So, Gen 5 is about halfway through childhood in current gameplay. I’ll be in a position to lay down my story explanation for the elfland shakeup.

Background reading if you haven’t tracked this conversation:
SimDjinn, This is YOUR FAULT,
and The Plan.

I’m having mixed feelings about doing it as I see the characters develop, but I think it would work if I went that way.

After I spent so much time playing around in the Harry Potter world, yesterday the most fabulous little world showed up on Mod the Sims: Avalon! THIS is what I was looking for when I started messing around with the Harry Potter world. And the HP world is awesome, but:

A) It’s Harry Potter, and I don’t really want to do anything with the story

B) It’s from back in World Adventures

C) I’d have to add all the lots to this new world, but I already hunted them down, downloaded them, and installed them. Compared to that, placing isn’t a big deal.

So if I’m going to do pure fantasy, I’m inclined to go with Avalon. I can keep Hogwarts around and poke at it to see if I can come up with something fun to do with it.

As far as the sims in the town, I could:

1. Start with a brand new population and only bring along the Samples and a couple of families close them. Download fresh, current-generation cross-pollination sims and elfify them. Most of the ones I have have kind of run through their stories anyway.

2. Keep most of the current town population and turn them into elves.

3. Leave everyone as they are, but cull the population of sims the Samples have never met, then introduce a bunch of new elves to create a town of mixed genetics.

4. Hold off to do the elves in a different game.

As far as the town itself, I could:

1. Stay in Sunset Valley, which could add its own fantasy elements as it suits my whim.

2. Move to Hogwarts World.

3. Move to Avalon.

4. Move to Lunar Lakes, where anything can go on both the science fiction AND fantasy axes.

5. Hold off for the upcoming Supernatural expansion and move to Moonlight Falls, the town that comes with it. It is apparently inspired by the US Pacific Northwest, which would be pretty. And I suspect the expansion will be out by the time Gen 5 are adults.

I am not committing to doing only one more move. It seems to me that about the max I can expect to run in a given town is three generations.

There’s also the option of, whether I move the Samples or not, just leaving them as they are with no elves and cutting the legacy off at 7 generations to move on to other stuff. In a lot of ways, this seems like it would be truest to them and their personalities. The only reason I hesitate on doing THAT is that I’m tracking Pinstar points, and I feel like I lose my scoring rights if I don’t make it to Gen 10 like a proper Pinstar legacy. I’ve come this far tracking all the !@#$ points. I don’t want to invalidate it! Heh.

I am going to put up a poll to get you guys’s advice on what YOU think would be fun.

I have the pictures for about six posts laid out, and that doesn’t cover half of how far ahead I’ve played at this point. I’m not sure why I’m not posting. The primary thing, I think, is that moving across the country isn’t a discrete event. It’s a process. And the process is looong. I’m not playing a whole lot, but I am playing, and playing is more relaxing than writing at the moment for whatever reason.

However, I really do want to get cracking on the posts because I have this sense that you guys didn’t react to the amusing things that happened in the story, and that’s because you HAVEN’T READ IT. Yeah, I don’t always claim to be rational.

We’re settling in fairly well now. It seems like there’s an endless list of things that have to be done in addition to unpacking — transferring driver’s licenses and a whole slew of bureaucratic nonsense. Setting up new bank accounts. Blah blah. I can’t even come up with a convincing set of examples, but trust me.

Also, we had some travel and family visits hit that we’d had planned for a year, far longer than this job of my husband’s was even a glimmer in anyone’s imagination. That meant we ended up flying two weeks after getting possession of the house for a 1.5-week trip. Right now my husband’s sister, BIL, and 5-month-old nephew are visiting.

So far, we’re insanely happy here. Reality hasn’t set in quite yet, though. My husband’s job doesn’t even start until July 9. I haven’t started looking for one of my own, and I’m not even sure whether I want to do that right away or take a while to try on the full-time mom hat, since we do have the financial flexibility with his salary at the moment.

At any rate, there’s a lot more to say about the Samples, and we’ll get back to it soon! Meanwhile, you guys need to post. Look at the “last post” notes on my blogroll! This is a real drought of sims legacies, and I’m fretting that some of you won’t come back! Don’t leave me lonely!

I have no Samples update for the moment, though I have pictures laid out for two of them if I can ever get around to writing the text. I just wanted to say:

WE GOT AN AMAZING HOUSE IN BOSTON!

We do not deserve this house. I am stunned that we were able to buy it.

Now I can’t wait to get out there.

(Sadly, the house repairs for the house we’re selling Just. Keep. Dragging. We’re so not ready to go on the market, and it’s frustrating. But we’ll get through it.)

It’s come up in conversation that all of my dear readers might not know who Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace were. Being a computer scientist, my reaction to that would be, “Huh? Really?” Heh.

Together, they are hailed at the Mother and Father of modern computing. Babbage designed two devices called the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine in the 1830s. Ada, Countess of Lovelace, designed the first computer programming language for Babbage’s engine. Neither of the devices were ever actually built because Babbage (a high-profile genius of the time) squandered his government grant money. However, the Analytical Engine was built from Babbage’s designs in the 1990s, and it would have worked. I got to see it at the British Museum while we were living in London.

Ada Lovelace has become prominent in my lifetime as a rallying figure for women in math and science.

The Difference Engine is the fuel for many a Steampunk alternate universe. What would have happened if we’d developed computers in the 1830s, one hundred years earlier than we actually did? It’s tantalizing to realize that if Babbage had been a better money manager, we just might have. Ah, the world may never know.

At any rate, when I was trying to figure out what hard core computer/science geeks like Zahra, Cyclone, and Fabian would name their kids, these guys seemed like the natural namesakes. It’s amusing that neither of the Sample kids turned out to have any interest in the sciences at all.

They were really colorful figures in their own right, and I love reading about them. I highly recommend Sydney Padua’s hilarious “historic” Babbage and Lovelace comics if you haven’t seen them: http://sydneypadua.com/2dgoggles/lovelace-the-origin-2/

I took a look at my Blogger stats today, and here is a partial list of my referring sites. See if YOU can pick out the referral spam:

www.google.com 11

callendars.wordpress.com 9

simdjinn.blogspot.com 7

atrophywifelegacy.wordpress.com 5

www.modthesims.info 5

www.google.co.id 2

boolprop.prophpbb.com 1

buy-a-computer.info 1

buycheapgenericviagraonline.com 1

I have essentially completed all the work on the elf Hogwarts world, and I’ve figured out how to populate it. AND, I think I have a plan.

I’ll run through five generations of Samples. The heir to Gen 6, upon reaching young adulthoold, will be Elf-ified and moved to the elf world. Then I’ll run through five generations there. I’ll track my Pinstar points for both half-legacies to make one complete 10-generation one.

I think I’m going to do a modified Rainbowcy in Elven Hogwarts. Basically, the heir will be restricted to making babies with someone of a skintone who is not already in the gene pool. E.g. if the heir starts silver (seems likely considering Charles), then his/her spouse will have to be NOT silver-skinned, and the next spouse will have to not be the skintone of either parents, etc. I may try to actually do a Rainbowcy progression: silver, gold, copper, bronze, cobalt, veridium, but that’ll have to depend on how the population of the town balances out, since I still want them to find love of their own volition.

I may or may not actually come up with a good story excuse for this to happen. We’ll see. Regardless, it’ll be fun ;).

So, why have there been no posts for a while here with the Samples?

Because talking to SimDjinn about future game ideas made me go out and actually try them out.

So, my idea for what I might do someday when the Samples are done was create a fantasy-ish neighborhood populated entirely by metallic-skinned elves using the metallic skintone series I used for Charles (http://modthesims.info/download.php?t=440794) and the pointed ears CAS sliders (http://modthesims.info/download.php?t=374167).

It turns out that the base idea works great and looks fabulous. I’m having some trouble with populating the town, though. I thought I’d read in Twallan’s documentation that sims that are immigrated into a town should be created using genetics from the sims in the sim bin. I created a couple of elf families and then ran an empty town, and I’m still getting ordinary flesh-toned immigrants. I’m sure this can be done though, and if I continue to be confused, I can just ask Twallan because he’s amazing and patient.

The challenging part turns out to be creating a neighborhood with a fantasy feel to it. Creating custom neighborhoods in Create-A-World is huge, daunting task that I can’t even contemplate. (Readhead, you are awesome.) Most custom neighborhood projects go on for a few months and then get dropped. Of those comparatively few custom neighborhoods that are actually built to a playable state and posted for download, essentially none of them are fantasy themed. I found one on EA’s site that some people were using and seemed to like, but it crashed on load. In retrospect, this is probably because I don’t have the Pets expansion yet.

Then I happened upon this gem: The Hogwarts Wizarding World (http://forum.thesims3.com/jforum/posts/list/191471.page). It’s a lovingly-reproduced Harry Potter neighborhood using movie shots to create a fabulous Hogwarts castle and Hogsmeade town. It’s fantasy-themed. It’s complete. It’s beautiful. However, it had a few issues:

1. It’s two years old, and the designer seems to have dropped off the forum in the way of these things.

In some ways, that’s good because Pets didn’t exist back then, and his world only requires World Adventures. However, it turns out that creating fully-custom rabbitholes (City Hall, Police Station, etc.) for the base game cannot be done without a mod — the apparently-famous Jynx Rabbithole Replacements mod (http://customsims3.com/forums/thread-53.html, registration required). And in two years, this mod has been updated several times, and the forum it was originally posted to shut down. The current version is not backward-compatible. If you load the Harry Potter world with the current mod version, you get a world with no rabbitholes at all. You can add them, provided you can figure out where they were supposed to be.

I spent about a day and a half wandering around the web, looking for old versions of this mod that the world would recognize. Eventually found these slightly-modified versions on ModTheSims (http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=411270) that are old enough. Of course, those old rabbitholes won’t actually WORK, but they did produce icons on the world map that I could replace with ones that would. And then after I’d tracked them down, I found a post in the original thread linking to them *headdesk*. (Though, in my defense, that link didn’t have a lot of context, and there are a ton of bad links on this thread as people tried to figure out how to get the world working.)

And because I am a nice guy, I posted the save file with the updated rabbitholes to the old thread. I wonder if anyone will use them.

2. Um, what am I going to do with a population of metallic-skinned elves in a Harry Potter world?

At first, I thought I’d smother the whole Harry Potter-ness of the place and just build it into a generic fantasy world, turning Hogwarts into a castle for a king and queen, etc. But as I played with it, I just couldn’t do it. The world is just so lovingly done. If I take the Harry Potter out, it loses so much of its spirit. So I’ve been updating it in the spirit of the original, leaning heavily on Wikipedia to supply me with people and place names.

Yeah, I read all the books and saw movies 1-6, and I swear I’ll see the final two eventually. I liked the books and some of the movies. But I wouldn’t classify myself as a passionate Harry Potter fan, and I can’t seem to muster much interest in trying to recreate them in The Sims. I want to play with elves. Metallic elves.

So, maybe this is a post-apocalyptic Hogwarts where the House Elves staged a revolt and drove out the humans? Ha. I crack myself up.

This has been a delightful side project. But I can’t say that any plans for it have materialized yet. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to take the Samples all the way to 10 generations, and I’m certainly not going to start another 10-generation challenge. I thought I might try my hands at a Wishacy, but I admit that I like to send my sims to bed at a reasonable hour so that they’re well-rested for the next day, and that not really the way Buckeygirl’s rules work. I’m somewhat considering doing a semblance of a Rainbowcy, but I don’t want to construct each generation’s mate in CAS; I want them to find love on their own. And I wouldn’t want to do more than five generations anyway.

Hmmm… maybe a Random Legacy, which is what Redhead is doing. That seems like it might be something different from what I’m doing with the Samples while not requiring me to bend my play style too badly. Hmmm.

At any rate, I’m almost done modifying the world, and I’m thrilled with it. It’s updated for Ambitions and Late Night, with theme-appropriate Medieval and Tolkien-themed lots added to support about twice the population of the original. My crowning achievement IMHO was figuring out how to rename the rabbitholes so that the Hogwarts school is called Hogwarts rather than “School House Rabbithole” or “Community School for the Gifted.” I think I’m going to add Apparition Stations (Subways).

If anyone is interested in my modified version, I’ll happily post it for download.

And meanwhile, Charles is still not married, and this is an issue.

OK, I’m still not dead. No drama here, not even baby illness. The holiday season just turned out to be way busier than I expected.

This week, I finally got some Sims time again, and I wasted every moment actually playing the game. I don’t know where my priorities are.

I highly recommend Eco Friendly as a personality trait just for grins. I am definitely in love with Charles. I couldn’t stand to be married to him, but that’s OK. I’m already happily married. I’ll just love him from afar.

Hey, I haven’t been able to access thesims3.com for most of the last few days. I was able to upgrade to the latest patch just fine, though. Anyone else having that problem?

Woo. So, I have pics for Shanni’s wedding and a Simantics post, and I haven’t been able to actually stitch the words together. However, my reasons for being quiet are in general better this time.

First of all, Amazon Download had both Late Night and Generations on sale for half price! So I had to get them. But then I really wanted to continue in Sunset Valley, but it’s essentially impossible to get the stock clubs into the town, and the skyscrapers look out of place anyway. (But seriously, some of those high-rise clubs that come with the expansion are like 61×48 and crap. I can’t even make a lot that shape in the world editor. Why????)

So, I downloaded the Sunset Valley Late Night Revamp from ModtheSims (http://modthesims.info/download.php?t=424192). And then I wanted to tweak it to add a few more of bars/clubs and some of the residential lots I’d already dropped into my existing game. And THEN I had to port my entire town because I was SO not going to start over with the Sunset Vally starting characters for another generation, plus my family’s had a lot of contact with the town at this point, and I wanted to preserve everyone at their current generation. Twallan to the rescue, but it still took a couple of afternoons fiddling with the Porter and MasterController’s Total Annihilation before I got everything over. Oh, and I resurrected a couple of attempts at making celebrity faces now that there are actual celebrities and an acting career. Bill Cos-b and Michelle Yo are now in town. Actually, a previous version of Michelle Yo is an elder with a husband and three children. So I renamed the elder Sim Mikki Yo and added a Late Night rework of YA Michelle Yo into the household as her daughter. So now Willem Yo (Shanni’s ex) has a younger sister who is an actress and looks uncannily like her mom.

As a bonus, I was able to put an old copy of Cycl0n3’s playable ghost back on the lot, link him back in as Charles’ father, and kill him! Meaning that the urn I mentioned Zahra keeping in her room that never actually existed (because it had to be annihilated to fix a glitch, if you’re not tracking my game drama in excruciating detail) now does exist and IS in her room! And someday there may be a CyclOn3 ordinary ghost haunting around the house. This makes my world feel right again. An unfortunate side-effect appears to be that Zahra picked up a level-one bad romantic reputation for cheating. Or that may be because the porting process temporarily gave the impression of multiple Fabians existing at the same time. She doesn’t have any extra romantic interests that I can see, so I assume there will be No More Cheating.

I hope the new setup doesn’t have too many bars and clubs. I wanted one of each of the lot types, but it seems like the biggest complaint with Late Night is that the clubs are usually empty. Still, I had a great time downloading fabulous lots.

And THEN my darling daughter got an ear infection. This was her first, and I hadn’t realized how scary they would be. She started developing symptoms early Saturday (of course), and by the time the pediatrician’s office opened on Monday, she was running a frighteningly high temperature, was either crying or sleeping in someone’s arms all the time, could ONLY sleep in someone’s arms (cosleeping anyone?), AND couldn’t hold down food. Our info sheet from the pediatrician told us not to panic at stuff like this, so we didn’t take her to urgent care. But I admit I was surprised when it turned out to be as straightforward as an ear infection. Later I did more internet research and discovered that those symptoms are textbook for a nasty ear infection.

She’s fine and happy now. Her acid reflux meds have been tweaked, and so far the results look good. The fight with the insurance company has been addressed by moving her to a different insurance. With the ear infection, tweaked meds, and some extra teething behind her, she has slept fabulously for THREE WHOLE NIGHTS. But I am not going to draw any conclusions from this because I get superstitious about things I have no control over. But lemme tellya, getting enough sleep that many nights in a row after prolonged sleep deprivation is better than drugs.

I still have about three posts before Charles takes over and the movie industry movies into Sunset Valley, but I’ve been using my precious Sims time recently just to play in the new town. Now that things are more settled (I hope), I expect to crank out another post or two.

But THEN, of course, there will be the holidays, and I will be making a pilgrimage to a week-long extended nuclear family gathering, and I expect to be silent then too. So let’s raise a toast to more posting after the New Year.

Just wanted to post again to say I am still not dead, and I am totally going to post soon.

This has been a pretty messed up month here in Susanland.

First of all, our darling daughter has been sleeping poorly for about a month straight. This is apparently called the “9 Month Sleep Regression” in some circles. We brought it up when we were at the pediatrician, even, and she said that she hears stories like that all the time — baby who sleeps through the night like an angel suddenly is waking up a half-dozen times a night around 9 months. Sources I found on teh intarwebz link it to crawling and beginning to learn to walk — basically it’s neurological overstimulation. And if the internet says it, it must be true. Whatever the case, BEING SLEEP DEPRIVED SUCKS.

We have good reason to be hopeful on this front. But I’m not going to say more because I have this stupid paranoia of jinxing things.

Then I’ve had an avalanche of work deadlines, some of them particularly urgent because my productivity has been lower than usual because I’ve been sleep deprived. See how that works?

Then we’ve had an ongoing battle with our health insurance company over the darling daughter’s acid reflux medication. Don’t say anything, you folks living in countries with decent healthcare financial systems. Not. A. Word.

And then the Pets patch came out, which of course required a major mod update, and a bunch of my CC was borked. I have a couple of bizarre screen shots of Charles sleeping in his borked futon. ModTheSims linked to a lovely conversion tool that would fix the CC, but it of course only runs on Windows. I tried to run it using the Mac .Net framework, but it couldn’t find granny2.dll, which was sitting in the same folder. I could never find a permissions issue or anything to account for the problem. So I had to find a Windows box. I have a Windows 7 tablet that I use for work, but for some reason it didn’t have the .Net framework on it at all, and when I installed it, it triggered a bunch of updates that took over an hour to complete. Plus, slate-style tablet computers running straight Windows 7 are just a terribly bad idea, and the computer is pretty hard to use. But I did get it all updated and have put the fixed CC back in my game.

So, the bottom line is that when I would normally be either playing or posting I’ve been, in order of priority:

1. Sleeping
2. Working
3. Screaming (sometimes literally) at the insurance company
3. Upgrading my game

I am so about to put up an heir poll! It’s so awesome to be ready to move to Gen 4. Most of my readers have gone through 2 Gens while I’ve been working on one. And I’d blame it on my incredibly detailed blogging, but I’ve only played about on Sim-week farther than I’ve blogged. The real issue is that one just doesn’t get as much time to play with a baby.

But I have even picked out the screenshots for the next post.