Peeking into the rock

Here is a link to some of that hypnotic Hungarian string music.  The video is an hour and a half long.
edit: have another one -- a whole raft of violinists paying tribute to one who just died.  Catch the cute kid with a stick and pretend bow at the beginning.

On another front, I have total laryngitis -- no voice at all, and no real warning: I was suddenly hoarse in the afternoon yesterday, but not extremely, and then I woke up with nothing. I can't really work with no voice, so here I have been all day, messing around with an embarrassing little Sims project -- trying to make the art nouveaulicious build set not suck.  It is clearly not finished: the edges are much rougher than EA's artists usually do, and the texture is nothing at all.  Obviously, it was a concept sketch and when EA decided they were done with the SIms 2, they yanked the project away from the people who were working on it and slapped the thing on the store page and people paid good money for it.  It's promising.  I don't have the skills to smooth out the mesh but I can retexture the things so they actually look like more than a jigsaw stencil.  maybe.  If you could see my desktop now, you would see this garish rectangle of awkward swirls of lime green, magenta, periwinkle blue, red, and ashes of roses -- justfive colors that would be distinct enough that I could use the magic wand selection tool and always get the right field.  This is a template for a layer that will have different colors of inlaid woods or paints, depending.  I traced the general outline from the object texture, but that was not immediately successful as the original texture had very little actual molding or shading to it.  It was like a flat piece of plywood, really.  Which means that the swirlies I put into the texture will look like crap if I don't figure out how to sculpt it all.  I think I have a trick to do that, involving the find-edges thing and then using the edges to make highlights and shadows on a different layer from the color part of the texture. But I also think there will be a lot of intermediate stages of suck.
For one thing, I can't smooth the blobs of color for the template, so therefore the curves are really difficult and tend to be hideous.  And not in the good way. 

Another thing is that there are five pieces to this: one-tile door and arch, two-tile door and arch, and a one-tile window.  I have started with the one-tile door. They do not share a common texture, and the swrily bits behave differently on each piece, so they will be happy if they go together at all by the time they are finished.

Also, the young doctor's go-to-city-hall marriage has turned into a Disney princess wedding with oranges.  Prague has a way of doing that to you, I guess.  At least the young folk are having fun.