He could repair something with no mechanical skill points. The moment when he gets electrocuted, he could be placed next to the Biotech Station (using move_objects on).
Then it's would be as if he was attempting to repair the Biotech Station.

In the background, someone could be cooking and start a fire. Batbox could be used to make Buy mode available again. Then the fire (which can also be moved with move_objects on) could be placed under the Biotech Station.
Then, it would look like as if Dr. Adam had started the fire.

And yes, this needs to be done with later EPs. I could do that if it sounds too complicated.

ETA: I've taken that picture. I hope it's OK.

Yes! That's perfect! Thanks for doing all this work that you could quite justifiably demand the people who made the families do. Next time I donate a family to one of these projects I'll try to supply some pictures for it at the same time.

No, no, it was fun to get to that scene and take a picture of that scene.
So I don't consider it as "hard work".

I actually like doing the Storytelling pictures, it's just I don't have time for sims projects anymore, or only at weekends

Even fun things become chores if you don't have time for them and are the only one doing them! Don't be afraid to delegate.

Oops, sorry I haven't checked back here for a while!

I'm totally happy for my sim to have a sibling If it makes sense, you can also change his surname. I'm not amazingly attached to "Crawford" if one matching his brother makes more sense.

I think I've missed a lot of the thread and it's hard to catch up. What is happening with Storytelling pictures? Are we meant to provide them for our families? Or an idea of backstory so someone else can make them? I no longer have AGS because I got windows 10 and the discs stopped working, I have UC now. (I guess that doesn't matter for picture purposes, though.)

I'm happy to make pictures but I am also not very good at staging scenes! I tend to be more of a "capture what's happening" kind of player than setting things up and I don't want to put a lot of pose boxes and animation trigger things into my game, I don't really know how to use them.

Well, you don't have to stage scences. You can also take regular photos, too!
I'd be grateful if you did so. I'm really busy these days so it'd take me a while to take all the pictures, so yes, I appreciate all the help I get with Storytelling.

OK. I will have a download of the hood later, open a vanilla game, and have a play! Just to clarify, should I be isolating my families from the rest of the hood and taking pictures ONLY with them, or is it OK if for example, I take them to a community lot and other members of the hood are there? I'd make a few options, in case some other character is doing something really wrong that I didn't realise.

You can take pictures on community lots! I've also taken some pictures on community lots where some sims from other households can be seen in the background.

Some scenes would benefit from having another character present. I wanted Esmerelda in the background of the shot of Claire, Maddy, and Ronda at the police station, but she wouldn't come on and the teleporter picture isn't enabled for community lots.

Yeah, sorry for my absence! High School kept me busy. I've already written my first exam in high school... and it's like I don't belong here! Everyone seems so... smart! I feel stupid among them. :/

Anyway, I've taken some Storytelling pictures. I hope they're OK.
@simsfreq I could also add your pictures to the Bachelors family album. Just upload them and I'll take care of them

I promise you, you are not stupid! Don't compare yourself to other people - you have no idea what's going on in their heads, and some of them are looking at you and thinking how much smarter or prettier or more organized or something than they are. It comes with the territory.

I've known more than one smart person whose learning style was so incompatible with the teaching styles to which they were subjected, that they had no idea how smart they were till they got out of school.

Poor Seamus!

Well, maybe you're right. Maybe I just make everything more difficult than it is actually.
Thank you for the helpful advice! You're really encouraging.

I try.

I'm gonna go way off topic and rant a little bit here. I've met far more people than I've ever wanted to in the last 55 years, and I don't think I've met a single one that was any stupider than me, in any meaningful sense. People perceive me as smart because I'm articulate and creative (and until recently had a good memory); but I often feel stupid because I am practically innumerate - I can't remember numbers or do even simple calculations reliably. In terms of raw processing power, my sister the summa is demonstrably smarter than me; and so is my brother the high school drop-out, who taught himself trig.

But I've also known people with low IQs and/or severe learning disabilities, who would seem to be stupid by definition, who were stupid in intelligent ways. I'm not talking about savants here; I'm talking about ordinary "retarded" (as we used to say before the misuse of words to stigmatize caught up with the usage) people. They knew how to negotiate the world they lived in and the people they lived among better than a lot of people with "normal" IQs and learning styles could and had worked out strategies to minimize inconvenience from their inability to think in certain ways. Among people perceived by society as normal, I had an office manager once who thought of herself, and was often thought of as, stupid because her speech was practically word salad. Without context she was completely incomprehensible. But any new equipment or software we got in, she had it figured out in an afternoon no matter how useless the manual was. (And the manual, though presumably always written by intelligent people who understood the equipment or software, was always useless. I have never once tried to read a computer manual that was any good at all for the average user.) She ran that office superbly, always knew exactly what was going on and how to get everything done. I think, from her reaction when I did it, I was the first person who ever told her she was smart, and that is a goddamn shame.

And you won't have to think hard to find examples of smart people who do stupid things. Or people who are brilliant in one area and dumb in the next. Or people who accuse themselves of stupidity over perfectly natural mistakes that don't look like a big deal to anybody else. Or people who coast through school and have genius IQs, who never accomplish a single worthwhile thing in the world. Impatient, lazy brilliance will always fall short when compared to patient, hard-working dullness. I have no reason to think you either stupid or dull; but anyone here can see that you're patient and hard-working.

There is a devil who sits on our shoulders, trying to block us from happiness and accomplishment. I warn younger writers all the time about it - the voice in the back of your brain telling you that the story sucks, that the idea is terrible, that the writing is miserably inept, that no one will want to read it, that it is the height of hubris to think that they can ever produce anything worth reading. I think that same devil is sitting on your shoulder at school, only instead of talking about writing it's talking about school work. And I think you should do with it what I tell younger writers to do with their critic devils - build a closet in their head, shove it inside, lock the door, and tell it to STFU. Focus on the work and you'll do fine. If there's something you're not getting, find a tutor; if a tutor doesn't work, find some other way around it. I've lived around the numbers thing my entire life. I even made top grades in algebra one year, because instead of trying to memorize the damn formulas (which I couldn't do) during that one year I had time during the test to look at each problem, review the principles behind the formulae, and recreate the damn things from scratch. Otherwise, I knew going in that my grade was going to be the lowest on my report card apart from whatever physical education hell I was being put through, and that there was nothing to be done about that.

Grades don't measure anything real anyway. They represent what you convince the teacher you've learned of what she intended to teach you. That's it. What she intended to teach you may not be relevant to your life in any way, shape, or form, and you may have learned all kinds of other useful things that weren't intended or aren't recognized. A certain number of people in the same class will learn less than you, and get better grades than you, because they're better at conning the teacher.

All you can do is the best you can do. And that's going to be good enough.

Peni, you're awesome! Thank you! Thank you! THANK YOU!
I'm glad to have a wise and supportive person who gives me such helpful information.

I was a little insecure about the new school and class but now no more. I'll try to do the best I can do.

ETA: I've also taken pictures for the Goth household. And yes, there's a Goth household in Emerald Heights, too! The household consists of one sim - Jhonattan Goth. Basically he is Mortimer Goth's (secret) cousin.

@Jawusa Its not Simon but Victor Goth because Simon is Agnes father in Pleasantview.

That is if you are using the Pleasantview sims.

Of course it's Victor. Simon is her dad! I must have been sleeping when I wrote the descriptions.

Hey @Jawusa When are you planning on fully releasing the hood? Do you have a goal month?

Yes, but I don't know when it will be. At the moment, I'm busy with school, so I don't have much time to work on this neighborhood.
But once it's finished, I'll upload the final version for testing.

OK. Only the Steeles need Storytelling pictures now.

I'm out of ideas, so that's why it takes so long. If someone has got a brilliant idea, please let me know. Thanks.

The Montes-King family should be fairly easy to generate ideas for, though some of the pics would need a lot of staging. You've got two families to establish, break, and combine into one. If you didn't use the pic of Holly and Maribel falling in love for the Wood family album you could use that, or I think I may have some others - I took a lot more pictures than I've passed on. I've attached a picture I took at some point of the Montes-King girls in their attic, but it isn't a very clear storytelling pic I'm afraid.

For Shonda Watson, it could show something from her past when she was with her ex-partner, and had her kid. Then, we'd show the break up (we could show them having an argument).

And eventually, we could see how she slowly worked her way into/up in politics and, according to the household bio, 'fighting for women's reproductive rights'. Perhaps having her protest in front of a governmental building (the city hall lot?) with a group of other people would be fitting for her storyline. It would be nice to see people from other households protest with her, not just random townies. However, not just anyone, but people we can sense that they're for the argument, for it all to make sense.

The Mayor (and Adam Patch since Shonda was shown in his household bio too) could be involved also, whether he's with or against her in that regard.

Perhaps something like that...

I just checked this thread for the first time in a while!

I'm sorry that I haven't helped at all with the storytelling pictures. I will do the Steele family pictures, since they are my creation and I didn't take the pictures for the Wentworths or Raffertys.

For the Steeles, I'm thinking I'll have Lianne and Rob meeting as teens (while both trying to rob the same place), them with a young Cole and baby Magnolia, them performing a heist as adults, a picture of Cole looking really miserable while working in his teen criminal job, and one of Magnolia terrorizing some of the other neighborhood kids (any suggestions- if none are given I'll randomly grab some kids from the neighborhood, but it would make sense if she had a negative relationship with the kids she's shown terrorizing). I could include a picture of Rob and Caesar Rafferty shaking hands too. Let me know if you guys think they need anything else.

It's OK! There's no need to apologize. We're all busy with something.

I'm glad you're going to take the pictures for the Steeles. Thank you!


I think that would be OK. You can randomly select some kids. I'll add the negative relationships later.

Edit: I've taken the pictures for the DeShong family. Let me know if they're OK.
Also, I've found an issue in MMAA's "Your Way Boutique"; the changing booths cannot be used. We'll need to fix that.

Edit: The pictures for the Watson family and for the Wentworth family are done as well. I hope they're OK.

Phew! Almost there. Now only one household needs Storytelling pictures - The Steeles. But @Jojoa777 wanted to take the pictures for them, so I'll leave that household to her.
I hope the pictures are OK. I've also used Peni Griffin's picture (see post #743) for the King-Montes family album.

Wow, you've worked hard! Sooo close now...who's working on the upload thread?