More Sims news and pictures!
Ransom and Marisa are now both at the top of their
professions.
Ransom Zoom is a Criminal Mastermind, and gets to wear
a really rad costume.
Here he is in the limo on the way to work:
The same day (I think) Marisa was elected to the Hall of Fame
(in whatever mysterious undefined sport Sims athletes play).
But I can't show you what she wears to work in that job,
because she hasn't been to work since her promotion:
Fingers crossed to finally get a boy-child.
(Hm, kinda boring expressions on their faces there, eh?
In motion they're much more animated; the pictures are
just badly timed.)
In the Raptor household, Kaylynn is getting along very
nicely (she came in with her Cooking, Cleaning, and
Creativity skills all maxed out, so she's a real asset);
although she wants to get engaged to Eleanor and that's
unlikely to happen (I'm still planning to have her find
a place of her own soon, so she can do Family things).
And Gina had her birthday party and grew into a
fetching teenager:
I noticed that on the same Settings menu that let me
make these pictures bigger and cleaner, there are also
settings for rendering detail and texture resolution
and stuff.
They were all set quite low (by default, or perhaps because
the game thinks my computer and/or video card are wimp);
I set some of them up higher, and now things look
really breathtakingly breathtaking.
All too easy to vanish into these little worlds
and never come out!
On this Roberts dude,
Reason has
a
readable item that also points to
this
summary of information and pointers to other things
about him.
Lots of useful reading there if you're deciding how loudly
to shout at your Senators or anything.
From the referer log, we find that
the impressive Cosma Shalizi has
linked
to our speculations about alien overlord transplants,
which is highly flattering.
From there I wandered
here
and here,
which led to the hysterical
Theological Engineering Exam 1,
which I may well have linked to before but certainly deserves
it again.
Stan is a frictionless, massless Mormon in a rest state...
(This is one of those pages where it's really hard to
explain to even a very bright eleven-year-old what
it is you're laughing about.)
And somewhere in there we also wandered to
this
entry and thence to
Erasing Landauer's principle,
which is very interesting stuff.
(Think you know that it inevitably costs energy to erase
information? Maybe not!)
Also from the referer log, a mysterious
URL
that might be, like, inside the Google Intranet.
K00l.
(Hm, is it rude for me to post that?
De minimus, I think.)
And the last link from the referer log:
a
hysterical page on another one of those vacuous link-gathering
sites that I still only dimly understand.
(I've used "nofollow" in that link, on the theory that whatever
it is they're doing, it smells fishy.)
Some great deadpan lines, though:
I've tried my best to put together the most comprehensive
outdoor fucking site on the Internet.
Indeed.
Kind of house:
treehouse
ginger bread
bauhaus
out house
doll house
pee-wee's play house
And more extendedly,
Kind of house:
, he said, That's not so much a house as a home.
He led me upstairs and pointed out the fine large
rooms, empty and recently vacated by the former owners,
who we asking quite a reasonable sum for the property.
And up the next flight, he said, motioning me upwards,
Is a most interesting, not to say peculiar layout. I
stumbled on the threshold at the foot of the stairs;
I almost fell forward; it was dark. Are there no windows?
I asked, but there came no answer, save the slamming of the
door behind me and the sound of a key turning in the lock.
For God's sake man! I cried, but all I heard was footsteps
receding down the uncarpeted stairs. I stood, breathing in
a strange sickly sweet smell of rot; then I heard from across
the room a slithering sound, a noise which froze my blood in my
veins.
(Yeek!)
Kind of house:
i would like to live in best would be a palmleaf hut on a
desert island i would have only seaslugs for my food and
only treeshrews for my company and i would write tiny poems
on treebark and float them off into the ocean in search of a
publisher of course a wifi hotspot would be nice but you cant
expect everything
which speaks for itself; and finally
Kind of house:
I often dream of being in wonderful, fantastical houses (or other
buildings). I always expect these dreams to be harbingers of Something
Important, but usually they just put me in a good mood the next day.
Which is, I guess, enough.
I have the best readers...
So various of the commie pinko bleeding-heart political
organizations to which I give money regularly have
started to send me emergency appeals with
screaming subject lines like "Help Us Save The Court!"
and "Defeat Bush's Corporate Lawyer!!" and suchlike.
I don't really get it.
I mean, if they really think they're going to get
Bush to withdraw Roberts' name and nominate someone
less ideological, they're fooling themselves;
unless there's something big that I haven't seen (and
that these hysterical appeals don't mention), the guy
isn't a right wing loonie to speak of, and any money
spent trying to get rid of him is, at
least to the extent that it doesn't in fact get rid of
him, going to be wasted.
(There could of course be something subtler going on
along the lines of showing Bush that he's going to get a
fight even about relatively sane nominees so he should
watch it next time, say.
Or it could just be a cynical attempt to
frighten me into giving them more money.
Organizations in general aren't the most ethical
entities we have.)
A reader writes:
Why do John and Jean have a glowing tennis ball?
That's not actually a glowing tennis ball, that's the
Thinking Cap, an aspiration reward (long story) that
makes Sims learn (and teach) stuff quicker.
Here for instance is Jean, getting a bit discouraged
despite the Thinking Cap, in the process of teaching
her youngest to talk (I think it was):
(I figure I've already got one big wide picture
eating up bandwidth and messing up the layout
in narrow browser windows this week; might
as well have two!)
The Caps eventually wear out, but since my Sims have
such happy and successful lives they can generally
afford to replace them immediately.
Inevitable in retrospect:
the Wikipedia
entry on The Strangerhood.
Talks a bit about the complex stuff that goes on
behind the scenes of the moviemaking.
And speaking of Sims 2 movies, see
the
winners of AE's Sims 2 Student Life Contest (in
collaboration with the USC School of Cinema-Television, of
all things).
Worth watching if you've got a nice fast connection.
(See also two
previous
contests
that I haven't looked at myself yet, and
the Contests page
in general.)
Podcasting update:
I pointed the podcasting-client part of iTunes at
the rss feed, and Lo it worked;
iTunes downloaded the "episode" and played it for me.
Hee hee!
I think I've now properly encoded the enclosures in
the Atom feed as well (but
I haven't tested that yet).
For today's episode
*8)
I've selected
a
random mp3 of Janis Ian talking about her music
(love Janis Ian) from
her downloads page.
(What, I'm supposed to host these 'podcasts' on my own server?
These things can get big!)
We went out and saw "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory"
at the IMAX (not "iMax") theater.
It was a hoot!
Johnny Depp did a maximally-creepy job, giving us
(as Steve
who used to have a weblog pointed out) basically
Willy Wonka as played by Michael Jackson.
And the squirrels and the factory and the kids
and all were pretty good.
But omg, the Oompa-Loompas!
Whoever thought that up (and thought of Deep
Roy in particular) is a flippin' genius.
We went to Barnes and Noble afterward and bought
the sountrack; the Oompa-Loompa songs don't have
nearly the same impact without the dance moves, though.
Here's
an
article about the Oompas and the squirrels.
Just for fun I'm fiddling with
"podcasting".
The RSS feeds for this entry (probably) contain an "enclosure"
tag, which might fool at least some podcast clients into thinking
that it's a podcast in some sense.
Heh heh heh.
If you use a podcasting client, point it at one of the
rss
feeds
(I haven't figured out how to podcast via Atom yet), and
see if it does anything...
On my wondering
the other day
why my Sims 2 snapshots seemed
so much smaller and lower-quality than some other people's,
I've found the answer!
It's a secret cheat-code subtly hidden within the game:
there's a "settings menu" that you get to by clicking with
the mouse on a certain symbol on the screen, and when you're
on this "settings menu", there are little "radio buttons"
(a special kind of icon-thing), and the ones craftily
marked "Snapshot Size" and "Snapshot Quality" (or something
misleading like that) turn out to control the snapshot
size and snapshot quality.
Who would've thought, eh?
(Thanks to the author of the very impressive
Arenia
Sims 2 weblog for answering my email on the subject
without making fun of my powers of observation at all.)
So now I can take bigger and clearer pictures of my
characters doing amusing things, like this one of
Jane being disgusted by her parents (John and Jean)
making out in the next room:
Isn't that cute?
(I probably won't post them in the log at this size very
often, but it's nice to have them like that as a starting
point for later cropping and compression and so on.)
Note the rather amazing detail: Jane was in the middle of
making omlettes when she stopped to be horrified, and on
the counter there behind her you can see the bowl with
the eggs and so on floating in it.
All sorts of developments in my Sims 2 neighborhood.
John Danvers did indeed escape Sally Raptor's charms,
but wasn't so lucky with her daughter; shortly after
Eleanor became an adult, she phoned up John, invited
him over, seduced him (in her Mom's bed and
in the hot-tub out on the lawn), and then started
chatting up his pregnant wife Jean (who fortunately
didn't stroll by any earlier than she did).
She then said good-bye to them and started romancing
the maid Kaylynn, who has now moved into the
Raptor's house (and Eleanor's bed);
just until she finds a place of her own.
(She's Family aspiration, and probably wouldn't
be very happy in the Raptor lust nest long-term.)
The Danvers' had their second child, and it was another
girl (Joan).
So now I'm five out of five for female children.
Jane Danvers and Georgia Bendett are going steady;
since Jane is Family Aspiration (like her Dad),
and Georgia is Fortune (like both of her folks),
I figure they'll make a good couple if the
attraction carries over into adulthood.
I do sort of wish that there was some Home Gene Splicer and
Artificial Insemination Lab that would let the girls have
a child with both their genes (I'm sure the fan community
has written one, probably the painfully-named
Insimenator,
but I'm nervous about fan-written ad-ons).
But I shouldn't be afraid of adoption!
Isn't all that silly?
Speaking of silly, the folks who do the extremely popular
"Red vs Blue" series of Halo-based animations are now
doing (or perhaps did in the past; I'm a year or two
behind on all this) a series based on The Sims 2:
the Strangerhood.
Some pretty funny (if silly) stuff.
I wrote
up another book.
I found a
delightful
picture
(and a variant).
Study
shows that 1/3 of studies are inaccurate!
