Here to kick off January’s Community Spotlight is YouTuber Lacey Loves Sims! In a brief introduction below, she gives readers a chance to learn a bit more about what she does. Take it away Lacey!
Hey you guys!! My name is Lacey Tjarks, also known as, Lacey Loves Sims. I have a YouTube channel that focuses on The Sims 4. The main focus of my channel is House Building videos, however, I also do Let’s Plays and Tutorials. I also recently started something called “Random Game Friday”… pretty self explanatory. Right now we are playing SimCity on Friday’s, and people seem to really like it! So looks like that is going to be a series!
So, I thought I would let you know a little bit about myself, and how I got into gaming. Well, you already know my name, so I’ll start with I am a 29 year old woman who… Let’s be honest here, I am a bit of a geek. If you saw me in person, you wouldn’t necessarily think that, but the geek is on the inside! I have always been an avid gamer, ever since I was a little kid. It started when I was around 11 or 12 years old. My mom got my brother and I an original Nintendo! We would play Super Mario and Sonic The Hedgehog every chance we got! My brother really liked Mortal Kombat, but I didn’t care for that one! (Probably because I was so bad at it!)
The next stage of gaming came at age 14-15 when my dad got a PlayStation. My parents are divorced, so I would visit my dad every other weekend. When he got the PlayStation, he got a few games to go with it. My favorite (and still favorite to this day) was Resident Evil! I would play that game over and over. Plus not to mention we didn’t even have a memory card, so every time I died in the game I would have to start over from scratch! But, I actually finally finished that game, without dying once, and I was so proud of myself! Even to this day, I have a collection of ALL the Resident Evil games! I just love them!
Then came the day when my dad finally got a computer! I was 15. At first we didn’t have any games, so I would just play solitaire and chat in chat-rooms. Remember dial-up? Yeah, I didn’t get on the internet too often! Then one weekend I show up to my dad’s house, and there are two brand new computer games sitting there! Can you guess what they were? Well, I am sure you can guess one! The original Sims and SimCity! At first, I wasn’t sure if I would like either one, but I was bored… so I tried them out! 3 days later… with probably zero sleep, I was being pried away from the computer because I had to go back to my moms! That two weeks was the longest two weeks EVER waiting to go back to dads to play The Sims again. When i first started playing The Sims, I NEVER built houses. I just played the game. I made sim versions of myself and all of my friends and family, then try to get them all in sticky situations in the game!
When The Sims 2 came out, I couldn’t get it right away because at the time I didn’t have a computer to play it on. Remember back when not everybody had a computer! I don’t know how we survived! Well, when I turned 18 I bought myself a computer, and a short time later, I bought The Sims 2. At this point, I did try my hand at building. But not often. I wasn’t very good at it. I would usually just pick a house already in game, and add things to it. Again, I mostly just played the game.
Then when I turned 19, I met my husband, and a few years later we got married. My computer was worthless by this time, so hubby bought me a new one! I remember being SO excited about the release of The Sims 3 and it’s open world concept! I just couldn’t wait to get it! This is when I really started trying to build houses and actually make them look “good”! Every time I started a new family, I would build them a house. And sometimes I would get sick of that house, and build a new one! But again, I wasn’t very good at it yet!
Alright, so here comes the sad part… In the summer of 2008 my 2 1/2 year old son tragically passed away. This broke me. I went through a very long very severe depression. I would not communicate with new people, and barely even spoke to my family. It took almost a year for me to even want to leave the house. Well, since my son died, I have not been very sociable. In fact, since his death, I have not made a single NEW friend. All of the friends I have, I have been friends with since childhood. I guess losing him made me afraid to bring new people in my life in fear of losing them. I am not sure what the logic is behind it, but it is what it is.
Well, over the past year, I have really made it my mission to get over this “trauma” or whatever you want to call it. About a year ago, I started watching YouTube videos of people building houses in The Sims 3. It started out like, I was just trying to get tips and tricks, and new ideas for my own builds. But, i really started to enjoy what I was watching! Not just for the build itself, but for the person behind the build! I probably broke my last computer with all the endless hours of YouTube videos! I am not sure why, but one day, I thought to myself… I could do this. I could make YouTube videos of my houses. Granted I knew nothing about actually doing it, so my first few Sims 3 videos were pretty horrible.
My thought process behind starting YouTube, is that I want to become more open. Like I used to be. I want to make new friends. That’s the wonderful thing about simmers, we are all so accepting and in a tight knit community. I love that. I want to help people. Like back when I needed help, I got that from other simmers. I wanted to be one of those people helping. I wanted to share my creations with the world. One of my biggest passions in this world is building and decorating houses. I want to share that passion. Most importantly I want to meet new people. Make new friends. Be there for people who need help. For all these reasons and more is why I decided to start making YouTube videos.
If you are interested in checking out my creations you can “of course” check out my YouTube page at https://www.youtube.com/user/Laceyma1985. If you like what you see, then hit that SUBSCRIBE button. I make daily videos, so you will always have something to watch!
Or, you can go to my Website at http://laceylovessims.blogspot.com. Here you will find ALL of my houses. Plus, I recently started making my houses available for download through MediaFire, so if you for some reason don’t like downloading through The Gallery, you can manually put the house into your game.
If you would like to follow me on social media here’s my Twitter and Facebook profiles!
I would like to thank Alexis at SimsVIP for giving me this wonderful opportunity to share my life and work with the community! It means so much to me, I am truly humbled to be here. And also, A HUGE thank you to all my fans on YouTube! I wouldn’t be here without you guys, and I truly appreciate every single one of you!
