After binge watching "Hey Arnold" on Hulu, I discovered that I wish the sims had more social activities for kids like in that show; They had bike-a-thon races, mud slides, baseball fields. Don't get me wrong, I love the things kids can do on the sims, but I usually like to start my main character as a child and having them do fun things like they did on Hey Arnold would make the experience amazing!

This!! Same thing happened to me and I thought it was the same thing too!

Remember the base game was supposed to come with clothing stores? Well, today I found remnants of the code:

Clothing Store part-time job:

Clothing Store rabbit hole type:

How interesting! I know EA left all sorts of remnants of things all over the code, but I would've thought the Clothing Store code would've been at the very least repurposed. It must've been a very late exclusion.

It was a failry late exclusion since the clothing store can be seen in promotional material as late as Nov 2008, and the game was supposed to come out on February 20, 2009.


The mesh was modified and used for the spa, which according to the rabbit hole list was the last rabbit hole added before release:

I found out that sims who are not vampires can "examine" the special vampire bed and they have some pretty amusing things to say. It seems like these are the only reactions though.

I was surprised to see that when my bird died he was actually at the bottom of the cage and not just magically disappeared like all the other small pets. I'm trying to do thing I usually don't bother with and playing with pets is on that list.

Not a real discovery but I'm watching Pleasantsims' TS3 recreation of Pleasantview series and it reminded me that the "Give birth in hospital" sequence is almost always weird in some way. You get mothers riding a bike, people who are suposed to drive the mother, driving right past her while the mother walks to the hospital, absent fathers all of a sudden showing up at the hospital. It's almost always a little odd and funny.

This morning I actually discovered that the "Like Swimming" trait does not actually affect pet autonomy during mod testing in one of my specific neighborhood saves! While playing I noticed that despite having said trait, while my test dog would always get the want to go swimming in the pool, he would never jump in the pool out of his own free will. I actually decided to look up the trait today in preparation for restarting my observations on the pet autonomy in The Sims 3, and sure enough, the "Likes Swimming" trait does not affect autonomy! It simply affects their wants, and judging by the code for this such trait, it also affects how they enter the pool.

Which is weird, honestly. All pet traits in The Sims 3 affect autonomy, but not this one for some reason? Even the "Hydrophobic" trait affects the actual behavior of the dog; they will never choose to swim, they will actively resist being forced to swim, and if worse comes to pass they will get a negative moodlet if somehow forced into the body of water. Again, the "Likes Swimming" trait only affects wants.

I genuinely wonder why this is. So far, it seems like a trait that has been accidentally left unfinished, but then again this is EA.

That pic made me think about how much I wish there was a smaller cage size for birds in particular. The terrariums and all are pretty realistically sized, but they take up so much room so you kind of have to place them before anything else and design around it.

Pets take subways! I'm testing a few new mods in Simmington, which is small and has a lot of subways that sims actually take in a semi-rational way. However, the dog takes them too. I can't find a setting in NRAAS traffic or Go Here that would prevent that.

Pets can also take elevators on their own, which is awesome if they live in a highrise dwelling. Was never sure if it was explained how they could reach the buttons, so there must either be floor-level versions for them to push or the elevators are voice (woof and meow) activated.

As for subways, given the way I see humans behave on them whenever I leave my immediate neighborhood IRL, I would have to say that animals would be a welcome addition. They couldn't possibly behave any worse.

I got a pretty big chuckle yesterday while I was playing. Clicked on the mailbox and one of the donate options was "Donate to Insurance Companies".

LOL...How much did your sim donate and which moodlet did they get?

Zilch... because my poor Sim is struggling to keep his house as it is! Who says art doesn't imitate life? Should I be expecting any forceful knocks at the door anytime soon?

Cue the "Stressed" moodlet any moment now.

I think MAYBE the devs were trying to hint that celebrity gossip is unfair and harsh ... but maybe not, I don't know.

I made an interesting discovery about CCMagic today, although (on past form) it may be that I am the last person to have spotted it.

I use CCMagic to install most of my cc, and I have quite a lot of it in there. One problem with it is that it doesn't always show a thumbnail of every item installed, which can make it difficult to find what you're looking for.

Among the items that didn't display thumbnails were some converted TSM chairs I download. They were fixed versions of some others I had which didn't work. They looked very nice, but sims couldn't sit in them properly: they would slide backwards so that their bums were hanging in mid air and their feet were clipping through the seat. The new ones were fixed for PETS, so I thought I'd give them a try, and hallelujah, they worked! But the patterns were different, so before uninstalling the faulty ones I saved the patterns from them and re- CASt the new ones so they looked the same. Then, back into CCMagic to delete the old ones, and surprise, surprise! there were my four new chairs, each displaying a nice thumbnail with the pattern I had just given them.

Intrigued, I tried the same thing with a number of other items that lacked thumbnails, and it worked each time. It works with CAS items too.

That is news to me, @Elynda, thank you for sharing!

I may have to see if that works because yeah not having the thumbnails kind of stinks.

I had forgotten that if you drop a food synthetizer at a base camp from Adventures, by default Register will assign a waiter. So now between that, the professional bar, and some extensive remodeling, the base in France has turned into something more like the TS2 hotels. Which frankly I liked a lot.

Just felt like sharing the idea, in case someone else is missing the TS2 hotels too.

I discovered that I need to be a werewolf and in werewolf form to growl at pets.

Funny. I never had that problem IRL. Hell, my terrifying howl once got my brother's puppy to look like every paw was trying to run away in a different direction. And then there was this trip on the mountain where, well, let's just say I just wanted to test the echo... and then a nearby shepherd's dogs decided to join in the howling. And *ahem* mom almost jumped off the mountain.

Hmm... then again, I AM pretty hairy... and I have these recurring vivid ultra-realistic dreams of running on all fours under a full moon... Nah, probably doesn't mean anything. Everyone has weird dreams, right?

Today I discovered that the Snake charming basket (WA) can give more than two options when I click on it...

Wait, it that "charm snake into clothing" as in putting a little hat and jacket on the snake or "charm snake into clothing" as in it crawls into your shirt? I know there are people that let their well trained snakes hang out on them (on their necks and the like) but the snakes in the baskets are cobras. That seems a wee bit dangerous.

Today I learned:
I took out the desk facing the the door in the Moonlight Falls library (which is supposed to look like a librarian's desk) and replaced it with four of the modular seating from Late Night because there is a lack of places to sit and the desk isn't really needed. I looked over and there were five sims sitting on the four seating sections. Apparently it isn't one sim for each section if you get enough of the sections together. I hadn't seen that before and will have to keep it in mind for large families.

Now I want to see the cobra in a little hat and jacket.....