Well, Sims 2 keeps crashing for me... so not a lot. I managed to adopt a dog though. I'm amazed at how good the dogs look. Very realistic.
It's a shame... because I just had this idea of a fun little story to make... but if the game continuously crashes I won't get much done. I'm sad.

@Creaft90 -I hope you're not trying to use Norton for anit-virus because with it's firewall you end up with no firewall at all unless you enable it's broken one.It also runs up RAM usage and ties up the computer so if that's the case I would be surprixed at the contant crashing after all of the issues I was having with Norton before disabling it.I've got to free up some space on my hard drive again and need to buy some strorage for that.I'll be heading into either the Pleasantview Epic Challenge or Apocalypse Challenge after installing some new historical CC I downlaoded.

In Arundel:

Andre Weburg had been a very content single man, and fell into a relationship with Elise Bruty, who became more than a casual acquaintance. She fell hard in love with him and proposed to him.

Now, one has to understand that Andre is a Romance pixel, and he wasn't looking to get engaged or married. Both events trashed his mood. He was looking forward to playing the field for quite a few more years..never settling down for a minute.

Elise changed that-and he couldn't find it in himself to break her heart by refusing to become her husband. He's not a mean guy.
Anyway, once he married her (just to keep her quiet, mind you.) Elise had a desire for a child, and he did not.

She conveniently 'forgot' to use protection against getting pregnant, and promptly became pregnant when they consummated their marriage.

Andre then went to work and came home later to find that she'd expanded their house for a nursery, which startled him

"Why is our house bigger?" He started to ask her, and then quickly shut his mouth when he saw Elise herself had also expanded in girth.
Question answered.

He's scared to death-and they will be very surprised when she gives birth because from all indications, she's expecting at least twins. (thanks, 'multiple children' mod!)

This will be quite the event, and I have no idea if Andre will end up abandoning her and the new children or not.
It depends on how he takes the arrival of an instant family on the next rotation.

I'm not using Norton, no. I'd believe this to be a Win10/DirectX issue. A lot of people seems to have trouble with it. I have an old PC stowed away... It might work. Unfortunately I gave the wi-fi card to my brother so I have no Internet on it.

Fortunately, you don't need internet to play the game. You can use your new machine for work/school/general purposes and play old games on the old one. You won't need to run an antivirus program nearly as often (some of the newer ones have been known to quarantine or even delete Sims 2 files in confusion), and can add custom content via flash drive, assuming your old one to have a USB port. But you'll want to extract the CC before you transfer it, as you need internet to use the latest zipping programs, which is a bit of a pain.

Mary Gavigan has popped and they've moved, carrying their old furniture, to a new house a little closer to Isaiah's girlfriend and immediately next to the Travellers. Which should be handy for Mary, since the new baby is Trent's.

In other news around Crooked Beach, Gaylord Riley, who wants to be mayor, finally got a job in politics, possibly through Nathan Gavigan's good graces, since they were already friends. Gaylord's wife Viv celebrated by going on the third of her desired 50 first dates with a random townie she picked up at Beachy Shops. Her second first date is mad at her now but hey, she was never promised a second date. Gaylord celebrated his immediate promotion by throwing a party when he got home. Which is kind of Gaylord's daily routine, really...He thinks he'll be a good mayor for this laid back coastal community someday.

Speaking of the Travellers, Tina gathered her friends into a group and headed for Public Beach No. 1, where Jonathan Elliot, an intersex alien teen who wears a kilt, dyes their hair purple, and intends to be a world class ballet dancer, surprised everybody by coming over and goosing her. They instantly fell in love, but neither knows what to do with this - they haven't been teens very long, Tina has never dated, and Jonathan's previous crushes have been guys. When Jonathan threw a party on Sunday prior to going to their job teaching an aerobics class (presumably to first graders) neither one of them acted on it, just danced together and hung out a bit.

It took a bit of doing, involved a lot of community lot visits, and she had to skip work (why does a substitute teacher go to work on Sunday?), but Dora Ottomas scraped together enough aspiration points to drink elixir and last through Sharla's birthday party! The party went well despite Sharla sleeping through part of it. Sharla is Pleasure and wants to be a game designer, so the family splurged and bought a TV and gaming rig to celebrate. As the last of her friend group to teenify, Sharla is very glad to be grown up, even if it does mean pulling potty training duty.

I'm still using my almost ten year old Windows 7 laptop and hqve MSE as my current virus protection and the Windows Firewall is active and i do have another firewall option if I really need bettere security which was free and much better than Norton's fake firewall which only disabled the option to use any other firewall besides it's own glitch broken firewall.I can still go online with my computer though I have to use adblockers in a browser and have always done that for ages.I even had Norton break my TS2 install a few monthes back and ended up disabling it and intend to get it uninstalled ASAP once the time can be found to deal with it.

Unfortunately the Ultimate Collection relies on Origin for some reason. The game just won't start unless Origin is in online mode. I might just buy some wifi stick just to keep it working.

That should not be the case: you only need the connection to first install it, not to run it.

from this site: Sims Community

Huh... I assumed it needed to be online as it always launched Origin when I tried to use the shortcut. When then Origin failed to launch after the third run and not launching Sims 2, I assumed it was an Internet issue. I updated Origin and repaired Sims 2, twice. In hindsight tho maybe it was a cache issue...

I'm confused. The UC always launches Origin when I click it to load. Is it possible to log into Origin without the internet?

Edit: I do go onto "offline mode" as soon as i'm on Origin though.

It's possible, surprisingly! I managed to log onto Origin while offline. But it threw a white screen with a Whoops error message.

Anyway, it works now! I'm really happy about it. I'd require some help troubleshooting though. But things are good now. I got started with the idea I had. Now I haven't planned it all out. But I'd got an idea or two that I decided to run with. Was thinking about getting some photos and get some texts along with them. I'm not sure if anyone would be interested except me though.

But here we go with some of the progress I've made so far.

This won't hurt... much.


Someone has been fighting...

Currently starting a challenge where I build and start playing a neighborhood only in the base game and add an expansion pack with every new generation (starting with the 3rd). Building purely in the base game with no custom content has been insane but it's forced me to get pretty creative, especially with community lots :P

I've been working a little on the "set" so to speak. I added another floor, a rec area and some balconies. I've also added some more decorative stuff. So new images may not match up with the older ones. The story has gone on into a slightly more violent phase. So for now, I'm not sure I can put up more images. That said, there are some side things I think I could share!


The doctor told him to step in... what's the worst that can happen?


Just another day in the Brig with the brothers.

Yes, I'm still alive and finally got a new computer. (Some may remember me asking everybody and their great-aunt once removed for advice on that, )
I'm still on my breeding-down the Uber-Megahood project and very much regretting my choice to let some Family Sims have lots of kids, thus overshooting my target of Sims in gen 2. I don't even remember how long I've been on this already... 3 years? 5?
And I'm just about through with getting gen 2 into their second year of college. At this rate, results can be expected in 2037.

I've gotten into a little trouble.... I had two ideas... but now I'm not sure how to bring those two ideas together. I'll have to continue thinking about that. But anyway, I'd get a little further ahead of my story.


Now due to me not posting some photos, context may be missing. But essentially the place came under attack. Ryan got injured so Andy is helping him out.


To the Infirmary we go, where Katie checks his injuries.

What were the two ideas?

It had to do with how one of the guys ended up in the brig. Either I could stage some some sort of fight between him and someone else, or they could find him with someone who's unconscious. I was then thinking that maybe it was all a misunderstanding aswell. But now I'm not sure how to ideally stage it. Nor if I should add another guy or use one of the existing ones. I'm also torn about if he should be some sort of tech guy or another marine.

tl;dr I'm not sure how to explain why he was in the Brig.

Does anyone remember my stupid self sim, who wished for long life from the genie? She cheated death six times. That's six extra rounds I had to play with her showing up at parties and on community lots. And those six extra days spanned a weekend too, which is a time when a lot of parties happen in Lacuna D. Stupid sim, I was sick of her!
Well, on the seventh day, she lost! During a party, of course.






Look at that face! She got hula girls, though!


Mai Tai of death:

@Simsample -That looked like it was a lot of fun.
I only got to add a few things to my community lot and the homestead for my Pleasantview Epic Challenge as I've recently added tons of new CC to my game.It should be spring in the year of 1600 in the town soon.

Some premade sims are consistent across playthroughs by the same person (not surprisingly), but others can be very, very different.

Isaiah Gavigan of Drama Acres drifted a little and ditched his family for college just when his mom and his younger brother Ezekial really needed him to help with the twins, but on graduation he and his high-powered wife bought the biggest house they could afford and moved the whole family in with them. (That iteration of Nathan was appallingly hapless - he never saw a chance card he couldn't pick wrong on.) Isaiah Gavigan of Strangetown was in college and a bit of a douchebag at the time that neighborhood vanished from the main menu. Isaiah Gavigan of Widespot has a steady girlfriend in Tina Traveller but they've grown apart during high school and he's tentatively dated another girl, but is a good big brother to his little sister and diligently helps his dad out at his family business, a bowling alley. And it turns out that Isaiah Gavigan of Crooked Beach is an absolutely stellar boyfriend!

He's young yet, but he's going steady with June Walters, whose family is the poorest in Crooked Beach. Her father Rufus works construction and her mother Alberta writes cookbooks when she's not too busy being pregnant and childraising. Tonight Rufus came home tired out from getting a promotion and Alberta wore herself to a nub being pregnant, looking after toddler October, and writing a cookbook, the proceeds of which will enable them to have a child bedroom all ready when October grows up in two rotations. Therefore, from the time she got home June was running around filling in the gaps - getting October fed and pottytrained and into the crib, cleaning up the yard, making sure no leftovers are wasted, etc., while Mom and Dad collapsed into bed. The sink was exploding but nobody had time for it. Once she was the only one left awake in the house, June grabbed a much-needed minute to get her fun up and was resigning herself to leaving her homework to pile up, when Isaiah did not so much as stroll by as wander onto the lot looking hopeful and walking up and down the sidewalk as if not sure he should bother them. Fortunately she was talking to the parrot they got during Rufus's short-lived political career, spied him through the big bay window, and ran out to greet him and play a quick round of red hands. She then influenced him to repair the sink while she did her homework.

Isaiah has maybe one or two mechanical points and I was expecting him to whack the faucet a few times with a wrench before turning on the TV, playing with the parrot, or wandering up to June's room to kill time till she could pay attention to him again, but no - he worked on that thing till he fixed it! So June came down and they had their first-ever makeout on the couch. They had to stop when Rufus got up to finish pottytraining October, so they watched TV till one in the morning, at which time June's energy was tanking and her fun was up, so she kissed him good bye and he left. Rufus was very understanding, teaching October to talk in the adjacent kitchen so they could have privacy and he couldn't see what they might be doing with their hands.

Elvira Lambert, a slightly younger teen with a 50-first-dates want, had just checked him out in the previous house, and decided she wanted him to be her first first date, and I'd thought about it, because Isaiah and June are awfully young to really settle down - but nope, Isaiah and June are a good solid couple right now and I am not going to let Elvira screw that up!

I think that could be a good idea! If you need some tips on staging that I would suggest a laying pose, there's a few poseboxes that would achieve a prone laying position or freeze clock a sim passing out animation. Then there's a few good poses ang has on the green and blue boxes that have sims kneeling, look like they are inspecting a passed out sim. Do you have ang's posebox archive?

@simsample I was saddened to learn of the passing of your selfsim. As I read what had happened, I felt an involuntary tear run down my cheek. I found her rather beautiful. But I'm glad to see she enjoyed life and lived it to the full right to the very end. And I'm glad she got the hula girls; I'm sure she deserved no less!

I think I'm right to try to keep death out of my own game. I seem to be a bit on the sensitive side, and there's no point in making myself unnecessarily unhappy. Our Real Life world is quite bad enough, so I think I'll keep my Sims game a little bit escapist and utopian.

Rest in Peace, Party Girl! I hope they have good parties for you in heaven.

@simsample At least now I know that this wish does allow death, even if you have to play six additional rounds XD

Aww thank you @AndrewGloria ! I love the way someone disagreed with your post, probably the bit about her being beautiful! Poor thing, her whole life was just one huge in-joke for me (I deliberately made her single, and have lots of boyfriends, and she adopted a kid instead of having a biological child- all these things were done just to make my husband and daughter laugh, as I used to joke that she was what I would have been if I'd never had them! )

@Sokisims Yes, I was getting worried after five times but JoandSarah77 told me that the chances of her winning should be reduced each time, so she should lose eventually, and that turned out to be right! She had lots more money than I do, and she died wearing her Rush t-shirt, so can't be bad, right?

Simsample, I also thought: "Aaaw! Goodbye, beautiful sim!" when I saw that . She was beautiful in a way I could relate to, with band t-shirt and Lennon style sunglasses, like she never aged. And that face she makes, like a kid told it's bedtime and time to put away her toys. "Just one more hour, please Grim?"

Louis Aspir wished for long life and cheated death eight times. Eight!