A rare YouTube video (not actually mine)

[hat_plays_sims]

Educational and amusing.

And DAMN, I want her hat.

Honestly, every clip I've looked at has impressed me in terms of historical accuracy. And I mean, it would impress me for a movie with a moderate budget, and this is an educational comedy clip show. Comedies always seem to put a surprising amount of effort into accurate costuming.

Horrible Histories clips on YouTube have been most of my weekend-- I'm particularly fond of their Historical Wife Swap skits. Also fun is Terry Jones's Medieval Lives, which the BBC made available in its entirety on YouTube, although I remember having some trouble with them randomly stopping. Still worth watching, just remember that aside from Monks and Troubadors, Mr. Jones focuses mostly on Medieval English lives.

ANYway, sorry for falling off the map again, May rose up with things I had to do in the real live physical world. I had a doll show to work, a trip out of town, a birthday, Mom goes back to work (she's been on disability since September, I think, for shoulder surgery) on Tuesday, and I have a week or two before my brother ensconces his fiancee in my home office, where the Simming computer lives, for a brief but ill-defined length of time... but before they turn up, I hope to have a small hair dump and some nun outfits (long story) to share. Hair to-do list has been updated with what I got done and what's still in the plotting stages.

And, hey, does anybody know how you go about extracting clothing meshes? Is it just go in, grab the appropriate GMDC, GMND, CRES, and SHPE, extract them, and make a new package, or is it more complicated than that?

Comments

[oph3lia]

There's a simpe plugin for that, I think it may actually be bundled with simpe now. (PJSE)

It depends what you're trying to do... If you want to make a new mesh, then you'll need a bodyshop recolour file for any basegame outfit and use that via the extracting tool (Tools > PSJE > body mesh tool > extracting stage), if you want a maxis mesh to play with, I usually do the same thing since browsing takes forever. If it's a custom mesh, just open with simpe and extract the GMDC.

[hat_plays_sims]

I made Apartment Life witch has tidily bundled with Trapping's PF and CF conversions, and I was thinking it was kind of a shame to have to restrict them to AL users. Let's say I already went and extracted the necessary bits from the game files (because... I did)-- do I only need to bundle those up into one tidy package file for folk without Apartment Life to be able to use the witch hats?

[oph3lia]

Hmm I'm afraid I'm a bit stuck there... are they hairs or accessories? I believe I've seen bodymeshes extracted from later game files just as a mesh package with no GUID change. But hair and accessory meshing is rather unfamiliar to me ( I've only ever made 2 accessories and I can't remember how now lol)

[hat_plays_sims]

They're hairs. So I may have to go ask on GoS when I'm on my proper Simming computer again. Fingers crossed all it takes is the mesh extracted.

[eien_herrison]

Sorry, can't really comment on sims stuff, but...

Yay, Horrible Histories! It's been very well received in the UK, winning multiple awards, and they've done their best to get it as accurate as they can, while still being entertaining. It's on my wishlist to buy, and my husband did say "for who -- you or any kids we might have?" (to which I answered "does it have to be an exclusive or?"). I've laughed a fair bit on occasions when I've seen a new type of skit pop up, and I know exactly what show they're parodying.

(Thanks for the link for Terry Jones' Medieval Lives -- I'm dabbling in a fantasy story set around the 13th century CE and I've been wanting some programs set in that time period. There's a new series just started [last Friday], the Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England [yeah, another show which focuses solely on England with nary a word on Wales or Scotland], which is based on a book of the same name but it's more fact than entertainment.)

Good luck to your mum at work -- my mum's been going through cancer and for her going back to work was exhausting but a relief (although her employment is a bit patchy at the moment as we're still working through it). Looking forward to your next hair dump :)

[hat_plays_sims]

Horrible Histories, what I've seen so far on YouTube, is pretty frickin' awesome. The only real historical wobble I noticed was the Witch Craft episode, and that's only because there was no such thing as a witchfinder until well after the end of the Middle Ages. I keep thinking I ought to find out if they're peddling Region 1 DVDs.

England, for some reason, is an intensely popular place to set your Medieval... anything. Which is sad for me, because in terms of the clothes I want to put on my Sims? I like Medieval France. And that hardly ever pops up in entertainment or even educational programming. (And while I totally support how popular Vikings have become lately, I keep looking at costume designs and going "You just watched Thor and didn't even Google, didn't you?")

I'll pass the good thoughts along to Mom! Today's her first day back; they scheduled her for a refresher course on the software they use at the hospital. Anybody'd be a little rusty after being away for so long. I hope everything works out for your mother, too-- cancer's a scary thing to work through. Is she in remission?

[eien_herrison]

Yeah, according to the wikipedia page they've had something like 8 facts proven wrong out of the 4,000 they've used up to the end of season 4. From a quick look I can only see download versions of the show on Amazon and iTunes, the only DVDs I can see are Region 2 imports (to which I can kinda understand offering digital downloads but not DVDs, but still annoying -- I'm one of those people who prefers physical things).

Medieval England seems to have some mystery and awe to it, and I don't understand it (being from England myself). It's not like England was the only country around in those times, and even if you go by easily-accessible history, you've got France and a multitude of other European countries at the least. My story is technologically 13th century England/Europe, but at least for the first book the setting is more akin to Ancient Sparta. I can't even pin-point when Vikings got so popular (How To Train Your Dragon, perhaps?).

Anybody'd be a little rusty after being away for so long. -- Yup. Where I work we do some occasional work placement programs, and earlier this year we asked some people if they'd want to return, and pretty much the first couple of weeks were getting them reaquainted with the software and what-not because it had been a couple of months since they'd last used it under our guidance.

Thanks for the well-wishes -- my mum's not in remission, we're still battling the initial stages. It's thyroid cancer but has metastitised to various places including bone (that's how it was found out, bad back pain was found to be a metastitised tumor in the spine and pressing against the nerves there). She's been through two surguries and one round of radiotherapy, soon to be two as the first one wasn't all that successful. I dunno if she knows the stage/survival odds but I do, and I'm keeping quiet about it because I don't want to say anything in case she didn't want to know the odds.

[hat_plays_sims]

That's pretty darned good. One of the things that twigged me was people fainting from Victorian corsets... which they did, but not usually as early as they'd been showing. But also a bummer that I can't get DVDs. I mean, I also get it, but... definitely a bummer.

I suspect some of England's mystique comes from things like Robin Hood and King Arthur-- everybody's at least a little bit familiar with those guys. For me, for the kinds of things I like to see on my Sims, the decision to run with heavily-French-influenced fashion is a purely aesthetic one. The women's clothes were more elegant and I keep hoping someone out there will make me a nice steeple hennin... which the English didn't really wear.

Good thoughts your mother's way, then. Lots of them. We lost my father to pancreatic cancer towards the end of 2011.

[eien_herrison]

If you're interested, this here is a video on the masterclass/the background on the show which is apparently where that little quote came from (they did cut out the sketches). The quote about the errors starts around 7:40.

I think you're right there -- Kind Arthur was one aspect I thought of, and I think it helps that both Arthur and Robin Hood were Disney movies, and also the recent BBC series.

Thanks for the good wishes, and sorry about your father :( The past year and a half has been quite hectic -- my then-fiancé got ill around late December 2011/January 2012. We got that sorted in time for a holiday in New York, then my mum starts getting back pain (and initial thoughts of it being sciatica). I get married, my mum goes in for a biopsy and gets a cancer diagnosis, then surgery to remove a section of her spine, thyroid removal, medication, radiotherapy. My husband comes down with a mystery rash with we think we know what it is (a side-effect of his medication). We think we got my mum's cancer reasonably sorted out, and then my cat gets ill and we find out she's got hyperthyroidism. We seem to now have that under control with medication (and I am now the only one in the household who isn't on any kind of medication) and news comes in that my mum's radiotherapy was only 30% successful.

Yeah, like I said, hectic. We're trying to get things to be calm in the house and thankfully there has been a few months in between bad medical news but at times it felt almost never-ending (still does, in fact). And this was so not meant to turn into a news-dump on my life...

[hat_plays_sims]

I'll take a look, thanks!

They're common folklore, those two, and they come with a lot of appealing story ideas-- a king dedicated to justice and all his loyal knights and his beautiful queen and her tragic love story with one of those loyal knights, and an outlaw of some stripe and his celebrated crusade against corrupt local law enforcement and/or England's least favorite king. They get told and re-told; Mom just recently got the Russell Crowe Robin Hood movie, and from VHS to Blu-Ray we've had more versions of the Arthurian legend than I can think of offhand.

Man, a sick pet on top of everything else just sort of heaps it on. One of our cats had... a saddle embolism? Basically a stroke, but in his hips. We got him to the vet, spent a couple thousand bucks on him, found out he has cardiac or atrial (I forget which) hypertrophy-- the muscles of his heart are enlarged, which reduces how big the chambers of his heart can be, which can lead to circulatory problems and strokes. He, too, is on medication now, and the vet is very impressed with the fact that he survived the initial stroke and its treatment-- most cats don't. He's just also inventing new and exasperating ways to avoid getting pills shoved down his throat. The pill pockets worked for a couple of days, but...

Good luck calming down. The best advice I ever heard was that it isn't about finding perfect stillness, it's about finding the best ways to stay balanced while life is going on.

[eien_herrison]

:) I only looked at the first ten minutes (got a lot of other stuff to do) but it was interesting so far to see the background and chit-chat involved.

Indeed -- mostly timeless stories set in a place that's familiar yet different.

I felt guilty because the vet suspected something was a little off with her last year, but because of all that has happened we only really got her checked out and tested a few weeks ago. She seems to be doing fine on medication, a little bit more energetic and seems to be eating more. Our trick is to give her the tablet in a tiny piece of cheese -- she loves cheese (cannot stress it enough) and pretty much inhales it + tablet. We tried with some treat sticks she loves, but it wasn't pliable enough for the tablet. We used to have trouble giving her worming tablets and eventually just asked the vet to give them to her when she went for her check-ups (my mum reckons she could smell them) but these tablets? Not a problem so far.

This is the second major event my cat's been through -- she got into a car accident six years ago, and the vet was very surprised that the only injuries she sustained were a crushed back paw and a hairline fracture. The vet's initial thoughts were to put her down because we didn't know the extent of her injuries, but because I wasn't around my mum delayed that decision until I was there. We then found out how lightly she'd got off (relatively speaking) although she did have to have her back leg amputated. She's been doing fine with three legs for all that time, and she might soon come to an age where she's spent more time with three legs than with four.

Having experienced what I have over the past year and a half, that advice sounds pretty much spot-on. I have my own little office nook in the house (where I work, write, and play sims) so it's mostly associated with me-time and a place where I can have to myself..

[hat_plays_sims]

This was Brother's first emergency-- his big sister Harley had pancreatitis last fall, but pulled through. They're both doing really well, particularly for being in late middle age as cats go-- Brother's eleven, Harley's twelve. (We switched them to being indoor-only cats last year, too, and they fought it for a LONG time.) We never had to give Harley pills-- she got shots and such-- but Brother needs a handful of tiny tiny pills every day, and he doesn't like taking them. He doesn't bite, he's really good about not biting humans, but he'll kick the hell out of whoever's shoveling meds down his throat if he can get away with it. (Blanket burrito is not the solution with a cat his size-- getting him into one of those is a three-man job.)

But I'm glad your tripod girl is doing well-- I think I've heard most animals do better losing a hind leg than a foreleg. I'm not sure why.

That sounds like a really good spot! I have a home office, but seeing as I work from home, I do kinda need one.

[eien_herrison]

My cat's fourteen and a half, and aside from her accident this is her first medical emergency, not bad for a cat of her age I think (and from what I've seen, hyperthyroidism is quite common in older cats). She still goes out into the garden but can't get over the wall with only three legs. From watching her walk it seems to be the forelegs are for balance and the hind leg is propulsion -- believe me, she can still move fast when she wants to.

Yeah, my husband also works from home and we have two separate offices at the moment. If we ever get our own place we'll be deciding whether to combine our offices into one or not. Still, it's a nice hideaway place for me :)

Books

[(Anonymous)]

There are also books available by the same name, we used these in Primary School way before it ever became a TV series (it wasn't a TV series until I was 18). Great TV program and still watched now I'm at University in a similar field of study.

Available here (not sure about in the US but I'm sure you can get them somewhere): http://www.amazon.co.uk/Terry-Deary/e/B001ITTQZW/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1380826414&sr=1-1

Or 'The Measly Middle Ages' and 'The Vicious Vikings' here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Vicious-Vikings-Horrible-Histories-Collections/dp/0590543644/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1380826414&sr=1-4&keywords=measly+middle+ages