They were communicating by telepathy.

And you'll find that I'm equally flippant either way.

Amazing.

That's because Bioware are men, and we all know what the male idea of "romance" usually comprises, I think. Good god! Did you ever play NWN and have a go of the brothel in it? And the cheesy meathead dude that you *had* to use if you were playing a female character, because the sexay chicks would just tell you to get lost? I felt like complaining to Ophelia about her house of ill-respute specifically because I was so offended at the lame gigolo I was expected to associate with.

Oh, I knew I should have said Doom. I didn't want anybody to think I only played a handful of games and was completely unaware of the user bases for most of them. It's my wandering uterus.

We've got one now. I feel so proud and special.

http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/security/current-threat-level/?version=1

Bwah! 

Anyway, the Sims fan base is dissimilar to that of, say, Counterstrike or a DnD-style game with user created dungeon mods. It's dissimilar in that there seem to be lots more women. This can't be a coincidence.

The divine philosopher Plato was doubtful in what rank of living creatures to place and collocate them [women, Sims custom content creators], whether amongst the rational animals, by elevating them to an upper seat in the specifical classis of humanity, or with the irrational, by degrading them to a lower bench on the opposite side, of a brutal kind, and mere bestiality. For nature hath posited in a privy, secret, and intestine place of their bodies, a sort of member, by some not impertinently termed an animal, which is not to be found in men. Therein sometimes are endangered certain humours so saltish, brackish, clammy, sharp, nipping, tearing, prickling, and most eagerly tickling, that by their stinging acrimony, rending nitrosity, figging itch, wriggling mordicancy, and smarting salsitude, their whole body is shaken and ebrangled, their senses totally ravished and transported, the operation of their judgment and understanding utterly confounded and all disordinate passions and perturbations of the mind thoroughly and absolutely allowed, admitted, and approved of;
-- François Rabelais

Obviously some 15 year old boys in the Sims2 CC creating community also display this behaviour, which we will blame on the feminisation of society and homoerotic advertising. Yes, that's what we'll do.

I'm about 80% sure that there's a mod out somewhere that really does fix it - maybe by TwoJeffs? Somebody else can confirm, maybe.

When I first got my LCD, I did notice a bit of blurring on some games - particularly on XIII, which was very brightly coloured and cartoony to start with. I've had the monitor for a few years now, and I must have just become used to it, because I can't even see the blurring any more. I do quite a lot of design, too, and using the LCD has never had any impact on that to speak of.

Plus there's the issue of vanity. I feel more like an uber-n3rd with an uber-cool monitor.

Nevar! The cat cannot be blamed for the monitor's inability to function with added hairs.

My cat used to sleep on top of my old CRT monitor, getting hairs in the ventilation slats and making the picture go green and wavy. Every time the desk was jogged, the picture on the monitor would shake and fade.

When I got an LCD monitor, the cat couldn't fit on top of it. He loitered in the vicinity, looking confused, then depressed, then found somewhere more sensible to sleep instead. Problem solved!

Even better if it could have inadvertantly set fire to stuff as it danced. Now that would be cool.

We've got a guy who looks a bit like the Pescado sim, only with a bowler hat, who plays the saxaphone outside Marks and Spencers. There's also a guy who does rubbish Elvis impressions in the tunnel near a pub. I don't know if the location is connected to the act.

That's pretty weird - I had most of the TS1 expansions and I didn't see a single bug until Makin' Magic. Even then, I only saw two bugs (Bonehilda wouldn't go back into her coffin and just stood in the bathroom for hours on end shaking her head and sighing so that all my sims stood behind her peeing themselves because they couldn't get to the toilet, and the screwed-up graphics bug that randomly happened when you visited/returned from Magic Town). Now with TS2, I consider it a victory if I can go for an hours play with no bugs.

It's always kinda fun to see how other people's milages vary, I suppose.

z0mg liek petz n stuff lolololololz0r.

 

I didn't really like University, liked Nightlife less, really didn't like OFB. I made the tragic mistake of installing the stupid Christmas pack. I'm having trouble imagining that I'll like any other expansion pack Maxis have to offer, to be honest. It's now become an exercise in what can be broken in the most inane way possible, and how the act of simply playing the game can be made as painful and non-fun as is humanly attainable.

I dunno, where I come from, FFS actually stands for something else, something more suitable. For Fox-ache? For Fock-sake? For Fix-sack? You get the picture.

This would rock so much. Finally, we'd be able to have a specific nursery room on the third floor, far away from visitors and pains-in-the-asses, just big enough for skilling toys, cribs and changers, and not have to send an older sim on a five mile hike to the fridge and back just to feed the little brat. A more awesome version of this would be almost too awesome to bear.

This didn't occur to me until you pointed it out. Thanks for making me disturbed, too.  What happens to them? Where do they go? Are they re-absorbed by the body? Do they fall off? Urg.

Yeah, the white one is the skintone of the mannequins in bodyshop.

Isn't there also some hairiness with the alien skintone and babies? Or has this been fixed in an expansion somewhere?

Oh, it is. You can have gothic weddings and everything now.

http://www.pronupsims.fr.st/

Pronup Sims is your new friend.

Note: This website doesn't appear to work in Firefox anymore. 

Probably because so many people complained that the default Maxis wedding gear was boring and made everybody's weddings look the same.

I learned that system mechanic really doesn't like .package files. It deletes them wherever it finds them, while it's running through its "remove junk and obsolete files" stage. Heh.

Some pictures of what my game looked like afterwards:

Brandi Broke with her funky 010101 hairdo and mesh clothing.
Marylena Hamilton and her trendy black gloves and tights.

Plus all my textures crapped out on me. Deleting everything from my clothing downloads folder fixed the problem, which was odd since the problems were showing up in a clean game with no modifications directly applied to any of the characters. Just the presence of the (now corrupted) clothing files in the downloads folder make the textures freak out.

It *is* quite amusing that System Mechanic thinks the package files are obsolete junk, in much the same way Avast! thinks that the game's a trojan. The makers of these programs are clearly trying to tell us something.

Oh, thank god somebody else has said it! Too many people are too frightened of what's going to happen to them without a firewall or antivirus running 24/7.

I regularly turn the whole shebang off if I'm playing games, and the only thing that's ever happened is my computer... runs a bit faster. Terrifying.

Sure it can.

The difference between Avast and Norton is that Norton wants to be everything it can possibly be, all at the same time. This makes it clunky and annoying. It also likes to decide for you what you should be doing with your computer, which will annoy anybody who has their own ideas about what's appropriate and what isn't. Avast! on the other hand, is just an antivirus program. It's not trying to be a soopa-elite-computer-media-multi-function-strategic-security-solution. It just looks for viruses and then removes them. Unlike Norton, which wants to quarantine them all instead of FIXING THEM. Gah.

My mum swears by Avast. Says it's great.

I use AVG, since Norton is a bloated, system-resource-hogging, nannying pile of shit. But I'm sure you've learned that, and that's why you've decided to bin it.

I also use Sygate personal firewall (free).

According to twojeffs, it's set as default to 100%, he's got a hack to randomise it. No idea what the cut-off time is, though. Probably 24 sim hours, otherwise it'd just be stupid (not that that's an unusual occurence in Maxian programming).