This Sims 2 blog follows the lives of the Nuidya tribespeople of the southern plains, as they try to survive, thrive and figure out what exactly it means to be a dragonspark. Along the way, there'll be drama, romance, utter silliness, high-fantasy worldbuilder rambling and lots of cats. Just watch out for those storm demons - they're sneaky. :)

Monday, May 18, 2015

The Liebster Award

I was nominated for the Liebster Award by Maisie and Shannon - I'm really honoured that my little blog got two nominations, it totally made my day when I found out! Thank you Shannon & Maisie! You two really deserve your awards and thank you for nominating me. Always great to discover new blogs, too... I will definitely be checking out your other nominees' blogs!




Accepting the nomination comes with these conditions:
1. Post the award on your blog.

2. Thank the blogger who presented the award and link back to their blog.

3. Nominate 5-11 bloggers whom you feel deserve this award and have fewer than or equal to 3,000 followers.

4. Answer 11 questions posted by the nominator, and ask your nominees 11 questions.

Here are my answers to Maisie's questions:

1. What is your favorite part of your sims & your neighborhood?
Watching Kulo Seeri's unique culture evolve over time. It started off as a goofy legacy where things didn't have to be consistent or make sense, then a couple of rebuilds led to the Great Storm and the period of wandering when the surviving Nuidya became very xenophobic and technophobic (they have since dropped the first phobia, while the second lives on and has given rise to a lot of complicated superstitions about electrical demons and how to handle metal) and now they've been settled for a couple of generations the mythology and cultural standards have started developing. Now that the tribe is on the verge of splitting into three separate villages, there are more changes ahead and I look forward to seeing which direction my Sims will take their lives in!

2. What are you really good at, be in regards to the game, real life, work, anything?
Singing, writing poetry and procrastinating. :P

3. How do you relax or unwind after a trying day?
Simming is one of my ways of relaxing, of course. Also playing card/dice/board games with my mum (I usually end up Scrabbling rings round my opponents), reading and practising meditation.

4. Favorite vacation or vacation you’d love to take?
I have to say I'm more of a staycation person - back when we used to take family holidays, getting dragged out to do touristy things when I just wanted to lounge in the sunshine with a book was a nightmare - but I'd love to get away to a quiet beach near a tropical sea full of turtles.

5. What projects do you have planned or hope to accomplish for your game?
Right now I'm setting up two new villages to solve Kulo Seeri's overcrowding problem. I want each one to develop its own style and personality, as well as having variations on the climate, weather patterns and what animals and resources can be found in each subhood. For Simming in general (as opposed to Kulo Seeri specifically), I have what I call a Hula List - that's the list of things I want to do in the game before I go hula dancing with the Grim Reaper :P I might share the list in a future blog post, but one of the main things I'd like to do is raise a Sim from birth to death of old age. In all my years of playing I've never done that without stopping midway through and having to rebuild the hood.

6. How large is your sims CC folder?
In Kulo Seeri? My cut for KS currently stands at 5.87 gigabytes. Overall? The Dragon's Hoard (my full CC collection) weighs in at 115 GB and counting! I'm a greedy dragon.

7. What is your blogging and playing process? (Write first, plan, play first…)
I play first, let the story emerge through what happens in the game, then build blog posts around those events. ROS rolling is really the closest to scripting I get. My Sims tell the story, I just add the details the game doesn't provide.

8. What is your favorite family tradition ether now, or from childhood?
On Christmas Eve, my family and I always go to Hebden Bridge for a few hours in the evening. It's a lovely, old-fashioned and artistic town not far from my hometown of Burnley, and it has a really magical atmosphere - especially when it's getting dark and all the lights are on. We take bread for the ducks in the river, wander round the streets and come home with bags of sweets from the traditional sweet shop. Then we take a family photo of me and my siblings in our PJs with the tray of Santa snacks... even now, when the youngest of us is 17 (and he'll be 18 by this Christmas), that tradition still endures. :)

9. Where do you find your inspiration for buildings (community/residential) that you build/decorate?
Other Simmers' pictures of their lots are my main source of inspiration. I keep a series of scrapbooks that I stick print-outs of other Simmers' pictures and ideas in. I've been doing that for a few years and I'm on scrapbook 7 now.

10. Favorite pizza toppings?
Hmm, I've never really been big on pizza. However, it does bring to mind one of the levels in the old-school computer game Zoombinis, which was my TS2 in the late nineties (in fact, I actually went through a lot of fiddling with virtual PCs so that I can still play it now!) The pizza topping level is one of my all time favourites, and I always liked the little pixel pepperoni and cheese and stuff. :)

11. What’s your favorite season in real life and in the sims game?
Spring is my favourite season - I suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder during winter, and I love to see everything blooming into life again after several cold rainy months of cold and rain. I have to admit though, I love Sim winters - it takes a lot to make it feel like enough of a challenge in Kulo Seeri, but that's half the fun!


And my answers to Shannon's questions are:

1. What’s your all-time favorite place in the world?  (If you don’t feel comfortable giving the location, just a description).
In the Clutter Lair known as my room, with a warm snuggly blanket round me, a good book and some soothing music.

2. Who is your favorite, non-sims author?
As someone who's always been an avid reader, I can't pick just one... so long rambly list time! Tolkien is someone I've always admired as an author, worldbuilder and language creator. I also enjoy reading books by Garth Nix and Brandon Sanderson when I want to lose myself in another world. "Planet Earth in a gloomy future" isn't my usual style, but Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games, Veronica Roth's Divergent, Michael Grant's Gone and Neal Shusterman's Unwind are all series I come back to when I want to remind myself that hey, things could be worse, as are Scott Westerfeld's books (in the days of the official TS2 site when everyone seemed to be posting topics about "how do u kil ur fugly sims? lol!!111!!!1!" I decided that if I ruled the world I would make his Uglies series required reading for all Simmers.) I've always loved Erin Hunter's Warriors books - and I've noticed a lot of parallels between her cat clans and Kulo Seeri, so they're also good sources of inspiration when I get stuck. Last but by no means least, the Airship Pirates Chronicles by "Captain" Robert Brown of Abney Park (as well as the band's songs) are both awesome and a metaphorical comfort blanket for my own feelings of being lost in time and born ten thousand years too late.

3. When did you start playing Sims?
I think I started when I was about 12. We had a few of the console games and my sister and I got hooked on them. Our uncle got us a copy of The Sims (1) Complete Collection to mess around with, and I enjoyed that but always felt something was missing. When we got TS2, all that changed - setting up the very early predecessor of Kulo Seeri filled that void and has done ever since.

4. What is your favorite part of playing or blogging sims?
I love the Simming community - all my readers, the bloggers I follow, the talented creators whose stuff I download. It makes Simming so much more than just playing a game. The most rewarding part of blogging is reading comments from people who like my posts, I don't get a zillion comments but it still is good to know that even one person likes what I've done.

5. What is your least favorite part of playing or blogging sims?
Building - or at least the thought of having to build. I'm not bad at it once I get started, but once I've started playing it's hard to break off and add another lot. Families with lots of toddlers, like the zan-Ace quins, are a close second. They're adorable but high maintenance!

6. Where do you find/get inspiration for your blog’s characters?
They give me most of the inspiration themselves - what they do in game, what their wants and interests are, as well as ROS they roll, all of those things help me work out who they are. Sometimes I know pretty early on what a Sim is likely to turn out like (Vedrafe zan-Avei has always had the highest health score in KS and been very active, so I knew right from her toddlerhood that she was likely to be a feisty risfe tomboy) and others take longer to really show their personalities (Zareb zan-Ace is a few days off elderhood and I've only just realised that he wants to be a strong leader like his father). Sometimes a Sim's personality changes drastically through game events. (Markal Go left the original Kulo Seeri as a sweet, flirty goofball of a Pleasure aspiration Sim, but has become a more mature and responsible character after losing two wives and raising five kids alone)

7. What about the setting, how did you come up with the imaginary aspects of your sims’ world?
Well, at first it was "I want to do a legacy - but on a tropical island!" and then, as I mentioned in Maisie's first question, things started evolving naturally. After the death of founder Sena Yuleng, with a kitten being born at exactly the same time in another house, the cat worship aspect of Nuidya culture came into play. When Castaway Stories came out and I migrated my Sims over there for a bit, I decided that the natives were the tribe that had raised Sena after finding her as a baby in a crashed spaceship. Then it started glitching, leading to the Great Storm... and things have kept building up since then. In every sense of the word.

8. How did you decide to start blogging about your game?
Reading Apple Valley's blog made me want to start sharing my own game's stories. I enjoy reading about what goes on in other Simmers' games, so I thought someone might like to read about mine.

9. Do you know any simmers in your everyday life, or just online?
Just online. Although when I first started Simming, my younger sister and I both played TS1. For some reason, she once named a TS1 Sim woman "ooh". But then, this coming from the Simmer whose first TS2 baby in Veronaville was called Baseball Capp...

10. On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being completely), how freaked out are you when the power/internet go out and you can’t play or read or write about sims?
Probably around 7 or 8... TS2 is one of my two favourite things (and the other is an online thing) so I get very frustrated when I can't do either.


11. All time favorite sims moment?
Hmm, this is a tricky one... hard to pick just one, but the best moments for me have to be the times something seemingly negative happens that enriches the story in ways I never would have thought of on my own. For example, the time I forgot to give Abina the right eye colour in CAS and she ended up with default EAxis eyes... that ended up with her losing her sight, and the tribe accepting the idea of keeping dogs in order to help her. The premade households that recently managed to slip into Kulo Seeri's Sim Bin and ended up staying are sure to add a lot to the game as well. I'm considering letting Tara Kat move to KS as well, she'd fit in perfectly...but I have my Simself who is also a Tara there already, not to mention the arrival of the AL premades means I have two Nathans (and both are "Nathan G.") confusing things as it is.

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My nominees:

1. Starr of Apple Valley - who I know has been nominated multiple times already but Starr is a superhero you guys. Two small children and lots of studying, and she still manages to post an update from her hood every two weeks. It's thanks to her that I have Li, Serendipity and their families among the ranks of the KS residents.

2. samantha-kathy - one of the simblrs I follow, samantha-kathy's blog has several hoods of different styles and themes, lots of creative ideas that I've been able to use, and she appreciates her followers a lot (enough to put up a gift at 47 followers). Here's some appreciation back!

3. Heimlichbourger - another simblr I follow, this is the story of a very detailed and interesting prehistoric Sim world, with a lot of effort having been put into the world and its inhabitants, their cultures and languages. Until I came across this blog, I thought I was alone in doing that, so I definitely recommend it to anyone who enjoys the worldbuilding aspects of KS.

I have to admit I can't bring any more Simmers to mind who haven't already been nominated, but I'm spreading the love anyway. :)

My questions:

1. What do you really wish could be done within the game?

2. How much note-keeping, if any, do you do to keep track of your Sims?

3. What's the most off-the-wall random thing you've done or considered doing in the game?

4. Which do you tend to do most with your Simming time... playing, building or writing?

5. If you were to spend a year away from Simming, what would you miss most about your game?

6. What's your favourite non-Sims game or pastime?

7. If you were a Sim, what would your aspiration be?

8. What is your favourite childhood memory?

9. If you were creating a playlist of songs that summed up your game and the Sims in it, what would it sound like?

10. What's your favourite thing to snack on?

11. If you could have any one super power, what would it be?


5 comments:

  1. Aww, thanks for the nomination ^_^

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  2. Great answers! So glad you posted your responses. I can't believe I forgot Tolkien! Ah so much love for his stories and world-building like you said. Your ideal vacation sounds amazing! Interesting how you came up with Abina losing her eye sight, I like when something happens to enrich the stories, and you have great, highly detailed ones.

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    1. Thanks, I enjoyed writing my answers and it means a lot to me that I got the nominations. I like unexpected things that enrich the game's stories too, and the way it takes me in directions I never would have thought of otherwise. And turtles, I love turtles. :)

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  3. It is so neat reading your answers! I think turns-of-events that were anticipated really become some of the best moments, too. Apple Valley was also the first sims prosperity blog that really ignited my imagination of what could be done with the game! It is pretty amazing in all this time you haven't had a sim born in game live their whole life and die. Maybe this iteration of Kuulo Seeri will be it!

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    1. I've had to keep rebuilding and recreating my Sims, so they've never lived a full lifespan in one iteration of the hood... I use the Gestational Aging mod by Almighty Hat so my Sims have much longer lifespans, but who knows, maybe I will get that first cradle to grave Sim in this one. :)

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