Sweet Dreams

We actually celebrated Christmas yesterday, since my sister and her husband were in town. They just left a few minutes ago, but they gave me the best Christmas gift: a Nook Simple Touch! When Laura and I were shopping at Barnes & Noble on Black Friday, they had a fantastic sale on Nooks, and I mentioned to her that I had been thinking about getting one -- even considered taking advantage of the sale myself -- but since I had already asked her for a couple of Sims 3 expansion packs, I wasn't expecting her to buy me one, so that was a really nice surprise! Unfortunately, though, the digital manga volume I bought (Red River Vol. 15) apparently doesn't work on the Simple Touch. :( Guess I'll still have to eventually upgrade to a tablet if I want something to store a lot of digital manga on, but in the meantime, I downloaded the Nook app on my iPod touch so I could at least read the volume I already bought. To my surprise, it's actually pretty readable, even on such a small screen. It's not a permanent solution to my manga overflow problem, since I don't have that much room left on my iPod, but I suppose it'll do for now.

Any suggestions for non-manga books I might want to check out?

As for the rest of my gifts:

( The Loot )

I think that's about it. It was a pretty nice Christmas!

Oh, it's already been a year since he joined the family, but I finally have a photo to share of my cat, Angel:



Isn't he just the cutest? (He and my brother-in-law are buddies. ^_^)

Finally! Chapter 26 of Melting Ice is done and posted at the usual places. Seems like rewatching the series gave me the kick I needed to finish it.

Now, to reward myself, I'm going to install the Sims Medieval game that just arrived from Amazon and relax a bit before trying to figure out what the heck Chapter 27 is going to be about...

Yeah, I finally took the plunge and bought one -- a shiny new HP Envy 15 laptop! We went to the same store, but a different location, and the customer service was so much better there. The salesman was actually helpful and didn't stalk me while I was browsing. They had a much larger selection to boot.

Originally I wanted a new desktop, but since this one still works okay, a laptop seemed a more logical choice. That way I can use both. The desktop I'll probably keep using to play Sims 2 on, along with doing most of my writing, while the laptop will be for Sims 3 and the internet, once we get it set up. Oh, yeah, we're finally joining the 21st century and getting rid of dial-up! (Getting rid of the landline altogether, actually, since we rarely use it to make calls anyway.) It's going to be AWESOME! Can't wait, can't wait, can't wait!

For the past week or so, I've been getting the dreaded BSOD. At first, I thought it had something to do with the graphics driver since at other times the screen would mess up and the computer would freeze, so I updated that, but that doesn't seem to have worked. In fact, now I'm getting different error messages than the ones I got before. Then today I was going to try a System Restore, only to find out all my restore points were gone except one from yesterday. (They do that on occasion, but gah, worst. possible. time.)

So now I'm not sure what to do. The good thing, I guess, is that at least the computer still works. The errors usually come within a couple of minutes of me waking the computer from sleep mode, and once I reboot, everything's fine. (And it doesn't happen every time; just some of the time.) They're more of an annoyance than anything else. Still, I can't imagine that constantly being rebooted from these errors can be good for the computer... I could take it to the local repair shop, but that would be the second time I had to do so, and if that's the case, I think I would rather get a new one instead than pay to fix another problem. I don't know. I think for right now, I'll just continue using this computer until it gets to the point where I can't use in anymore. (Or the errors drive me crazy. You know, whichever comes first.)

Well, at least I have time to make backups of all my important files this time, which I'm in the middle of doing right now just in case.

So, remember back when I was planning Against The Rules - Sims Style - The Sequel? Well, that ended up being a lot more time consuming than I originally thought it would be, so I decided to give it up. However, I know a couple of people were interested in it, so here's a basic rundown of what happened with Ami's and Akira's family.



Here's the family portrait. Together, Ami and Akira had three kids (a son and twin daughters), while Akira had two more sons from other relationships. As you can obviously tell from the photo, one of those "relationships" was actually an alien abduction.

( More pics under here! )

Long time, no update. Still quite busy, especially with it being Birthday Fortnight over at sailormoonland . I didn't even have time to do my monthly manga review. Most of my time has been dedicated to getting things set up for my Sims-style Against The Rules sequel -- and by "setting up," I mean downloading a bunch of custom content that I don't really need. -_- Before, the only CC I bothered with was Bodyshop stuff. (For the Sims-illiterate, that means skins, eyes, hairs, clothes, make-up, etc. Basically, stuff to make the Sims look pretty.) I honestly didn't care much about how the houses looked, since I was the only one who saw them, and I always cared more about the Sims themselves anyways. Now that I'm doing this story, though, I decided to download some other stuff, and now it's become like an obsession. Seriously.

But to tide you over until I actually start working on the story, here's a sneak preview of our two main characters.



This is Akira Kitagawa, of course. Yummy, isn't he? ^_~ Kinda makes you want to strip all his clothes off and... *coughs* Ahem, I mean, well, um, Ami's a lucky girl?



And here -- as you can obviously see by that name tag that I did not realize was on this pic until now *headdesk* - is Ami Mizuno. The hair's not exactly right, but I don't download a lot of unnatural color hair. This was the best match I could find. At least it's blue, and who says a person has to stick with the same hairstyle all their life, right?

I've also created Sims of these characters, but I don't have pics of them yet:

Makoto Kino - Funny story. I originally wasn't going to make a MakoSim, but I decided I didn't like the skin tone of the first AmiSim I made, so I renamed her Makoto and made her over.
Mercury (the dog, of course)
Dr. Saeko Mizuno
Professor Ryu Nakajima
Yui Yokoyama - She probably won't show up in the story itself, due to spoiler-y reasons if you haven't by chance read the fic, but I wanted to make her anyway.
Hideki Matsuno
Maeko Nishimura
Nibori Kitagawa
Izumi Kitagawa
Satoshi Kitagawa
Junko Kitagawa

Still haven't decided if I'm going to make Sims of the rest of the Inners. I don't think they're really necessary, storywise, but it could be fun to have their kids around to play with Akira's and Ami's eventual progeny. (Actually, Makoto already has a kid. I married her to a townie (a Sim that came in the game) who I renamed Itto Asanuma, and now they have an adorable daughter name Hana.)

For the first time since I started playing Sims 2 about two years ago, the social worker came and took all three of the children of one of my couples. I'm still kind of in shock about it. All the couple did was leave their children home alone for a couple of hours after school, something I have my sims do all the time. Usually I just get a warning! And to make it extra cruel, all three were set to age up into teenagers in just a few hours. I thought about just closing out without saving, but I had been playing for about three hours up to that point and hadn't saved once, so I wasn't looking forward to the idea of replaying their entire childhoods again.

On the fortunate side, I did have one of my nice elder couples who were about to experience Empty Nest Syndrome adopt all three of them, so it's not like they were lost forever. And they kept all their skill points and relationship points! Yay! Of course, adopting them set them back in age to the beginning of childhood, which is annoying, but I suppose I can just use a cheat to age them up to teenagers like they should be.

Man, I can't believe this happened. From now on, I'm making sure to have someone available to babysit when I know the parents won't be home by the time the kids arrive home from school!

Heh, it's been a while since I updated this thing. Been obsessed with the Sims again. You know how that goes... I'm going to try to do some actual writing today, though. I need to get back into the habit.

For some actual content, here's another manga review:

TITLE: Fall in Love Like a Comic
AUTHOR/MANGAKA: Chitose Yagami
PUBLISHER: Viz
RATING: Older Teen (16+)
CATEGORY: Shoujo
NUMBER OF VOLUMES: 2
SCORE: 6 (Fine)
RECOMMENDED FOR FANS OF: Chitose Yagami, romance, comedy 

Link to "Fall in Love Like a Comic" Review

I don't think I mentioned it, but I gave up Sims for Lent again this year. Well, a few days ago, I felt the urge to control the lives of virtual people that I couldn't satisfy with Sims, so I pulled out my trusty GBA and decided to play Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance. The first time I ever played, I cheated and used a walkthrough to get through the game, so this time I decided to play cheat-free. And guess what? I won! ^_^ Okay, I admit that I did use the walkthrough once near the end to find a couple of relics I needed to get the good ending, but still, I'm pretty proud of myself. I wonder if I can do the same with Aria of Sorrow...

So, I was playing Sims earlier today when I came up with the idea to have my current family celebrate Halloween by dressing them in costumes and putting out some of the decorations that came with the holiday pack. This was the result:

( Sorry, I forgot to resize, so these are kinda big. )