toastsims

excuses blah blah whine

2008-06-12T22:02:16Z

Um yeah so. I had some computer problems (don't ask) but they're mainly resolved now, but in the meantime I went back to retro console gaming and I'm having a good time playing Ocarina of Time and Chrono Trigger, so I'm kind of not in a sims mood right now. I'm sure I've missed a ton of crap... I'll catch up someday.

Also I had this small problem with my neighborhood exploding. I don't know what happened, but I went to open it one day and it just wouldn't. I'm pretty sure I tried every possible solution for this and nothing worked, so now I'd have to open my last backup and play through like a week and a half that I lost. This doesn't sound like too much of a problem, only here's what happened in that week and a half:

--the legacy boys grew to teen and one of them was abducted by aliens
--Lance finished 50 dates
--Lance called up 49 of those dates and broke it off
--JC spawned a plantbaby who's the perfect storm of ugly
--legacy house had a huge facelift
--I played every house in the neighborhood that had kids and aged them to teen

This was hours and hours and hours of playing. I can't recreate the abduction without cheating, which I may do anyway because, fuck it. But the plantbaby is just lost and there's no guarantee I can get one that looked the same. Also, I was so averse to having trashcan kicking funtimes that I made Lance influence every one of his dates to "cheat" with someone else so he'd be furious with them but not vice versa. Do you know how long it takes to influence 49 people to flirt with someone else? A LONG GODDAMN TIME.

So now I've spoiled what should have been a funny surprise in my next update, but whatever. My point is, I look at this pile of crap I have to deal with and now playing this game just seems like a horrible burden instead of fun. I know I will eventually cowboy up and deal with it but for now, ugh, I just want to make Link kill some monsters.

P.S. Does anyone know of an easy way to make those hearts go away with Lance's dates? I'd like him to be faithful to his wife (in his relationship panel) and at this point I think I'm not averse to cheating, because doing all that work again is just... ugh. Can the Insiminator do this? I have no experience with it and the manual is about as thick as War and Peace.

toastsims @ 2008-06-03T18:34:00

2008-06-03T22:36:03Z

Hey, I'm not dead--just wanted to put that out there. I had some shitty technical problems and then I got busy with other things so Sims are on the back burner for now. See you all again soon, I hope.

Bender: Well, you're boned.

2008-05-17T06:39:48Z

Strangetown suddenly won't open, and I've been trying to fix it for almost two hours. If I can't make it open soon, I have to revert to my backup. Where the legacy kids are still... kids. And that means... no abduction.

*screams and kicks things*

I was SO SURE I made a new backup after the abduction BUT OF COURSE I DID NOT PLEASE KILL ME

default replacement funtimes

2008-05-16T05:30:47Z

I had this small problem a while (like a friggin' year) back, wherein I had a black-eyed alien and a brown-eyed human sim breed and they gave me two kids with human skin and "brown" eyes. Problem was, I couldn't tell whether they were supposed to really have brown eyes, or whether they were showing that way because of the glitch where alien eyes won't show up with non-alien skin. And I couldn't check their DNA with lovely non-Mac SimPE. Today I finally got off my ass and threw some default eyes into my DL folder. It worked!

Eden Apocalypso showed up with sparkly, pretty Lyran brown eyes...

...while his sister Paradise still had the ugly Maxis poo-brown, so I knew she was supposed to have alien eyes. I gave her some alien contacts made by TreyNutz and now she looks awesome. Thank you, Mr. Nutz.

I really like how the Lyran eyes look--they're simple and cartoony in the way that I like, none of the creepy bulging-out-of-the-head 3D "realism" stuff, but they don't look like they're covered in cataracts like the Maxis eyes. I'm sort of tempted to leave them in. The only thing holding me back is my fear that they will make my ugly sims look less ugly, which is not something I want! So I popped into the legacy house real quick to have a look.

No one was home but Kay and Lance and I didn't have time to play so that's all you get. Good old Kay... still refusing to be ugly. *sigh*

I dunno. Still ugly, but with these sparkly pretty eyes. It's kind of a weird juxtaposition. I'm not sure how I feel about leaving them in, so please tell me how you think they affect the look of these sims, if at all.

Gage Jr... hot with default replacements or not??

save the drama for your mama

2008-05-15T01:29:26Z

I was really hoping that simsecret would be an amusing send-up of the angsty solipsism of PostSecret, or at least that I would get to read secrets like "the simming world knows me as Candi, but in reality I am a CPA from Boise and my name is Stu Weinerburger." But it turns out it's mainly an excuse for catty bitches to anonymously bash other people in the LJ legacy community. What a revolting waste of potential!

weird

2008-05-04T22:25:04Z

Sooo... when did Hula Zombie become Shiva Zombie? Is this a Seasons thing? Have the hula girls discovered Hinduism, or perhaps Judaism?

Ugothlacy Vol. 15

2008-05-03T03:21:08Z

New chapter is up.

http://forums.boolprop.com/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=21093
(link to thread on Boolprop.com)

why yes, I HAVE been busy

2008-05-01T22:33:36Z

Good lord and butter.

Strawberry juice, ahoy. By the way, this is not even HALF of the extent of this problem. :P

SQUEE

2008-05-01T03:46:22Z

One of my male sims just got ABDUCTED! omgomgomgomgomgYAYZ

"Stop squeeing and get this damn thing off my head!"

Various spoilers:

It was one of Lance and Kay's sons--they're teens now, and it was the uglier one too! Such good luck. What uglacy is complete without some crazy alien genes, right? The competition is going to be stiff though, since JC's become a plantsim and spawned a plantbaby whose face makes me want to hide under my chair. I can't wait until they're both adults. I may have to have an heir poll!

Oh man, I was squealing at the computer like a crazy person when I saw my sims running for the telescope. I think I do want to get Free Time when it's available for Mac, and I'll definitely want to summon aliens. Still, the joy I get from the random, unforceable abductions is one of my biggest pleasures in this game.

scariest glitch EVER

2008-04-27T11:05:50Z

I took Lance and JC to check in on Plant One Right Here. Also employed there, as always, are Johnson Pai and (the late?) Aaroc. So anyway, this is what I see when I open the lot.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

THEY HAVE JC'S FACE

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

WHY YOU DO THIS

I tried changing their uniforms and they would go back to their normal faces in casual clothes, but not in any uniform I tried. I even tried to make Johnson change appearance in a mirror (he's a manager so I can control him) but the option didn't appear. Finally I just sent them home because it was creeping me out so bad.

Does anyone know if this can be fixed?

And yes, that's a plant sim in the background, if you've been paying attention you know who it is.

uglacy musings

2008-04-22T06:03:52Z

Ugh. Guyyyyyyys, my uglacy spouse is not ugly. She's the OFB townie with the Bruty face, the blond Mommy hair and the blue striped shirt. As soon as I got the clown suit off her and gave her some decent hair, she was suddenly attractive. Phooie. She and Lance have had two kids who are child-aged now and I can't quite tell how ugly they are, but I hope they will be goofy-looking at the very least. The way sim faces change from child to adult can be rather drastic as I'm sure you're all painfully aware.

The whole episode has made me feel sort of racist, and I guess that sounds like a weird statement, so let me explain. I discovered Kay (the former townie) has "dyed" hair, so I changed her hair back to its genetic color, which is red. I gave her a brownish-red hairstyle, and suddenly she started registering as black to me. Or African-American, or whatever, except of course my sims do not live in America. Do you know what I'm saying? There are certain facial templates that are clearly supposed to have more African features, and I think they tend to look terrible on sims with pale skin, and the Bruty face is one of them. When you put that face on a dark-skinned sim, it looks much more normal. Kay has I think skin 2, and as soon as I darkened her hair I started seeing her not as a "white" sim, but as a really light-skinned "black" sim. And yes I know there are no real races among sims, but I still carry these notions about racial features with me from the world I live in.

Sometimes I worry about the whole concept of breeding "ugly" sims... I mean I intend the whole spirit of the enterprise to be a light-hearted jab at Maxis and their silly, mostly non-human-looking facial templates which tend to combine in ways you would never see among real humans. But there is always the danger that it will just descend into bashing people who don't have the tiniest noses and mouths. I dunno. There are a lot of uglacies out there which are basically 80 slides of "holy crap you're ugly!" every chapter, and I try to let my own ugly sims have lives that extend beyond their faces, but I still know that ultimately the whole thing IS about what they look like, and sometimes I feel guilty about that. A lot of kids and near-kids read this stuff and I hate to be promoting the idea that life is all about how your face looks, even as a joke.

Blah blah blah. I don't think there's any solution to these issues... but they do bother me sometimes. Still, I'm much happier to be breeding ugly sims than to have 10 generations of identical beautiful ones.

toastsims @ 2008-04-20T06:11:00

2008-04-20T10:23:09Z

I spent an hour last night rebinning clothing that had been placed in stupid categories by the creator. The only way to do this on a Mac, that I know of, is to export the clothes in Bodyshop and then import them without changing anything. It's a pain when you're doing a lot of them. But I was just ready to tear my hair out from having to scroll through three pages of dresses in the swimsuit category.

DRESS ≠ SWIMSUIT
DRESS ≠ ATHLETIC WEAR
DRESS ≠ UNDERWEAR

Some creators are particularly egregious in this sin (coughROSEPEGGYcough). One is forced to wonder if they don high heels and crinoline every night to go to bed. I also had about three pages of men's clothing inexplicably denoted as formal wear. Sims don't ever dress up except for weddings--if you wouldn't wear it to a wedding, it DOESN'T go in the Formal category. This means you, short sleeve shirt with no jacket!

Anyway, my point is, now that I've done this (and of course deleted the original copies of the offenders), I find that I can no longer open Bodyshop without removing my SavedSims folder--which is where all the rebinned clothes are.

*pans self*

Land Lubber's MOAR MOAR CHALLENGE Edition

2008-04-18T08:22:55Z

I'm on a roll here.

Land Lubber's Siberia Challenge

Challenge rules are the same as the original, except seasons MUST go Spring-Fall-Winter-Winter

Hmm. What kind of sim could withstand double winters without shelter?

Why, a viking, of course.

...a pimp viking.

Cy Beria
Default Leo (UGH), 4/10/4/4/3
Romance, LTW something or other

Yeah, I chickened out of Grilled Cheese, but if I do the Bring It On version I promise I'll do it then. Anyway, a romance Leo with no summer should be plenty challenging. Sniff... summer!

Do not mock the pimp viking, Morty Roth. He will pillage and slap you.

So apparently they completely lied when they said you need Pets because this lot installed fine too. Unfortunately. It's big and full of useless crap like guitars and armchairs instead of a decent bed. So my lazy sim who needs more comfort than fun will fit right in here. >:(

Also, you load it and, surprise! Covered in snow drifts on Spring 1. At first I thought this was supposed to be a joke someone did on purpose. But it never melted even though the temperature was normal. After 24 hours with no sign of melting, I declared it a glitch and cleared it with the Debugger.

Led to some interesting developments, like catching fish covered in snow.

...Yeah.

You know what they say about a man with big boots, right?

That he needs some fishing badges.

After clearing the snow (and losing a valuable growing day, grumble) Cy gets to work planting a crap-ton of tomatoes for the winter. There's about $1000 free and I spend it on seeds and ladybug lofts. Could have used some of it on fertilizer maybe, but I hate spraying plants. Hate it.

The pimp viking's having a rough start. His stupid Leo needs are hard to keep up, and his aspiration is already getting quite low. He's a Cold Fish after two days of no pimping.

So it's a good thing nothing incredibly creepy is happening on the lot.

Well, maybe a nice shot of Boot Smoothie will cheer him up.

But it just makes him think he is a vampire. Bleh!

...a farting vampire.

Bloody useless sim! He can't get enough comfort out of that plank of wood he sleeps on, and he bitches and moans about it all day. I hate lazy sims. Hate them. Five active points should be the bare minimum to be allowed to live.

Finally I decide I can't deal and buy him a better chair. I guess by default that means I'm doing the "Build It Up" variation of the challenge where you're allowed to buy better basics as finances allow. But, I'm just being honest, all it means is I Phail at lazy sims.

Now Cy can sit and survey his kingdom of tomatoes while he waits for hot ladies to pass by.

It's already Fall by the time someone walks by that he likes. Check it out, instant THREE BOLTS for Hat Lady. (Yeah, I already forgot her name. I'm bad.) So we can finally fulfill that Ask Sim On Date want without worrying it will be rejected.

Why is Slow Dance always the first want sims roll on a date when they don't know each other well? And there's never any way to get the date above OK unless you do it, if only to get the damn want out of the panel. Drives me insane.

Well, whatever. Hat Lady forgives him. And Cy goes from almost Red 2 to platinum. Ugh, finally.

Money is a problem, so the bouquet is sold to pay the bills. And that's the last we ever hear from Hat Lady. Alas!

The fish pond has already frozen up, but Cy gets his gold garden badge and spends the rest of the autumn telling his plants about the glorious age when pimp vikings ruled the world.

Regardless of what Priya thinks, it is now winter, and very cold.

I put Cy on an all-tomato diet. It seems to work pretty well.

He harvests the last of the tomatoes, but the other plants are still growing, so he has to spend most of the day talking to them because they get sick so quickly in the snow. His aspiration is getting ugly again.

Ah, right on time.

After splurging on a crappy radio so they can Dance without having to Slow Dance, Cy has a Great Time with the townie skank. I forget her name, so I'll just call her Allyn, since there's a 90% chance of that being correct in my game.

I try to make some extra money with the guitar, but it doesn't exactly pan out.
Priya.

Like she's so great at guitar. Look at that, wrapping her thumb around the barre chord! Very poor form.

Jesus H. Frog on a pogo stick. The eggplants take forever to grow, and their quality plummets in the snow. I guess we don't actually need them, but I put all the effort into tending them and I want my reward!

Patricia Wan was one of the welcome wagon members, and she still has a good relationship with Cy. So when she walks by the lot one day, I grab her for a date.

Whoops... I don't know how this happened, but Cy is just over 50 lifetime with Patricia, while she's fallen in love at the first flirt. At first I feel kind of bad about this, but then I remember it's Gabe O'Weenie she's dating. I don't like him. So screw it.

So one thing leads to another...

That's a very happy pimp viking.

Your pole dancing joke here.

So apparently this was Patricia's first time. And now both Cy and Patricia are rolling the want to get engaged. I thought Patricia was already engaged to Weenie! But I guess not! And Cy doesn't have the fear of engagement. Only one thing to do...

I tell her to leave.

What? Come on, it would never work. And besides, I can't figure out how to get her back into her overcoat and I don't want her freezing all over the lot. I'll let her catch Cy cheating sometime and she can pretend to be surprised, slap him silly, and go back to her precious Weenie. It's all good.

Now the penguin is teaching our scarecrow the spatula trick.

The penguin frightens me so much.

It's a constant struggle to keep the pimp viking happy, but I finally manage to harvest the last of the veggies, and they're all Mouthwatering, TYVM. Now he just has to last another 6 days of winter without freezing.

This would be a lot easier if you didn't turn blue after building ONE HALF OF A SNOWMAN.

SO STUPID.

Apparently 3 nice points is mean enough for an Evil Snowman. Eek.

Allyn(?) comes back for another date. I wonder what it is that makes some family friends come around randomly to visit and others not bother.

Well, whatever.

And look who else comes back for more. I guess now that she knows what real Pimp Viking love is, it's hard to settle for a Weenie Man.

Your Cannibal Holocaust joke here.

Gads, Patricia! You already have a nice weenie boyfriend with a decent job (okay, teacher's salary, but still), obviously crazy about you, been left by his wife when she realized she was a gay pirate... I mean, he's a sure thing. And yet you still throw yourself at the pimp viking with the evil snowman!

No, this is not another photo of the last date. This is a third date! Patricia keeps coming back! I was worried it would be hard to keep Cy's aspiration up for the end of the challenge, ha ha.

They rolled matching wants to get married. Again. This is getting disturbing.

Amidst all the pimp viking-ing, Cy manages to max Mechanical. I fed him vegetable cocktail because it does seem to help, although when I Test IQ with the Debugger, it shows no change. So I really don't know.

Last day of winter. Patricia comes by again. I ignore her, frankly it's getting stalker-ish. Instead, Cy drinks his eggplant crop.

Yum yum! Eggplant juice! Nothing I'd love more to drink six glasses of in a row.

And it's spring. I completed the challenge, but I upgraded some of the furniture, so I guess I failed at MOAR CHALLENGE. Ah well, spank me.

Sorry this one doesn't have a nice romantic ending, but I really don't know what to do. I thought Cy liked Hat Lady the best, but she seems to have moved on. Meanwhile Patricia is becoming an obsessed stalker and Cy is screwing up the neighborhood premade story. Ah well, romance sims are good at that, aren't they?

The big photos are... big. You can see my lack of anti-aliasing distressingly well in them. I dunno if I like that.

Land Lubber Challenge, MOAR CHALLENGE edition

2008-04-15T08:08:52Z

Argh! Uploading photos is just a bitch no matter how you do it. I think the real problem is the way the Sims 2 program names the photos you take in the game. I can tell there's a lot code in there, but other than that it just seems like random garbage to me. It makes organizing photos so difficult outside of the game.

K, anyway. STORY OF CRAPPINESS 2.

Land Lubber's Lonely Island Challenge by ukpoppyberry

Rules are the same as the original Land Lubber's Challenge, but all four seasons MUST be summer!

Just for laughs, I tried downloading and installing this lot even though I don't have Pets, and it worked. Go figure. The two trees are orange and lemon; the furniture is equivalent to last time.

Loane Lee-Islander
Default Aries, 5/7/6/3/4 (?)
Pleasure, LTW Professional Party Guest

What Pleasure sim wouldn't love to be marooned on an island where they're not allowed to work? Shit, sign me up.

Well, maybe not.

Leftovers still not allowed to be saved, but you do get a sink on this lot, so all the extra fish goes down the drain--gah! I seriously consider deleting the sink for this reason, but decide it would be contrary to MOAR CHALLENGE. This decision becomes important later.
In the back, you can see Alexandra O'Mackey giving one of her "death to men" stares. She will also become important later.

Challenge starts with about $500 in the bank. After fertilizing and planting, I have enough to buy a composter and a tiki light. I also add 2 squares of garden soil. I think that's enough, I plan to fish more than garden this time, since the water will never freeze.

Plus Loane has a bigger social need than Lana did, and she'll need to be able to yak with the neighbors much of the day while also doing something productive.
Rose Greenman wants everyone to know what a hottie her husband is since he went to the green side. What a snob.

Loane's wants aren't too awful, though she does spend a lot of time wishing she could ask someone on a date, go downtown, and get drunk, sometimes all at the same time (probably the best way to do it). Usually she has some kind of piddly want to play with someone that keeps her in the green. It's definitely more of a struggle to keep her happy than last time, though.

It's harder to keep her needs up too. She loses hygiene faster than I'd expect (do sims sweat in the heat?). Fortunately, the first few days are pretty cool and a glass of water does fine for temperature until the lemons are grown. When stupid Rose Greenman isn't hogging the sink.

I feed her a boot one morning just for kicks. She farts, blames it on someone invisible, randomly gets paranoid for a minute, and then laughs like a lunatic at nothing in particular. Feels just like I'm back in my old dorm room again.

When the fruit's harvested there's no need for lemonade, so I give her orangeade, hoping for fishing or gardening points. Alas. Apparently useless badges don't taste so good.

Lana drops by one day, possibly to share some tips on living in the wilderness. Nah--really she just wanted to see the Easter Island head. Can you blame her?

Strangely, Alex O'Mackey comes back for another visit one day, and then she earns 10,000 points for becoming Loane's best friend. I guess she really likes her!

Uh... I guess she really likes her... and Loane does want to ask someone on a date... and her aspiration could use a little help...

I have a special fondness for Alex, she was my test sim when I first installed Seasons. I always kind of suspected she was batting for the other team. I mean, check out her memories--she goes right from having her first kiss with Weenie Man to being married to him, but she doesn't remember falling in love! Total small-town closet case. I was actually going to have her sex up the neighborhood bicycle, Stella Roth. But Stella is such a pain in the ass, I just couldn't bring myself to inflict her on Alex.

Soooo... anyway... well, it doesn't say in the rules that you can't go on dates, just that no one can move in. And what do you know, the dread pirate and the castaway have two bolts without matching turn-ons. I totally by accident made Alex her dream woman.

They would have been happy to go all the way on the first date, but as you can see Loane was getting a little bit overheated. Not that I blame her; you have to admit, there is something about those short-haired pirate babes.

So they have to end the date early. But hey, nice platinum plumbob anyway. First one of the challenge! (And the only one not forcibly induced by strawberry lemonade.)

D'aww. Gay sims are so much cuter than straight ones. I don't know why I think this. I guess I am a self-loathing heterosexual.

The day after the date, we get our first Mouthwatering produce, without a gold badge. When you're in love, even the lemons look shinier!

Awesome! The rules don't say anything about dates... so I say we get to keep it!

Gardening and fishing more than cover Loane's fun need, though, so no one plays it except stupid Rose Greenman. You are not even supposed to have a Fun bar!

Now it's Loane's turn to be the obnoxious one blabbering about how hot her significant other is to any poor sucker who'll listen.

Speaking of hotness, about this time Loane starts to get very hot indeed. There's some kind of heat wave going on and suddenly she's at the top of the temperature bar almost all day.

Certain other sims who are too dumb to go home to their air conditioning are having problems too. Priya. I hope you burn to death in this neighborhood, too.

I stupidly used all the lemons on worthless orangeade and now it's several days before there will be more. Nothing to do but drink from the faucet six times in a row. Water is much less efficient at cooling sims, plus it makes them have to pee. So she spends all day glued to the faucet and the toilet.

I have her try to cool down with water balloon fights, but it barely does anything.

Water water water. Pee pee pee. I cave and just put a sink in by the bathroom. I would have planted more lemon trees, but I thought I should buy ladybug lofts first! Damn it!

What's worse, she can't sleep through the night. She gets an hour tops before I have to get her up to cool off again. It takes an hour to drink 2-3 glasses of water to get her back to low red.

Then she gets maybe another hour of sleep before she has to get up and do it all over again. Christ. I mean, I can't argue that this is inaccurate. If you've ever tried to sleep in a heat wave with no a/c you know how very accurate it is. She can't get any rest, and her other motives are still draining away while she drinks.

I finally push it too far and Heat Stroke appears in her queue. By a panic reflex, I click to cancel it, and amazingly this works. It buys her enough time to get to the sink, anyway. I wish real life worked like this. Get Fired. Cancel. Rear-Ended in Rush Hour Traffic. Cancel. Get Dumped For Some Girl With Bigger Boobs. Cancelcancelcancel.

Unsurprisingly, the cheap sink finds all this a little hard to take.
You'd think having a nice spray of water in her face would help to cool her down. But... no.

Drinking makes her need to pee. Peeing makes her hygiene tank. Showering makes her hot again. Between the vicious cycle and the lack of sleep, certain other needs are getting tough to fit in.
Still no lemons.

This goes on for two more days. No sleep at night, spending all day by the sink. I'm pretty sure I've lost the challenge and she's going to either combust in her bed or starve to death because she was too busy peeing and passing out.

Finally, lemons.

As Will Wright is my witness, I will never go lemonless again.
The heat wave is finally over, and Loane is a decent temperature again. I'm looking forward to getting her a good night's sleep.

Of course.

That asshole! He took the date reward from Alexandra! Then he goes for the bookcase, both the tiki lights, and the chess table I bought because Loane wanted a Game then never played it.

She's too tired to care.

Soon, Loane gets her gold badge in fishing, something Lana never got to do.

Fishing is a lot more lucrative now.
It's Summer 3 (out of 4) now, and barring any more heat waves, Loane can just fish her brains out for the rest of the year.

Just shut up about the damn wishing well already, Daisy.

Jacob whateverhisnameis comes by to moan about his breakup. If you're hoping for pity sex, you're seriously barking up the wrong tree here, kid.

His dad comes by later and lo and behold, Loane suddenly wants to influence someone to prank. I don't blame her.

A couple of real winners, these two.

With some vegetable cocktail, Loane manages to max Mechanical. Might as well know how to fix the sink since it breaks down every five seconds.

It's Summer 4. Loane gets the memory for earning $5k, presumably from selling the produce right off the bushes instead of from inventory. That's a possibly useful thing to know.

So I buy her a bass and suddenly she no longer rolls wants to Perform Music For Tips. Figures.

Oh, what the hell. I'll have her skill for her dream job. Lord knows the Dread Pirate could use a little extra income.
The reflections in my mirrors are always all fucked up. I wouldn't keep them on anyway, because of the lag, but they really freak me out when I turn them on for a photo. They're always warped like a funhouse mirror.

She spends her last night on the island getting high and discussing... the economy. Actually, I think getting high is probably the only way to be able to stand discussing the economy.

I give her an abbreviated course of Eggplant Therapy, then stuff her inventory full of loot...

Because she's moving out.

Arr!

I'm happy to report that this version of the challenge was much more interesting and lively than the last one, partly because of the weather and partly because I chose a tougher aspiration to keep happy. I think it's definitely time to go for the Grilled Cheese.

Land Lubber Challenge

2008-04-13T11:11:10Z

Blogs are tawdry. But at least one can curse here. I am going to try out the scrapbook deal and see how it feels. So far I can't figure out the "client," it takes forever to sort through the Storytelling folder to upload, and all my photos are out of order. It's already a huge improvement over Storytelling Mode!
yuk yuk

TEST STORY OF CRAPPINESS.

The Land Lubber(')(s) Challenge by Webbymom

1) Have one single Sim live off the land for the space of one Sim year (4 seasons) ...

There must be absolutely no jobs taken, no telephone purchased for their lot, no fire or burglar alarms, no greenhouse, and no shelter (i.e., house with a roof). “Fake” shelter has been provided for on the lot, but it’s just for looks.

Only one Sim allowed on the lot. Make a Sim in CAS. They can be male, female, rough and rugged or glitzy and glam, and whatever aspiration you want, but either way, they're on their own.

Lana Lubber, Scorpio 7/4/7/3/4
Knowledge, LTW celebrity chef (glitch??)

I did not "roll for aspiration and personality to make it more interesting (optional)." I will come to regret this.

I couldn't download the provided challenge lot (no Pets) so I recreated it myself. Crappy fridge, crappy counters, crappy sofa, crappy bed, crappy bookcase, crappy grill. Hobo fireplace. No phone, no alarms, no sink. Curbside garbage can locked up. All trash must be composted instead.

Charmingly rustic plumbing.

Couldn't tell from the photos how many fruit trees there were so I just gave myself one of each.

Seasons go spring-summer-autumn-winter. Dunno how much money is supposed to be left after purchase of the lot, so I familyfunded down to only enough to fertilize all the garden plots. I had Lana greet the first walkby thinking all the fish he caught would end up in her inventory, but I forgot that only happens on lots where there's a home business. Apparently most sims don't believe in the concept of ownership when it comes to fish. Damn hippies.

But apparently she won't starve. Behold, badly pixelated dinner!

Or not. Ah well, it's unfair of Maxis to expect that someone who can't even boil spaghetti could handle Bass with Squash properly.

The fridge is only there so you can take fish out of it to cook. No regular meals allowed; only fish and juice. Not proving difficult to catch fish so far, but eating bass at every meal probably gets old fast.

No leftovers allowed. Gotta throw away any extra fish, which really bothers me. I hate to see good food go to waste, even simulated food. At least it's going to be composted.

Ugh. I hate camping. Nature is all well and good, but not when I need to poop or shower. I am indoor plumbing's #1 fan.

Lana wakes up with spring slutspam, so I have her flirt with one of the Riverblossom Hills local yokels. What's this guy's name again? His poor wife isn't cold in the ground and he's tromping around in the woods looking for hippie girls to sex him up. Ah, spring!

His son comes by later to complain. Or maybe he's just hoping I have InTeen. (Nope.)

Know how many days (non-autumn) you have to do the crossword in the paper to get the very first Logic point?
Five.
Being a crossword fan, I always hoped EAxis would give the sim crossword a little extra importance in some later expansion, kind of like how being able to drink from the tap became useful with Seasons. Does it do anything special in Free Time?

Lana stops a walkby every day. Even if we can't steal their fish, we need them to keep the social bunny away. Stupid Daisy Greenman is lording it all over town about their wishing well. Well yeah you got the damn wishing well, you have three plant sims in your family, bitch!

I made Jason into a plantsim and this is how he repays me. I hate the Greenmans, I really do.

Our first produce. It's Tasty. Lana can have OJ for breakfast instead of bass, probably quite a relief at this point. I wonder if there's anything you can make with bass and oranges. Bass à l'orange? Orangebassade? Like the Bass-O-Matic from SNL.

It's summer now. Partly cloudy with a 90% chance of naked hippies in the woods.

There is probably some sort of specialty market for porn like this.

Except for the first day, Lana is way easy to keep happy. Too easy. I wish I'd picked a more challenging aspiration. I do love neat Knowlegde sims who get off from scrubbing the bathroom fixtures, but there's no aspiration rewards allowed here, so keeping her mood up is sort of pointless.

The weather has been distressingly benign as well. No lightning, and I only have to give her lemonade once to cool her down.

Meadow Thayer's mom comes around to barf oversized pieces of hard candy into our stream. There might be some kind of specialty market for porn like this too, but I don't wanna know about it.

Remember middle school? "Know what this is? It's a brainsucker. Know what it's doing? It's dying."
Well, facesucker in this case, I guess.
Okay, never mind.

And a gold gardening badge. Snore.
I'm starting to miss the asylum right about now.

That damn penguin! Penguins should NOT be allowed to come around in the summer! Fortunately, Betty Goldstein has brought her special anti-penguin pellets today.

"There's something very important I forgot to tell you."
"What?"
"Don't cross the streams."
"Why?"
"It would be bad."
"I'm fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, 'bad'?"
"Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light. Total protonic reversal."
"Right... that's bad."

Uh oh... they crossed the streams.

And it's fall. The pole bean is neither a pole nor a bean: discuss.
Well, okay, actually I guess it is a bean. So much for that topic.

When Lana doesn't bother to say goodbye to her guests they tend to stick around fishing until the wee hours. Free burglar repellant!

First skill maxed, cooking. Yawn. Now I've met all of the mini-goals of the challenge and I'm bored.

Pond freezes up on the first nanosecond of winter, but there's plenty of fish and produce to last the winter.
Yawwwwn.

Jesus christ, I hate camping.

Why does the penguin always talk about bombs? Seriously, has anyone figured this out?

And yet here I am rewarding the violent talk. I am such an enabler.

But even I have my limits. No beer for penguins.

Snow on the pillows and sheets, but Lana stays toasty warm at night! This is really distressingly not hard.

She warms up in bed, in the shower, with the hobo fire, and with tomato juice. I was really thinking the cold would be more of an issue.

She has nothing to do but skill (pointless) and talk to the last of the eggplants all day to keep them from croaking. So she can turn them into eggplant juice, drink them, and get skills (pointless).

Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

So about this time, I start wondering exactly how many of these pointless skills I could get her.

I mean she's got plenty of eggplants.

She reeeeeally has a lot of eggplants.

Even after she Served Eggplant Juice and had the entire tray glitch into an invisible dimension... twice

She still has a whole lot of eggplants.

So for the last two days of winter, all she does is drink eggplant juice.

With a very occasional break to drink pepper punch for energy.

Or strawberry juice.

I make her earn the very last point on her own so she'll get the memory properly (dunno if they fixed it, but I never patched).

When Lana wakes up the next day, she has maxed all skills, spent a year living off the land alone with no shelter, and it's spring.

She wants what any sane person would want in this situation...

...to get seriously laid.

Oh my.

Well, we'll leave them to it.

There's no scoring on this challenge, so I guess... I won? It really wasn't as hard as I expected, I think if I do it again I'll try something crazier. Like a Grilled Cheese Libra.