First, some funnies before I get to the real rant:

Hearkening back to the last family vacation, this has to be the best travel-return pileup I’ve ever seen.

If you’re not tracking, that’s Lance (elder), Charles (teen), and Ada (child) on their return from Egypt.

Toya and Adjo showed up at the theater plaza the evening Ada sold muffins.

But something was wrong….

Charmaine seemed to be having a bit of a bad hair day.

And the worst of it is that I did haul the toddler into CAS to fix it, but I still don’t know what that bad toddler conversion hair is so I can delete it.

Shanni had a bit of trouble getting ready for her wedding.

Not a lot to say here, except that it’s actually a pretty artistic camera collision detection fail.

Mortimer lost track of what he was upset about.

Or maybe he just wished Shanni were dead.

Actually, poor Mortimer was a wreck for the whole wedding. He STILL wasn’t over Shanni dumping him, and Cornelia Goth died between the time Shanni dumped him and the wedding. So I had to keep an eye out to make sure his constant grief freakouts didn’t photobomb the whole event. Agnes was also grieving for Cornelia, but she handled it better.

Hank romances Bella Bachelor out at good old Lover’s Leap.

He’s since dumped her and is going with Holly Alto, and I think I just got a notification that they broke up too. I finally gave up and pollinated Pauline with his love child so that their genes will make it to the next generation. It seems pretty clear that the only way either Hank or Pauline will going to breed is by accident.

OK, and now for the rant. Look closely, now.

If you think there’s a floating head watching Mortimer put the moves on Madison Langerak, you’d be right. That would be Conrad Branch. Here’s another view:

Here Layla is talking to Parker Langerak at a previous iteration of the Agnes/Shanni wedding that I lost due to game crash.

Creeped out yet?

It turned out that five guys in total spontaneously lost their bodies. Also included were Richard Branch-Langerak and Christopher Steel. I don’t remember who the fifth guy was. I tried to make Twallan’s DebugEnabler reset their outfits, and it reset them but didn’t fix the problem. I tried to haul them into CAS and fix them, but CAS didn’t think that ANY clothing was appropriate for them.

Then I began a longish back-and-forth with Twallan on his forums. He insisted that these guys were pregnant and I had no pregnancy morphs installed. The problem was that A) I didn’t have any male pregnancy turned on at all, and B) I looked up their statuses in MasterController, and none of them were listed as pregnant.

This went on for something like two sim-weeks. In one particularly memorable moment that I failed to photograph for some reason, a bodiless Richard carried his toddler into a scene where Charles was striking out in an attempt to romance a chick on the steps of City Hall. (That scene will come up later without the creepy Richard.)

I should’ve just gone ahead and installed male pregnancy morphs to see if their bodies would appear. It was still clearly some kind of glitch, but it would’ve given me more information on WHAT kind.

Then I tried to package up my town to move it to the Late Night modified Sunset Valley, and when I tried to package up my townies using Twallan’s Porter mod, the game would hang. Through a lot of trial-and-error, I determined that the exports failed only if one of these bodiless guys was included in the file.

At that point, I just gave up and abandoned them in my old save file. It’s kind of sad because Kaylynn Branch-Langerak and Emma Hatch-Steel both ended up as abrupt widows with several kids each. Also, Fabian lost all of his living family but Tyrone. (Aside: I thought they were his brothers, but it turns out that both Austin and Ida Branch were dark-skinned after all, and I have a vague memory of Fabian being orphaned as a teen and moving in with relatives. Man, if I’d remembered that earlier, I’d’ve used it in the story. At any rate, I think the Branch boys are actually Fabian’s cousins. Whatever the case, all of them have dropped off his family tree, he no longer knows he’s related to them, and they don’t keep in touch. There’s only so much nudging I can do in the name of game continuity in an eight-sim household. Maybe Fabian didn’t like living with them and would rather not talk about it.)

At any rate, good riddance to bad game glitches.

All may not be right still. I finally installed male pregnancy morphs and turned on male pregnancy for male-male relationships ONLY. Since then, as far as I can tell, EVERY pregnancy in the game has been carried by a man.

Remember Trixi and Xander Clavell’s birth control failure? Trixi went off and married Jess Ursine, and XANDER had the kid. Arlo Bunch just gave birth to his and Velvet Sharpe’s love child. And in current gameplay, Charles just ran into Adjo about to pop with his and Toya’s third kid.

ARGH.

So I have more questions in to Twallan, and I think I may turn male pregnancy back off again and cross my fingers.