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.

I’m a poet, and I don’t know it.

Woo. So, actually getting Adjo out of the house turned out to be a cluster of Simfail.

First of all, you’ll notice that there’s no glittering engagement ring and no vows in Adjo’s story. This would be because, for some reason that only makes sense to them, the developers of The Sims 3 decided that nobody was allowed to become engaged or get married in an eight-person household. They are, however, allowed to go steady. I cannot fathom what they were thinking. One of the primary ways of moving characters out of a household is to marry them. WTF? And why allow boyfriend/girlfriend relationships, but not engagement, since neither of them involves any kind of household change? The world may never know.

My original intent was for Adjo to propose to Toya in the park. But they did everything but have Whoohoo on a park bench, and I couldn’t get the Propose interaction option. So I looked it up online and discovered the developers’ folly. Now I was left with two choices: move him out and hope the story progression would figure out that he was supposed to marry Toya and move in with her, or try to hack it with mods. Now, I am running Twallan’s StoryProgression rather than the base game, so I probably could have done that. If I were running the base game and moved Adjo out without actually marrying them, then Toya would probably have had babies by immaculate conception, and Adjo would have left town. But I wanted them to get married in MY GAME.

So I tried to hack it. I used Twallan’s MasterController to set their relationship status to engaged, which it let me do. Then it let me hold a wedding party for them. But when it came time to do the deed, you guessed it: no option to get married. Couldn’t pull one over on them. Sigh.

So I decided that Adjo would move out then and there and buy the starter home I had picked out for him. Then I’d use Twallan’s mods to move Toya in with him. So he tried to move out, and the game hung. At least three times before I clued in that it wasn’t going to work. At first I thought that maybe you can’t move out during your own wedding party, so I loaded a save before the party happened, and STILL the game hung when I tried to move him out.

This appears to be an unrelated bug related to the joys of World Adventures. I love World Adventures with a burning passion, but it is not to be played by the faint of heart. In fact, I wouldn’t advise playing it without Twallan’s Overwatch at the very least. It is filled with game data-corrupting bugs that can ruin your legacy right quick. I apparently took my legacy in my own hands by inviting Layla over from Egypt and having Lance marry her before I discovered that mod. The only thing that happened there was that Layla’s family tree was wiped out. But friends and acquaintances have had really nasty things happen when their sim returns from vacation. At any rate, it appears that there’s some kind of obscure bug that makes the game hang on move-out if there is too much tomb-raiding swag in the house. Huh? Lance’s whole career was tomb raiding. The house his filled with swag. It wasn’t even clear that I would be able to fix it by removing the swag.

According to forums, the best way to deal with this bug is for a Sim in a bugged household to get married on a community lot and move away from there. The lot would presumably have no WA swag in it. Which would work IF ADJO WERE ALLOWED TO GET MARRIED.

So I threw another mod at it. I used Twallan’s mods again to set Adjo and Toya’s relationship status to married. Then I used them to move Adjo out of his household, Toya out of hers, and both of them into the little starter home. As a result, the Sample household funds were not used to buy the house. Instead, Adjo got fresh startup funds. But I am taking the !@#$ money and counting toward my legacy because I have !@#$ earned it.

That pretty much solved it.

And without further ado, bloopers!

Shanni opens her dresser drawer in embarrassing closeup.

After breaking up, Shanni and Jake had trouble breaking up, if you know what I mean.

Adjo and Toya take, “One heart, one mind” a little too seriously.

The lawn gnome spies on two hot chicks in their underwear.

Zahra takes time out from Fabian’s apology for cheating to tell him that he stinks.

While Adjo was getting his marriage license, it was apparently very windy in the park.

So here’s what really happened.

I replayed Jared death four, count ’em, four times. He decided to die the morning of the wedding, and his death sequence took over two game-hours to complete, causing the lovebirds to miss their own wedding. I ran the death through twice from my save point, and it was clear that the timing had already been calculated. The mood hit for missing your own wedding, on top of watching a family member die, is almost enough to make a Sim jump off a cliff.

Sheesh. Talk about the resident asshole taking a parting shot.

So I decided to see if I could fudge things. I turned off aging so that Jared would last through the wedding, then I turned it back on. Only this time, after two days he didn’t die. But he also seemed to have lost all of his volition. He left work abruptly and literally stood in the parking lot all day, then came home in the evening to stand in the entry hall of the house. He would do something if I told him to, but he had no free will at all.

And the weirdest part is that he disappeared from the family portrait on the load screen. It appeared that half the game thought Jared was dead, and the other half didn’t. Not entirely unlike the Lance’s girlfriend bug, come to think of it. This game clearly has some separate data structures it doesn’t always keep in sync. Serves me right for trying to tweak fate, I guess.

Then next day, he left work again after one hour, and this time he actually did die in the work parking lot (at the age of 100 days). His gravestone appeared, but his spirit didn’t get sucked into it as it was supposed to. He just stayed as a ghost in the parking lot, again with no volition, and in the evening returned to the same spot in the entryway.

Seen here just after he’d peed himself. Didn’t think a ghost could pee himself? Think again.

Only now he was cluttering up the house, still with no volition, and I couldn’t control him. He wouldn’t go back into his grave, so he hung around like furniture all day, peeing himself, and I couldn’t get rid of him.

At that point, I just gave up and returned to my original wedding day save point, let him die on schedule, took the mood hit, and married the lovebirds afterward. Posts from this point continue from the replayed timeline, with a couple of particularly cute shots from the first time through.

Damn Jared.