It's not just you. Internet writing is generally a cesspool. There's some good stuff, but it's mostly terrible. No editors, is the problem.

Ah. Things that move in a way that is not predetermined. Cars and other movable portals (alien spaceships?) have a pre-programmed animation sequence.

I would guess that it's because it moves. The base code from Sims 1 wouldn't (hypothetically) have anything that would allow an object to move from place to place on its own. So the simplest solution (but perhaps not the best) is to make it an NPC, a sim with a unique mesh and animation system.

List objects with bugs. Then it can be expanded to include documentation about the bug(s) themselves, such as what happens and what triggers them, and whether it causes computer explosions.

Has any chat in the hisory of the world ever been worth looking at?

I am staying away from NL information until a month after it comes out, to minimize chance of going insane due to evil marketing schemes and buying it before the most pressing game crashing bugs are fixed. Also, if I wait, I have a good chance of getting it for my birthday.

The inventory thing sounds like it's going to be entertaining. Any object includes cow plants? Elegant way to hand the cemetary business, too. But I cringe when I consider the bugs . . . eep.

Egads. I'm never going on a vacation ever again. Ever. Too many unread posts . . .

My personal adventures in psychology have been fairly tame: moderate depression edging into severe, due to a combination of chemical issues and school not working, treatment, school change, and now getting back to "normal." Oh, and "mild ADHD," for which I take Concerta. Not sure whether it actually fixes a "disorder" in me, but it does improve my ability to focus on my own projects and other enjoyable things. I don't know nearly as much about autism, AS, or the related behaviors and patterns as I'd like, especially since I've come across them in my sporadic researches into GT education, and recognize mild versions of a few of the symptoms in myself. I have a spotty short term memory (names and where I put things can be gone in a few minutes) but I can remember all sorts of random details from a book I read or a vacation I went on six years ago. And that business about garage door openers sounds quite interesting, although I can see how it would be aggravating if that was the only thing a person talked about.

On a related note, one of my psychologists (goverment, through my dad being Coast Guard, and didn't have nearly enough time to do anything other than prescribe medication, so we went elsewhere for counseling) tried to diagnose me with "Oppositional Defiant Disorder" because I wasn't too keen on taking medication for the "mild ADHD-like symptoms," as this didn't sound like it was much of a problem and I wanted to do my own research. And possibly because I'd told her that I planned on starting a revolution.

I have some very severe doubts about "Oppositional Defiant Disorder," or whatever it is, as the diagnostic criteria seems to be mainly "is between the ages of 12 and 18," but I know from experience that anyone who says "its all in your head" about depression, autism, or any other mental eccentricity that causes persistent problems should be dumped off the nearest bridge. Or lit on fire, if there isn't a handy bridge.

Yep. The nastiest cancers--lung, breast, melanoma--are nasty because they have a tendency to spread everywhere, as well as growing like crazy and basically eating whatever internal organ they happen to be near. Not fun. But you catch 'em early, and you have a pretty good shot at knocking them off, because we have a better understanding now of what they do and how they do it.

I'll never understand why some people think that environmentalism is altruistic. It's self-interest. We aren't going to "kill the earth" because the biosphere is very robust, but the state that we like and can survive in is hair-trigger delicate, so we have to worry about killing ourselves.

Check out Home of the Archon. Very interesting site in general, but there's a link down at the bottom, "Bright Catharsis" that if you click on leads to another page that has a bunch more links, some of which will refer to "Of CT Scans and Kings." Very well written story of being a cancer patient and dealing with the medical system of Halifax.

Anyway, this sit is fine small. Don't want it to get clogged up with useless posts. Cozier, too. In a "hmm, am I sitting on a flamethrower?" sort of way.

Eh, the SimPE portraits have been wiggy for me for ages. Don't really mind it, as they just tend to get stuck on a previous age group. Sort of nostalgic, more than anything.

I don't really mess with my sims in SimPE, except for dealing with corrupted memories, and messing with custom content packages. I don't mind the new UI, but it is a little trickier to work out than the old one, mainly because it's got a bunch more buttons that let you interact directly with the UI, moving windows around and such. Say, I may have to write that down, and see if I can work it out. Increasing the interactivity of the UI itself increases the complexity of using the program. Hmm.

I think the fear "Get Caught Cheating" is actually the closest the game can get to actually having a fear of cheating, since actually cheating is a good memory, but getting caught isn't. Honestly, I'd like it if Family sims thought that cheating on their spouses was a bad memory, or perhaps fear it, if they were nice. Be a little more realistic, because some people do get all wiggy from guilt, even if they don't actually stop. Other people (mean sims?) just don't give a damn. Although nice-meanness is more about how fun they think pestering people is, and how obsessed they are with snuggle-type interactions, rather than actual consideration for other sim's feelings.

Hmm. That'd be another thing: what if niceness caused sims to only be willing to do interactions that they knew would be accepted? And grouchy sims were more willing to do whatever they wanted, regardless of what the recieving sim felt? That'd actually make the distinction have a point, rather than just what flavor of annoying interactions they chose, and whether they spy on people with the 'scope.

That's basically why my dad learned what Spanish he knows. Or used to know. He's retired Coast Guard, so when he was XO of a cutter in the Caribbean, (The Durable, if anyone cares.) he had to be able to tell people "Put your hands in the air" and "Where are the illegal drugs/weapons immigrants?" even if he didn't speak Spanish. Though I seem to remember something about not actually ever learning Spanish. Something about threatening them with a shot gun . . .

I took a trip to Europe last summer. France, Belgium, and Germany. Everyone was very nice, and the signs on the transportation were in about a dozen different languages. Most people spoke English, too (To my great annoyance, since I didn't get much chance to practice my French) although that may have had some to do with my Dad's mangling of "Parlez-vous anglais?" and "Sprechen Sie Englisch?" (He actually knew German fairly well, as he lived there for several years in high school.) The menus and signs and things were mostly in French or German, except in train stations, but that wasn't a big deal because I've been able to read basic menu-ese since French I, Dad knew enough German to fill in the gaps between cognates, and we had a very useful phrasebook/traveler's dictionary with most of the words we ran into.

Honestly, French isn't that tough if you know English and a bit of the Latin you can pick up in textbooks and dictionary. Grammar's generally much trickier than vocabulary, but one can learn to read enough French to get around during a week in Paris, as my brother discovered.

Faster than a speeding . . . er . . . something very slow.
Stronger than anyone in the household when it comes to withstanding their shower screeching!
Able to make it to the bathroom without peeing on the floor!

Super elder, to the rescue!

Maybe being Captain Hero would allow them to move fast enough to be useful?

And generally, it'd be nice if sims got more fun or social from hanging around with friends than with total strangers. That's the whole point of inviting over friends rather than random people. You enjoy spending time with them.

Was wondering if there were any tabletop roleplayers gallavanting about the site. I have some suspicions, but I was sort of curious. Also, anyone ever done any online/forum type roleplaying? I'm considering the possibility of running a game electronically, and thought this might be a good place to get advice/recruit. It's still in the earliest of planning stages, of course, but if anyone's interested I'll push it up a few notches in priority on the "List o' Random Stuff Oddysey Works On Spasmatically."

That, and I was wondering how many other people here are itching to break out the dice and show those nitwits on the BBS what REAL roleplaying is about. Not that inane sentence completing business. Bet most of those people wouldn't know a d20 if it hit them in the face.

I believe I may have just branded myself as a complet geek. If I haven't already, of course, seeing as I have a t-shirt with the "geek." printed on it in large letters.

I've had family sims with all adult children get the want, and most sims start wanting grandkids after their first one, but it's not strong enough to run over the standard adult wants like the elder tree.

It's still sort of twitchy. I've had sims keel over in the bathroom (got stuck, not sure how) and when I send a second sim in to plead, the first thing the second sim does is insist on using the bathroom. Had two sims die on account of this "must use bathroom! I'll plead later!" thing. Now I immediately switch into buy mode and get rid of it if I need someone to plead in the bathroom, then put it back when they're finished.

Have you ever seen one of those old British propoganda tapes from the war, where they spliced footage of a Nazi parade and played some of it backward, so it looked like they were linedancing? Hilarious.

It is pretty much all bs. It's stuff like this, 13th sign business and all, that proves it doesn't stand up to decent scientific inquiry.

For example: Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, and *mysterious recently discovered planet-like object* are all fairly recent additions to the whole thing, but pre-discovery astrology never even slightly indicated the existence of these planets. If it actually did work the way it is reported to, there would have been discrepancies in it that were resolved by the discovery of said planets.

I'm Scorpio, but the only part I really like is pluto. Come on. It's small, cold, dark, and gives astronomers fits trying to figure out what it is. An excellent metaphor. :-D Anything that annoys people is good by me.

Yeah. I'm rarely very attracted by male celebrities. They just don't look very interesting. Or something.

The exception, of course, is Viggo Mortenson. (I think that's his last name.) And that's as much the characters he plays as anything else. Aragorn rocks.

Ah, the almighty dollar. Seems the army hasn't really learned that lesson, eh? What with that business of the humvees armored with salvage scrap metal and all. Reminds me of Catch-22, and Milo Minderbinder/bender whatever his name was. Business + Military = bad. As in, chocolate covered egyptian cotton and attacking your own base bad.

American's are great at blowing stuff up, and great at doing it from great distances with fancy equipment, but very bad at keeping stuff from being blown up. This is the Navy's fault, but that's another rant.

Oh, yeah. I've got some sort of insane format conversion program. "3D Object Converter" I think it is? Anyway, it converts Hash AM ".mdl" files to ".obj" files, as well as about 200 other things. There's a lot of shareware and freeware that does similiar stuff. Probably something out there that'll do it. I'm thinking about having a crack at it, but I have no idea what to do with the file to get it into the game. Work on that, maybe.

That's because you're a guy, Pescado.

And ZZ: That's another thing. The classical definition of beauty, with the emphasis on proportions and mathematical perfection, really has very little basis in reality. The main reason that the golden ration shows up so much in the human face is because there are so many ratios in the human face to begin with. Although there is an instinctual definition of beauty, (day old infants watch pictures of "attractive" faces longer than they do pictures of "unnattractive" faces) it's not nearly so hardcoded and definite as was once believed.

I haven't heard about the poll results--at least specifically, as I can think of something that might fit it, but I haven't been able to find it, since all the links are dead--but I do know that when you blend a group of faces into one faces, the result is usually surprisingly attractive, since the various flaws even each other out. However, conscious selection often produces sub-desirable results, since there tends to be a gap between what people think they want and what they actually want, especially in the case of something like beauty.

Truly *beautiful* faces, however, almost always vary from the standard norm in some way or another, which is why extremely good looking people usually have rather exotic or striking features.

EDIT: If anyone's really interested in this stuff, I recommend "Why Is Sex Fun?" by Jared Diamond, and any books he references. It's all about sexual selection, specifically, what sexually selective forces have drive the human sex life to be so weird in comparison to other animals, including our closest genetic relatives. Gender roles, beauty, it's all in there. Very good book.

In sims 2, it's either recycled from Sims 1 or inanely buggy.

That branching career track thing does sound rather awesome. Especially if they actually implemented the "chance cards are affected by skills" thing that seems to have been the original idea. So a higher charisma and logic skill would steer you towards the general/political side of military, while a higher body/mechanical would steer you towards, say, the mercenary or astronaut side. Hmm. Branching tree systems usually work well in RPGs, and are fairly easy to test. If they made the different careers intertwining, more of an interconnected flowchart thing rather than a linear progression, and either get rid of "Max" jobs or just have a handful of "top jobs" that you weren't as likely to get forced out of but could leave of your own volition via chance cards or whatnot . . . Too bad they didn't implement the "switch to another job" chance card thing, or I could actually implement (parts of) that.

Anything with emergent properties is cool.

At this point, my "main" neighborhood has had just one round of elder keelage, and are in the middle of their first round of game-born sims going through college, so most of my families are semi-wealthy. They would actually seem much wealthier if I ever got around to improving their houses, since they're mostly still living in the crappy starting houses that I threw togethor for the original "Two elder parents, three adult children, one spouse, and one teenager" horribly overcrowed original houses, or in the "one couple with less than 20k because I have the no handout hack and their parents haven't keeled over yet, so their families don't have much money to send them" houses.

Dunno about eyes, but I know that in many parts of the world young children have lighter skin and hair than they do as adults. It's a signal for youthfulness. Interestingly, there's a theory that the oft-remarked upon preference towards blondes in Europe and North America is actual a preference towards lighter, and thus more youthful, skin. And in women, skin color varies with one's fertility cycle, with (I think) the lightest skin color corresponding to peak fertility, the darkest skin color corresponding to one's period.

Also, "Western" beauty preferences seem to be shifting towards somewhat darker skin and hair, and more African/Asian mixed features, reflecting new demographic norms. Check out beauty magazines and models. I don't think the research is definitive yet, but it's an interesting possibility.

Ah, the science of beauty, and sexual selection. A most fascinating topic.

It's not unusual where I live for the wife to keep her name and the children take the father's name. (Or whichever one they want, once they get old enough.) Of course, divorce usually throws an entirely new wrench into the works, and may be the reason for that practice.

That was what my mom wanted to do, but she changed her mind when Dad said it was okay with him. Changed her middle name to her maiden name instead.

Hyphenated names are demon spawn! They're annoying and difficult to spell, not to mention rather unsightly, and suggest that the couple in question is actually a corporation. Or a law office.