Cute

Dinah was playing her game this morning where she pushes the kitty tunnel up to her golfball-in-a-ring toy, then plays with it from inside the tunnel. Of course, once I got the camera out, she folded her paws underneath her and pretended that she wasn't actually playing. I thought it was cute anyway.

I played a little with The Sims last night. The Jedi family went downtown and bought a cat, a female named Audra, a little black and white one. Qui-Gon actually wanted a dog, so we might go back later and get one. Cats just seem to be easier to take care of, particularly since they use a litter box. If you have dogs, do you have to let them out? Do you have to walk them? And their scale seems odd--they're the same size as the cats, it looks like.

Then I tried making a P3 family--recreating the people I work with, because now, of course, I can make dogs, too. It just didn't seem worth it if I couldn't have Simon and Diehard.

I wasn't completely happy with the characters I created, although mine is pretty good--it's the same one as the SimWilla in the Bob and Willa family, and Dave's was pretty good, too. I found a redhaired guy with a goatee. Eugene wasn't bad, either, but the rest of them were kind of a stretch. Maybe I'll go looking for better ones before I actually move them in somewhere. I think it would be fun to try to make the office, though. Maybe I'll do that this weekend, if I have time.

Also, somewhere, I have Lord of the Rings Sims skins that I downloaded, but never did anything with. Maybe I'll find them and install them. Someone wrote yesterday and asked me where I got the Beatles skins; several people have written and asked me, and I always go and find them and send them the link. I need to remember to put in a link when I put up screenshots so people can download them. The Beatles skins were from 7 Deadly Sims.

I've tried making random families, but I don't enjoy playing with them very much at all. The fun, for me, is in recreating existing people, like my own family or the people I work with, or in having skins that represent characters in movies or books, or celebrities. People that already have personalities and histories, even if they're fictional characters.

I'm doing Moodswings again. There were several reasons why I stopped originally. One is that I began searching the web for interesting things to write about, and that felt wrong. Another is that most of the things I was finding, I found on other weblogs, and I was just recycling them, mostly.

It was hard to stop doing it, but during the time I took off, every time I found an interesting link I kept telling myself that I have no obligation to be some kind of link clearinghouse, that I don't have to tell everyone I know everything. I can just see something cool and just say, "oh, that's cool" and enjoy it myself without sharing it with the world.

Also, I was keeping a list of links, and while I always enjoy finding lists of links on other peoples' sites, I've found that, for me, it's usually a bad idea. I can't link to everyone, and people get their feelings hurt, and then I feel guilty, and man, life's just too short, you know?

But I did find that I missed having a place to record the little weird cool things I found along the way that didn't really belong in the journal, and while I have another "secret" weblog that's just for me, I guess I'd still like to share some things. So Moodswings is back up, but I'm guessing I won't be posting there every day, and I'm not going to worry about it. It's just going to be kind of an adjunct site to the journal, a place to occasionally save an interesting site, nothing earth shattering. There's a constant link to it on the sidebar of each page.