![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hat_plays_simsI have GOT to learn to make swatches and take in-game screenshots as I make stuff. Oof.
State of the uploads, I've got in-game swatches for everything for Buy Mode Blitz, and all the screenshots I need for Body Shop swatches for clothes, but title card pics are taking longer, and in-game shots of clothes, longer still-- my testerhood has two Sims in it. That is not enough Sims to display clothes properly.
So how about a break for some educational videos? Stuff that makes me want to make content. Not always content I have the skills to make, at least not yet, but-- you know, things you can look at and go 'oooh, that'd be nice to have in my game!'
English Heritage has been doing this neat little series called Homes Through History which are, like. Zoom conferences between historical people and modern kids. I'm embedding two of those; this one has some really neat views of the living-history stuff at Dover Castle-- not only the Lord Steward's clothes (and how he stands to show off the fur lining his cloak), but the bright-white limed walls, the brilliantly painted furniture, all the fabric hangings, the quick tour of the kitchens, the look at the pottery and table silver... It just really makes me want to figure out how to retexture furniture that looks painted, rather than stained (or just sanded smooth, because Primer and Volatile do a pretty good job of looking like clean new wood, and Fission and Grenade look like clean older wood).
Mistress Marian Fortin, on the other hand, is the wife of a successful middle-class wine merchant, and her 1290 home is a little... smaller than Dover Castle. But she gives us a good tour of her home and she shows us so many of her home goods-- jugs and tableware and furniture-- stained and painted both-- bedhangings, shoes and pattens, that fantastic cupboard painted with a man on a ship, either representing Master Fortin or bought because they felt like it represented him, they don't say. Mistress Marian's own outfit is just delightful, too, with her veil and wimple and fillet, shift and red kirtle and blue gown, tablet-woven belt and waist pouch and annular brooch.
It's a really neat look into a couple of Medieval homes, and I find this sort of thing really fun for figuring out how to decorate.
Now for some playlists.
If you have five hours to spend (in five installments), Secrets of the Castle follows Ruth Goodman, Tom Pinfold, and Peter Ginn as they visit Guédelon Castle in France-- a massive experimental archaeology site, as researchers design and build a small 1230-1240s Medieval castle (suitable for a minor lord's modest household-- I think they said of fifteen-to-twenty) using historical tools, methods, and materials-- and modern safety standards where necessary. (Secrets of the Castle was made in 2014; Guédelon is taller now, and projected to be complete in 2023. ... It did not take 26 years to build a castle in the Middle Ages, partly because your construction site wasn't a tourist attraction, and partly because workers in the period rarely had to stop and go 'hang on, but how did they really do this?' and reinvent the wheel.)
Considering construction is easier in the Sims (for which I am grateful), what I find really interesting about this documentary has very little to do with clothes (Ruth's are good, though, and I do love her headwear; most of the other clothes are a combination of a couple of period-enough pieces, and modern worksite-safe shoes, and modern pants tied to the calves to give an illusion of hose. ... I did the same thing for my sister's high school production of Once Upon A Mattress). Secrets of the Castle is about living and working and architecture-- and painting and tiling and milling and-- okay so.
While it's about Guédelon Castle as a castle, there's no one there playing the lord. The team retires to a literal hovel and not a guest room in the castle. They split stone and carry heavy things and cook meals and make tile out of clay and paint out of lumps of iron oxide found in the clay and paint murals and get their mural-painting skills mocked by a couple of French ladies. You don't see how to build a peasant hovel, but you do see how to furnish one. You don't see how to run a castle, but you do see how how many crafts and craftspeople it takes to build and finish one.
It's just as fascinating watching Tom help to plane a crossbow as it is to watch Peter learn to lime-render walls as it is to see Ruth making a meal for the workmen in the castle kitchen.
And they do all go off to see how a trebuchet works, too, so that's fun.
There are lots of long, lingering shots of not only Guédelon, but the "village" growing up around it, complete with livestock and wildlife. It's just. It's a delight to watch.
(Someday, I need to figure out walls, because I really want some Guédelon-style painted lime wash. Episode three is just. Fantastic for how castles were decorated.)
If you have seven hours, Tudor Monastery Farm of the BBC Farm series, and its Christmas special, are well worth a watch. It's Ruth, Peter, and Tom again, this time as tenant farmers in the year 1500, raising sheep for the monastery and everything else on the farm (plus raising geese, maintaining the coppice woods, mining for lead, cutting stained glass, taking in laundry, spinning, weaving, and fulling cloth...) to support themselves and get ahead a little. It's a little late for my purposes, but!
While 1500 in England is basically the last gasp of the Middle Ages, and the clothing shows it, the team is also using methods that were already old in 1500-- well, not the spinning wheel Ruth uses, and there are some advancements in smithing, but the farming, the weaving, the washing, all of Ruth's delighted work in the dairy? That's all firmly Medieval, of interest to the Armchair Historian because it hasn't quite yet been replaced by something more efficient. (Cows pulling the plow, for instance-- in later centuries, that changed to horses, because horses are better at it, but originally it was cattle, because cattle earn their keep in more ways, on a farm, than horses do.)
Like the rest of the BBC's Farm series, Tudor Monastery Farm focuses squarely on the lives of common people, and the last couple of episodes acknowledge the looming specter of Henry VIII and the dissolution of the monasteries.
The Christmas episode in this playlist isn't from the Tudor Monastery Farm series, it's one they did in 2006. If you're not comfortable seeing animal carcasses butchered and dressed, you may want to give this one a miss, but they do show how to put the skin back on the peacock for presentation, so if you're interested in that, this is. This is Elizabethan Food Network.
This is the Tudor Monastery Farm Christmas episode. Which... seems to be filmed at a way sunnier time, but I'm from California, what do I know about what England looks like at any particular time of year? (And being from California I'm well aware that you film things when you film them.)
Again, butchery warning; I actually am pretty comfortable watching meat go from carcass to table, but the pig's head kicks off the Christmas preparations and it is. Very visibly a face the whole time. (And yes there are plenty of non-pig-face bits to watch, but as the main course at Christmas Dinner, the boar's head is a recurring sight for the first twenty-five minutes or so.)
But there are also (live, non-butchered) piglets and falconry (and some dead pheasants and squab) and the importance of the inversion festival and archery and twelve whole days of revelry Ruth waxing rhapsodic about spices and the age-old problem of 'we put this seasonal decoration together outside and did not measure the entrances to inside first.'
I will admit I've watched Secrets of the Castle and Tudor Monastery Farm at least three times each now. ... Possibly four for Secrets of the Castle. (I also like If Walls Could Talk with Lucy Worsley, but that one doesn't have an embeddable playlist.)
State of the uploads, I've got in-game swatches for everything for Buy Mode Blitz, and all the screenshots I need for Body Shop swatches for clothes, but title card pics are taking longer, and in-game shots of clothes, longer still-- my testerhood has two Sims in it. That is not enough Sims to display clothes properly.
So how about a break for some educational videos? Stuff that makes me want to make content. Not always content I have the skills to make, at least not yet, but-- you know, things you can look at and go 'oooh, that'd be nice to have in my game!'
English Heritage has been doing this neat little series called Homes Through History which are, like. Zoom conferences between historical people and modern kids. I'm embedding two of those; this one has some really neat views of the living-history stuff at Dover Castle-- not only the Lord Steward's clothes (and how he stands to show off the fur lining his cloak), but the bright-white limed walls, the brilliantly painted furniture, all the fabric hangings, the quick tour of the kitchens, the look at the pottery and table silver... It just really makes me want to figure out how to retexture furniture that looks painted, rather than stained (or just sanded smooth, because Primer and Volatile do a pretty good job of looking like clean new wood, and Fission and Grenade look like clean older wood).
Mistress Marian Fortin, on the other hand, is the wife of a successful middle-class wine merchant, and her 1290 home is a little... smaller than Dover Castle. But she gives us a good tour of her home and she shows us so many of her home goods-- jugs and tableware and furniture-- stained and painted both-- bedhangings, shoes and pattens, that fantastic cupboard painted with a man on a ship, either representing Master Fortin or bought because they felt like it represented him, they don't say. Mistress Marian's own outfit is just delightful, too, with her veil and wimple and fillet, shift and red kirtle and blue gown, tablet-woven belt and waist pouch and annular brooch.
It's a really neat look into a couple of Medieval homes, and I find this sort of thing really fun for figuring out how to decorate.
Now for some playlists.
If you have five hours to spend (in five installments), Secrets of the Castle follows Ruth Goodman, Tom Pinfold, and Peter Ginn as they visit Guédelon Castle in France-- a massive experimental archaeology site, as researchers design and build a small 1230-1240s Medieval castle (suitable for a minor lord's modest household-- I think they said of fifteen-to-twenty) using historical tools, methods, and materials-- and modern safety standards where necessary. (Secrets of the Castle was made in 2014; Guédelon is taller now, and projected to be complete in 2023. ... It did not take 26 years to build a castle in the Middle Ages, partly because your construction site wasn't a tourist attraction, and partly because workers in the period rarely had to stop and go 'hang on, but how did they really do this?' and reinvent the wheel.)
Considering construction is easier in the Sims (for which I am grateful), what I find really interesting about this documentary has very little to do with clothes (Ruth's are good, though, and I do love her headwear; most of the other clothes are a combination of a couple of period-enough pieces, and modern worksite-safe shoes, and modern pants tied to the calves to give an illusion of hose. ... I did the same thing for my sister's high school production of Once Upon A Mattress). Secrets of the Castle is about living and working and architecture-- and painting and tiling and milling and-- okay so.
While it's about Guédelon Castle as a castle, there's no one there playing the lord. The team retires to a literal hovel and not a guest room in the castle. They split stone and carry heavy things and cook meals and make tile out of clay and paint out of lumps of iron oxide found in the clay and paint murals and get their mural-painting skills mocked by a couple of French ladies. You don't see how to build a peasant hovel, but you do see how to furnish one. You don't see how to run a castle, but you do see how how many crafts and craftspeople it takes to build and finish one.
It's just as fascinating watching Tom help to plane a crossbow as it is to watch Peter learn to lime-render walls as it is to see Ruth making a meal for the workmen in the castle kitchen.
And they do all go off to see how a trebuchet works, too, so that's fun.
There are lots of long, lingering shots of not only Guédelon, but the "village" growing up around it, complete with livestock and wildlife. It's just. It's a delight to watch.
(Someday, I need to figure out walls, because I really want some Guédelon-style painted lime wash. Episode three is just. Fantastic for how castles were decorated.)
If you have seven hours, Tudor Monastery Farm of the BBC Farm series, and its Christmas special, are well worth a watch. It's Ruth, Peter, and Tom again, this time as tenant farmers in the year 1500, raising sheep for the monastery and everything else on the farm (plus raising geese, maintaining the coppice woods, mining for lead, cutting stained glass, taking in laundry, spinning, weaving, and fulling cloth...) to support themselves and get ahead a little. It's a little late for my purposes, but!
While 1500 in England is basically the last gasp of the Middle Ages, and the clothing shows it, the team is also using methods that were already old in 1500-- well, not the spinning wheel Ruth uses, and there are some advancements in smithing, but the farming, the weaving, the washing, all of Ruth's delighted work in the dairy? That's all firmly Medieval, of interest to the Armchair Historian because it hasn't quite yet been replaced by something more efficient. (Cows pulling the plow, for instance-- in later centuries, that changed to horses, because horses are better at it, but originally it was cattle, because cattle earn their keep in more ways, on a farm, than horses do.)
Like the rest of the BBC's Farm series, Tudor Monastery Farm focuses squarely on the lives of common people, and the last couple of episodes acknowledge the looming specter of Henry VIII and the dissolution of the monasteries.
The Christmas episode in this playlist isn't from the Tudor Monastery Farm series, it's one they did in 2006. If you're not comfortable seeing animal carcasses butchered and dressed, you may want to give this one a miss, but they do show how to put the skin back on the peacock for presentation, so if you're interested in that, this is. This is Elizabethan Food Network.
This is the Tudor Monastery Farm Christmas episode. Which... seems to be filmed at a way sunnier time, but I'm from California, what do I know about what England looks like at any particular time of year? (And being from California I'm well aware that you film things when you film them.)
Again, butchery warning; I actually am pretty comfortable watching meat go from carcass to table, but the pig's head kicks off the Christmas preparations and it is. Very visibly a face the whole time. (And yes there are plenty of non-pig-face bits to watch, but as the main course at Christmas Dinner, the boar's head is a recurring sight for the first twenty-five minutes or so.)
But there are also (live, non-butchered) piglets and falconry (and some dead pheasants and squab) and the importance of the inversion festival and archery and twelve whole days of revelry Ruth waxing rhapsodic about spices and the age-old problem of 'we put this seasonal decoration together outside and did not measure the entrances to inside first.'
I will admit I've watched Secrets of the Castle and Tudor Monastery Farm at least three times each now. ... Possibly four for Secrets of the Castle. (I also like If Walls Could Talk with Lucy Worsley, but that one doesn't have an embeddable playlist.)
