Shannon

I've decided I want to write more poems this year since for the past three years I've averaged about five poems overall, which seems a bit pathetic to me. So, anyway, it's basically all I've been doing for the last week or two and I'm not sure if it's because I'm genuinely enjoying it or because I'm just trying to avoid working on my other half-finished projects, probably a combination of both. Anyway, here are some I finished last week. I still have two or three I'm working on, one of which is very nearly finished so will definitely be done sometime soon and the other two are still just vague ideas so I'm not sure if/when they'll be completed. Also, in regards to my bigger writing endeavors, I realized that I have actually added a bit to this story, which started out basically as a way for me to compile a lot of information about Swan Dive's Beatrice in one place so that I could get a better grasp on her character but I'm starting to get really invested in it so who knows where it will actually go or how long it will be. Ideally, I would love to get up to the actual events of Swan Dive and look at them from Beatrice's perspective but I have no idea if I'll ever actually make it there.Anyway, poems now.

In the Light, You Are Mine. Honestly, the origins of this poem can be traced back about a year and a half. It's gone through three major revisions at this point, all of them entirely different from one another. I basically just took the handful of random lines I still liked from each version and re-incorporated them, changing the concept a bit each time, until I was happy with the end result. Actually, this poem was once inspired by a line from the Grammatics song, "Cruel Tricks of the Light," ("Now and every shining time/You were ghostly-eyed and mine") but you can't really tell now. I guess that's a good thing. It's more original.

The Hallway. I wish I could have come up with a more interesting title but, alas, I couldn't think of anything more fitting. But, really, that's the only part of this I don't like. If you can believe it, this one was inspired by a truly terrible poem I wrote way back in 2003 when I was, what, thirteen or fourteen? Anyway, it used such compelling phrases as "herbal shampoo" and "musky cologne" but I liked the title - Out of Touch - and wanted to do it justice now that, in my opinion, my writing is about a thousand percent improved. My favorite part of this one is the last three lines. I find them really quite devastating and beautiful and I don't care if that sounds a bit conceited because it's true.

Bus Stop. This one was very, very loosely inspired by January. Basically, I decided I hate that story now but like some of the description and imagery and the general mood of it. So I stole a few very small bits from it and transplanted them into an entirely new concept. Also, this was my attempt to write something other than a sad love poem, which are all I seem to be writing lately despite the fact that they relate to my own life in absolutely no way.

Now, here, have some Sims!

Next post will be the start of generation four. Yay! Well, just barely but still. Excitement.

1. I've been (finally) posting my albums of 2010 list over at my music blog for the past few days. Check it out here if you are so inclined. I've still yet to post my number one but that will be coming sometime tomorrow, probably early in the day as there's really no point in holding it back since, to me, it's very obvious anyway.

2. I haven't really been good about mentioning it here but I've also been posting bits of the novel I started during NaNoWriMo, Swan Dive, over at my Dreamwidth. (I know, I have too many journals to keep up with.) As far as the chapters go, the ones that have no date beside them I pretty much haven't touched since I first wrote them back in November, the ones that say "updated" have been edited/vastly improved and "new" means, obviously, that they are newly written. I've basically just been adding them as I go along but I haven't written much apart from outline notes in a week or two. I'm going to try to get back into the real thing soon.

3. I am SO EXCITED FOR THE NEW ELECTED ALBUM, HOLY SHIT! I had honestly resigned myself at some point last year to the fact that it was never going to happen so the news basically blew my mind. So unexpected! I really hope Blake can still deliver the goods after so long. Truthfully, though, I have more faith in him than Jenny at this point. After all, he did write one of the best songs on Under the Blacklight and it was also just about the only song that sounded like it was written in more than ten minutes lyrics-wise. So I'm not too concerned. Plus he's been silent for so damn long he must be sitting on a masterpiece by now.

4. I am going to be posting a few of these one after the other in quick succession in an attempt to get reasonably caught up to where I am now (which isn't going to happen because I'm playing as I'm posting, haha). So... enjoy or scroll past, your choice.

So... I haven't actually played the Sims at all in almost a month. I know, right?!? But I've got other, more productive things taking up my time lately - or they're more productive in my mind, at least - and haven't felt much of an urge to sit down and play for hours. But I still have quite a few pictures sitting around that I haven't posted yet and I just realized that I also have commentary for this next batch of them that's been sitting around for awhile too so I might as well post it, right? Though I think this legacy is going to stretch on for a million years considering the rate I'm getting through it at. It's been going since May and I haven't even gotten to generation four yet, God. Anyway, I should probably refresh the memories' of the invisible thousands of people who actually read this blog on what happened in the last couple installments. So, here we go...

Last time: Brendan and Bree, the youngest members of generation three, grew up into adorable children, so adorable that they began to edge their older sister out in the heir race. Speaking of that older sister, Bianca was put to work making over the fashion-challenged population of Riverblossom Hills but instead spent most of her time admiring her own good looks instead. But she's awesome so, whatevs, she can be as full of herself as she wants. Meanwhile, in college, eldest child, Bradley, turned out to be a total bore and also somewhat creepy. His hobbies include playing in piles of leaves, bonding with the creepy elderly drama professor over his dormmates' weak bladders, and only having chemistry with his ex-aunt, Dollie, chemistry which led him to sneaking his first kiss out of her while I wasn't monitoring his every action. Argh. Also, his cousin, Ben, continued to seduce the hottest males on campus while simultaneously engaging in a heated feud with a dormie for no apparent reason and being stalked by his well-intentioned but rather creepy boyfriend, Abel. And then there was Ben's twin brother, Beckett, who was just as boring as Bradley but, thankfully, not nearly as creepy. And I think that covers everyone! Well, everyone who matters anyway.


In other news, here's a new story I wrote here. Yeah, the one I mentioned not too long ago. Basically, I managed to turn the beginnings of a terrible poem I started at least a year ago into a 20k word novella... in about a week's time. I think I may have been briefly possessed as there's really no other logical explanation for how easily and quickly that many words poured out of me. It was actually an incredibly liberating experience. Usually, I have exactly where I'm going to begin and end with a story all planned out but this time I basically ended up making a lot of it up on the spot as I went along. I mean, I had the basic premise for the story and the two main characters have been in my head in vague forms for a long time now but most of the details just kind of filled themselves in the more I wrote. That's never happened to me quite so completely before. Because this is a pure labor of love and I'm not exactly an expert on the topic that plays a large role in it, it might not be completely realistic and true to life. But I don't really care. I'm not going to get all caught up in technicalities when all I wanted to do was write a sweet love story in a slightly different way than I usually do. I tend to write about depressed characters with angsty backstories that find love - or, in fact, don't find love - with each other. I didn't want to do that this time. I wanted to give the characters an obstacle to overcome, yes, but not the kind I've come to rely on too much. And I wanted to keep their lives generally angst-free but not without the little bumps along the road. I think I managed this. Anyway, the ending as of now is a bit abrupt but I was starting to run out of steam so I thought it best to stop before it began to sound forced. If I feel the pressing urge to go back to these characters in the future, I may add more to their story but, as of right now, I'm considering it a finished piece of work. And as for other stuff, I've been working on a couple small things with little progress and am also trying to find the desire to dive back into my NaNo novel. I know it will come back once I actually start writing again but that's the part that is always hardest.

I'm working on prepping my albums of the year list for my music blog right now and it's proving to be a rather tiring task. I finally just got my top twenty ordered how I want to and I think I'm happy with all of the albums I decided to put there. At least I hope I am because I refuse to change it any more; otherwise I'll never be finished. Though I keep discovering albums I should have listened to that I'm just now getting around to checking out. Ugh. But I have to draw the line somewhere. I made one last-minute inclusion that I just fell in love with a week or so ago and it's pretty hard to compare how I feel about an album I just heard versus one I've had for months so I'll just have to deal with it and accept that a year from now, there will be albums I wish I would have put in there that I didn't. So. Yeah. Right now, I am writing all of the little reviews which, I swear, every year I say, "Oh, I'm not going to bother writing long reviews this year. Just a few sentences." But then I start writing and just can't fucking stop! No matter how I try! So I think I'm writing more this year than ever. Even for the fucking honorable mentions! I just can't seem to shut up! Anyway. Hopefully, that will be done before 2010 is too far gone or maybe before it's even ended. But don't count on that, I'll probably procrastinate for at least a couple more weeks.

As I am doing right now by posting another Alpha update, woo! But there hasn't been one in awhile and I'm still impossibly behind (seriously, as soon as I start to catch up to where I am in the game here I get re-obsessed with playing and end up way ahead again) so it's a reasonable form of procrastination. Besides, I already had this stuff all written, I just had to copy and paste all the text and image links in and voila! Finished! I've still got another ready after this too so I might post that in a bit as well. Anyway. Right now, I seriously still have no clue who I'm going to pick for heir! Gah! SPOILER ALERT: I've already decided it will probably be one of the twins but choosing which one is the hard part! I was leaning towards Bree because she's awesome. Then I was leaning towards both of them because Brendan is also awesome. Then I was leaning towards Brendan because Bree found herself a super-boring boyfriend. Now I'm leaning towards both of them again because I found her a better boyfriend. AAAAAHHHH! IT'S SO DIFFICULT!!!

Also, as you can see, I've kind of given up on the "last time" intros because I figure it's just as easy to go back and look at the previous entries. And, besides, no one reads this anyway so it doesn't really matter!

Oh my God, you have no idea how excited I am to get to the more recent updates because the twins that are born in this one are seriously unbelievably freaking amazing, guys. I thought Bianca was my chosen one after she grew up into a child and though she is adorable, she kind of looks a lot like Amelia with red hair at times and the twins have a more balanced combination of Amelia and Alessa's features and FUCK THEY'RE JUST SO AWESOME. Okay. Anyway. I'm getting ahead of myself here. Let's take a step a bit further back first.


I've still been exploring the Sims 3 a bit and though there are things about it that amuse/entertain me, I think it's kind of deathly boring. First of all, one of my favorite things to do in Sims 2 is spy on townies at community lots and see what antics they get up to so I thought it would be even more awesome with the whole open neighborhood thing. Wrong. Basically, all they do is stand around like idiots or complain about how they're starving to death without doing anything to remedy it and so because of these two things, they never actually socialize at all. Which brings me to my second annoyance. IT TAKES SO FREAKING LONG FOR THEM TO DO ANYTHING! Seriously, it takes hours to have a conversation that should take minutes because the Sims stand around for ages before actually starting to talk. It's like this with any kind of action and it is so aggravating. Thirdly, it's just tedious. I feel like all of my Sim's time is spent working or sleeping and she has hardly any time to do anything extra. Okay, so obviously judging from these pictures, she does have time for some other things. But still. Everything takes so incredibly long and they day seems so short. So I don't think I'm going to be switching permanently anytime soon. Maybe I'll still play a bit when I get bored with the legacy but I can't see myself getting really invested in it or anything. Anyway, the following mostly consists of Felicity's quest to hook a man. Enjoy.

So... I bought a laptop! Really, the thing I wanted it for most was just so that I could work on my writing while away from our desktop computer (because I have officially become too lazy to actually write things out by hand... isn't that so sad?). But I spent quite a bit of time comparing a few different ones before deciding which to buy because I was hoping I might be able to use it to play Sims too. So I was very careful to get one with what I hoped was a compatible video card. Anyway, I got the laptop yesterday and installed the base game last night and it works! And the graphics actually seem just about as good as they are on our desktop which makes me really happy! Since it was only the base game I couldn't transfer over my current Sims yet so I played around in Veronaville and gave a few of the Maxis Sims there makeovers. The guys were all mostly pretty blah, even after making them over. The girls turned out better because makeup can do wonders (especially since it seemed the Maxis idiots decided every female in that neighborhood should have practically non-existent lips, WTF?!?). So here are a couple pictures just to prove that Sims does in fact run on my laptop! Sorry for the somewhat crunchy quality. I had to use the in-game camera.

Juliette Capp:


Hermia Capp:


Tybalt Capp (Okay, at first I looked at him thought, Holy crap, this poor guy has the most unfortunate facial structure EVER. But then I made him over and he suddenly got hot. Like really hot. Hotter than a pixel person should ever be allowed to be. I kind of love him now and want someone to have his babies RIGHT NOW!):



Titania Summerdream (who I think is adorable - that tiny nose!):


Anyway, God, I haven't played the base game in so long that I forgot some of its annoyances: custom content can't be subfoldered (though apparently default replacements can so it took me forever to figure out why they showed up and everything else didn't), when the Sim changes clothes with the closet it just shows one outfit at a time instead of thumbnails of them all, either the Sim calling the taxi or the entire household must leave for a community lot - you can't pick and choose who stays and goes, you go to the neighborhood screen once you leave the family's lot and pick a community lot from there (I remembered this was how it was in the first Sims but I didn't think it ever was in Sims 2)... and many more things I'm sure I can't remember right now.

So now that it works I have to go through a lot of hassle to get everything running perfectly. If I want to play the Alphas on there (which I think I do since I don't want to start even more new families and forget about them) I first have to go through the tedious process of installing every expansion/stuff pack then installing all the patches then transferring all my custom content/Sim information over from this computer. And then hoping that it all works still. My laptop has 2GB of memory and our desktop has 3 so the thing I'm most concerned about is how smoothly it will run. It works fine with just the base game but each expansion makes it more and more of a memory hog, I do believe. But I think it'll be easy enough to add more memory if I need it. It's just the money that's the difficult part.

Speaking of money, what the fuck, this laptop is going to bankrupt me. Seriously. First of all, the laptop itself was a little over $400 which is a really, really good price considering my sister's cost somewhere around twice that. Granted, mine's not the newest, shiniest model and doesn't have all the extras like a webcam and so forth but it's good enough for me. But then there's all the things I want now to go with the laptop. I just bought a new USB flash drive because mine looks like it's going to break soon and only holds like 500MB worth of stuff. I also just bought a cheap little mouse because I cannot seem to get the hang of using the touch pad the way I want to in the Sims. See, since I take so many pictures, I have to be able to get very precise, perfect angles which is very, very difficult with the touch pad. Maybe I'm just missing something obvious but it's easier for me with a mouse. And it was like ten bucks (on sale + promotion code, woohoo!) so no biggie. So I've spent like $450 altogether so far. But then I kind of want a new external hard drive because I think I actually bought mine a few years ago that holds 70GB for the same price or maybe more than you can get a 500GB one for now and I'm getting close to running out of a room. That's not a very necessary purchase right now but I would like to do it at some point. Then there's the memory if I need that. Then... it's really uncomfortable to sit on my bed with a laptop for an extended period of time so I want a desk. GAH. WHEN WILL IT EVER END?!?

Anyway, I'm rambling. I should go. I'm going to go distract myself with getting together all the things I need to install Sims instead of working on my novel. But that's okay. I'm up to 35000-some words now so I think I can slack off a little bit.

P.S. This is the most adorable/awesome thing in the entire world, I swear. I love that this part of the song is like an epic indie rock dance party.




Also, these lyrics are not in the part of that song featured in the video but I am so in love with them right now. <3 <3 <3

It seems I got it wrong.
I was chasing after something that was gone
to the black of night.
Now I know it's not what I wanted at all.

And you said something like
All you want is all the world for yourself
But all I want is the perfect love,
Though I know it's small,
I want love for us all.

And not just the lyrics but Sufjan + Shara Worden singing together there, oh my goodness, totally amazing. And also the very end of that song breaks my heart. And "Futile Devices". And the "Oh bathing boy/Amazing you" bit in "All for Myself". And this part in "Vesuvius" - "Sufjan, follow the path, it leads to an article of imminent death/Sufjan, follow your heart, follow the flames or fall on the floor/Sufjan, the panic inside, the murdering ghost that you cannot ignore" - gives me major chills. And also "I'm not fucking around" in "I Want to Be Well". And the "I love you a lot/I love you from the top of my heart" section of "All Delighted People". And and and. And I'm just totally crushing on Sufjan in general right now. Kbai.

Last time: Amelia became a fabulous and fierce and, okay, maybe slightly full of herself teenager who promptly took to terrorizing her brother, Adrian, to show him just how much more awesome than him she truly is. Ambrose also was so overtaken with sibling rivalry towards Adrian that he punched clean through a door to get to him. I'm not sure what they've got against the poor kid, apart from the fact that he is, sadly, much more boring than the two of them. In the meantime, Adam became an adult and moved out, August tried and failed to skip school and pissed off the ever-cranky Piggy by trying to clean up her literal pigsty of a living area and Tally and Royce, unsurprisingly, pretty much just acted like children and pretended like their actual children didn't exist. And, did I mention, Amelia is fucking awesome? Because she totally is.

Last time: Well, it all happened so long ago! (Sorry about that, got bored with the game for a little while, though everything in this update and the next few actually happened months and months ago.) Let's see if I can remember... Due to the week's chosen mini-challenge, Tally was not allowed to verbally communicate with her family or anyone else because of a case of "laryngitis." Appropriately, she came down with the flu at that exact time. She spent the week surprising us all by actually being a decent mother and paying attention to her children for once... apparently, once she doesn't have her own voice to keep her company, she needs to seek out entertainment elsewhere. Meanwhile, her children did their best to avoid her sudden maternal instinct. Ambrose and August grew up into the most adorable little chilluns ever! Adam was disgusted by Ambrose's inherited sloppiness (finally! because I never quite figured out where all these neat freaks were coming from) and continued to slut it up with every teenage girl he came across! Amelia grew up too into a toddler and later a child and her adorableness may have nearly cemented her place as the heir of generation two! Oh yeah, and Adrian also grew up but sadly became a pretty boring teenager who only likes to constantly admire his own physique in the mirror. The twins bonded over tormenting each other. Tally started worshipping trees. Royce nearly burned down the house. Piggy still exists. All is well.


P.S. I've written a couple new things over the past few months. This poem which is a rewrite of one I wrote a few years ago. I may attempt this with a few other older poems in the future that I still mostly like the content of but don't really match up with the way I write now. Also, I wrote this story which is a continuation of the last story I posted. I'm also in the middle of writing a third story with the same characters (which is supposed to be the last but I'm not sure if it actually will be or not) along with trying to finish the next chapter of my novel and the eleventy billion other projects I've started and left abandoned. But I'm kind of in a creative rut at the moment so I haven't done much lately. They will all be finished at some point though, I promise!