First Post!

Like anyone else who has found their way here, I love The Sims. I was a casual player of the original incarnation when the franchise was still new, and I loved how gameplay was augmented by the expansion packs so I collected them with fervor. By the time TS2 was released, I was immediately hooked and resumed my acquisition of expansion packs and stuff packs just as eagerly as before. I was late to the game in discovering the world of custom content, particularly after college when I stopped actively playing for a couple of years to get involved in that annoying thing called "real life," but by 2007 I was a hardcore downloading freak with gigabyte upon gigabyte of mods, hacks and general pretties cluttering up my Downloads folder. Now that TS3 has taken the Simming world by storm, I'm ready for action...and I'm already captivated by all the possibilities that the game provides.

This blog will be a chronicle of my adventures with TS3 in terms of gameplay and my favorite custom content discoveries, and hopefully my own creations, eventually. Although I love the game and I have a million ideas of what I'd like to see in it, I am not a custom content creator, at least not yet. I'm also not a computer expert, by any means, so I hope that by sharing what I've learned, I can help those players who are even less computer literate than I am. In this vein, my first few posts will likely be lengthy, and meant to provide the noob Simmer with a frame of reference upon which to get started; although I find it unlikely that inexperienced players will find my blog before they find the larger, more widely known sources, it seems like a fun project. This will not be my normal procedure, I promise.

Anyway, I've already gone on a little longer than I intended (but if you think this has been wordy, wait until you see the treatises I'm already considering for my next few entries). Stick around, and I hope I'll eventually be able to provide my fellow Simmers, whether they are long-time members of the community like myself or someone who is completely new to the series, with something interesting.

Happy Simming!