It's not a competition! I'm making my own soap by playing the town. You're making a comedy or a drama, depending on how you frame it. Someone is always doing something interesting when you're playing 10 houses. I say "my" own soap, but my family has become pretty invested in the haps.

Today in the Broke compound, Trigger had his first kiss with John Burb, the boy across the street. Poor John is probably feeling confused right now, but he can sow some wild oats before growing up. Brandi and Skip lost their virginity to each other, and then promised to be together forever. Susie became BFFs with Brianna and then mastered the movement skill. Buck woke up this morning to discover his lover, the comedy club owner's wife at his door and they made passionate love. She thinks she's in love with him, but it's only the attention she's getting and the revenge on her husband. He's just in it to wet his wick. Flat just got a promotion and Flo is preparing a birthday extravaganza for Cash, their sweet little surprise.

My Sim just won the lottery! Never even knew this was a thing and got it first time. Is it rare or do you pretty much always win if you buy a ticket? (Shame the Sims 4 doesn't have some really expensive cars or anything I could buy, money seems arbitrary sometimes...)

I have come to the conclusion that when I am bored in a house, it is time to shake things up. I'm bored of the Lothario/Caliente living situation and I hate Nighat. First, I'm going to remove the door to her bedroom tonight. Then, once she dies, I'll age all everyone up and move them out. I was planning on aging up all the current teens in the next rotation, but maybe Don, Nina, and Dina are a little older than the rest. I don't know. With Charles Burb and Brianna Newbie now teens it feels right to have the old teens begin to age up and move on. I just don't know if I want to keep playing the parents or not.

Thus far, Nina has asked John Burb to "just be friends" while they were in the afterglow chatting naked on her bed. I picture the conversation went something like this:

J: Oh, that was good. You're so beautiful and perfect
N: *sensing that he's going to bring up the future* I do enjoy our time together and you are a thick king, but I think we make better friends and lovers than we do a couple, don't you?
J: Of course. You're right, we should dial this down.
N: I'm way too young to settle down with just one boy, John *giggle*

Don and Cassie Goth meanwhile have been having huge fights over music, school, the future, everything. Then he got the ball and chain moodlet from the noncommittal trait and I knew he had to end it. So they had a huge fight and he broke up with her with a dramatic swell of music and a yelled, "That's it, Cass, we're through!" Depending on how the romance system works in 4, they will probably be getting back together soon. SOL gave him the heartbroken moodlet afterward and he did the make up and apologize actions, but they're still broken up.

The Brokes seem to be infested with crabs. Poor Brandi got them twice last week after hanging out with Skip. Of course she does the "Ask about health" interaction with Skip and he's like, "I'm clean, babe." Reader, he was not clean. His only partner is Brandi, so I'm blaming this on Ruby because he took over her old trailer after she moved out.

Speaking of Ruby, she is currently married to Mike Bachelor, has Jeff Pleasant as one boyfriend, and is wooing Bjorn Bjergson as the other to fulfill the "3 relationships at once" goal. I'm undecided as to whether they're all poly or what. Ruby and Mike have had a few conversations about their shared passion for romance and open-mindedness so they definitely have an open relationship, but I'm not sure about whether Jeff and Bjorn are poly or cheaters. I'm feeling ambivalent about her having kids, so I got rid of her store of condoms. I suppose with SOL I can just have her and Mike have the kids convo, but I love a surprise baby story line. So many possibilities!

I've been enjoying noodling with the club system lately, but the most successful clubs have been the Ladies Book Club, the Teen Study Group, The New Crest Explorers (kids), Varsity Basketball, and The Best Friend Club!!! (girls). They force me to make sims interact which is a problem for me. If left to my own devices I'm likely to have my sims garden alone the whole of their lives, then they end up being very well fed and accomplished, but lonely. I'm working really hard to have adults have friends. The game doesn't make it easy!

I have learned an important lesson today:

If you have a sim walled into a room and you have your active sim leave the lot, then the walled in sim will teleport with you. (I think this is related to the auto-call-meeting thing that happens if you get together with two members you're in a club with?) If you get frustrated with having to restart the death clock on that sim and kill them using MCCC, then every sim in a 3 lot radius comes to "witness the death." If you exit out of the "witness death" action then your sim will have no reaction to their friend dying. They'll instead decide to try and order a coffee from the distraught barista and shoot the breeze with a depressed Geoffrey Landgraab.

Taking about winning the lottery: One of my newest sims did not win but he could claim that he did. Explanation: I did create a sim. It was a single male teenager and he did just get the default money that all sims get. After leaving CAS I did NOT move him in anywhere and just aborted the moving process. After that I did other things.

Next time I entered the game I did find this sim on a lot that I never did move him into. A lot that costed X-times more money then he had! Now this world is in a old save and it's not very populated. So my wild guess: the game itself needed some sims to fill the empty lots whit and took what it found, in this case this young man. Lucky him getting a big fancy house for free.

I got the bundle deal and pulled the trigger on GTW, Strangerville, and Backyard Stuff. I feel like they go together thematically given the sci-fi theme of the first two... I kinda threw Backyard stuff in because I wanted it. I'm honestly enjoying the stuff packs a lot. Laundry pissed me off a lot in 3, so I'm glad it's its own thing that I don't have to get and that I don't have to have vampires to have nightlife and wizards to have mushrooms. I will say, though, I'm annoyed that garlic isn't base game, but it's not enough to make me get vamps.

One winner of the Lottery was an actual Sim I hadn't yet played, living by himself so I moved in my female Sim who benefitted too as she was the one who entered it in the first place! Major Whiskers also won it once so I adopted him also. :lovestruc

UPDATE: Nothing to do with the Sims but I actually won £96 on the UK online National Lottery after registering yesterday for the first time after this. Two lines, one won and one got another "Lucky dip" I've limited myself to £10 as I can see myself getting addicted!

Yall. I am loving the holiday system. Finally I get some representation! I admit it feels a little weird to have the whole world be amorphously ambiguously Jewish, but good weird. Right now I'm playing the Landgraabs and it's Rosh haShannah. Nancy LOVES the storytelling tradition and opening her home to guests. Geoffrey loves everything about the holiday except the cleaning. They cleared out the living room and put the couches into storage and have a gigantic table set up. Nancy cooked the fish dinner and each family member called up their friends and invited them to hang out. Before sitting down to the meal, they sang Mayzie Grow and they must have 20 people over. Everyone is talking and telling stories, there's tons of food. It's everything you want Rosh haShannah to be. My head-cannon was always that the Landgraabs were Episcopalian, but I'm really happy I committed to simsifying the holidays and putting them in. It's really normalizing.

(yes, he's named for the Witcher guy, though the kid has long black hair, not white)

So I have this family of hillbilly trailer folk, nothing wrong with that. They had a series of marriages, affairs, divorces, people moving in and out. Nothing unusual there. A lot of kids who are sort of half-silbings. Make a lot of money selling marijuana.

But there was this one kid, Geralt. He seemed okay as a toddler. But when he reached childhood, he became the most erratic Sim I've ever seen. Tell him to do something, he'd start to do it, then he'd circle back to where he started. Over and over again. Ignoring all his needs. He walked in circles. He was ... broken.

I tried many, many things. Of course, Reset sim. Load, reload game. The family moved houses. Even after patches and expansion packs were added Geralt was just ... Geralt. Corrupt save file? No, everyone else was okay. A mystery.

It was just a struggle to keep him fed (apples in inventory, he could eat the before bailing out on the actions). But otherwise he was always walking in circles until he passed out. Often soiled himself.

The rest of the family just kind of let him be. "Oh, that's just Geralt." It's not like there's any sort of hospital in my SimCity, at least until I recently bought the open for business pack thing.

I thin I've found the problem though. In-world, Geralt finally met a therapist who can help him with counseling and medication. Out-world, I finally looked more carefully at his entire profile and realized he had a custom content trait 'neurotic' which while perhaps okay for adults was not appropriate on a child! Not sure if I put it there or it was random.

Live and learn.

Brandi and Skip are at less than a week from aging up to YA, so I've moved her from the Newbies to the Brokes and I get to work on getting her pregnant. I've had a terrible thought, what if Dustin isn't Skip's? What if Dustin was Trigger's? She finds him attractive and flirts with him when she gets a chance... Dustin would still look like a Broke because they're cousins. It would show up in the family tree, but it could be one of those open family secret things nobody talks about. I need to think about this.

My Anderson family have gone berserk for knitting. I lost sight of the father and he was sitting on the toilet knitting.

Ruby Broke's aspiration is Serial Romantic and she's married to a man with the "cuckold" trait from Wicked Whims. I thought, "This is great: she can meet her goals and he can get his jollies off!" Nope, that's not the case at all. While he enjoys the part of her engaging in sex with other men he is NOT OK with her performing romantic socials with anyone else. The other men also hate when she is talking to him. So, back into the shadows go Ruby's other relationships and if Mike ever asks her, why she can tell him that he likes the idea of seeing her with another more than the reality. I mean, that's an awesome reason to divorce, as sims games go...

I've been doing a lot of thinking about how and whether to incorporate aliens, the only occult I have other than ghosts, into my game and how to do so. I don't want them to feel look and feel like sims with more powers and another set of outfits, so here's what I've come up with. Aliens need the suits when in their alien form. Different colors need to mean different things and the strange makeup is part of ritual related to mating. I'm thinking something along the lines of females are green and males are blue and juveniles are purple. Aliens in disguise will have unnatural eye colors and dress more conservatively than the humans around them. For female sims, this might mean long dresses with long sleeves and gloves since their suits have incorporated gloves and shoes. When swimming, they wear long sleeve rash guards, leggings, and swim shoes. Humans just assume that they are eccentric or very religious.

I don't use to write here but this event was so random it made me laugh.

So I was playing my sim Serena (from here: https://modthesims.info/showthread....67#post5648067). She is in the Mixologist branch (just leveled up to stage 8) and I decided to "play" (make a sim just for the fun of it). So I left my sim and did that. I made a very fancy looking sim and gave her the Fortune anspiration. She wanted to become rich. I also made her a snob and told her to walk that that way (no, I did not make her evil as well). And as I was happy whit her design I decided to keep her. However, I did not move her in, she's just "in the sim bin" (as we said back in the days of TS2). After that I did close down the game for a few hours.

Later on I went into the game and back to Serena who I did send to Brindleton Bay, a world I have never been playing in. While she was there the winner of the lottery was drawn and who did won? Well, not my sim Serena even though she had bought a ticket for §100. The winner was the snooty sim I just created. Who did not have a ticket! I guess we can call that "money for nothing".

Visiting Brindleton Bay, my sim did meet a stray dog and they they did become quite good friend. This dog is not in the adoption pool so my sim have to get her adopted by befriending her. But here I see one of the stupid things about this game. In TS2, and as I remember it even TS3, strays is moving around in all worlds. But here they are nowhere to be seen other then in this world. But it is possible to summon a stray... By Phone!!?? How does this even work?

#smalltownproblems Nina Caliente and John Burb used to be together in high school, but she broke up with him when he was going through the meanstreak phase because she didn't like how he treated her. They've remained friends and occasionally friends with benefits. When he graduated from high school, he moved to San Myshuno and got a job as a line cook at a catering company. When Nina graduated, she decided to get a job at a catering company as well. Now they're exes, who fuck, as well as coworkers.

Meanwhile Nina just started work at Simstagram, which seems more like Buzzfeed due to the chance cards that come up, and met Michael Bachelor. He's her boss, and he's married with a baby. She's trying really hard not to develop feelings for him, but he has this boyish grin that just makes her weak in the knees.

I'm getting really annoyed with the completely arbitrary noise complaints you get in apartments. Any time my sims shower some asshole starts pounding at the door like "Keep it down! I can here you through the wall!" That's just the way things are, dude, calm down. You will always hear your neighbors plumbing, if you know your neighbor has IBS because you can hear it through the wall, you've got trouble. Anyway, I had one of my mischief sims go over to the obnoxious neighbors place, clog their kitchen sink, give the wife a stink cloud, pick the husband's pocket, and fight the wife. So I'm feeling better about that.

You buy a solar panel for §675, and you get §7.15 in electric credit per day, so in 95 days, you break even. But a sim lifetime is between 94 and 104 days.
I kinda thought they would be pushing "renewable" energy, but they're not making it seem practical other than some eco-fascist in a hard hat will come by and slap you with a fine if you don't buy the panels.

edit: I think my numbers were right as I thought I only had non-electric items in my house. I'll try it again, but I don't see any return on investment. I mean, it's sort of like real life back in 1985 when I was at Uni, but here in the future I think there is a real return on investment.

I suppose like any good parent, you spend the money investing in the security, the well-being and a better world for your kids. Knowing you'll not see much benefit or return in your own lifespan, but as one generation leads into the next, on and on, the diminishing return factor has passed and it does then start to kick-in and work for those generations to come. All the while with the hope they may attend your graveside, or urn of ashes, once in a while to say thanks for the unselfish, long term planning.

Dang, even come back as a ghost from time to time, for them to hug you for it. It's a wonderful life, and afterlife, after all... in the Sims.

Today, I am playing with my two sims, from the K-Pop band, BTS. Their names are Jimin and Yoongi.



In this game, Yoongi's trained to be a wizard. For my story, he ended up casting Rejuvenation on himself and Jimin, which will curse them to outlive their friends and family. I'm gonna span this for future generations until I've had my fun. There is also the fact that Jimin has developed an actor career and Yoongi's devoted himself to making the paparazzi disappear in several different ways.

OK, Angie's started playing the violin again instead of getting on with the cooking. I am going to buy her a violin and if she doesn't start with a skill level of over 5 I am going to be very cross. She's had enough practice already!

I found out that the reason that my college Sim's dorm was always full of trash, is because kleptos and their variations can steal the garbage chute out of the wall.

I left the Eco-pack on. And sure enough, "Sharing is caring" was voted in because I wasn't watching for it. I noticed my computer was gone then I checked. Yep. Then I discovered that even if you lock your door, if you talk to sims on the front porch that they're invited in. I lost another computer.... So, I got a laptop and carried it in my sim's inventory. They stole the kitchen sink.
The problem was, I was playing a vampire in that vampire world; only the Vatores and Vlad so I could only get 3 signatures, not the required 5 signatures. And Vlad and my sim didn't get along... So, I moved a big vampire family into that garlic house and got their signatures. I feel sorry for them.

I started reading and ended in tears of laughter. Thanks. That's put me in a good mood before bedtime.

This. This is happening in my game right now.