Well, despite apparent inherent literacy, they can not read books with big, complicated words. It's only the cute/obnoxiously titled books under "child development" that can be read by sprogs.

Okay. He did explain what it's for - it's for changing the quality of work while you're on the job - the tones are the bits in the box that say things like "play golf" "suck up to boss" "work hard", etc. He's saying that if he expands that box with yet-to-come options, it may require use of the scroll wheel to access them all. He can't map it to the normal scroll hotkeys because those revert to zoom no matter what.

Re: The books.

The only trick to getting the sprogs to read them on their own is to leave them on the floor - they won't get them out of the bookshelves themselves.

Well, don't forget about the books - 3 series of them give skills (Painting and 2 others I can't remember offhand.) Buy them at the bookstore and let the toddler read them, they'll skill that way as well. (There doesn't have to be parental involvement, either, as apparently sim toddlers are fully literate before they can speak.)

He's correct - it occurs whenever a sim AGES that that's the case, regardless of whether it's candles or not. What I found was that I had to restart the game before I used the testingcheats -shiftclick - choose traits, otherwise it would keep "ignoring" that last trait.

I wonder - did you use digital download or did you purchase a physical copy?

The morons used a pirated version and installed it first. Then, I bet, did NOT uninstall, and simply installed a legit version overtop. Then they went to the official forum to bitch that the launcher stated they were using an unauthorized version.

Should anyone still be having issues with the Traits when a sim ages up, restart the game, testingcheatsenabled on, shift click modify traits. If you just modify traits without restarting, it'll continue to dump the "extra" ones you've earned.

re: phone calling
You can also click on the headshot in the relationship panel and call them from there. Doesn't help for services, but I find that a lot faster / more intuitive.

Just drag it from the inventory to the fridge. Sounds stupid, but it works.

Re: The interaction non-options:

One thing I've found is that the menus are gradually contextual - after you've done a few "romantic" interactions, more and more "romantic" interactions will appear - IE you have to kiss for awhile before you can give a massage, etc. I think it's an interesting aspect to gameplay, but I haven't decided if I like it or not.

I did much the same, but I absolutely could not resist including the line "they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous peoples of... wherever. "

It appears, at least to my significantly less than awesome mind, that ea may have done something very weird in the Ikea stuff pack - after installing it last night, my phones lost nearly all functionality. Invite headmaster became crank call, call sim became ... nothing. I'm curious as to whether others are having this issue?

ohh.... kay.......

Now I think my system is just possessed. While taking out all hacks did NOT work, taking out just those few *appears* to have. I've no idea which one of the few it was, though....

Well, I just attempted using an image instead, and that wasn't it - gamecopyworld is my *friend*. Still the same error, and the fact that it's occurring for two separate animations doesn't point to it being the crack, but something else instead. I updated all my hacks about five minutes ago, JUST to see if one of them might have updated?... I'm leaning towards it *possibly* being some kind of hack, but I haven't the foggiest idea what or which. The non-maty hacks I have are:

anybodybemanager - squinge
morecustomers - squinge
neverquit - squinge
ofb_customernomorecomplaining - squinge
ofb_nobadmakeovers - squinge
ofb_refreshemployees - squinge -

the maty hacks I have are: (edited out due to insanely long list and problem solution in new post below)

Some that I noticed I had, and kept, was bvchildanimfix, because I never could get patch 2 to work (kept telling me my sims install was invalid, or some such twaddle, even after properly un-cracking). Still another is engagewantfix, which I have no idea why I still have..., nobogartingofbtoys, same deal..., norandomcrush.., pianofix.., sandcastlefix, and that's it. I'm going to move them out, and try again without just those, just to see.

none of which I could see causing a conflict, but again, this is an area where i'm a little bit out of my depth

Mkay. As near as I can tell, and believe-you-me, it has something to do with one of those idle-animations (ie framing a photograph for sims interested in art), and for me it's specifically the one related to science, having to do with a "logic puzzle". I've heard others describing a science - hobby sim pulling out a rubic's cube-like toy and playing with it. I've noticed that it's not happening with all sims, only the science ones, for me. Alas, I am very much awesome in many ways, just not in *this* way, and can't seem to go deeper than that. I have no idea if a re-install would work, even, and exploring the disk and directory are proving fruitless for me. Uninstalling / reinstalling hacks is doing nothing. There are exactly two things which are strange about my install, one is that I use a widely-available crack in order to play, and the other is that I installed the core game files to a different partition/drive. Zazazu, did you do either of these?