hello friends

I may be on day 7 and counting of some kind of horrible thing that started off as an incipient cold, spent a brief while as a crushing headache, and then mutated into a narcotics-defying cough and a double-ear infection, with some other fun stops along the way; but that doesn't mean I can't edit up a bunch of screenshots in Paint Shop Pro and then type a bunch of stuff into a text edit box!



Previous updates are here.

General warning: sometimes I swear.
Any and all Merrick updates may be tw for fighting, infidelity, miscarriage, abductions (of the alien kind), and death.

Last time: generation six finished up college and went home (where in some cases "home" has been redefined as "the Sim Bin for possibly eternity, unless I feel like chucking them into Casa de Spare, I dunno"). Maddie met and proposed to a townie named Cyd! Jinx wasn't quite so lucky in love.

( Is it time to take my antibiotics again yet? )

Note: this is the spares update for, and should be read after, generation 4.

Previous entries are here.

General warning: sometimes I swear.
Any and all Merrick updates may be tw for fighting, infidelity, miscarriage, abductions (of the alien kind), and death.

The heir for generation 4 was Adrian, and the spouse was the former llama cultist Kaylynn. The mainline kids were triplets -- Lyman, Doc Boy, and Arlene. This is the spares update, with Adrian's sibs and their offspring. Most of it was written as I was playing, some months ago.

( Those header images get harder to make the more spare houses I have to stick in 'em. )

So I've been using a giant laptop as my desktop replacement for years now, and putting up with its 17" screen (which is great for a laptop, but not that great for a desktop). Did you know that the entire time, we had a 24" monitor going unused in the basement? Because we did. For years. Just about exactly twice as much screen real estate, completely unused. But eventually I remembered that this was the case and we hooked it up to my computer! And now everything looks tiny because I have a choice of exactly one resolution that fits the monitor and that resolution is "a butt-ton by an ass-load". Which is why I've decided to start making the pictures in these posts just a little bigger.

Also, my Sims game runs at a bigger window size now, which is kind of cool. It was actually always set to run at 1366x768, and I never realized it was a bit shorter and quite a bit narrower than that until just now. That doesn't kick in until next update, though.



Previous entries are here.

General warning: sometimes I swear.

Last time: Doc Boy and Frances J. Worthington III got married! They each had a baby, but then the babies turned out to not really exist. Instead they had three babies. And eventually two more! Doc Boy's want to top the criminal career, and Frances's want to top the law enforcement career, somehow failed to spawn a wacky sitcom. The nanny was horrible and my Terminator reference wasn't much better. Maddie and twins Owen and Lisa became teenagers, and got a series of pretty crappy dates from the matchmaker; Jinx hit child and youngest Keisha became a toddler. Then I stopped playing for a while in an attempt to avoid the inevitable.

( some text here )

Next time: Ghosts! Mystical powers! SCIENCE!!! Somebody gets pregnant... and somebody dies. Also, Yig Hall comes back for a repeat performance.

Me: Argh, this house that I just built in Sims 2 costs $33,000, ergo a new family cannot move into it because families only start with 20k. Oh well, I'll delete some furniture and wallpaper and stuff and the eventual tenants can replace it once they get jobs.
House value: [goes down to about 22k]
Me: Okay, I'll delete some walls too. I'll remember where they went, I can put them back later.
House value: [still over 20k]
Me: I'll... delete part of the porch?
House value: [jumps up to 35k]
Me: Dammit! Put the porch back! Put it back!
House value: [down to about 22k again]
Me: ...I'll delete some more unneeded walls? And maybe a couple windows?
House value: [jumps up to 27k again]
Me: Fuckit. I'll put everything back and just use cheats to get someone in here. [rebuilds house exactly as it was, minus an end table, a lamp, and a couple of OMSPs¹]
House value: $78,899

...whatever.


1. OMSP: One More Slot Package. It's basically a plain, boring-looking block that is the same height as an in-game object, like a counter or the piano, and it can be clicked on and "recolored" invisible. So if you're like "I want to have this vase of flowers on the piano!" then you put down a piano-height OMSP, put the vase on the OMSP, move the OMSP so it occupies the same spot as the piano, then recolor the OMSP invisible. Now it looks like your vase is on the piano, even though technically it's not.

And now you know.

Note: this is the spares update for, and should be read after, generation 3.

Previous entries are here.

General warning: sometimes I swear.

The heir for generation 3 was Michael, and there was no spouse because he was a Romance sim and could never, ever be tied down, man, it's like this bird you cannot change, you dig me? The mainline kids were Drew, Adrian, Toby, Aldo and Kurt; they all had different moms except for Toby and Kurt who managed to be full siblings. This is the spares update, with Michael's sibs and their offspring. Most of it was written as I was playing, some months ago.

( Long entry is long. )

Okay, this is worth a second dumb Sims post in one day.

So I'm playing a house based on these plans, and the ground level doesn't have any rooms except for a completely enclosed area in the center that just supports the house proper. I stuck some cheat objects inside of it, because I can get in there even if my sims can't.

Then I clicked down a floor to get in there to use one of those objects and found



a half-dead cafeteria worker passed out in his own filth.



Somehow this guy got into a completely locked room, long enough ago that he's very nearly starved to death. For... a day? two? he's been wandering the doorless, lightless concrete cell in which he finds himself, probably screaming for help, and wondering, as the hours tick on and the madness grows ever closer, why no one answers. He can hear the sounds of life above him -- footsteps, children laughing, voices raised in animated conversation -- but the darker shapes in the blackness are closer, and ever more numerous, and they whisper to him that this is no longer his world. Yes. Yes, he nods. There is no more light or life for him, not anymore. The dark is forever, and it has taken all that he was.

...

Or, y'know, I stuck a door in a wall and let him out so he could escape without dying and ghosting up the place. Whichever.

(Pretty sure he fell victim to the bug where your sim is talking on the phone with someone and they hang up and the someone is teleported to your lot for no good reason, because he's a household friend and he did call the house recently. It's just... usually they don't teleport into a doorless chamber.

He's lucky he didn't wind up in the cowplant pen out back.)

But I do know that Colleen looks very sad to not be allowed to find joy in anything, but rather to feel only fear at the idea that someone might smash the urn of her freshly-deceased father.

For the Sims 2 nerds in the audience: the only reason she has an extra want slot is because I tried giving her one with the Insimenator in the hopes that that would jar her empty slots into rerolling. All it did was make them show up black and locked.

At least she seems to have fixed herself a few sim-hours later.

This has nothing to do with the Merrick legacy, for the record. I was just hopped into an old, unrelated-to-anything house to test out some new downloads.

I've been meaning to get to this post, about which nobody will probably ever care except for me, for like six months.

Go go holiday weekend action!



Note: this is the spares update for, and should be read after, generation 2.


General warning: sometimes I swear.

The heir for generation 2 was Ruthie, the spouse was jerkface Derek, and the mainline kids were Cassandra; triplets Jeremy, Michael, and Duncan; and triplets Tiffany, Crystal, and Knute. This is the spares update, with Ruthie's siblings and their offspring. Most of it was written as I was playing, some months ago.

( Long entry is long. )

Next time: I don't know! Maybe the generation 3 spare update, which is also pretty ridiculously long.

The Xbox is in the same room as a studying mecha, so I'm holding off on busting out that lended copy of Saints Row 2. Thus, Sims.



Nirapama: I'm feelin' pretty good right about now!


Nirapama: Wait, maybe I'm not.
Gopal: What the hell is even going on here?!

Potty-training mishap. The toddler came back out of her chest when he was done.

Also:


"Flash powder" is the name of the color. There is a set of natural hair colors created by a former member of the Sims community which other creators can apply to hairs, and they all have vaguely explodey names, like one of the reds is Molotov.

That's not the part of the name that made me post about it, though.


Now if you'll excuse me, I have a new wallet, and I wish to huff its leathery goodness.

Two months since the last Merrick post WHAT

The apparently-book I'm writing is in a slow spot now -- I know the basics of what's about to happen, but I need to let it turn over in my head before I start putting words on not-paper -- so now I'm actually playing Sims again. Or, in this case, posting the update that I played months ago.




General warning: sometimes I swear.

Last time: One last gen 4 kid was born, a boy named Kurt, who sadly was a faceclone of his mother. Aldo was abducted by aliens, and Toby caused two different kitchen fires! Michael got haunted by 43724973343 ghosts, then got old at a sexy party with a baker's dozen of his college girlfriends. Toby joined her siblings in the I Done Gots Abducted By Aliens Club; Kurt grew up mysteriously fast into a teenager LOOK I WAS BORED OKAY, and then also took a trip to the saucer in the sky. Also he figured out how to set macaroni and cheese on fire. And then all the kids left for college!

( EHRMAHGERD! SERMS! )

Next time: possibly the gen 2 spares update, since all I really have left to do is fight with the gimp long enough to get a good animation out of it (the way the gimp does animations is really stupid you guys). Either that or the start of generation 5. Yes I am way behind on spares updates.

Spoiler from the first update of gen 5: ohmygod babiesssss D: