Saturday 2 September 2000

Pic of the day: Melissa the budding artist. Screenshot from The Sims. Nighties downloaded from The Sim Boutique.

SIMple pleasures

Saturday again! I got up at usual working time, mainly because I was ravenously hungry. I've experienced that a bit lately. Heh. Live and learn.

Took the bus to Tangvall again and shopped for yoghurt and vitamin pills (C and E). I bought a lot of yoghurt, but I seem to have eaten about half of it already. What can I say? I am a bit hungry these days, and there aren't all that many other things I can safely eat. But I happen to really like yoghurt anyway. And today I took the last penicillin pills. Presumably the stuff will be out of my system in about 48 hours. Presumably the antibiotics killed not just my friendly gut flora but also the troublemakers that made me sick earlier this month. Hey, optimism is cheap! :)

***

I've been online a lot today. First I downloaded music files. Legal, of course. MP3.com is virtually burgeoning with them. I lucked upon the page of Lagoona, a Swedish group famous for their melodic trance tracks. If you like trance music, or if you don't know what trance music is, I recommend checking out this group. I find it tiresome as a background music in the long run, but it's beautiful to listen to. A bit too fast for lava lamp music perhaps, but your mileage may vary.

Isn't it fabulous that there's all that stuff for free? And legal, too. I understand that the artists get paid a little for each download. How MP3.com can afford that is beyond my comprehension: Their ads seem to be mostly for themselves, some other music sites and a teeny bopper cosmetic site called Sephora.com. The sad fact that I now recognize that brand name, me being a middle-aged Norwegian male, sort of attests to the power of persistent advertising. But I fail to see how anyone can make mounds of money from it. Do teeny boppers have lots of money these days? Or is it really a subsidiary of Sinister Neurochemicals Ltd?

Then in the evening I downloaded "skins", usually clothes, for The Sims, one of my all time favorite games. The expansion pack, Living Large, is out just recently, but I doubt it has arrived in the local shops here on the south coast of Norway. It won't be long, though, and I'm looking forward to it. In addition to heaps of new house designs and furniture, there will be new careers and some items that are really powerful gameplay-wise. For instance a lamp with a genie, and a voodoo doll. Also alien abductions and a few new non-playing characters, such as a robot and Mr Grim Reaper. Who, for the occasion, is accepting "quit or double" bets. Ouch. I'll try to avoid him, in the game as well as in Real Life, I don't like the idea of betting with Mr Reaper.

What I do like though is to have lots of fashion clothes for my Sim characters. Just because I try to not buy any for myself doesn't mean my poor Sims should be similarly deprived. Today I particularly looked for children's clothes, since Harry & Ginny adopted their second child today. Most of the skins out there are for women, but there are some nice children's clothes too. For some reason, the best site I found was very slow and I got many size mismatch errors on download. Perhaps the weekends are high-traffic time in some countries.

Then again, most e-mails from America seem to be written on workdays. Go figure. Of course, it could be the company I keep ...

***

I took a walk around the neighborhood. My neighborhood, not the Sims. Wearing, like so often before, my small minidisc player. From the start, it sounded very strange. As if the melodies were played on children's toy instruments rather than the real thing. Eventually I intuited that it must be the connection between the player and the headphone cable. I checked it, and it was quite tight. Then I pulled the plug halfway out, and suddenly the sound was fine. Never underestimate the power of male intuition! Anyway, I guess this means that one part or another is nearing breakdown. I hope it's the headphone, though these particular headphones with remote control and LCD are probably not cheap.

It felt good to get to stretch my legs. I felt more optimistic than in quite a while. Which may not say a lot, I admit. I've been pretty resigned lately, haven't I?

And I thought about how I don't take time for simple pleasures anymore. Things like coloring in a coloring book, or looking at a lava lamp. Or even playing my 15 years old electronic organ. Unpretentious things that won't help or harm anyone.

Instead, I watch my Sims stressing with crybabies until I get stressed myself. But I guess it's sort of worth it when the babies hatch and I get to watch Severa and Melissa play and laugh all around the house. Simple, childlike pleasures.

(Sorry about the names, I'm not very imaginative sometimes.)