Unfortunately, you combine the tag thing (and heck, even hugging) and the streaker wackiness and you have something that J.J. Thompson would be up in arms about. Funny he never mentioned the streakers . . .

I like the chairs, and the lightning bolts. I've noticed that Nightlife has been pretty heavy on graphical information; before, the "while eating" actions would have probably been put in their own submenu.

Game calls it "rivals." Sounds like that's what it is; another sim competes with yours for the attentions of your date. A sim who is "furious" with yours is more likely to become a rival.

Many of those tokens do seem to have something to do with food. First time they cooked a food, first time they ate a food. I'd guess that the game doesn't give a sim a want to eat a food until they've already eaten it, except maybe cereal or ham sandwiches. That way you don't get sims randomly wanting to eat Lobster Thermidore when they're two days out of CAS and have no skills.

Honestly, I rather like the idea of townies having memories of five or six generations of sims. Make for some interestingly bizarre conversations. Be a bit cumbersome, though.

Ahh . . . okay. The "Grand Vampires" get to ignore that rule, apparently.

So, it's incompetence, with a really lame excuse. 

They can be influenced by another sim to do so, and they will bite other sims autonomously, but I don't get the option in the standard social pie menu. Where is it supposed to be? This is a fairly minor problem, considering that I'm having issues with memory icons and corrupted memory conversations, but it's irksome enough that I want to be able to fix it. Assuming it is a problem, and not just the result of my own incompetence.

The furious thing is cool. It kind of reminds me of a suggestion here at some point, about changing the requirements for negative interactions so friends could beat each other up. Definitely adds a bit of life to the relationships.

Alien zombie grilled cheese-obsessed vampire nanny?! Woot! If you make a hack that replaces the regular nannies (or at least one of them) with that, I might actually use nannies again. They're really sort of useless to me, even without the annoying bits, because my sims don't often have kids before they've built up enough days off to keep an eye on them, and they usually have grandparents to do that anyway.

But an alien zombie vampire who constantly yakked about grilled cheese? Awesomeness.

Yup. Going to stick solar panels on my roof. Take that! Hah!

The main problem with the response has been the bureaucracy. Basically, FEMA has to get massive amounts of authorization to do anything, or they won't be sure that they're going to have the money. The administration has been trying to take FEMA apart, and has been doing a fairly good job of doing so, and before Katrina it was looking like FEMA was going to be taken off of natural disasters entirely and its resources were going to be devoted to terrorism.  Guess someone forgot that homeland defense includes natural disasters.

The Coast Guard is an armed force, so it runs along military lines. You give them a job to do, and they do it, and they'll worry about the money later. Most of the Federal Government isn't set up that way.

The drilling platforms aren't that big of a deal at this point. They locked down any leaks pretty quickly, so they're not producing any oil, which isn't the greatest thing because I think the Gulf platforms (not just the ones that got unmoored by the hurricane) account for around 50% of the countries oil, but they aren't leaking or anything.

This is why watching the television news depresses me. I watch the news, and I think about all the tens of thousands of people who were still in New Orleans because they didn't have any way to leave, either no car or no money for a hotel, and I think, "This is wrong." Gut feeling of wrongness. This whole mess was definitely made worse by things that we do, how we handle things. New Orleans wasn't underwater when it was started. Stopping the replacement of silt, provided by flooding, is to blame for that. The loss of the mangrove swamps took out a natural buffer to flooding. Global warming increases the nastiness of the system that creates hurricanes. Our use of toxic chemicals to do everything makes natural disasters that much worse when they release those chemicals.

Bioelectric emanations? You mean . . . like a shark? Eep.

Yoda/Reverse Polish Notation statements are good. As is Chronomancy, as a tool for annoying New Agers.

Tarot, and other fortune telling, is interesting, especially since even if you start with the assumption that the reader is reading their client, rather than the cards, it can still be useful, as Rohina said when she used it for academic counseling. I'm personally most interested in dreams; there are some interesting documented incidents, reported by professional dream researchers in a at least casually experimental setting, involving shared dreams.

I'm going to murder whoever said, "Ah, we don't need check trees."

Dead! I'm going to boil him in oil, light him on fire, drop him off a very tall building, beat him with his own computer, and chop him into little bits. And then I will jump on the bits! Dead, I say, dead!

Check trees gooood. Check trees very good.

Inge also said something about the Sims2 code being much better able to handle massive amounts of sims in a family, and they stop doing interesting stuff after a while as visitors, so in Sims2 you should move them in to do prison type things.

On the population growth side of it, if you start with one sim couple, and they have ten kids, and all their kids get married to non relatives and they all have ten kids, and so on . . .

2
10 (20)
100 (200)

Okay, yeah. In about four generations, you have massive explosions in your neighborhood. In the Sims, you can have either a very wide family tree (lots of kids) or a very deep family tree (lots of generations) but not both. Your game explodes.

Hook . . . I never thought I'd say this, but you are even more awesome than I am in Excel. My spreadsheet that calculates the end of the world using U.N. estimates pales in comparison. (The look on someone's face when you say, "According to U.N. estimates, the world as we know it will end in approximately 90 years," is absolutely priceless.)

I'm pretty sure that YAs use the same meter as adults.

Noooo. If they had gotten my e-mail address through my own stupidity, then it wouldn't be evil. EVIL! Evil, I say!

Bad Ukrainian data-harvesting websites! Bad! Although it is rather amusing to get spam that I haven't a clue what it's selling.

Indeed. I've stopped watching the news. My dad watches CNN every night, when he gets home from work (Why? I don't know. He already gets enough of it while he's on the job, as he's a retired Coastie who now works as a civilian for the part of the Coast Guard that does water-borne pollution cleanup for Superfund, so he's been spending the last couple of days co-ordinating with FEMA and getting disaster relief and cleanup teams into New Orleans.) and I just head upstairs and turn on some music. I read the paper cover to cover, but TV coverage is not good for my depression. I get very nihilistic when massive environmentally-related disasters hit and all the news and politician people start screeching for more of the same.

Papers and reports from my dad and his friends are good, though, and I can't really avoid them. Once a Coast Guard brat, always a Coast Guard brat. I'm very glad you got out, Reggikko, and glad that everyone else who has gotten out has done so. There are sharks in the water! Not many, but a few, washed in from the Gulf. (I don't think the press knows about it, but if anyone sees anything about it on the news, it's not just reporters exagerating.) And toxic chemicals, and oil, because things like drycleaning products and gas tanks are all above ground in New Orleans, and thus just get sort of washed away. And toxic household chemicals, too. I think I'll stop now.

It's a nasty situation down there, but I'd be very much surprised if New Orleans actually rolled over and died. Badly wounded? Yes. Dead? Far from it. Those people are insane. (In a good way, of course.)

I think this is normal. Prima Guide (not a definitive authority by any means, but useful for confirmation) says that the cashier won't have romantic interactions available while on duty, unlike other NPCs. Try interacting with them while they are off duty. (for the papergirl, invite her over, as if she enters the lot to deliver the paper she's on duty for the duration of the visit and will leave if you stop interacting with her, rather than doing "random visitor crap") If they're still being weird, (and it's a teenager doing the romancing, as CS said) that's a bad thing.

If you can't resolve this issue, try ordering delivery pizza, chinese food, or groceries. If all of your standard delivery persons are male, either inviting the ones you know over to your house before ordering, which forces the game to pick/generate a new one, or just order it several times. Alternatively, you can invite the maid over before he or she would normally arive, which also forces the game to give you a different one for that day.

Eegh. Over rides aren't a good thing. If you can avoid replacing an object, you avoid cheesing people off. Personally, I like the money order thing basically the way it is. Also, I am paranoid about mailboxes. NO TOUCHY THE MAILBOX! Mailbox bad . . .

Bush quote. The implications are simply priceless.

The other problem with Ukrainian sites is that if you even go there once, accidentally, they will NEVER STOP SENDING YOU SPAM! In Cyrillic! That you can't read!

Aspiration meter varies by age. Increases as they get older. I think that's the kind of thing that's hardcoded, though. Doubt we'd be able to mess with it, but you never know.

On the rewards thing, I'd download JMPescado's anti-ghost sign and poke around in the files. Once you find out how to mess with the reward value on that, theoretically you'll be able to alter the same value on  the other reward objects. I say use JMP's because it's easier to find and it's all in one package, with nothing else there.

Fixed the link. Hopefully. Works for me now, at least. This is what I get for not sleeping enough the past couple of days . . . ugh.

It looks like the professional definition obsessives (Say, that'd make a good disorder name. It'd cover lawyers AND M.D.s) have decided they want to break up autism into a bunch of modular disorders, each of which comprises a group of behaviors that usually come in packs. So one kid might have behaviors A, B, and C, while another has D, E and F, but they can both be labeled autistic because some kids have B, C, and F or A, C and D. Makes some sense, considering that these researchers are finding that a large variety of behaviors can be linked to similiar physiological causes. I just hope that this will make life easier for people, rather than making this even more complicated than it already is.

Or it could just be that researchers and doctors and such like coming up with new disorders. "Let's see how many pages we can cram into the next edition of the DM-whatever."

They do seem to have difficulty telling good memories from bad ones. Once had a family sim sobbing for days about getting abducted by aliens (during my "make six guys and have their entire lives revolve around trying to get abducted" period, with a family that I had intended to make two family and four knowledge but accidentally made the knowledge all fortune instead) and one of his fortune housemates came over and congratulated him about it. Then he went back to crying.

Or, heck, go all out and get your hands on a Ukrainian pirated version. All the interesting cracking sites are in Ukrainian.

Semantic pragmatic disorder? A disorder that involves a sensible use of words?

Ah, no, here it is:
# delayed language development
# learning to talk by memorising phrases, instead of putting words together freely
# repeating phrases out of context, especially snippets remembered from television programmes
# muddling up 'I' and 'you'
# problems with understanding questions, particularly questions involving 'how' and 'why'
# difficulty following conversations


To the website! So you can steal the bullet list yourself!

Apparently it's one of those autistic spectrum things. But whoever named it was insane.

I did the little survey thing. Booster packs? Ugh. I supose they'd at least have less bugs, though . . . but perhaps this is why University was rather light on content? The space stuff sounded vaguely interesting, I must admit.

I once worked out a whole design for a "Religion" based expansion pack. A sim could choose a religion, which would be sort of a cross between a career and an aspiration. You would get religion points for doing certain things, and lose them for doing others, depending on the religion, and you would increase the total reserve of points you could have by making friends with high-religion point members of your religion and gaining skills, including a possibly hidden "Religion Skill." You would then get rewards based on your total religion point reserve. When you got enough religion points, you would get some sort of religious being who would follow you around and do stuff for you. (Each religion's would have different appearance and abilities. Angels, saints, prophets, ghosts, demons, devils, minor gods, etc.) High enough skills (religion and logic, most likely) would allow you to see other people's "religious beings," and other skills (Religion, charisma, possible other skills depending on what the specific religion valued) would allow you to give commands to your and other people's religious beings. (Think exorcism.) Of course, the game wouldn't ship with any recognizable human religions, but it would be possible for the end user to implement.

Basically, the whole point of this was to have an excuse to get sims a little guy who followed them around and lit people on fire. Oh, and to make them glow: once you get enough religion points, the sim becomes a "religious being" themself, and any children they have while they have this many points get nifty abilities and glowyness, fulfilling the required "new species" for the EP.

There's some possibility of my family being descendants of some of the Normans who came over with William the Conquerer, (Who were, in turn, descendants of Vikings, according to family legend.) but the furthest back records we have are from the 1500s in London about some guy named Ig. Or something. My grandfather and uncle are into genealogy. That far back, though, most people are related to some sort of famous or royal person.

I once had a sim brag about having an accident at a party. Perhaps this is some Maxian idiosyncracy?