PocketWatch Romances

Archive for October, 2008

Despite my blithery loquaciousness, I’m actually feeling kind of awful. I’ve caught my mother’s head-cold/generic respiratory crud, so my nose is clogged — yet it drips at the same time, which I cannot understand — and I’m sneezy and wheezy and coughing and I can’t hear very well.

Every time I start to feel sorry for myself, though, I remember that hey! It could be worse: I could be throwing up. Then I feel better, at least about having a condition that causes me to get a hand (or handkerchief) full of snot when I sneeze. It’s gross, sure, but it could be SO much worse.

I’m trying to drink plenty of fluids and get plenty of rest, but it’s hard to do the latter when you do the former properly.

I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, I can understand why you’d want people to pay for stuff. Take CC for The Sims, for not-so-coincedental-example. Considering the work involved in making decent, nearly- to completely-seamlessly- and non-irritatingly- tiling floors and wall-treatments alone, even just simply-patterned ones (anybody with a modicum of dexterity can make flood-fill solid walls and floors; those are boring, though), it’s amazing that there are as many people making anything for The Sims as there are.

Not only are they making stuff, but the stuff they make ranges from the silly (a potion that has no point other than to kill your sims) to the amazingly detailed (people who make multiple versions of an incredibly elaborate outfit so that, as they film their Sims-based action movie, the character’s clothes become realistically torn and grubby) to the useful (a bed that lets two sims sleep in it even if they can’t stand each other outside of it — great for small houses).

To top it off, some of the creators have been doing this for years. The Sims 2 was released September 17, 2004. Four years have passed, which is quite a long time to be doing almost anything — particularly when it comes to creating stuff for a game.

In addition to the above, the major Sims-Stuff collection sites (The Sims Resource, Mod The Sims 2, InSIMenator) are very very popular and as a result use massive amounts of bandwidth. (Part of the popularity comes from the fact that they gather lots and lots of custom content creators in one place, often with overlap between the three of them. Whee.) Bandwidth costs money, so… Why not get it from the people who are benefitting from their largesse? (To be fair, of the Big 3 only TSR has limited free content should you opt out of the whole subscription thing. The other two have a one-time/revolving donation option, but there are no restrictions on what you can download if you don’t cough up some dough*.)

So, yeah, I can understand why you’d want people to pay for what you’d worked hard on creating.

On The Other Hand…

It gets into kind of an odd grey area. Does what you create, using Maxis/EA’s framework and tools, belong to you to the point that you can sell it? If it does, then what does that mean for other derivative works (like fanfic)? If it doesn’t… Then why does Maxis/EA not crack down on pay sites? (Well, okay, so that’s a relatively easy one: it’d make them look horrible [or worse than they already do, what with the whole SecuROM debacle].)

People who are more adept at making their points have written about this very thing, including the fact that EA changed its EULA and that their attitude is ‘Filesharing = good, pay sites = bad’. (NB: since the information comes to me third-hand and from an internet messageboard at that, I personally am taking it with a small grain of salt. Not because I don’t want to believe that the conversation took place, but rather because, well… This is the internet. There are people online who claim to have slept with everyone from Ronald Regan to Grimace and anyone/anything in between, so, y’know. Again, this is all Just Me, so.)

I guess for me it comes down to a couple of things. The first, and biggest, is that I don’t mind donating to sites that provide me with something, whether it’s as intangible and ephemeral as a good laugh (World O’ Crap; Sadly, No!) or something just as intangible but slightly more lasting (music, files). Looking at TSR in light of what I now know about them/EA/Maxis, it makes me feel rather uncomfortable to know that I happily gave them money (including not too long ago**). Lastly, and not playing nearly as large a role as you might suspect, is the twin facts of my relative poverty and my inherent cheapness.

(So I’m not likely to die of hypothermia in a downtown alley; that doesn’t mean I have any money. I’m looking for a job! Honest! I just need one that doesn’t involve much contact with other people. I also need to look into the symptoms of/talk to a doctor about agoraphobia, but that’s another post. Anyhow, where was I? Oh, right, being cheap.)

So I’m cheap. I’d rather go to the trouble of downloading something for free, even if I have to navigate fifteen different sites and/or use bittorrent (which I cannot STAND; that’s another post too). This applies primarily to Sims stuff, since I’ve never downloaded cracked software.

And if I ever get my stuff together enough to offer my own Sims stuff for download? It’ll be here and/or at MTS2, free, in perpetuity. Mostly because a blind pig could probably make the same walls, floors, and clothing and quite possibly do a better job. (Well, okay, I guess I kind of have an advantage, at least when it comes to lining up wallpaper seams, but I’m still not that great.)

* from my favorite Bloom County strip of all time.
Opus: “Pear pimples for hairy fish nuts?”
Frustrated Hare Krishna: “Just cough up some dough, Mac!”

Look, I love you people. I personally suck very very hard at making mods/other custom content, so I can appreciate what you do more than superficially.

However (and you knew that was coming)… Is it really so much to ask that you pick a site and stack all your stuff together in one place? Hell, you can get your own website/domain for $50 a year from A Small Orange; even I can afford that.

I understand that you’re busy and that you’ve got lots of other stuff to be doing, but… I already have nine hundred and thirty-seven different forums (fora?) that I’ve got to be logged into, sometimes just to freaking LOOK at something in order to find out if it’s something I can even use. Don’t send me to another one, thanks. (It’s one thing when you send me off to get something that you’re not able to include; it’s another thing entirely when its something you made yourself.)

Love (no, really!),

Me

PS: If you had to pay to get the initial item, I’d really really appreciate a note mentioning that fact. Nothing annoys quite like thinking you’re going to get some cool-looking little thing and then discovering that it’s not free. (Not that I object (…totally…) to paying for custom content; it’s primarily the fact that you didn’t see fit to warn me.)

I called them, like, 20 minutes ago. I didn’t know when to expect things to be up and running again, but here I am. Woot!

Yep, I am. Still. You’ll not get rid of me that easily!

In other news, I’m already tired of winter and it’s not even January, yet.

That’s all, for now.

…And hi! *Wavewave* I’m still alive! Woo.

Also, it’s snowing. Suuuuuuuck.

At the ever- and endlessly-entertaining Seventh Sanctum, they have about a million different Random [Whatever] generators. One of them will give you hundreds of mind-bending, often hilarious, occasionally interesting, pairings for fanfic. Here are some of the pairs that came up for me:

Matilda (Roald Dahl)/Schillinger (Oz)*
Clow Reed (Card Captor Sakura)/Jane Seymour (Henry VIII’s wife)
Counselor Troi (ST:TNG)/Sesshoumaru (Inuyasha)
Lord Mark Vorkosigan (Vorkosigan books)/Soubi Agatsuma (Loveless) [Heeeee. "Who are you?" "I'm Lord Mark Vorkosigan." "Oh." {50 pages of angst and general psychological distress} The End. Or, alternatively, Mark takes Soubi back to Beta and gets him into one of their mental health clinics, which makes Soubi a happier, healthier guy...]
Lord Rochester (Plunkett & Macleane)/Fidel Castro
Petty Officer Jennifer Coates (JAG)/L (Death Note)
Toboe (Wolf’s Rain)/Alex Krycek (The X-Files)
Count Olaf (A Series of Unfortunate Events)/Mr. Collins (Pride and Prejudice)
J.R.R. Tolkien/Cecil B. Demille
Mrs. Bennett (Jane Austen)/Arthur Wellesley (1st Duke of Wellington)
Megan (My Little Ponies)/Rodney McKay (Stargate Atlantis)
Watanuki Kimihiro (XXXHolic)/Ginger (Ginger Snaps)
Zalbag Beoulve (Final Fantasy Tactics)/Shakespeare
Aphrael (Eddings’ Elenium Tamuli)/PsyDuck (Pokemon)
Herbert West (Re-Animator)/Destruction (Sandman) [This is an interesting one, actually – considering Destruction’s inherent nature and West’s aspirations.]
Agent Ajedrez (Once Upon a Time in Mexico)/Jane (Daria)
Baron Munchausen (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen)/Illidan Stormrage (Warcraft III Frozen Throne)
Cayce Pollard (Pattern Recognitions)/Despair (Sandman)
Condoleeza Rice/Brenda Walsh (Beverly Hills 90210)
Pit Stain (Adventures of Pete and Pete)/Justin (Secret of NIMH)
Offred (Handmaid’s Tale)/Rebecca (Tank Girl) [I bet that there’s someone out there that could make this work. Torch, maybe.]
Brian Griffin (Family Guy)/Go Go Yubari (Kill Bill)
Iria (Iria the Animation)/Lazarus Long (Heinlein)
Dryden Fassa (Escaflowne)/Wanda (The Fairly OddParents)
Lawrence of Arabia/Calcifer (Howl’s Moving Castle) [I can actually see this one, since Calcifer is very old by the time we meet him in HMC.]

* Yeah, this could be a majorly horrible fic. But you could probably write a decent one, too; one that didn’t completely gross people out. I don’t know anything about the Oz character, but from what very very little I’ve heard about the series I know that A) it has Christopher Meloni (mmm!) and B) is very very violent. I don’t really wanna know more, frankly; I have enough trouble with the violence in The Shawshank Redemption and it’s not even graphic.