Last night, my Sims (a husband and wife) were playing chess at the gazebo (in Riverview). A strange guy came up to their chess table and appeared to cry, then cheer. Next, he tried to ask the wife to dance, but she just ignored him and continued playing chess with her husband. The guy kept standing there and would occasionally cheer. He didn't leave for a few hours.

Seems like my sim's baby's been working out. I got a notification telling me he was proud he became thin and will remember it for the rest of his life.

That has happened to me several times!

I've seen it before too, it's a hilariously common glitch. From what I've heard, it's most likely connected to the genetics a baby technically already has despite being a purely generic character model- if it has genes that would cause it to age up into a thin sim later in life, the game often seems to suddenly recognise that during the baby stage and erroneously display that message in response regardless of the fact that A: nothing below the child stage actually has a variable body shape without mods and B: nothing has happened that would change its natural weight even if it did have a functioning weight slider. It's a theory that does explain that message often appearing very soon after birth- the baby inherits thin genetics, and the game immediately misinterprets them and reacts accordingly.

In other news, here's an old picture I took of a cat that apparently knew all about the return of aliens and felt pretty pleased about it...

...All the way back in March.


WHAT ELSE ARE YOU HIDING ABOUT SEASONS CAT

WHAT ELSE DO YOU KNOW

Well, clearly the cat has been playing Supernatural, too, since it's obviously a fortune teller.

My Sim's nectar maker broke. Her husband tried to fix it and got singed. She tried to fix it and got singed, the make then caught fire. The husband called the fire department. Then both Sims decided the logical thing to do was to run (and stand) directly in the fire/path of the fire. Regardless of how many times I made them leave it, they thought going back to the fire's direct path was the safest thing to do.

I did a short 5-gen legacy, which had several WTF moments. One involved my vampire Sim, Chase, getting married. I invited his half-brothers to the wedding, and one half-brother was a three-star celebrity. I send Chase over to greet him and he responds with, "Uh, do I know you? Maybe you should impress me before talking to me." Um...one, you're his half-brother. Two, if you don't know him, why did you accept the freaking invitation to his freaking wedding? Three, Chase is a vampire who maxed the athletic skill in one day, and since you chose to insult him on his wedding day, he will now proceed to beat you up.

Strangely, that half-brother ended being the one who cheered and threw confetti all night after Chase and Brandi were married (which didn't happen for quite some time because Brandi kept IGNORING the command to get married to her wonderful husband whom she'd been in love with since teenagehood and kept asking for her mother-in-law's autograph...), o_O

Another thing I didn't understand was Brandi being accused of "sleeping with an occult." Yeah, first off, she's married to a vampire, which the whole town seemed to approve of (she even got the Eternally Faithful reputation). As strange as it sounds, married people actually have sex with each other (WHAT?!? Impossible!). Secondly, the biggest hit to Brandi's relationship was with her mother-in-law.
Mariah: "You dirty whore! You're sleeping around with disgusting creatures that aren't even human!"
Brandi: "But that creature is your son."
*facepalm*

Yeah, EA's scandal system is idiotic. For instance, you'll get scandals because you had a child out of wedlock. Because EA thinks this is 1950.

One can't help but speculate as to what the implications of the public disgrace system will be for Supernatural. Because a witch is (presumably) classified as an occult, whereas ghosts aren't recognised as such by the game despite still being a separate life state.

This will, of course, almost certainly result in the sim paparazzi apparently believing that it's more scandalous and indecent to sleep with a human being who happens to know a few spells than it is to bang an intangible dead person.

As if we didn't have enough reasons to hate them already.

One of my other Sims got ripped for marrying and sleeping with an Imaginary Friend turned real. Okay, first of all, how the snot are people supposed to know he originally was an Imaginary Friend? Secondly, he's real now. That means he's a human being. He's NOT imaginary anymore.

(It took me a while to discover Imaginary Friends were considered occult. At first I was super freaked out because I had moved my legacy family to a different town and it erased all the family relationships between each other except for marriage and stuff. So I was scared to death that sister Heidi was frolicking with her brother-that-the-game-now-only-recognizes-as-acquaintance Chase. I'm like, "Heidi, if I find out you've been cheating on your husband with your own brother, I'm going to shoot you.")

Every time I read the word 'paparazzi', and an unfortunate event involving them and a celebrity Sim, Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi" plays in my head.

There, there .. have some tea and cake ... *huggles*

Idk, how did people find out when my sim got knocked out by a poison dart trap six stories below the surface of Egypt?

The paparazzi, they see everything man.

Mingham, the reason the paps hate anyone having a sex life of any kind, whether it be banging the butler, groping a ghost or woohooing with a witch (outside the 'norm' *yawn* marital bed) is because they can't possibly have a sex life when they are hanging around other peoples houses all day and night. Jealousy is an ugly thing.

That's the biggie for me - I can just about tolerate the scandal system throwing a hissy fit when my sim snogs the butler but I feel it's totally out of touch for EA to imply that single motherhood is something to be ashamed of.

You're entirely right there. Admittedly, illegitimate child scandals would actually make sense if they occurred as a result of a married celebrity having a child with someone other than their husband or wife, since that's the sort of thing that realistically would lead to trashy tabloid scandals and some degree of negative press if word got out about it. But that's clearly not what the scandal feature for celebrities is going for. Instead, the game seems to envision a disturbing alternate reality in which the Old Hollywood star system, with all its draconian morality clauses, hypocrisy and false images of idealised wholesomeness, never died a much-deserved death and instead persisted into the modern era.

This also makes me wonder about the implications of life in SimNation: Due to regular sims not having to put up with the scandal system forever shaming them for mostly harmless activites and insisting on constant adherence to backward, out-of-touch notions of morality, surely sim celebrities would actually be some of the most miserable, stressed and self-loathing people in the entire world? Ironic, really. And yet also somehow kind of fitting.

...I'm sorry, I'm incredibly prone to overanalysis. Resuming comedy picture mode. :P

I don't typically download mods. But I may just get Dexter the Bear for the paparazzi. Maybe you'll think next time about spying on me having an intimate moment with my vampire husband after I shove a hot poker up your nose.

And actually, Twallan's Story Progression mod handles it exactly that way. If your sim winds up pregnant from an affair, when the child is born there's a % chance to trigger an event that causes the cheated on sim to realize the kid isn't theirs and break up with the mother.

Today my Sims went down to the lobby of their apartment building to wait for their carpools. The man went down to wait in his underwear.

Vampire sim goes into a vampire lounge, goes to the bar to talk to the mixologist. The topic: Complain About Vampires.

Sim stays over at a friend's house and after getting up in the morning, makes their bed. The host (who happens to be Neat, among other things) then asks them to behave, as they are acting inappropriately.

A sim decides to break it off with his romantic interest (who has Commitment Issues) and asks her to just be friends. Even though their relationship is full green, not only does she take it very well (tiny LTR hit, no heartbroken moodlet) but actually considers it a flirty action and responds in kind.

I agree, I hate the way the Celebrity, even the normal reputation is handled, and with the cheating? Let's see, I made an basement underneath the Military Base, if I recall this was Sunset Valley, where the base is far off from everything. Two of my Sims have sex in that basement (I teleported them there, noway to get there, pretty sure they weren't celebrities). And somehow the other sim discovered they were cheating soon as I teleported her girlfriend back >.>,. here the most annoying part, the three are supposed to be in a threesome triangle, something stupid I thought that no Jealous perk would take care of, just made the damn thing worse.

And the celebrities can't do anything? Can't have a child when not married? Or how about all of them not able to get married again or have children after their husband died, it still treats them as unfaithful >.>, and annoying when in the story you make it that the dead spouse says it's okay to move on...

Willow, do all three of your sims have No Jealousy? It makes the sim that has it not get jealous, it doesn't make everyone not jealous of that sim. That being said, if I recall correctly it's notoriously buggy and ineffective.

I think both Awesomemod and (?)Mastercontroller tweak jealousy settings to make it less insane, if that helps.

I think it's woohooer that does that. Reducing the chance to get caught. My sim has a level 10 Kama Simptra and his romantic interest didn't bat an eye

With a 10 kama simtra, the sim's partner was probably thinking, "Yeah.. she's cheating.. but as long as I'm next in line.. who cares?"

And now, another set of absurd screenshots from a while back documenting how Lester, Carrie and Lolita Scumthorpe came into the world.

A word of warning: It isn't pretty.

We've all seen less than ideal Sim births. Pregnant sims cycling to the hospital, husbands in the passenger seat of cars while their wife's in labour, everyone else in the family apparently far less calm and far more freaked out than the poor woman who's about to have a baby, the list goes on.

But all of these stories pale in comparison to the cringeworthy tale of Kathryn Scumthorpe and the worst birth ever.

I should have realised that this entire pregnancy was headed for disaster one day into it when Kathryn first discovered she was expecting triplets and then immediately headed for the bar. But hey, I also learned something that evening:

There is absolutely nothing stopping pregnant sims from drinking alcohol, regardless of the fact that they can't do things like skinny-dip or seek employment.


I can only assume it's a product of all the euphemisms the developers used in an attempt to keep the rating down. It seems they were so intent on not mentioning alcohol that it led to them overlooking the fact that they'd allowed virtual pregnant women to happily pour it down their throats as much as they like. And that's so ironic it's glorious.


QUALITY ANTENATAL CARE

My feelings of impending doom were not helped one bit by Larry's subsequent reaction to his wife announcing her pregnancy:


...Yeah.

So the second and third trimesters went about as well as you'd expect for anybody involved with this bunch of idiots, and on the third day Rick Scumthorpe witnessed Kathryn's water breaking. At this point, all notions of logic, reason and basic human decency went right out of the window.


"ohgodthebabiesarecomingthebabiesarecoming HELP"


"Oh, hell no, you're on your own here."

And then Rick just wandered off and left her there. While more or less pulling a literal trollface.


DITCHING BIRTHING MOTHERS LIKE A BOSS

He then followed up with what has to be the douchiest sim expression ever:


Are you there, Rick? It's your sim god talking: You are an asshole.

Off-camera, a 4-year-old Sprog happily sat around watching this catastrophe and repeatedly pointed and laughed at his mother's plight. My god, could this situation possibly get any more horrendous?

And where the hell's Larry in all of this-


YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS


And so Kathryn was left in the lounge screaming bloody murder and having to simultaneously cope with three full-term foetuses and one full-capacity bladder while Larry and Rick drank themselves into a stupor in the dining room.

Rick apparently felt this was an appropriate time to hone his bartending skills...


...Even though he doesn't have any.

Larry, meanwhile, decided to talk business with an executive from his hideously unethical mining corporation and still totally failed to notice his trophy wife trying to give birth in the next room:


WHAT DO YOU MEAN O.S.H.A COMPLIANCE


DO I LOOK LIKE I CARE IF THERE'S TIBERIUM IN THE WATER SUPPLY

And so after several hours of horrifying, epidural-less and totally unsupervised labour, the current Scumthorpe triplets were finally born in a messy puddle on the floor, after which Kathryn immediately staggered upstairs and mercifully passed out. Sprog had also fallen asleep on the floor by this point, and Rick had broken so many bottles in a futile effort to make cocktails that his grandchildren will probably still be picking up the shards of broken glass.



Around this time, Larry finally noticed the existence of his new children:


WHAT

WHO LEFT ALL THESE BABIES LYING AROUND


GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HOUSE YOU HORRIBLE LITTLE FREELOADERS

And then the cumulative effects of several bottles of scotch all hit him at once and forced him to kneel before the porcelain throne.


Charming.

So what have we learned here today? Well, quite a few things. That QUALITY PARENTING begins at conception. That EA's use of family-friendly euphemisms can sometimes hilariously undermine their efforts to prevent controversial sim behaviour. But most of all, that no matter how badly your pregnant sim's friends and family react to her having a baby, at least you can take comfort in one thing: They're not married to a Scumthorpe.

Well, at least until I figure out how to make them into downloads for everyone who requested them. Then all bets are off.