Names

As you may have noticed, apart from the heirs to the three original homes of the founding families I'm not going to be putting any particular effort into keeping the Bhalli, Darwin and King names the main ones in the 'hood. There's several reasons for this. First, and least importantly, it's more realistic. Second, it makes it easier for me to identify particular family lines, eg Darwin vs Pasang. Third, it means when the game doesn't recognise sims to be related and I'm not too squicked out to let them get together (or they refuse point-blank to let me not get them together) I don't get the issue of sims who are in love and only tangentially related having the same surname and thus freaking me out!

Quick Note: Haunted Houses

I've decided that I want ghosts around, even though they are extremely annoying... hey, if I'm going to have vampires, witches and maybe even zombies eventually, ghosts are nothing. Most graves, including almost everyone descended from the founding families, will get moved to the cemetery but in the case of deaths like Esther's I'm going to hide the urns somewhere in the house where they can't be interfered with. I will try and keep the number of "haunted houses" low - one per sub-neighbourhood (I forget the game term for that), and the ghosts won't become apparent unless they actually haunt someone to death or something.

Usually they'll happen via gameplay, but I have made one on purpose - I set fire to the Jacquards in Bluewater and hid their urns in the foundations of their fire-damaged house, thus bringing a whole curse-malarky in. It may become a plot-point if anyone ever moves in there, but then again, they may not... The supernatural abounds, apparently.

Quick Note: A slight change in style...

Until now I've been writing all the posts in the past tense, but I think I want to try a few new things - some in present tense, some in first person, all of that. At the moment I'm falling into the trap of making updates feel like quick recaps on what's going on, and I'd like to try writing it more like a story even though almost all of what goes on is gameplay and based on wants and personality etc rather than me setting things up on purpose. Which reminds me, I really do need to tweak ACR so it's all vaguely in-character 0_0

This may sound like a stupid question, but...

...how do you do the "read more" thing so that only the first photo of a post is visible, thus meaning there aren't "spoilers" and the main page of the blog takes a shorter time to load? I'm only used to Livejournal cuts, and not so used to Blogger...