Today my Sim gave birth outside, next to the garage, beside the trashcan. Her husband was in the horse barn, letting the horses out of their stalls.

leo6girl, maybe she's trying to tell you something? This is why I don't use end tables when I'm decorating:

So, um, yeah.

Remember that tiny little newborn baby that Mortimer Goth autonomously abandoned in the middle of a burning meteor crash site a few pages ago?

That wasn't a one-off incident.


Every single time I pan the camera over the local pool I find the same screaming, neglected floorbaby ditched on the ground and nobody showing even the tiniest bit of concern about its well-being. Not this bloated beardy man, not Rick Scumthorpe, not Arthur Friend, not a passing woman in a red suit, NOBODY pays any attention to it no matter how much it cries or craps or comes close to starvation. I switch to the Goths, I send someone to recover it, and yet it's always back there within a matter of days, once again bawling ineffectually at the heavens while everyone else on the lot wanders around pretending that it doesn't exist.

The entire universe just hates this baby, I guess.

It can't hate the kid that much if they're not doing anything. :P

:'( That's sad, Mingham. Maybe you should age it up and have the Scumthorpes take it in (or kidnap, might be a more fitting word) and then use it as a slave. Wouldn't have to find a new butler then...

You know what makes this recurring case of QUALITY PARENTING even more frustrating to deal with? That baby was supposed to grow into a TS3 version of Cassandra Goth. I could age her up so she's no longer immobile, but let's face it- the damage has been done, the story's gone off the rails and most of her earliest memories now probably revolve exclusively around floors, familial neglect and flaming boulders from outer space.

Wonderful.

In other news, I decided to delete the Fireproof Homestead reward for everyone who previously had it... and then realised something.

Sprog can now start fires.

So I clicked on Sprog, selected "Burn Something Nearby" and watched as he...


...headed down into the wine cellar and set Judas's alchemy station on fire?

Ok, now I'm scared. He was nowhere near it when I told him to do that. He wasn't even on the same floor. And yet he still went out of his way to set fire to the one object in the house that A: would cause the most annoyance if reduced to a smouldering pile of ashes and B: would logically be the most likely to explode.

If he goes for the triplets' chemistry table next time, I'll KNOW that he's become self-aware.

OMG! What if he finds out how to escape the confines of the computer-simulated world, and finds his way into our universe!
NOTHING IS SAFE!

You know, you should have checked with the community first as to whether it would be advisable to delete the fireproof homestead reward first. We could have warned you it's a bad, bad idea when Sprog is around.

Admittedly, the whole point of that was to enable Sprog's abilities resulting from the hidden Pyromaniac trait. If you have the Fireproof Homestead reward, it blocks those abilities from being used for some reason. Possibly a bug they never fixed.

It's also part of a general move on my part towards using mods to make the game harder. Like many people, I find that TS3 is often too safe, with not enough things posing a genuine threat to sims. This, I feel, is counterproductive, as you're probably going to feel much more attached to something you need to actively try to keep safe from harm. So I'm letting fires occur, modding lightning so it occurs more frequently and is more likely to strike the active lot, making mummies deadlier, increasing the prices of things so losing vast amounts of money in one go is actually possible...

...Actually, I may have accidentally modded in a serious potential disaster with that last one. There's a mod out there that renders your chances of success when using the slot machines from the Store casino set far, far lower and makes using them in the first place more expensive. Couple that with the fact that I'm pretty sure sims can autonomously use said slot machines, and I think I just enabled sims to develop crippling gambling addictions and bankrupt themselves.

Hey, it'd make for a good story...

The logic for what a sim sets on fire is about as interesting as the logic behind what a kleptomaniac sim will steal.
Put him next to a nice, expensive car. "Steal something"
He goes around to the back of the house and steals the porch light. Ok, he needed a light...

Bring him back to the car and try again.
He goes around to the back of the house and steals a flower patch. I guess the yard was looking a bit bare...

OK, we have one more try. Put him as close to on top of the car as possible, then use "Build on this lot" to put a fence between the car and the back of the house.
He goes all the way around the house to steal the grave of the man who was his very first Nemesis when he was alive. (Sentimental value, maybe?)

So for the night his progress toward 50 k of stolen goods was a whopping 27 simoleons.

But when he finally -did- steal the car, guess what the burglar grabbed when she showed up two nights later?

(So why is it that the Master Thief in town needs lessons on what to steal from one of his rivals?)

Edit: I would also be worried if Sprog starts to want to learn inventing... Between burning things and detonating things there will be nothing safe.

Guess where my Sim left her baby (the baby before the trashcan birth) right after giving birth?



She left her daughter where she was born, out in the horse barn.

What I really like is that picture. Sprog looks like he's thinking, now, I wonder how this is going to go.....

Oh god no you've doomed us all!!!
well actually we were all probably doomed from the start.

I bet no one will ever guess where my Sim taught her daughter (the one who was born in the horse barn) to walk at.


After potty training, I clicked for my Sim to teach her daughter to walk. Going out into the spacious living room would have been a good place, right? WRONG! My Sim goes outside (33 degree Fall weather), through the yard, into and through the front paddock, through the horse bar, then stops in the back paddock. The poor baby was crawling after her Mommy, all the way to the back paddock. Only after they both got there, did the Mother change the baby to outerwear and then proceeded to teach her daughter to walk.

I have learned not only that a horse barn is an excellent place to give birth and leave your newborn unattended. Also that a horse paddock, during Fall, when it's 33 degrees outside is a great place to teach your child to walk. It is also ideal if you let said child crawl to the paddock, instead of carrying him/her.

Perhaps an incentive to learn more quickly? If I had the choice of crawling thru horse turds or walking, I'd darn sure learn to walk in a hurry!

Guess what, I bought Supernatural and the first thing that happened was zombies eating my plants.

EDIT: Alright my sim just got turned into gold by the Philosopher's Stone... WTF?! Now I must resurrect him!
Another Edit: I resurrected my sim only for him to be killed by jellybeans! The randomness doesn´t stop today!

I think the more appropriate name of the car would be Christine. Still don't understand this infatuation, she has a husband and three children.

I hope that this doesn't mean she has something in common with the guy from My Crazy Obsession who was in a relationship (emotional and physical) relationship with his car.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_%28novel%29

And now I'm wondering why nobody ever made a sim story parodying that book after car relationships were introduced with Fast Lane Stuff.

It seems so obvious now...

I can try, if only I can understand how my sim developed this unhealthy feeling.

Or you can do it, Mingham. You're much much better in story-telling.

Is that where the weird car-relationships come from?!
I don't have fast-lane, but it must've come in the patch. I just assumed I'd picked up a weird glitch, and as I very rarely give sims cars (What's the point? They get free taxis and carpools anyway, and they never put the car back on the drive when they're done) I just thought it was that one sim that one time

One of my sims became a teenager, so I decided to teach her how to drive. She went and got into the car, but before her mother could get in the car with her the mailman asked her mother for an autograph, dropping the interaction. Instead of getting out of the car, the teen started driving. She wasn't learning how to drive, and there was no bar, the car was just going with the teen in it who didn't know what she was doing! I couldn't cancel the interaction to get her out of the car, she was stuck in there, as if it was a runaway vehicle. Even worse, it was the Motive Mobile, which means that she would be in the car indefinitely, forever, since her motives would always be maxed. I eventually had to reset her to rescue her from the car.

Stupid mailman.

It must come from some patch. I don't have Fast Lane Stuff, but all inactives have some degree of relationships with their car.

My actives don't, but when I switch over to the inactives, they have relationships with their cars.

...Yeah, totally the most appropriate time to do that, Alphonse.

That's just because the sims has become a modern day version of Sodom and Gomorrah.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodom_and_Gomorrah