Note: You might be nominated for a Liebster Award! Check my other post to see!

Griffindork of the Dysfunkshinul Legacy and I both procrastinated ourselves out of nominating each other, so we’re fixing that now!

My nominations were heavy on serious narratives. The Langurds, OTOH, make me laugh so hard I’m in danger of peeing my pants on a regular basis.

Here are Griffindork’s questions:

1. Black pen or blue pen?

People use pens? With ink? The last time I used a pen was to write a check to the babysitter, and it was purple. So there.

2. Is a hamburger a sandwich? Discuss.

A hamburger is the transcendent ideal that a sandwich longs to be. Especially if it has swiss cheese and mushrooms on it.

3. If you went to Hogwarts, what house would you want to be in? And let’s be honest, what house would you actually be in?

In all fairness, I would totally be Slytherin. It’s all about being clever, dammit. Brainy is what I do.

Maybe I could make a club for Slytherin geeks who are clever, but who have social skills too poor to connive.

4. If you could manipulate one of the four elements (Water, Fire, Earth, Air) which would you pick and why?

Earth, but only if I can be a Metalbender. Metalbending is the power of the modern world.

Would the modern world of the Avatar have Plastic Bending? What do you think? Would petroleum products fall under Earth?

5. What accomplishment, besides being nominated for this award, are you most proud of?

I actually had to skip this one and come back to it. Accomplishment? Duh? Does not killing my kid yesterday count?

I wrote a novel and tried to get it published. It didn’t sell. I learned a lot, and I’m going to try it again someday.

I also recorded music with my band (see below), and people paid money for it.

6. How long have you been simming for?

I played both Sims 1 and Sims 2 obsessively, but not for all that long. I really became a simmer in 2009 when I started THIS LEGACY FAMILY. Because I don’t give up anything.

7. What kind of rig are you running the game on?

(Takes a deep breath.)

I have a 2014 Macbook Pro running Windows 7 under Boot Camp. I used to play the Mac version until I installed Supernatural and Seasons (got both at the same time at a half-price sale), at which point the horrendous lag turned into chronic Error 12s starting at the first save attempt after loadup.

Lots of geek digging produced the revelation that Sims 3 for Mac runs inside an interpreter for, I kid you not, WINDOWS XP. Which is 32-bit and incapable for accessing more than 2G of memory.

XP? Really? WTF EA? That question is like a broken record, I know.

So I just gave up and bought a copy of Windows 7. I reboot my computer a lot.

But that’s also why I can’t play Sims 4. I gave the Windows partition on my harddrive 150GB, and that turns out to be EXACTLY enough to hold the operating system and Sims 3. Sims 3 takes up ONE HUNDRED GIG, and like 1.5 of that is mods. The rest is !@#$ game, expansions, and store content. Dang.

I’ve considered picking up the Mac version of Sims 4, since I have enough space on the OSX side. But I’m burned enough by Mac Sims 3 that I’ll only do that if a Sims license applies to either operating system (this is true for Sims 3, which is why I could switch without spending more money). I haven’t been motivated to find out yet because I want to finish my !@#$ legacy.

(Exhales. It was your fault for asking.)

8. Do you play any musical instruments?

I play the viola! It is a wonderful instrument! It is possibly the instrument with the least prestige in existence! And it can’t even do band!

I love my viola. I used to play in the medieval dance recording band Musica Subterranea for like 7 years. We published two albums during that time. Then I moved to Albuquerque, NM and spent 8 years playing in the Albuquerque Philharmonic, which is an amazingly high quality volunteer orchestra; it had so many semipros that I was proud to call myself mediocre by their standards.

Then I had a kid. Then I moved to the Boston area. I’m still trying to scrape something together here. The cool thing about playing a viola is that nobody plays them, so any pick-up group is exited to have one. The suck thing is that it plays the alto clef, and after all these years my sight transposing is still kind of lousy.

9. Who is your favourite sim you’ve ever made/played/written/micromanaged?

CHARLES. It is all about Charles. I don’t know why my heart sings for an eco-hippie ghost who wears John Lennon glasses, but there you go.

10. What is your opinion of TS4?

Optimistic.

By all accounts, the performance and reliability are amazing compared to Sims 3 (which is a low bar anyway). I’m all squee about emotions. Every time the AI improves, I get happier. I really like the open world, but I’m willing to give this world style a try.

Sims 4 seems to really push for rotational play, and I don’t WANT to play rotationally. The most important part is that I want a Story Progression that pairs sims off and makes babies without my intervention. I am really all about the gene mixing. Sims 3 didn’t do this very well without NRaas either, granted. But nobody’s written a marriage-and-babies SP mod for Sims 4 yet. I’ve even considered trying to write one MYSELF once I get the game.

I’m also hung up on toddlers, and I don’t like color presets.

11. And finally, which came first, the chicken or the egg?

I guess, evolutionarily speaking, it would have to be the egg, wouldn’t it? Some dinosaur-descendent laid an egg with a genetic mutation that contained the first thing we would call a chicken.

Problem solved. You’re welcome.