What a shame..

Yes Barb! At last I found his hidden gallery. Thank you....

I have mixed feelings about the amount of stories being published at TSR which may be connected to me having not that much spare time as I wish I had. Because I am quite new to the story stuff, I have still a lot of catch up to do. I must confess I have not read most of the member stories listed in our grand library yet, although I do look forward to it. It will be weeks, too, before I am uptodate just on the new stories being published while I was on my 2-weeks-vacation! For me, there's more than enough stories out there. My concern is more about having to many of the less good ones around. Everyone deserves a chance, so I try to read on even when the story does not get me hooked on the very first picture (at least if the total amount is less than 40 pics...). Still, reading them consumes my available time which would probably be spend better with better stories.

That leads directly to the second theme of this thread. Fred, first let me thank you for your nice comment about my entry at lovrby126's guestbook (which was the result of a long consideration). As I do not know him personally I tried to thank him for his intention to entertain others while hinting at the low quality of his stories at the same time. He replied to me with an absent-minded PM that was in line with his strange stories. Either his account is kind of a hoax or he is mentally at a very young age - my guess is the latter. I doubt he has evil intentions, so if he likes to publish stories without hurting anyone, why not. Just do not make him a member of Simmetry
At least he gives proof to the fact that not every story at TSR gets a minimum 4 star rating automatically (before that I had given up on considering the average rating to be an useful guidance about which story was worth reading and which not).

Just adding my humble opinion here...

I was so shocked when I read that lovrby126's story and profile description(and not to mention the gallery). I don't think he can be 31, as he says, or if he is, then he must be very depressed or slightly retarded mentally. No problem there, just shows what kind of variety of people play sims and obviously write stories.

Stories at TSR showcase that variety too. I myself write my Gardener's Dream there and as long as I keep some guidelines in mind, I usually survive without my chapters getting rejected. With this story it is rather easy, since I'm telling the story of my sims(or actually my mum's sims), except for couple twists and turns, and that kinda keeps it along the lines of 'possible in game-play'. Of course some of the stories at TSR make me question the reasons and motives of the person who proof-reads the stories and some stories definitely make me hope there was some kind of 'quality-line'. But I admit that is rather snobbish and it makes it sound like I consider myself a better writer than most of the writers at TSR, which is not the case.

English is not my native language, not even the first foreign language I took in school. I have studied French for almost 10 years now and English for "only" 9 years, for all that I use it almost as much as my own native language, Finnish, nowadays. English is not the easiest of languages but I have found it relatively easy to learn and as it is the current lingua franca of this globalized world, I think everyone should do their best to learn it. And writing stories is an amazing way of improving your writing skills. Even "broken" English can be readable as long as it's not written WITH CAPITALS ONLY and the writer has remembered to use the . and , at times.

I say, let's give everyone a chance to write and try to impress us with their writing skills. Maybe I sound like I'm preaching and being a hypocrite but if we give the chance to everyone, we might get something brilliant out of it, along with the rubbish... You can never know

Besides, we can keep Simmetry to ourselves...