It's either that, or go bats watching them do some other mundane college thing.  It's not on the main deck, so I don't really have to watch them much anyway.  I can just listen to to ka-ching noises in the background while I manage the sims on the main deck.

The only expansion pack I have is university, so I don't use home businesses or anything like that to make money at college.  The money comes from a combination of factors:

1) It's a greek lot that has had lots of sims pass through it, and always has several sims in it at any point in time, so it just accumulates wealth over the years.
2) Most of the sims I send there have $9500 or more from scholarships and over time that just adds up.
3) The house and the dorms have been pimped out over the years, so there's not much left to spend money on.
4) 4-8 sims in a house at college gathering 1200 each every semester adds up.
5) There's not that much to do at college.  Most of these sims have maxxed or nearly maxxed skills, and you can only spend so much time making friends.  Even for popularity sims, there's not much use for more than 30 best friends.  So instead of spinning their wheels, my college sims maintain a greenhouse with 30 money trees.  At $1200 per harvest, 3 or 4 (I forget which) times per day, you can make a lot of money.

Heh, I don't even know how I'd go about making my sims that poor...  The ones that attend my Legacy family's greek house typically leave college with like $40-50 thousand.  How do you even spend all your money at college?  After a few generations all the dorm residences that I use are pretty well pimped out...

I think the fruit chairs are probably inspired by the fruit chairs from the "citrus set" of furnishings in Animal Crossing.

OK, I finally got around to fixing this today.  My plan worked fine without having to even replace the tombstones.  For future reference for anyone who has this happen, the following 20 characters got unlinked during the "event".  This occured in spite of the fact that I have nounlinkondelete installed, so there's something weird going on that's bypassing that fix.

005 Willow Nigmos
006 Creon Nigmos
011 Lyla Grunt
015 Mary Melons
026 Glabe Curious
035 Vicki Sims
036 Patrick Jones
041 Melissa Sims
046 Luc Smith
064 Seth Zaidi
065 Ichabod Specter
066 Hugh Thanasia (groan)
068 Riggor Mortis
069 Earl E Demise
070 Tim Lee Demise
083 Peponi Muenda
084 Lerato Muenda
089 Bejamin Cho
091 Knut Futa
134 Brenda Zaidi

There were also 40(!) other character unlinked character files that had the same timestamp, but they were already unlinked even in an unplayed copy of the neighborhood.  Don't know why the game felt it needed to touch them.  There were three or four other character files that were not unlinked that also had the same timestamp.  Mary Melons, Glabe Curious and Knut Futa were unlinked at the time of the "event" even though they don't appear to ever had a tombstone in the Specter lot.  There were three graves in the lot which were left untouched - Olive (which makes sense, since she actually died and wasn't a pre-created messed up Maxis hacked piece of crap, or at least, not a pre-dead one), Danelle Greaves and Jessica Ebadi.

Here's hoping it doesn't happen again.

OK, after a little more investigating, it appears that all the missing tombstones did get unlinked somehow.  So this is my plan:
1) Back up the current neighborhood
2) Copy all the unlinked character files out of a backup.
3) Go into SimPE and clear the unlinked flag
4) Go back to the lot, and if the tombstones aren't there, use the assignable gravestones to replace them

Sound like it might work?

This is a different problem.  The tombstones aren't disappearing one-by-one when haunted (there's actually a fix for that floating around here somewhere that makes tombstones unhauntable).  A whole bunch are disappearing all at once when the lot is loaded (or possibly when it's being saved).

(This thread mentions a couple other people with the same problem).

Yes, as far as I can tell, in fact, I only have this problem with the Specter lot.  I've played the Goth lot for quite a while, for instance, and all its tombstones remain intact.  Likewise, I have a couple other houses that have accumulated a number of tombstones and none of those have ever disappeared.  I've seen other people post about this particular lot suddenly losing all but two or three tombstones, but I've never seen a solution anywhere.

As far as the avatar - I'm using a Yehat because a Spathi doesn't fit very well in a square format.  Why, if you're a Fat Obstreperous Jerk, is your avatar a Burninator and not a Thraddash?

I actually have nounlinkondelete installed.  I think there's some particularly screwy behavior either with that lot, or with the affected characters that's causing the tombstones to disappear when the lot is loaded.  I have backups of my neighborhoods, so I think with some work I could probably restore the lot back to the way it was with some work, but I'd like to prevent it from happening again in the future.

And I think we've had a discussion about the avatar before.

There's something messed up with this lot and/or the ghosts that inhaibt it.  Once before, when I moved Ophelia to college, all but a couple of the tombstones on the lot vanished for no reason.  Later on I reset all of strangetown.  Today, the same thing happened again, though nobody moved out of the lot this time.  All but three tombstones are gone (Olive, Jessica and Alan remain).  I tried copying a backup of the lot, and that didn't fix it.  I looked at some of the missing characters in SimPE, and they don't appear to be unlinked or anything weird, as far as I can tell, and the character files are there.  I tried recreating the tombstones with the assignable gravestones, but the characters in question are not among the choices, so I have to assume there's something wrong with them.

Anyone have any idea what the deal is with this lot?

You can find out by looking at them in SimPE.  It's also possible pretty easy for it to occur by chance now and then - twins aren't all that rare.

There actually is a pregnancy modifier token that twins have (and I believe can pass off on to their offspring) that causes them to have increased odds of having twins.  Kaylynn the maid and the Caliente sisters have the token in Pleasantview, for example.

I am a serious coder, and I have to say, that's not quite true.  To say that a computer understands only 0 and 1 is like saying that you only understand the numbers 0 to 9.  It's not very meaningful.  Often, yes, computers use a pseudorandom number generator with a deterministic sequence.  However, true random number generation is possible (and is used all the time.)  Some processors (including some models of Intel and AMD processors) come with a true RNG built in that generate truly non-deterministic numbers from thermal noise.  There are also specialized pieces of hardware you can get for this purpose for high-security applicaitons.  You can also get true random numbers from sources like your sound card.  Linux and some other operating systems gathers "entropy" from things like keystroke timings, hard drive seek latency and other truly random sources to create a entropy pool from which it pulls truly random numbers when needed.

I don't know what this says about the Sims sadorandom numbers, but I just got a third abduction a little less than a week after the first two.  I just double checked to be sure, but there are no abduction-odds hacks.

I think dizzy's saying that clumps in random sequences are normal, and RNGs that have very few of them are actually less random (though for some applications, that may be what you want.)

Truly random sequences will have non-random appearing clumps sometimes.  For example, flipping a coin 6 times and getting the same result each time seems improbable and non-random, but it's not that improbable, nor necessarily non-random.  It will happen now and then with a good RNG.  A good random number generator will produce these sorts of clumps at the frequency at which you'd expect them to occur.  Since humans are very good at spotting patterns, and very stubborn about accepting the randomness or non-pattern-ness of something, a truly random sequence of numbers usually has a lot of apparent clumpiness.

My clump was particularly improbable though, so that's why I asked the question.  On the other hand, there are an arbitrary number of improbable combinations of events that haven't happened in my game, so maybe I just got lucky.

In my legacy house, I've been trying to get sims abducted for five and a half generations.  I have any teens out there virtually every night for the whole abductable period (with occasional breaks to recharge/energize), and if I have space in the house, I also have any impregnable adult males out there too.  Up until today, bupkis.  Not surprising, abduction outside of the Curious house is really, really rare.  But then I finally had an adult male abducted and impregnated.  Then, the very next night, I had a teen female abducted.  The odds of this happening purely randomly are really, really small.  Obscenely small.  By my calculations, worse than 10,000:1.  I didn't use any cheats, and the only abduction related hack is my Multi-PT hack which does not, by itself, modify abduction odds at all.  I haven't installed any new downloads at all recently, so it's not possible that something slipped in.

My question is: Does an abduction on a lot increase the odds of further abductions on that lot (might make the absurd knowledge wants for multiple abductions actually possible)?  I have some familiarity with the abduction code, but my knowledge of simantics is spotty, so it's likely I might have missed some code that does that.  The two sims in question happened to be using different telescopes, so if there is such an effect, I presume it's lot-wide and not telescope specific (though the abduction odds are stored in a BCON on the telescope object.)  Is it just the sadorandom number generator creating a cluster effect?  Is it caused by nearby high-tension power lines?

Hmm, I went to burninate it, but it seems to have disappeared after his first haunting.  Incidentally, I don't know if I can recommend killing drama professors.  He gets upset if anyone on the lot tries to woohoo while he's haunting.  He's doesn't actually seem to be able to actually do the run into the bedroom fists flying thing, but it does make the "caught cheating" noise and the participants jump out of the bed all guilty looking.

OK, will burninate.  Incidentally, the ghost actually appeared on the back porch of the house, which is probably the nearest spot on the same level as the *Gravemarker.  He probably couldn't appear there because there was an object on it.  He also appears to be attached to a bed in the house that he woo-hooed and slept in long before he was ever moved in.

In my legacy house, I just extermininated a family member via disease.  He was in a little separate quarantine house up on columns off in the corner of the lot so he wouldn't get anybody else sick.  After he died, I dismantled his little house, but there was one tile that would stubbornly not delete.  I used the burninator to see what it was, and it turned out to be something called a *Gravemarker.  I presume all dead sims leave them, and that they have some important function?  I did not save it after burninating it, because I didn't know if it was important or not.  Is there any way to move it?  I don't mind having it there since it doesn't seem to interefere with objects or sims or building except that it's on a second-floor tile floating in space.

Also, during his tenure in the house, he never really owned a bed.  Would it actually be possible for him to have some favorite object that ISN'T a bed?  He spent most of his time complaining about comfort/energy or falling asleep on his feet but he did use a pinball machine, a phone and a microwave that both got moved back to the main house, and a terlet and shower that did not...

I believe that with TS2U it is possible for a sim to suffer symptoms and spread illness on a community lot, so that was changed sometime after university.  I had a sim catch a mysterious illness from Loki Beaker on a community lot.  There seems to be some special disease related scripting with the Beakers though, so it may have been a special case.  At the time that it happened, the patch for University (the one that came out around the same time as NL), was not yet available.

Also, is it really possible for a Sim to come home sick from work?  I've only ever seen a sim get sick from the biotech station, food poisoning or roaches, and even then it's really rare, not to mention that any of those scenarios are pretty unlikely unless you're incredibly careless or trying for them.

Do the ones with the weird eye color have the same skintone as the ones with the correct eyes?

Maxis alien eyes are kinda a weird case.  They actually don't have a texture - they're transparent.  So you see whatever texture that part of the skintone beneath shows.  A lot of people thought that alien eyes had special inhertence rules because you never see them on non-alien skin.  The reason is because maxis skins have ordinary brown eyes.  I first noticed this when I installed default replacement eyes, and saw that the children of some aliens with human skin still had the old maxis eyes (they actually had alien eyes).  If you had alien eyes on a zombie, they'd be pitch black because the zombie skin has just black for that part of the texture.  And the mannequin skin (which you couldn't easily get into your breeding pool because it crashes the game for want of a baby-skin) has very pale gray eyes.

Yeah, I saw that thead, but the download link is broken.  I also can't find the hack anywhere in any of the hack directories.

I do not have nightlife, so I am getting spam barristas anytime I visit a lot with a coffee bar.  I saw there was an alpha hack available at one time that fixed this, but it appears not to be available anymore.  Does anyone have a copy stashed away?  (yes, I know I should upgrade my game).

Doh, I was gonna say Death Wish staring the immortal Charles Bronson.  Or was it Death Wish II?  Whichever one where a gangster played by what's-his-stupid-face from The Fly and Macintosh commercials killed his daughter.  Or was that his wife?  Or was that the sequel?  I think it was the one that had the soundtrack by Herbie Hancock, not the other one, which was Jimmy Page.  It wasn't the third one, when he accquired the sidekick that held his box of bullets for him.  Anyhow, the best Charles Bronson movie is Once Upon a Time in the West.  What was this thread about again?

Oh, fears.  Yeah, they're pretty much impossible.  I've been trying to get a satellite death in my Legacy house for a few generations now.  I had a husband and wife who spent pretty much all their free time watching clouds/stars together.  Finally, she gets taken out, but they were perma-plat, so aside from a little sobbing, no problem.  Even one of the teenage kids who had her death as a fear was hardly fazed.  So I thought I would have some drama with the widower since legacy is so freaking boring after generation 1.  I used the surgery machine to give him a permenent scowl then had him make enemies with every townie that walked by.  I had his cousin make friends with them so I could invite them to their joint B-day party, and he kicked all their asses repeatedly, making them cry, and a bunch of people got scared by the ex-wife's ghost, then he fed himself to the cowplant.  And it was still a roof-raiser!  His daughter had his death as a fear and she didn't quite get low enough to get into aspiration failure.

What does it take to make sims unhappy?

I think you're right diamonde.  The Grim Reaper does not have a SDNA entry in the neighborhood, but he DOES have an "Age Data" entry in objects.package which describes hair, skin and eye color and is the same sort of thing you'd find in a regular saved bodyshop template.  The same is true of Pollination Technician (no SDNA, but there is an Age Data entry in objects.package).  In fact, my poli-tech hack consists mostly of bodyshop templates with a few things added.  Obviously Polli Tech does pass on his genes just fine.  If you have "boolprop testingcheatsenabled true" in your userstartup.cheat, you can use the SimDNA cheat on Grim Reaper or Hula Zombie or any of the other special NPCs if they are on your lot.

re: grimpregnation

JM may be right as far as DNA (skin, hair and eye color) goes, but for the facial structure, it's definately not self-pregnation.  The offspring always have the default face.  Same for the remote control car.

re: My pollination technician hack

I don't have NL or OfB, which is why I haven't done anything with it.  I did get a lot of posts that indicated that it did work with NL.  The major issue people reported was that the pollination technician did not show up in the family tree, but this seems to be a new feature in NightLife to make it so that alien babies can have relations without it being incest (which I think my hack solves in a better way).  Alien abduction is so rare though that I can't see why that's important unless you're cheating to get lots of aliens.  It's possible that my hack interferes with that feature though, as a few people have said that the family tree relation didn't get disrupted.

If somebody would like to take over maintenance of the hack, be my guest.  It's actually very simple - just a couple objects (clones of PT with new DNA and face data), and an override of one global BHAV.  It's not written that well because I didn't have a good reference for simantics at the time.

Speaking of my hacks - if anybody wants to take over my ultra-gnome, be my guest.