I've returned from the Thing (it ended up being A Good Thing!), but as much as I want to get back to Ste-M, I haven't felt much like dealing with my simming computer (turning on a desktop = sooo much effort; let's stay in bed with the laptop forever!). Hence, another downloading spree! Especially huge since I'm still catching up on Christmas stuff from GOS. I just looked at the Dropbox folder where I'm storing all these new bits, and it currently contains 234 items, most of them .rars—eep! Oh for the days when I would blithely drag everything over to Sim File Maid and wave it adieu...! When I would download a fully decorated lot and just say, "Yes! I'll take it all!" Of course, I'm still cleaning up parts of my downloads folder as a result, but man, was it ever quick and easy. Fellow cc junkies out there, what are your strategies for tackling big hauls? Not necessarily the eventually sub-foldering strategies (although I'm always curious about how other people do that, too), but how do you like to break it all down?


I always run everything through the Compressorizer before anything else (satisfying!). Then for Body Shop content, I take all subfolders out of my downloads except for the new Body Shop files and whatever genetics/other clothing/meshes/etc. I want to look at alongside the new stuff. Then in Body Shop, I go through and make notes on which recolors I want to keep; which hairs look funky in the back it turns out; which new things can replace old things and vice versa; exit, and then I trash everything I don't want to keep. I move all the new files into a separate folder in my downloads for a temporary quarantine, and blammo! that takes care of that. (By the way, it took me way, way too long to realize how much easier life is when you start up Body Shop without all of the non-Body Shop content in your downloads folder!)

That's been working well for that, but I haven't had a good method for sorting new Build/Buy stuff—especially since I recently (!) learned that it's not a good idea to delete objects from the in-game catalogue. So: the plan is to try a similar method as above, where I pull everything from my DL folder except the new stuff, open up a test 'hood, and go through category by category to decide what I definitely want to keep. Then I suppose I'll either note which files I want to dump when I exit the game—or better, package a lot with all the rejected items which I can then open in Clean Installer to find all the to-be-deleted files. And then delete them! The only reason I feel like this will be trickier is that it might be hard to keep track of duplicate/orphaned meshes... but maybe not? What do you guys think? Do you have *strategies*?

Also, some non-LJ sites I've been liking recently. They may be ancient news to all of you, but I thought I'd pass them along in case they aren't:


Sims 2 Creations by Tara: Lots of lovely cc, like these adorable patio chair recolors above. My only (minor) gripe would be that too much of it comes in big room sets that I frequently don't have the patience to sort through and so have to pass up—and ah, the deco in some of the houses! Want you! :-(


OhBehave: So many things I love, including some super cute winter coats and the above dining set that I'm already overusing.


Strawberry Mousse: Lots of mega-darling deco items.


Salix Sims: Well, this one isn't exactly a recommendation... Such gorgeous stuff, but 1) they're using adf.ly all of a sudden, which, no; and 2) I suspect a lot of it is super high-poly, which my game could certainly do without. Right? So it's good that I can't have that chair? Wah. At least we can still look at everything...

Okay, I think that ought to do it for my CC ramble today. Was it fun for you?