TSS Insider Issue 5

Flobos husband can sleep on a washing line. Can we have pictures??

TSS Facebook got a lot of hits. Why? The forum was down and poor Rics was sweating buckets trying to fix it. Meanwhile the troops were beginning to panic and came to TSSFB to get their fix. Rics conquered the battle and everything is back to normal. Hurray. Well nearly back to normal

Peacy has a new excuse to procrastinate... he claims Photobucket is doing maintenance. I ts up again Peacy!!

Steph has discovered that living on her own takes up more time. Well... yes, you have a man to look after now.

Judy is going back to work. Thats going to be shock to the system. And exhausting for the first few weeks.

Kate has a birthday upcoming. It seems fashionable nowadays to give presents to others on your birthday. I think I preferred the old way.

Jorgahahaq has a knee more accurate than the tv weather forecasters. She predicts rain.

Small children in Israel have a nasty shock coming. Hopefully a daddy with some concept of parental control.

Burmina still can't get her Sims game to work, thats since last October. Nobody knows why.

Kaleeko has moved into machinima. Is there anything that gir l can't do?

Fidler popped in long enough to announce his new build Ma Tai ZenTai. Isn't that a cocktail?

We have a new look site. I t will be lovely when its finished.

Photobucket had a really bad day, updating sites is obviously not an easy thing to do.

Bergs is back on the computer playing Sims, she even has a wip. Clean that sink will you?

There was a lot of cake around this week, virtual calories are great. Not very tasty though.

Smoky got her oven cleaned (that’s me) so the kitchen doesn't set off the smoke alarm any more.

Jorgha is battling with next doors pit bull. My money is on Jorgha.

Alli is close to joining in some of the challenges, only close mind.

These hairs all come from Anubis-under -the -sun. Blog link:-http://anubis360.blogspot.com

Lots more on her blog, worth a look, and a wander round

Oh look medieval! Very pretty though.

Smoky decided she would like to move to a new home in a new town and start a new life. She had seen Victoria Bay advertised and thought it sounded a perfect haven from the hustle bustle of Bridgeport.

First she bought a little starter home on BeachFront Boulevard. Lightly furnished and nicely decorated she felt it would be a great beginning..

There are a lot of starter homes available in Victoria Bay.

Simply decorated but very tastefully done it was a good beginning.

Off to explore the surrounding amenities.Smoky then took a trip to Mcgregors Community garden, she is a very keen gardener and wanted to have a look around to see what she could glean from here for her own, as yet, dream garden.

Then she was off to check out Pocket Pond Park to catch a little dinner. Its tiny but very accessible and she succeed in getting a nice piece of fish to grill

Victoria Bay A new world by Ruthlesskk

Smoky moves home

Further exploration took her to Statler Park, where to her delight she discovered a bandstand and had a good thump on the drums. More noise than skill here but an entertaining place to visit. Joined in the local grill-a-thon, the fish will have to wait till tomorrow.

Then off to check out the pool, Bayside Public Pool. Hmm not exactly olympic sized but good for a cooling dip on a hot day.

She would dearly love to grow some death flowers so off to the graveyard to see whats around, its pretty hilly here and Smoky felt a bit hot and tired.

Checking out the shopping area, everything is available here and even a pretty shady patio to sit with a cool glass of nectar and watch the world go by.

This is a lovely world to play, compact and small and the landscaping is perfect. If you want to play a standard game with a sims family then this is your world.

Download Link

www.thesims3.com/assetDetail.html?assetId=394

Another little listing of blog storymakers to visit thanks to Seaweedy’s assiduous

searches.

Today In the World of Sims Sto-ries 4.13.11April 13, 2011 at 1:58 pm (Uncategorized) The Season LegacyGreyson makes a difficult decision between sweet, yet fragile Pea and lovely, lively Aila.http://equinoxseason.wordpress.com/Judging LoveBlake and Jade’s relationship undergoes a great test after Blake is shot. Jade feels responsible and a crazed gun man is on the loose.http://kristendaray.livejournal.com/7015.htmlMy Life Caught On a Silver CameraWilhemina Jones fulfills her bestie’s request to spy on the new kid in town.http://nessasuarusrex.wordpress.com/PermalinkLeave a Comment

April 12, 2011 at 1:57 pm (Uncategorized) The AwakeningDmitri makes a deal with Sarah regarding little Cathy, his future mate.http://dutchysim.blogspot.com/ClandestineAbby Reid learns the difficult truth about the tragic death of her parents and how it links to Christopher Hartman.http://clandestine-nygirl.blogspot.com/DesiredKarver Styx, evil incarnate, makes his presence known to Zoe and Drake Steele.http://desiredsims3cont.wordpress.com/s7-chapter-06-are-you-afraid-of-the-dark/

Seaweedy is of course a very talented author in her own right. You should read her new story here in this weeks copy of the Insider.

This weeks challenge was quite different from earlier ones. The client wanted a set designed for a film about a PI and this was to be his office and waiting room. The look was slightly seedy and well used. So what did our intrepid designers come up with?

Haze was first.

The setting was an old victorian house, with its use changed to commercial. Haze went for a stripped back look.

Bylos went for a slightly different look, her PI is obviously musical and tinkles the ivories while waiting for clients.

The brief was filled very satisfactorily here.

Now who was next?

Cab got quite carried away, and wrote most of a story, it was tempting to put it all here, but we resisted

Cabs second picture, there were more but you would have to check the thread.

Next entry came from Pallypoo..

Love her hat, and the aquarium.

Love the quality of Pallypoos images, she saves all hers as png format. Seems to make really clear pictures.

Pallypoos second picture, complete with Miss Jones. Now will Cab and Pallypoo produce a tale out of this?

Mythago also seemed to be starting a story!

Now we need to know what the judges said.

Attention Picture Perfect Week 24 Participants!

Haze Cera-Love, love, love the brick! The brick and the wood floor are such wonderful combinations. The green window coverings make a great accent color. Love the bar and fireplace addition too. Tweek-The brick gives it a masculine feel. The bar makes me feel like the detective likes to get "personal" with his clients. I almost feel like I'm looking at a movie set and the detective ends up with the girl at the end. I like it.

Cab Cera-Great layout! I love the seperate rooms for reception and office. The bookcases lining the walls is fabulous. Great texture choices too, leads me to think of Mr Walters as a low brow slum lawyer. Tweek-Great layout. I like the reception and waiting area. The colors say this is a professional place and I can even smell the books.

Myth Cera-Great color choice. The grey is unexpected but very pleasant. Great layout! Again I like the seperate reception and office spaces. It's very clean! Tweek-I love the colors. Your detective must have a professional decorator. It looks very neat and organized, shows me that she's picky and precise and I know I'm going to get quality service. Just hope she's not overpriced! I think the layout is great. Good job!

Bylos Cera-I really like the lighting here. Makes it feel a little bit secretive and seedy. Wonderful pattern choices. The piano is a great addition to the space! I love your layout too!

Tweek-I like the shape of the desk. The bookshelves in the waiting area as well as the office makes me feel like this detective has been in business for a while. Great job.

Pally Cera-The red in the reception area is wonderful and so is the green in the office! Great use of clutter, it really lends to a busy feel for the PI/lawyer...who ever he is! I love your layout too! Tweek-I like the waiting room, the layout of it is great. The fish tank really caught my eye and gives a relaxing feel to the room. The office area looks great, I like the detective board in the corner...makes me feel like she/he is a hands on kind of person. Looks great!

And the winners?

Attention Picture Perfect Week 24 Participants!

Our winner this week is:

Myth

Honorable Mention goes to:

Pally

Look out fro week 25, which seems to have created quite a stir!

SLIP IN THE TIME STREAMby Seaweedy

Bolting upright, my breath ragged and my body covered in a sheen of sweat, I listen for the voice. Blessed silence answers me for a few moments. Then I hear it, calling to me. It is not a dream! It is real and I know if I descend the stairs to my workshop I will find the source of the mournful sound.

But I cannot bring myself to go to the basement. I cannot look at the monstrosity I have created. I cannot consider the fact that I have opened a door and through that door has entered a wretched entity that I am now responsible for. I lay next to my wife and pray the voice will stop.

Sleep I have missed overwhelms me and soon I am blinking into early morning sunlight that streams into our bedroom. Eva has left for the day. I picture her down at the beach, starting a new painting which will be sold to one of the many visiting tourists, fulfilling her dream of being a working artist.

My working day must start soon as well. But first, a read through the paper, fearful of finding another story about a vanishing. My search yields results and I continue on in spite of my apprehension: “Police of Barnacle Bay baffled by the tenth disappearance this month, this time a family of four.”

I stumble downstairs. The workbench awaits, seemingly innocuous. I fiddle with some scrap, pretending that making toys and other gadgets is a satisfying pursuit. The hours melt away and I almost make it through the day without acknowledging the presence of evil.

Finishing up, I hurry to turn out the lights. Over my shoulder, I spot it. The hulking menace. My very own vehicle to other dimensions. It squats in the darkness, waiting for curiosity to quicken in my mind and draw me back into its disturbing interior.

Gratitude washes over me when I hear the front door swing open. Eva is home and as long as the rest of the day lasts, I am free of the haunting terror of the disembodied cries calling me, begging me to set free a restless spirit trapped some place I cannot find.

We spend the evening as we do so often, locked in an embrace of love, trying so hard to expand our little family of two. If only I could create life inside the womb of my darling Eva with the seeming effortlessness it took to build a door between reality and nightmare.

If only it were a nightmare, something I could shake off once I open my eyes. But no. I slide away from a conscious state into R.E.M. Sometime after, my ears register the forlorn uttering of a child, his voice so piteous: “Father...father...where are you?”

I sit at the window for several hours, trying to will the voice away. I watch the moon begin its descent. I long to see the sun rise in its stead, knowing I will have some relief but then night will fall and the eerie lamentations will begin anew. I will be compelled to make every effort to make. Them. STOP.

Eva joins me. She wants to speak and so do I, wishing I could share my dread with her but knowing it is best if I shield her from it. An awkwardness we never felt before has risen between us. I am so grateful that somehow, she is unable to hear what I hear. It would destroy her tender mind.

“You are so far away from me, Morgan,” Eva begins. I nod but I have nothing to say in my defense. If she knew how incredibly far I traveled in her absence, what would she think? What could I rationally expect her to believe?

The conversation so difficult to start withers away and we turn our attention to breakfast and coffee. Eva eventually leaves the house and I rush downstairs to the workshop, averting my eyes from the behemoth in the corner. I spend several hours poring over my blueprints, searching for a way out.

The clock ticks down the day. I know I still have an hour before the sun starts to dip in the horizon, the point where Eva will cover her canvas and pack up brushes and paints and head for home. I draw a deep, shuddering breath and forcefully punch out a new series of numbers on the control panel.

For what may as well be an eternity, I roam from one epoch to another, witnessing the evolution of all things. Another man might linger, hoping to garner the wisdom of infinity. All I want is to find the child who calls to me, the child who thinks I am his lost parent. But I fail in my quest.

An afternoon spin in the beast yields no wandering soul but it does silence the voice for several days. My normal sleep pattern returns and I could almost forget the visitations. But the flyers, posted in a frantic effort to find the missing, keep multiplying. Fifty residents mysteriously gone from our town.

After the first couple of disappearances, Eva and I had a laugh speculating about alien abductions or something in the water making people invisible. We were joking but in the back of my mind I had already started to suspect that my continuous forays in that infernal machine were to blame.

I kept detailed records of my traveling. I compared my notes to the stories of the vanishings. If I entered the Time Stream at 4pm on a Sunday, the people would last be seen at that hour on that day. The realization of what I was doing should have led to the immediate destruction of my invention.

But then, I wonder, what would become of the voice? Even if it went away, I would still be haunted by the existence of a child out there, somewhere, searching for me. If I demolish my creation, would I end the life of this youth, set adrift for reasons I could not comprehend?

Could it even...somehow...be the soul of the child Eva and I were trying so hard to conceive? My bold experiments with time and space might have brought me to the brink of the secret of existence. I may have unlocked a dimension between what is desired and what can be made whole.

Why does the spark of life elude us yet I am pursued? I ponder this dilemma but am startled out of my reverie by the return of the sound...so far away, so sad, so frightened yet so determined to pull me back in. Once more, I think to myself, one more search and then never again.

Eva decides that day to paint some vistas of the ocean from the cliff behind our house. I had never before risked traveling while she was at home but the voice has become so plaintive, so yearning, I can wait no longer. Locking the workshop door behind me, I turn and face my nemesis.

Hurtling across the continuum of the Universe, I only pause here and there to listen carefully but the voice cannot be followed, it cannot be found. I long for a name to call out, for a face to try to recognize amongst the sea of humanity I am exposed to. Nothing. I had to return, my hands empty.

Climbing the stairs, my heart is as heavy as my steel-toed boots. I could not continue my search for what may or may not be a member of my family, knowing the havoc I was wreaking on the families in town, families inexplicably less in number due to causes that could never be known.

I wash my hands, thinking ahead about dinner. Maybe I would take Eva out and we could spend the evening cooing over baby names as she liked to do. Maybe have a serious discussion about our options...fertility treatments? Adoption? What would it take to fulfill our wish for a child?

Stepping outside, I am surprised to find an unfinished painting at Eva's easel. Oddly, her palette and several brushes are lying on the ground. Eva is never careless with her things. I wonder what would have called her away so suddenly. Our car is still in the drive so she can't have gone too far.

I quickly reenter the house, calling her name. Our bungalow is small, only our bedroom, our bathroom and the open kitchen and living room. If she is home, she would hear me, surely. I enter the bedroom and see her purse and cellphone sitting on the bedside table. She wouldn't have left without those.

Then I am struck as if by a million volts of electricity. My knees buckle and my bowels run cold. What have I done? Has my last trip through time and space cost me the one thing I hold dear above all else? For what? For what have I made this monstrous journey?

And then I hear them...the sounds of horror. A voice, young and high calling to me joined by another, this one much lower, more feminine. Unmistakably familiar but I strain to be sure.

“Morgan...Morgan...where are you?”

I want to acknowledge fellow TSS member Colleenm for creating Morgan and Eva.

Paogae is an Italian lady who definitely has the Italian sense of style. She builds stunning, very different homes with amazing interiors. Over time she has become more and more deft with her creations and has been featured both here on TSS and on the ea site, which shows that occasionally they do get it right. The ea feature was Dolce Vita. Now which one would you choose to feature?

Paogae's studio is here:-http://www.thesims3.com/mypage/paogae

http://www.thesims3.com/assetDetail.html?assetId=3770147

A neat little house built on a 20 x 20 lot. Clever bathroom here.


Pagoa also has a nice touch with baby rooms. This one in 'Love me is particularly nice.

Did you notice the sloping garage supports? Its clever cfe without going too wild.

She certainly has a good eye for colours, this is one of the interior shots from 'Golden Stone'.


Can you tell this is from her Christmas house? Modern and Merry its called.



That's the link for Modern and Breezy.

This one is Sunny Corner.


Paogae's latest creation is Sunset Panorama, which shows where she has got to with her interior design and building skills.


The music room.This has got to be one of the most beautiful bedrooms I have ever seen.

Paogae has a showcase thread on TSS which is worth a visit too,

http://www.simmerssociety.net/index.php?option=com_kunena&func=view&catid=8&id=84649&Itemid=56#84649

If you would like even more pictures there is also a showcase thread on the ea forums.

http://forum.thesims3.com/jforum/posts/list/241782.page

Its lovely stuff, keep building because you just get better.

The Antics of Stu-Ghost & Eric

Season 3 - Chapter 1 – Off on an Adventure

Antics Way by PlayKimSim

“So...” Stu-ghost almost grumbled. “Are you going to tell me where we are going?!”

“Stu!” Eric rolled his eyes. “How many times do I have to tell you? We are going to Sunset Valley! It’s

not like I haven’t told you already. And besides, it’s a surprise!”

“I know. I know!” Stu-Ghost sighed. “We have had a lot of surprises recently!”

“Yes, I know... But you will really enjoy this one. I promise, love.”

Moments later Eric pulled up outside the delightful Antics Way designed by PlayKimSim.

“Here we are!” Eric smiled leading the way inside.

Stu-Ghost was speechless and stood outside looking at the architecture while Eric made his way in.

Eric was busy chattering away that he hadn’t realised that Stu-Ghost hadn’t followed him inside.

“Oh!” Eric suddenly said to himself when he finally realised that Stu-Ghost wasn’t in the room with

him. “Where has he gotten to?”

As quietly as only a ghost can float, Stu-Ghost floated through the wall, and...

... took a deep breath!!

“Boooo!” He shouted at the top of his voice!

“Arghhhhhhhhhhhh!” Eric screamed in a high-pitch soprano girly scream!

Stu-Ghost couldn’t stop giggling. In fact, he was laughing so much he nearly pee-ed himself!

“Stop laughing!” Eric tried to say still wheezing in after-fright! “You frightened me half to death!”

Well, that did not help! That just made Stu-Ghost even worse!

“Ha ha ha!” Stu-Ghost continued laughing hysterically. “Half to death! Ha ha ha! Well then! We

would both be on the same side! Ha ha ha!”

“Ha ha!” Eric frowned. “Very funny! Seriously, now. Enough already!”

“Ok, ok. Sorry” but Stu-Ghost was still trying to stop giggling... “Not until you at least smile...”

Eric rolled his eyes, smiled half-heartedly and then caved in and started giggling, too.

“Come here, you! You are funny!” Eric said, giving Stu-Ghost a hug.

“So, what I was trying to explain before you crept up on me, and while you were missing in action, is

that I set up a competition for designers to design us a new home! The next surprise is that this is

the first one. There will be more! And..., we get to live in them all! Isn’t this going to be fun?!”

“Woah!” Stu-Ghost said releasing himself from Eric’s hug. “And you never asked me to design it?!”

“Er... um... well...” Eric fumbled to find the words, “I... er... thing is...”

“Yes?”

“Stu, you weren’t actually around at the time to ask or to discuss it. I thought it would be a lovely

surprise for you!” Eric felt suddenly a little forlorn.

“Ha ha ha! Gotcha ya!” Stu-Ghost giggled again.

“Stu!”

“Sorry, hon. I do think it is great! Less work for me, and more time for me to explore other designs! I

am intrigued!” Stu-Ghost admitted.

“Phew!” Eric beamed at Stu-Ghost.

Within no time at all, the two them settled into what both do best...

Stu-Ghost sat down and feeling inspired started to draw and design.

Eric on the other hand, made himself quite at home in the kitchen.

“Dinner, Stu!”

“Coming!” Stu-Ghost shouted back.

“Hmmm... smell’s delicious, hon. Thanks for cooking” Stu-Ghost smiled as he floated towards the

table.

“Pleasure, treasure” Eric said, wolfing down his meal.

“Scrummy!” he said. “Even if I might say so, myself.”

“hmm... it is!” Stu-Ghost said equally wolfing down his dinner. “Scrummy? Did you just say

scrummy?”

“Oops. Yes I did!” Eric laughed coyly, thinking to himself: “I wonder where that came from?”

“Stu...” Eric smiled, but clearly changing the subject. “I love you!”

“Awww! I love you, too, lovely-man-with-all-the-wonderful-surprises! Who else would have thought

to have set up a design competition behind my back?!” Stu-Ghost jibed.

To be continued in the fabulous story thread on TSS..............................

Thank you to our hard working contributors this week. StuArt for his Antics and also Seaweedy for a marvellously creepy story.

Not forgetting of course Ricslady who is having a difficult week with upgrades to the site. We loves ya Rics.

Smokytopaz

TSS Insider Issue 5

Documents

Transcript of TSS Insider Issue 5