There is a pile of random junk just off the dojo lot. There isn’t even a lot there anymore. I tried to put the junk yard there, but the terrain got badly squashed, and I moved it. Apparently, there is an EA bug that leaves the junk spawners even after you move the junk yard.

The lawn gnome plays dead better than Charles does.

Here’s just a random pic of the Sample house with the meteorite on display in the front yard.

Michelle Yo and VJ Alvi trained for four days straight at the dojo without going home. Charles wasn’t there because he was managing other bits of his personal life, so I’m guessing this is some kind of glitch involving a venue that the active household owns, but no member of the active household is actually there. It’s kind of neat that I can peek in and see who’s at the dojo when Charles isn’t there.

All of a sudden, after Charles returned from vacation, I got individual messages for each of 8 levels of Sim fu and 6 levels of Athletics for Michelle. I guess she’s now qualified to do some pretty scary movie stunts.

Creepy paparazzi running around in a hospital gown.

Can we say Silent Hill?

After seeing her in my pictures for about three straight incidents, I pulled her into Twallan’s MasterController and changed her to something less frightening.

Ada being a little bit crazy.

Charles visits the bookstore with a Bad Pet ghost shader. Bad Pet being next to Deghostify on the Twallan debug menu :).

And I close with Layla, who is the first Sample to actually use the video game system.

Glad someone is getting a good time out of it.

Townie and Cross-Pollination Update:

Harvey Ursine married Zelda Mae on his deathbed. Zelda inherited all of Harvey’s assets, and Toya and Jess got nothing. Zelda has produced a daughter named Valerie that she claims is Harvey’s, and we might as well believe her.

Toya finally made it to Congresswoman and has begun her own crooked political empire. She doesn’t need Daddy’s help anymore anyway. Twallan is keeping me up to date on all the campaign donations she has diverted to a private slush fund. She and Adjo have announced that they’re expecting their fourth kid.

Not to be outdone, Shanni has announced that she and Agnes are expecting again!

Malika Williams finally died of a very ripe old age.

Jess and Beatrix Ursine-Hodgins now have a son Harrison. Trixi successfully sued Xander Clavell for custody of their daughter. (Read as: Xander keeping Trixi’s kid in a world without random male pregnancy bugged me, so I moved her.)

Xander has since knocked up Bella Bachelor, and they’re actually in a relationship. In fact, I’ve been getting Twallan notices about how in love they are. Now that he’s an elder, could this menace to society finally be ready to have an honest romance? (Um, no. They just broke up.)

Malcolm Landgraab and Beatriz Williams (Malika’s younger daughter) are a hot item. So hot, in fact, that they have an unexpected bundle of joy headed their way. Malcolm hasn’t been in the story since his best friend Adjo left the household, but he turned out pretty sweet in my game. I hope he’s going to settle down.

Holly Alto married Michael Bachelor. The Altos now have a bun in the oven. They are crazy, head-over-heels in love, or so Twallan tells me.

Velvet Sharpe made an honest man of Arlo Bunch and married him.

Viola Sharpe never found out about Israel’s transgressions. He seems to have settled down, and they are generating a lot of Twallan notices about how sappily in love they are.

Mortimer Goth proved that he really does like older women. He married Emma Hatch, Christopher Steel Hatch’s widow (Christopher being one of the invisible-body sims that I had to terminate). Mortimer inherited three stepkids ranging from teen to toddler. They managed to have a baby boy of their own just before Emma became an elder. Mortimer’s sister Genvieve is also still living with him, bringing the household up to 7 sims. I added beds to Goth Manor so the whole his-hers-theirs collection could live under one roof. I’m sappy like that.

Darlene Branch has raised Arvid Voss’s love child to elementary age. Darlene and Arvid are still a couple, but they haven’t moved in together or talked marriage. Maybe Arvid is scared of being a daddy. (I double-checked, and she is Darlene BRANCH, same as Fabian. I checked her family tree, though, and she is in fact the daughter of Jack and Judy Bunch. I think she must have married Conrad Branch right before I axed him for the invisible body glitch.)

Fabian with hand-through-salad disease.

For no apparent reason, Zahra picked up a serving of the same salad and put it on the floor.

This choking gesture seems to be an Insane thing.

An interesting dawn moment in China.

Shanni turned up as the chaperone for Ada’s field trip to the mausoleum. She and Ada really are very close, aren’t they?

OK, informal poll. The last couple of sessions have been surprisingly fruitful in Charles’s life. I think Charles kind of told me who he wants, but I’m curious. Knowing no context, who catches your fancy as a mate for him?

Veronica
Good Sense of Humor, Eccentric, Daredevil, Athletic, Dramatic
LTW: Paranormal Profiteer

Berthe
Good Sense of Humor, Brave, Clumsy, Athletic, Charismatic
LTW: Firefighter Superhero

One of them is technically against Pinstar rules, and I’m trying to decide if I care :).

Time to bridge the generation with a Simantics interlude.

Around this time, I installed the Pets patch, and shortly afterward, I purchased Late Night and Generations and moved the entire town to a modified Sunset Valley. It took me a bit to get things moving smoothly. Most of these pics are from that adjustment.

Charles gets even more ghostly in the shower.

Fabian has a really blockheaded day.

When Lancelot died, there was no space for the Grim Reaper in the dining room. So he just stood outside, slashing his scythe through the wall. Here’s an example.

Layla has lunch WHILE she’s watering the garden. Seriously, the garden was actually being watered.

I had to reset her.

Well, then DON’T EAT IT!

I forgot to reinstall Charles’ skintone after the upgrades, and the game gave him Death’s.

And the best for last. Charles’s custom futon was really screwed up by the Pets patch.

I tried to fix it by upgrading Charles to the double bed, but that produced this:

Get a load of his feet here:

I uninstalled the futons, and Daluved1 eventually posted a fix. However, these futons naturally float in the air, and you have to adjust them downward. When they’re adjusted downward, Charles gets a routing error when he tries to go to bed. So for now, I’ve reported the problem, and I’m just letting the futon float.

Oh, and townie/cross-pollination update!

While I was packing up the town to move, I briefly switched control to the Williamses. Israel Sharpe-Bauer is still living with his foster family, and Viola moved in with him. So, a very pregnant Viola had gone off to the junk yard (!) to write, and Israel was home on a date with Pauline Wan! Poor Viola. Her husband is a dirtbag. Now she they have a son (whose name I haven’t looked up).

Malika Williams is still alive, and now I know why. Her age was apparently reset at some point to the beginning of elderhood. I think I may just trigger her age transition, because she’s like 120 now and creeping me out.

Arvid Voss’s relationship with River McIrish was somehow erased in the move, and now he’s with Darlene Bunch. I turned YA-to-elder relationships back on, but he isn’t biting. Plus I don’t think he’s a YA anymore anyway :).

Trixi married Jess Ursine without any unexpected baby surprises. They seem pretty happy. Jess seems to be just the right amount of bad boy. He’s a coward associated with an organized crime gang, but he really just writes books. Due to my pregnant men glitch, Xander ended up with their baby. I think he’s still living with his parents, so they’ll have to deal with it.

And getting on the subject of creepy townies, Jamie Jolina married Iqbal Alvi. They had a son. Then Iqbal died, and Jamie got it on with her stepson Miraj. Then THEY got married. And had a son. I believe it is now impossible to chart the Jolina-Alvi family tree without using the third dimension.

Vita Alto is the Leader of the Free World. Her husband Nick Alto is the Emperor of Evil. Sunset Valley has some political troubles, clearly.

OK, I revamped my post tags again. “Simfail” is now reserved for the technical rants about crashes and fixing borked cc and other such nonsense. I have a new tag for Bloopers and the silly, quirky, charming nonsense that the game produces. The tag is “Simantics.”

That’s “Sim” + “Antics.” Get it? Ha! I crack myself up!

Anyway.

Immediately after Shanni and Agnes became engaged, Agnes announced that the had something important to do elsewhere and left. That got my curiosity up. Agnes is a professional author. She shouldn’t need to leave the house at all if she doesn’t want to. If it had been relevant to the story, I’d’ve said she needed to meet with her publisher or something. But it wasn’t. But I had to know what was so important she had to walk out on her new fiancee right after receiving a ring. So I followed her.

I’d never tried to follow an NPC sim before. It turned out that I could just keep my camera on her car, and she never vanished or anything. It was pretty cool.

She drove all the way to the edge of town to Goth Manor. So I figured she was going to visit her sister Cornelia’s family.

But no. She got out of her can and ran around the house to the wilderness behind it.

She ran up a hill.

Past a set of standing stones I didn’t even know where there. Awesome.

Then she stopped.

And picked up a rock. And put it back down again.

And ran all the way back to town.

So if an NPC sim has to leave a meeting for some kind of emergency commitment, now you know what they do in their off time.

And here’s a standing stone with etchings in ancient simlish that I just thought was cool. Some of them have pics of UFOs :). EA really ought to get around to introducing some aliens to this version of the The Sims.

Velvet has finally found love.

She and Arlo Bunch got into each other in my last session, and just before I closed out, THEY had an unexpected pregnancy and decided to move in together. She’s the first character to move OUT of the Cosmopolitan Lofts. It must’ve been getting pretty crowded in there.

For some reason, I thought Arlo was a creeper, but I looked him up on the Sims Wiki. He’s a child at the time Sunset Valley initializes, and he seems to be completely wholesome. So, assuming that he didn’t pick up nasty traits for his final two, she did good.

So far, the only character still losing in love is poor Trixi, who is stuck with Xander Clavell’s baby and abandoned by her baby-daddy for a 100+ year-old woman.

DUDE. None of your Sims can find the protection. But I think just adding them has doubled the reproduction rate of my town.

Also, I need to take a look at this unexpected pregnancy probability in Twallan’s settings. I didn’t think I’d touched it, but sheesh.

So, we’re overdue for a few bloopers!

I created a lot to put the junk yard on when I installed Ambitions. It let me create a lot across from the science center, and I thought that would be a great place for inventors to get scrap.

This is what it created.

This is Agnes failing to get around the fence to the entrance because the parking lot is vertical.

And what IS Agnes doing at a junk yard anyway?

Needless to say, I moved the junk yard.

Layla had a bit of a bad hair day when I accidentally deleted the hairstyle she’s always had as part of her sleepware.

That hair dye does not become her.

Blair Wainright was a bit too eager to get a makeover from Shanni and brought her baby.

Someone more ghostly than Charles is sleeping in Charles’ bed.

Annnnd. In present day gameplay, about 1.5 Sim-weeks from where we are in the blog, there’s been a lot of action with your legacy characters.

The Collingswoods are expecting a baby. (I have male pregnancy turned on for gay couples only. I’ve decided that if Mad Scientists can create Robot-Human hybrids, they can help gay couples make babies. 🙂 )

Arvid Voss and River McIrish are going steady.

Israel Bauer was dating Viola and Velvet Sharpe at the same time. He eventually decided on Viola, and after a while, the two of them got so hot and heavy that they forgot their protection and ended up starting a family earlier than planned. They decided to have a shotgun wedding. But they did it in true style with an epic wedding bash at Viola’s home in the Cosmopolitan Lofts that made the news. Israel has moved in there with her. That makes six people in the Cosmopolitan Lofts. I didn’t realize there were enough beds for that.

After that, Xander Clavell was dating Velvet Sharpe and Beatrix Hodgins at the same time, probably behind their backs. This continued until Xander knocked up Trixi. I think there’s another shotgun wedding coming, but I wasn’t clear on that. They may just be going steady. Poor Trixi. Xander is such a bastard.

And Velvet has been two-timed twice and is still single. Clearly this is not her game.

Adjo does the peepee dance.

Charles’ birthday had just started, and Zahra was coming to pick up Charles to blow out the candles. So there was at least a half-sim-hour before anything was going to happen, but apparently this still prevented Adjo from peeing autonomously.

Lance guards Shanni while she sleeps.

I really have no idea what’s going on here, or even why he was in the kids’ room.

Oh, and I had to play through Adjo and Shanni’s birthday twice because of a game crash, and THIS is what Adjo aged into the first time: