Meet Joe Shmakova

Joe Shmakova Legacy

NOTE: Some of my Simming friends and I are doing a Legacy Challenge where we all start with the same founder. Everyone submitted a Sim (except for me, since I joined late), and we voted on who we liked best. A Sim named Joe Shmoe won. I changed his name to Joe Shmakova for variety’s sake. We also voted on his primary aspiration (Knowledge) and his personality (Pisces). Everything else is up to each individual player to decide. Anyway, I thought this would be a fun way to actually PLAY the game, since I haven’t in many, many moons. I’m keeping each update to 5-6 pics so I don’t get bogged down in writing lengthy updates like I usually do. All right, enough introductory patter…let’s meet Joe Shmakova!

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More Retroness

Whew, I finally finished decorating 109 Cypress Avenue! Pics below.

A quick note first — even after packaging the lot so I can figure out what CC I used (recolors aren’t identifiable in-game), I still can’t find some stuff. I will keep trying to track it down, but in the meantime, if you get tired of waiting for me, you can always try the WCIF forum at the Sims 2 Community, either by doing a search or starting your own thread. If you do start a thread, however, make sure you upload my pics to a place like Photobucket instead of linking directly back to my pictures (also known as hotlinking). The Sims 2 Community gets a ton of traffic, as I learned the hard way when I posted some pics over there and the combined hits from that and Mt. Geneva drove up my resource usage and got my web account suspended. Eeep.

OK, now for pics! The first one is for Maddy, who wanted to see what a bedroom at 109 Cypress Avenue would look like:

Holiday Hills
Master Bedroom
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More 109 Cypress Avenue

Hey folks, I’ve been having fun downloading retro stuff and working on my midcentury ‘hood, Holiday Hills. I finally finished decorating the living room/foyer and kitchen/dining room of my “modern” house at 109 Cypress Avenue, which took me forever and a day because I have too dang many downloads. Seriously — I can spend a whole hour just trying on curtains to see which ones look best. It’s a sickness. But I have to say, I enjoy it immensely.

Anyway, since I’m having so much fun with it I thought I’d share more pics of my progress. I’m slowly working on a credits page, but it’ll be awhile before it’s up and running, so please feel free to ask me where I found something if an item strikes your fancy.

And now…Jen attempts 1950s interior decorating!

Holiday Hills
Kitchen

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Unretirement

I decided I’d rather have one blog than two, so Greetings from Mt. Geneva has been un-retired, and Gnomesby has been merged with it. Now all of the Franchesca Diaries stories are in one happy place, yay. And since I like the WordPress layout I had at Gnomesby so much, I’ve decided to use it here, too.

Currently I’m working on a Fran update and a few other things that are just for kicks. One of the things that falls into the latter category is a retro ‘hood I’m calling Holiday Hills. It’s a throwback to the 1950s (with a little late 1940s and early 1960s mixed in) — not the actual 1950s, of course, but kind of an impressionistic rose-colored glasses Simsian view of the era. A fantasyland.

I’m not sure if I’ll actually play with the ‘hood or just build stuff and take pictures (because it’s funnn!), but anyway, I thought I’d share a few of a work-in-progress. Here we have a modern ranch house on the beach.

Holiday Hills

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Strange Changes

You may notice a few changes here around Gnomesby — new WordPress theme, weird links to The Franchesca Diaries, random ’80s lyrics showing up in the header — and you may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?”

Well, I will tell you. In the spirit of laziness I’ve decided that creating a brand new blog for Fran was too much work, so I’m just going to use this here Gnomesby site. Since Franny will end up in Gnomesby eventually, it works.

But…I couldn’t just let the site be, you know? I had to futz with it and spiff it up a bit. Now that I have it the way I want it (well, except for a nice graphic up top, but I’m working on that), it’s all ready for me to start posting stories.

In the meantime, let me know if anything looks weird or doesn’t work, etc.

And since this new layout looks a little barren without a picture, here’s another sneak preview shot:

Fran preview pic