’t Beat Reality

By Bay Posted Friday Dec 23, 2022

Filed under: Epilogue, Personal, Random 34 comments

This week’s post will be a little on the shorter side, I’m recovering from the flu and Christmas is in just a couple of days. The observant of you will notice that means I’m writing this the same day it goes up, to which I say; snitches get stitches.

Jokes aside, I don’t usually write so late. The issue is, this week has been a shit storm. It was last week when we noticed our ceiling in the dining room was a bit…slack?

 This was taken to show our property manager, so it's low quality and sideways via phone photography. Just, tilt your head to the left or your device to the right. Or, if you like, do neither and pretend my entire home is sideways.
This was taken to show our property manager, so it's low quality and sideways via phone photography. Just, tilt your head to the left or your device to the right. Or, if you like, do neither and pretend my entire home is sideways.

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Sims 4 Overthinking: Realism to a Point of Mildew

By Bay Posted Friday Dec 16, 2022

Filed under: Epilogue, The Sims Overthinking 8 comments

We’re almost ready to finally start cranking forward the years on this build. I only have two things on my to-do list before we can make that happen; a pantry, and a basement.

Neither of these things are made easy by The Sims 4 build-mode setup. The only closets that EA has given us are for clothes. I could scuff it and put one of those in the kitchen and just pretend it’s full of canned goods, but that isn’t how I roll. I could also, in theory, install a mod to help me out. The Sims 4 has fantastic mod support, which is amazing after the nearly entirely locked Sims 3. The problem is, I don’t like mods in my builds. I have all sorts of mods for my sims themselves, don’t get me wrong. Clothes, makeup, tattoos, it’s all on the table. But no build-mode mods is my general rule, because I like to make my shared content accessible. If I upload my house to the gallery and someone likes it enough to put it in their own world, I don’t like the idea of half the content being inaccessible without a bunch of hoops.

People generally get around this by just putting links to their mods in the description of the build. But, if I’m honest, there is almost no build on earth appealing enough to make me want to spend an hour fighting with Adfly and compatibility issues.

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Sims 4 Overthinking: Two, Maybe Three Bedrooms

By Bay Posted Friday Dec 9, 2022

Filed under: Epilogue, The Sims Overthinking 23 comments

Week three! Finally, we can get the interior shape done and get started on moving forward in the years.

Last week I actually made a mistake Gasp. I know, right? I thought I was the first infallible 24-year-old too. We will have to press on.. I mentioned that my ‘outlet cover’ in the kitchen (pictured below) was deserving of praise from future inhabitants.

Later, the inhabitants will cry because there is only one outlet by the kitchen counters. They should be instead rejoicing that the old homeowners needed a place to plug in the home phone.

My bad. This mistake, funnily enough, came from a childhood memory misfire. I know that home phones didn’t plug into the wall! I might be a zoomer, but I am only a year too young to be a millennial by most accounts. Plus, my dad collected junk electronics and refused to move into the 20th century.
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Sims 4 Overthinking: Wooden Outlet Covers

By Bay Posted Friday Dec 2, 2022

Filed under: Epilogue, The Sims Overthinking 31 comments

Alright, where we left off two weeks ago, we had just ‘finished’ the house’s facade.

This is not the final finished exterior by a longshot, it can't be. With so many windows, there is nowhere for me to place stairs except for in the middle of the building, which I try to avoid.
This is not the final finished exterior by a longshot, it can't be. With so many windows, there is nowhere for me to place stairs except for in the middle of the building, which I try to avoid.

I’ve worked from a few reference images of real-life houses built in the early 1900s, but I’m mostly winging it. Half of the point of this project is to be low-maintenance while I get my bearings, so I suppose I should admit I don’t do a lot of historical research for these projects. It feels a bit dishonest to say ‘let’s go through one of my normal builds’ and then do a ton of research I never do on my own without an audience. Maybe I’ll do some research and disclose it, but if I’m honest, probably not. What I know comes from family, stories, and history I already have.
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Turkey Crime Scene

By Bay Posted Saturday Nov 26, 2022

Filed under: Epilogue, Personal 51 comments

So, it’ll surprise no one that my entire family experiences textural issues with food: gristle, bits of fat, and bones. We were the kids who wouldn’t eat the bone-on chicken wings and legs, or we’d just take a single bite from the outside and proclaim it finished.

Dad’s autobiography was riddled with clear neurodivergence, which was only a peek into his real life. One of my favorite things was the fact he’d still be wandering around in shorts at this time of year. It wasn’t that he wasn’t cold, it was that he was so used to wearing them that the change felt wrong. It wouldn’t be until late January that he’d finally break and switch to sweatpants. He’d take a couple of weeks acclimating to the change, just in time to experience a month and a half of comfort. Then, come May, he wouldn’t switch back to shorts no matter how hot it was because he was used to the sweatpants, and the cycle continued.

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Sims 4 Overthinking: Where’s the Plumbing?

By Bay Posted Saturday Nov 19, 2022

Filed under: Epilogue, The Sims Overthinking 26 comments

Years ago, I saw a YouTube video of real-life architects reacting to Sims 4 builds.  They mainly had little issues with the builds, IE: You can’t put windows to the east because you’ll be blind in the morning, or, you can’t have a vast open space like that without support beams, etc etc. But the other issue they had really stuck out to me.

Why were these digital builders sticking in the realm of possibility? The individuals reacting to these builds were architects. Building stuff that makes sense in the realm of possibility was their full-time jobs. Why the hell are these gaming dumbasses doing the same crap they have to do for work? At work, they can’t just ignore zoning laws, but these ‘simmers’ can! Why are they building normal stuff?

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Inheriting an Audience is Weird

By Bay Posted Friday Nov 11, 2022

Filed under: Epilogue, Personal 48 comments

These last few weeks I’ve had Peter posting to the site, and before that, I was doing some lighter content. The podcast, some venting about VR, but nothing really substantial. The long and short of it is: it’s the holidays, and I really, really miss my dad.

Pumpkin carving was enough to leave me out for an entire day, recovering from the smell of fresh-cut pumpkin; a smell I associate with my dad. He used to do the pumpkin carving for us every year. We kids would draw out our designs, and he’d do his best to cut them out. It’s been a really long time since any of us carved a pumpkin with Dad, I suspect however many years it’s been since I’ve been old enough to hold a knife on my own. But still, the memory sticks as ‘how it’s done’ and leaves Halloween feeling wrong and unfinished.
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