#i am almost physically incapable of giving a concise answer to anything!

[thebramblewood]

Thank you to @venriliz for tagging me! I'll tag @thecrumblingisle, @sweetbeagaming, @cactusblossom, @simatomica, @10000dreams, @solarlemonade, @lotuso3o, @cinnamonferns but feel free to ignore! I know it's a long one.

1. What’s your favorite sims death? Oh my god, I forgot the running with scissors death in TS2 existed until @venriliz mentioned it, but that made me remember I once killed off an unwanted legacy heir using that method. :/ Don't ask me why I couldn't just move him out and leave him to his own devices. Anyway, I think death by cowplant is pretty classic.

My LEAST favorite Sims death is freezing because I had a really traumatic experience in the second generation of my legacy where my Sim Phoebe made the bright decision to host a birthday party for one of her housemates at the Bluffs in Windenburg in the dead of winter and everyone decided to start swimming and like three people froze to death, including the birthday girl. It remains a horrifically vivid memory to this day, lmao.

Putting the rest under a cut!

2. Alpha CC or Maxis Match? Maxis Match for the most part. I find that anything alpha just ends up looking too out of place unless it's closer to the Maxis side of the spectrum.

3. Do you cheat when your sims gain weight? If it fits their lifestyle, I'll have them work out/eat healthier, but I try not to interfere otherwise.

4. Do you use move objects? Absolutely, it's permanently activated!

5. Favorite mod? MCCC is obviously essential, as well as anything that makes CAS better looking and more efficient. I also wouldn't play without Sunblind these days! I can't get enough of those gorgeous sunrises and sunsets.

6. First expansion/game/stuff pack you got? I think I got City Living and Seasons at the same time. I was kind of a late adapter to TS4 but fell very quickly down the rabbit hole.

7. Do you pronounce “live mode” like aLIVE or LIVing? I want to think I pronounce it like LIVing because I know that's technically correct, but I think half the time I still pronounce it like aLIVE in my head.

8. Who’s your favorite sim that you’ve made? Oh, this is so hard... If we're going solely on Sims who originated in CAS, there aren't really many options! Most of my Sims have been born in-game. I am really proud of Helena, and I think everyone can tell how attached I've become to her. Hmm, I need to make more Sims, I guess.

9. Have you made a simself? Noooooooooo. The Sims for me is very much an escape from myself, so I don't think I ever will.

10. What sim traits did you give yourself? I would probably give myself music lover, perfectionist, and socially awkward.

11. What is your favorite EA hair color? The lightest blond, I think? The one that looks almost platinum and isn't quite as yellowy as some of the others.

12. Favorite EA hair? That short choppy hair from Cottage Living (the one the Creature Keeper has). For a while, I was absolutely eating up every single variation I could find.

13. Favorite life stage? If I'm being honest, young adult. I find that my gameplay is most varied and interesting when my Sims are in that stage because they're traveling, meeting a lot of people, trying new things, etc. Once my Sims settle down and start a family, it's easy for me to forget places and people outside their home lot exist and everything becomes more routine.

14. Are you a builder or are you in it for the gameplay? Me, a builder? That's a funny joke. I'm definitely more in it for gameplay and storytelling. I'll do everything I can to avoid building a lot myself. I don't mind redoing interiors, but it takes me forever, so I try to limit how often I do that, too.

15. Are you a CC creator? No. I've done a couple very basic recolors/edits for myself. We're talking kindergarten level stuff. I don't really have the willpower for learning anything more complex right now.

16. Do you have any simblr friends/a sim squad? Sim squad is such a weird term to me. I do still feel like a bit of an outsider in the Simblr community at times, but I also have a handful of mutuals who I've enjoyed connecting with, and it always makes me happy to see them in my notes and on my dash!

17. What’s your favorite game? The only games I've ever been heavily into are The Sims and those Nancy Drew computer games... I think you can guess which one is my favorite. But if we narrow down the franchise, The Sims 2 has a very special place in my heart.

18. Do you have any Sims merch? No.

19. Do you have a YouTube for sims? No, and as someone who can't stand hearing or seeing recordings of myself, it would be a nightmare.

20. How has your “sim style” changed throughout your years of playing? I've honestly wondered about this myself! I don't think it's really changed so much as become more refined. I don't make a ton of Sims, so I don't think I have an obvious aesthetic style. But my play style has definitely changed in that it's more storytelling-geared, which does mean I spend less time actually using gameplay mechanisms and more time setting up. My visual style (e.g. composition, editing, etc.) has definitely evolved a lot even over the past few months.

21. What’s your Origin ID? Going to pass on this one! My sister and I share an account, and I don't upload anything on the gallery anyway.

22. Who’s your favorite CC creator? Oh, so many! I will download basically anything that sforzcc or softerhaze upload. My absolute favorite hair creators are simstrouble and okruee. And I've been using a ton of stuff from awingedllama and leaf-motif when decorating lately. But those are just a few that come to mind.

23. How long have you had a simblr? I only just started my Simblr back in January or February. But I've been on Tumblr itself way too long to admit out loud.

24. How do you edit your pictures? I try to let Reshade do the heavy lifting, but I also like using a few of these actions in Photoshop to make them pop a bit more.

25. What expansion/game/stuff pack is your favorite so far? City Living because San Myshuno is one of the only worlds that really feels "alive" to me and I think it does festivals best, and Cottage Living because it's the complete opposite but the slowed down, quiet, countryside aesthetic is so serene and relaxing.

26. What expansion/game/stuff pack do you want next? I don't trust EA to do it right, but all I want is bands and another super dense and populated urban world and more apartments! I would also never like to see another world inspired by an American suburb again.

#i am almost physically incapable of giving a concise answer to anything! #asks

[unimportanthistory]

Who am I

Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality - it's all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I'm attending here is a show with another set. And the show I'm attending is myself.

Be careful: everything fades, everything vanishes. Something must remain of us.

My world falls apart, crumbles, “The centre cannot hold.” There is no integrating force, only the naked fear, the urge of self-preservation. I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralysed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness. I never thought. I never wrote, I never suffered. I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to crawl back abjectly into the womb. I do not know who I am, where I am going—and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions. I long for a noble escape from freedom—I am weak, tired, in revolt from the strong constructive humanitarian faith which presupposes a healthy, active intellect and will. There is nowhere to go. Except if nowhere is the place you want to go.

But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn’t do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn’t in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.

I act and react, and suddenly I wonder, ‘Where is the girl that I was last year? Two years ago? What would she think of me now?

I tried to remember. I had the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. I was going mad by ricocheting in between. At times I had no interests. I had no interests in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape. At least the others had some taste for life. They seemed to understand something that I didn't understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go. Suicide? God, just more work. I felt like sleeping for five years but they wouldn't let me.

It begins to seem to me at such times that I am incapable of beginning a life in real life, because it has seemed to me that I have lost all touch, all instinct for the actual, the real; because at last I have cursed myself; because after my fantastic nights I have moments of returning sobriety, which are awful! Meanwhile, you hear the whirl and roar of the crowd in the vortex of life around you; you hear, you see, men living in reality; you see that life for them is not forbidden, that their life does not float away like a dream, like a vision; that their life is being eternally renewed, eternally youthful, and not one hour of it is the same as another; while fancy is so spiritless, monotonous to vulgarity and easily scared, the slave of shadows, of the idea, the slave of the first cloud that shrouds the sun... One feels that this inexhaustible fancy is weary at last and worn out with continual exercise, because one is growing into manhood, outgrowing one's old ideals: they are being shattered into fragments, into dust; if there is no other life one must build one up from the fragments. And meanwhile the soul longs and craves for something else! And in vain the dreamer rakes over his old dreams, as though seeking a spark among the embers, to fan them into flame, to warm his chilled heart by the rekindled fire, and to rouse up in it again all that was so sweet, that touched his heart, that set his blood boiling, drew tears from his eyes, and so luxuriously deceived him!

And so I ask myself: 'Where are your dreams?' And I shake my head and mutter: 'How the years go by!' And I ask myself again: 'What have you done with those years? Where have you buried your best moments? Have you really lived? Look how cold the world is growing. Some more years will pass, and after them will come gloomy solitude; then will come old age trembling on its crutch, and after it misery and desolation. Your fantastic world will grow pale, your dreams will fade and die and will fall like the yellow leaves from the trees. . . . You know it will be sad to be left alone, utterly alone, and to have not even anything to regret — nothing, absolutely nothing . . . For all that you have lost, all that, all was nothing, stupid, simple nullity, there has been nothing but dreams!

I am nothing.

I'll never be anything.

I couldn't want to be something.

Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.

I see my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Billur, the French translation student, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

I am in my old room once more, for a little, and I am caught in musing - - how life is a swift motion, a continuous flowing, changing, and how one is always saying goodbye and going places, seeing people, doing things. Only in the rain, sometimes, only when the rain comes, closing in your pitifully small radius of activity, only when you sit and listen by the window, as the cold wet air blows thinly by the back of your neck - only then do you think and feel sick. You feel the days slipping by, elusive as slippery pink worms, through your fingers, and you wonder what you have for your eighteen years, and you think about how, with difficulty and concentration, you could bring back a day, a day of sun, blue skies and watercoloring by the sea. You could remember the sensual observations that made that day reality, and you could delude yourself into thinking - almost - that you could return to the past, and relive the days and hours in a quick space of time. But no, the quest of time past is more difficult than you think, and time present is eaten up by such plaintive searchings. The film of your days and nights is wound up tight in you, never to be re-run - and the occasional flashbacks are faint, blurred, unreal, as if seen through falling snow. Now, you begin to get scared. You don't believe in God, or a life-after-death, so you can't hope for sugar plums when your non-existent soul rises. You believe that whatever there is has got to come from man, and man is pretty creative in his good moments - pretty mature, pretty perceptive for his age - how many years is it, now? How many thousands? Yet, yet in this era of specialization, of infinite variety and complexity and myriad choices, what do you pick for yourself out of the grab-bag? Cats have nine lives, the saying goes. You have one; and somewhere along the thin, tenuous thread of your existence there is the black knot, the blood clot, the stopped heartbeat that spells the end of this particular individual which is spelled "I" and "You" and "Billur." So you wonder how to act, and how to be - and you wonder about values and attitudes. In the relativism and despair, in the waiting for the bombs to begin, for the blood to flow and trickle before your own eyes, you wonder with a quick sick fear how to cling to earth, to the seeds of grass and life. You wonder about your eighteen years, ricocheting between a stubborn determination that you've done well for your own capabilities and opportunities... And a fear that you haven't done well enough - You wonder if you've got what it takes to keep building up obstacle courses for your self, and to keep leaping through them, sprained ankle or not. Again the refrain, what have you for your eighteen years? And you know that whatever tangible things you do have, they cannot be held, but, too, will decompose and slip away through your coarse-skinned and death-rigid fingers. So you will rot in the ground, and so you say, what the hell? Who cares? But you care, and somehow you don't want to live just one life, which could be typed, which could be tossed off in a thumbnail sketch = "She was the sort of girl....” And end in twenty five words or less.

And then… Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing. I wanted the whole world or nothing. Just like that, I wanted all of you to myself or none of you at all.

Remember when I told you that I have spent all my life resisting the desire to end it. Do you remember your reaction? It suddenly seemed to me that I was lonely, that everyone was forsaking me and going away from me. God I feel sick when I think how vulnerable, how fragile, how bounded I made myself in the eyes of you. I feel sick when I remember I gave you the power to hurt me. Yes, I was infatuated with you. I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren't having any of those.

Maybe, maybe I’m in love with missing you more than I’m in love with you.

No, I don’t love; I don’t love anybody except myself. That is a rather shocking thing to admit. I have the selfish love of my mother. I have none of the plodding, practical love. . . . . I am, to be blunt and concise, in love only with myself, my puny being with its inadequate breasts and meager, thin talents. I am capable of affection for those who reflect my own world.

You’re dissolving. You are all dissolving. This city is dissolving. None of you matter any more. I don't know you, I have never known you and I am very pure. All that wine and those sticky kisses I had and the dirt that settled on my skin on the way back is turning into something pure. Isolation.

I know that if I were mad, after several days of confinement I should take advantage of any lapses in my madness to murder anyone, preferably a doctor, who came near me. At least this would permit me, like the violent, to be confined in solitary. Perhaps they’d leave me alone.

Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh. I remember what this flesh has gone through; I dream of what it may go through. I record here the actions of optical nerves, of taste buds, of sensory perception. And, I think: I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence. Of the millions, I, too, was potentially everything at birth. I, too, was stunted, narrowed, warped, by my environment, my outcroppings of heredity. I, too, will find a set of beliefs, of standards to live by, yet the very satisfaction of finding them will be marred by the fact that I have reached the ultimate in shallow, two-dimensional living - a set of values. This loneliness will blur and diminish, no doubt, when tomorrow I plunge again into classes, into the necessity of studying for exams. But now, that false purpose is lifted and I am spinning in a temporary vacuum. At home I rest and play; but in there, where I work, the routine is momentarily suspended and I am lost. There is no living being on earth at this moment except myself. I could walk down the halls, and empty rooms would yawn mockingly at me from every side. God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in it's appalling self-consciousness, is horrible and overpowering.

I am left for a moment alone. Disorder, a broken wine glass on the floor, spilt wine, cigarette ends, fumes of drink and delirium in my brain…

Though the past was no better one feels as though it had somehow been better, and that life was more peaceful, that one was free from the black thoughts that haunt one now; that one was free from the gnawing of conscience — the gloomy, sullen gnawing which now gives me no rest by day or by night.

I grew to feel the tender skin of sensitive child-fingers thicken; to feel the sex organs develop and call loudly to the flesh; to become aware of school, exams (the very words as unlovely as the sound of chalk shrilling on the blackboard,) bread and butter, marriage, sex, compatibility, war, economics, death and self. What a pathetic blighting of the beauty and reality of childhood.

Then I have my old diaries. At nights like this I get the courage to read a few pages. Most are teared into pieces, burned, blowed, flushed… They did vanish, but something did, something did remain of me. And what remained is not the pages, it is me. Perhaps nothing vanishes and the word change is merely a deception. In a certain sense the past is far more real, or at any rate more stable, more resilient than the present. The present slips and vanishes like sand between the fingers, acquiring material weight, only in its recollection. Now and even tomorrow, is nearly yesterday and everything is stupid.

I’m eighteen (even older) now. I want to believe in the word “change”. I want to change. Perhaps my life is nothing but an image of this kind; perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I simply should recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.