He doesn't seem to actually sleep, plays his game almost mechanically, and knows far too much about how the game works. He's obviously some sort of mad scientist's plot for world domination gone awry. It would explain the bunker.

Yeah. Writing is fun, even if you're just messing around with it. For me, anyway.

It'd make sense if a novel made more money than a painting, but it doesn't. Annoying.

That would certainly be interesting. I chuck stuff at my friends. Starbursts, dice, small lead figs with pointy bits, books, computers, chairs, etc.

My brother and I once worked out an entire religion expansion pack for TS2. Basically, you picked your religion, and then you got and lost religion points based on actions, much like the aspiration bar. If you got high enough in your religion, you got special powers. And something about a religion skill, that let you see/summon some sort of supernatural religious entity that followed you around, sort of like the social bunny. Except that ones of the same type would be friendly, and ones of different types would fight.

The satanist religion was our favorite. You could command your demon/devil following around thing to light stuff on fire.

Ah, yes. The pool table, and instruments. Doi. I feel silly now. Musical instrument-orchestrated doom. Of course.

And finally, an actual use for that blasted pool table. Hates it. Hates. Grr.

I just note the number of days in the description. If a family splits, I write the new family as (number of days the old house was at when they left) + (number of days they've lived as their own family). And sims have to be synched before I merge them.

And for couches make sure you click on the specific tile that is stuck.

If the Maxis reference thing is true, I wonder if any of them will be as good as "No Account Nickel Monkey?" That title alone is half the reason I play fortune sims. The other half is "Penniless Peon."

Yeah, Knowledge sims can be kind of annoying. They tend to get obsessive about romances, and it really sort of annoys me that skills are the only sort of "knowledge" they can get. Their the only aspiration whose main wants are basically finite, or dependent on random events. Which is ironic, because knowledge is not finite. That, and they tend to get obsessive about things, and will act like retarded Romance or Family sims for long stretches of time.

Say, though . . . I think I may have thought of an actual use for those damn scissors. Suicide! Still rather random, but doesn't involve the long periods of whining involved with starving, the collateral damage of burning, or the inability to plead if they drown.

I keep my sims roughly time-synched, mostly because I only play them for a couple of days at a time anyway.

I think the main advantage to having a level 6 is that you can have a never ending stream of pledges. Theoretically, anyway, if influence weren't ridiculously easy to come by.

Free will off always does the trick for me. Power Idle never makes them do stupid stuff like that.

Oh, yeah, alien genetics.

Aliens normally have green skin, and always if the other gene is default, but I think it can be suppressed by custom content. Not totally sure. They usually have black eyes, but occasionally (5, 10%? Again, need to check. TreyNutz might know . . .) they have the "default" gene they inherited from their parent. I think that custom content eyes are dominant, but not totally sure.

Alien eyes can only be expressed on sims with green skin, so a non-green sim will have Maxis brown--not the default, either, because if you change the default you still get the original maxis.

There's only one alien skin tone, so unless you have a multi-PT hack installed all your alien spawn have the same skin.

The only problem with disabling the censor is that it makes me start wondering how sims pee with their pants on . . . deep thoughts. Maybe I should ask the BBSers?

Laurenke, that's absolutely hilarious.

But did I miss something? Like the latest edition of Oxfords? Since when was "rivalry" more extreme than being "enemies" with someone?

And perhaps this was hinted at with the "a willing subject with whom you share a friendly rivalry" bit in the SimVac thingy. Can you imagine? A sim who is simultaneously friends and rivals with someone (hey, if it's based on lifetime, it could happen) would get something like 500 phone calls a day asking a variety of inane questions.

Why couldn't they implement something that wasn't already theoretically covered? Like a romance bar? The binary nature of love in the sims is rather silly. After all, I'm not one flirt away from falling in love with anyone I'm friends with. And it's possible to like someone romantically before knowing them super-well.

My favorite method is room o' doom, using judicious placement of APOs. You have a corridor room leading to your Room O' Doom, and that one is locked so that only the sims you want killed getting into it. The inner room has a death field activated for whatever category you want, as long as it includes the sims to be killed. Then you stick some sort of high-advertisement object into the inner chamber, and voila: Room O' Doom. Still fine tuning that last bit, though. Anyone know an object that sims are friggin' obsessive about? I could use a toddler, but that just seems . . . wrong.

So, the sims store data about themselves in their files, and lots store data about what the sims are doing at the moment in their files? And if a lot doesn't already know what a sim is doing, it spawns them at the mailbox?

Gender fluidity? What in blazes is that? It's either something really weird, or you need to read a bit more modern SF.

I always liked The Cat Who Walked Through Walls. I think it's sort of a sequel to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. (Which I need to read . . .) And I like ST, even though I don't agree with a lot of it, it's very interesting.

I've been an SF fan since . . . oh, boy. Probably around third grade, when I discovered Animorphs, although it could have been before then. They aren't really SF, but they started moving me away from fantasy and towards SF. I read a lot of Golden Age in middle school, and it was basically the first non-kids SF that I read. Asimov, Bradbury, Heinlein. A little later I read Dune, and all the sequels. Won't touch the new prequels, though. Read halfway through one of them, got bored and annoyed by the ineptitude. Now I read Asimov's Science Fiction, the magazine that used to be Astounding or Amazing or something. Not the one that Campbell edited; that's Analog, now. Books are mostly classic SF and whatever I pick up off the library shelf, particularly new releases. I'm a particular fan of robot stories, but I'll read just about anything that is well-written and thought provoking.

I write SF, too. Sort of. I have two "finished" stories, one of which that has no dialog and isn't really SF but is set in a non-Earth world, and one that is almost all dialog and  is has the deus ex machina cranking along on the last page. I also have a truly craptastic 70+ page novel that I wrote when I was in seventh grade and has about three or four dozen characters, most of home will wander off for 20 pages or more until I remember about them and give them whatever the next line that needs to be said is. Then I have the scattered wreckage of at least twenty stories on my hard drive, which will likely never be finished.

I'm a junky . . . heh.

I've got a friend who makes mobiles out of AOL coasters. And other art. That involves a microwave.

Sim genetics run roughly thus:

There are three levels of dominance for eyes and hair. If a sim has two genes of differing dominance, the higher level will express 100% of the time. If both genes for a given trait have the same dominance, there's a 50% chance of either gene expressing.

Level 1: Custom.

Level 2: Dominant Default. For eyes, this is brown and dark blue. For hair, this is black and brown.

Level 3: Recessive Default. For eyes, this is green, grey, and light blue. For hair, this is red and blond.

Skin is different: if a sim has two custom skins, it's random which one will express. If it has one custom and one default, it will always express the custom one. If it has two defaults, it can express any skin tone in between the two. So a sim with both the lightest and the darkest skintone gene can have any skin color. This means that two sims with the lightest skin in the game can have a baby with the darkest skin, if any of their antecedents had that gene.

The real genetics behind these traits is still not completely understood, but I know a few of the basics. Brown eyes are dominant over blue and green, and green is dominant over blue. Other genes control the intensity of the color, the appearance of other colors, and probably a bunch of other things I don't know about.

Hair color is determined by (at least) two sets of genes. One controls the level of melanin, giving a range from dark brown/black to blond. The more melanin, the darker the hair. The other controls the amount of what is, if I remember correctly, basically rust--iron oxide. This produces the varying levels of red in hair.

Skin color throws a bit of a wrench into the works, because (again, if I remember correctly; I really need to look this up . . . ) skin color is tied to the overall level of melanin that the body produces. Higher levels of melanin override whatever the local levels of melanin are in the hair and eyes, making them darker and browner. Melanin isn't the only chemical that produces skin color. There's also a yellowish pigment that I don't remember the name of, and the distribution of blood vessels in the skin. So instead of just a "dark to light" spectrum, it's a three dimensional spread, although enough melanin will override any other color.

The sims is a very good example of Mendellian genetics. Unfortunately, in real life there are genes whose influences "mix," producing an intermediate color (or whatever) rather than one or the other expressing. And having multiple genes control a feature, even if all those genes obey Mendellian laws, produces results that don't follow the standard Punnet square genotype mix. These sorts of interactions are what produce the sort of uneven blending we're used to in heredity. Mendel got unbelievably lucky, because he picked six features that all followed rules he could discover with the mathematics available to him.

Put staples in the letters? Or some sort of live animal with teeth?

Alliterative insulting titles, in alphabetical order. I wonder if they go all the way up to Z . . .

Yeah, don't know the exact mechanics of the bills, but that's how it is. Wouldn't it have been a lot simpler for them just to play the game long enough to set up the scenario, rather than screwing around with the files? Yeesh.

What kind of bugginess do you have with the Curious house? I rather like that house, but this is the first I've heard of it being screwed up. Or is it a your-game thing? Hmm. Doesn't JMP mostly play Strangetown? Has he noticed freakish bugginess in that house?

Yes, yes we do.

Plane tickets to Redwood.
Instrument of thwappage.
Large sign reading "It's the bugs, stupid!" for every executive there.
Staple gun.

Definitely. For me, this is an online community of my intellectual peers, something which I cherish in both the real and online worlds. Age, education, whatever. I just like talking with people who think.

Meh. You hit LTW, and you don't have to mess with all those little wussy wants, unless you really want to. Permaplat is a good thing.