For some reason, Malcolm Landgraab keeps rolling fears about his various girlfriends becoming witches. Kind of random, lol.

Lack of windows makes anything 100 times harder to build. How on earth am I supposed to fill 1440 tiles of floor space in a floor that doesn't have a single window? It's the 4th (and thankfully final) floor of what is meant to be a main university building already equipped with a bar, a library and a conference room. I could do offices but the lack of windows is hurting my brain.

Why can't you have windows?

It's part of the shell. The other 3 floors didn't have many windows but had enough interesting architectural details to make them easier - that and me knowing exactly what I wanted to do with each area before I started building. The last floor is just a windowless square.

Man has a type

Clearly it needs to be something where a lack of natural light, or precise control over lighting, is an advantage. Could it house labs, darkrooms, a nightclub, a theatre, an archive, or a cinema for showing arthouse or educational films?

Or one option might be to delete the floor and put in some two-storey lights for the floor below?

Those are some interesting ideas, especially the archive given this will be the main building of the university.

Labs I will leave to their dedicated building - I plan on having a building for each major, so I can tailor the labs to their specific needs. Or, more likely, a group of a few similar majors: physics and maths in the School of Science, possibly biology too (though I might separate them into a dedicated School of "Medicine"); psychology for the School of Psychology; economics and political science in the School of Economy; art in the School of Fine Arts; philosophy, literature, drama and history in the School of Letters. Of course, this might result in an amazing rendition of the School of Science given my own experience and a very poor execution of something like the School of Fine Arts, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Especially for an archive building you can also definitely get away with a larger and emptier attic space that's not exactly 'private' but not a very useful part of the building, and would work fine even if it's mostly still empty. My favorite version of this that I've done is the top two floors of my police station, where there's a couple utilities and storage areas, but for a university you could also have a little hangout space with crappy couches and a TV that a couple frat brothers dragged up there or something lol

Loki Beaker was alien pregnant and although I thought I had checked the pregnancy scanner and saw that he was having one baby, he had twins. He had two cutscenes too, which I don't think is right--at least, I can't remember having two cutscenes for twins before. Two girls. I had to think quick because I really was expecting only one, and I named them Hella and Angel. When they aged up to toddlers, I saw I had guessed right! Hella has no nice points, and Angel has nine nice points! Although it would have been funny too, if I had gotten it backward and they were misnamed.

Second set of alien twins born to a Sim who isn't far off from being an elder. Pascal had the first set.

Honestly, in this case I would've swapped their names for the giggles.

I think some mods have higher chance of twins if a sim is close to elderhood. In real life, a woman who is closer to menopause is more likely to release multiple eggs at once, apparently.

I wouldn't be surprised if I had a mod affecting that because I have lost track of all my mods by this point.

My doctor used to warn me that the candle burns brightest just before it goes out.

I read them as Hells Angels. XD

Last year at this time I was binging Sims 2 for the exact reason only my goal was to finish a house. I was going with my parents to our vacation home and my mom suggested to bring the laptop. I was too embarrassed propose that to not seem like I was addicted to devices but I gladly accepted.

I have absolutely no idea of when I wrote that post since I got back to the game recently after more than two years.


I still have that old ROS rolled in 2020 for my main hood to play. I'm still debating though.

Maybe they can aspire to that--after all, they are Beakers. Just need to find some motorcycle CC.

The trouble with rooms without windows is that they make you and your Sims 100% dependent on artificial lighting. In building for my Sims, I always try to provide at least one window in every room, including bathrooms and, where possible, passageways and stairways too. However, unless you have a lighting mod (and I haven't!) so much ambient light seems to permeate Sims buildings, that it is possible to play for ages without noticing that there is no artificial lighting in the building. In the last couple of weeks I played young Colin Gillies and his gay teenage friends Toni Forth and Tommie Clyde (all boys) for three full Sim days before I noticed that their Maxis house (actually two houses making one residential property) had absolute no electric lights in it. Now I know these Veronaville houses considerably pre-date the electric light bulb, but surely previous generations of Veronavillians must have had candles, oil lamps, and latterly, maybe even gaslighting. Now the boys have rectified this, and installed basic, but adequate electric lighting throughout their property, but it has set them back some 1,500 Simoleons! However three Sim days is really nothing. I played Andrew and Gloria at 19 Chorus Court for months without noticing they had no lighting at night. It was only when Andrew threw a big party to celebrate maximising his logic score that we began to notice how dark and dingy their house was after nightfall. You might have thought that, with all that intelligence, Andrew might have spotted something amiss. Andrew says, "Don't try to be smart with me!" He's right of course; I shouldn't try to blame him for my own shortcomings!


By now some of you must be starting to wonder what's become of me. I haven't been around the forum nearly as much as usual -- in fact I only posted twice in the whole of June. Well, I have been more concerned with some Real Life things, but that was not all that boring. I have been coming out as gay (albeit celibate) to a few more people I know, and buying some clothes, and making some costume jewellery to wear for Pride, which I took part in for the first time. Of course it's not unrelated to The Sims. My Sims, especially Andrew, have really played the major part in me coming to accept myself as gay.

At the same time I was still Simming a little. You may recall I had a bad fall at the end of February, and broke one of my vertebrae, causing me a lot of pain for a while. Around that time I was adding a lot of new CAS Sims to Veronaville. Some of these became townies, but quite a few remained as playables. Some that I originally intended to be townies, actually became playable just because I liked them so much. What I didn't do properly was record what happened in each family in the game's Storytelling feature. I generally took plenty of in-game (Control-C) pictures, but I didn't write the captions for them. This is important, because it's my main way of keeping track of what's happening in each household, when I come back to play them 2-3 years later. Without it I'm lost, or as good as. . .

. . . So what little Simming I've been doing has largely consisted of opening recently played households, and trying to add text to all the pictures I'd taken using the pictures themselves, my Sims' memories, and my own memory. It can be a slow and laborious process, which may be one reason for my lack of posts here. I think I'm now just about up to date in Veronaville, so I hope I'm about to start playing properly again. In catching up with Sims whose story I hadn't recorded properly, I've now reached the Romanovs, added in May 2022, and only played for two Sim days then. In the last couple of days I've caught up with the Romanovs' story-telling, so I'm about ready start playing them going forward. As some of you may remember, Her Esteemed Grace Juliette Capp, Grand Duchess of Veronaville has granted the Romanovs, the Russian Imperial Family as shared by Mischief Managed sanctuary in Veronaville. In real life they were brutally murdered (executed if you prefer the official Soviet version) in Yekaterinburg in 1918, but in my game Juliette Capp has given them the welcome that (IMAO) the British Royal Family ought to have given them at the time. Of course there is the minor detail of them moving from early 20th century Imperial Russia to 21st century Veronaville, giving a bit of a Rip van Winkel effect, but what's a hundred years between Sims? Possibly even harder for them than technological change is the fact that the social and sexual mores of modern Veronaville, are very different from the rather straight-laced ways of 1900-1917 Imperial Russia. It really is a culture shock for the Romanov family. It will be interesting to see which of them are the first to start to adopt modern dress. My suspicions are it may be Anastasia, the youngest of the Romanov daughters, who already has a Veronavillian boyfriend and a Romance aspiration. Alexei, the youngest of the Romanovs, and the intended tsarevitch, is also trying to make sense of modern life in Veronaville. Although I haven't been playing the Romanov family recently, they do (as is the way with TS2 Sims) keep turning up when I'm playing other families. Alexei has shown up a few times recently at PaintBoyz, downtown Veronaville's rather notorious nightclub for gay teenage boys. Alexei seems both fascinated by, and a bit scared of, what he's seen of Veronaville's gay scene. Colin Gillies and Tommie Clyde, a couple of boys who live in the Via Veronaville (mentioned earlier in this post), have been trying to befriend him recently, and he has been seen a few times at their dining table, looking a bit incongruous in his army dress uniform. I think it's only friendship they're offering; I don't think they're trying to seduce him. But Alexei is wary; he seldom stays long after the meal.

Anyway it seems to have come round to my turn to play the Romanovs. We'll see how things go.

Lovely to hear from you! We did wonder how things were going with you. Nice to get an update on your sim households as well.

I hope your first Pride was one to remember! Have you seen the photo of the old man hugging the queer flag in Portugal? He'd been waving the Portuguese flag as the parade went by, which made people nervous because there's a nationalist party there that's very anti-queer, but when somebody stopped and asked him he said he didn't have the right kind of flag but wanted to wave something, so the person who asked traded him their flag for his and he folded it in his arms up against his chest and bent his head over it with his eyes squeezed shut, just crying for joy. I hope something similarly good happened for you!

In the Bigg City attached to my Widespot, Candy Hart has finally saved up enough money from selling romance novels to buy her own house! It'll be a bit of a fixer-upper, and she'll be there alone soon since her son Arden is only five days (four, really, I send them the day before they grow up to be sure I never lose track of time) away from going to college; but it's really awkward dating around the landlord, who adores her. She doesn't want to hurt him and I don't want to deal with the repercussions of the landlord finding out he's being "cheated" on.

Glad to hear from you @AndrewGloria !

This is why I like the lighting mods, they really do make the game look more like it did in the beta photos, where everything looked so much cosier somehow.



Wow, that's wonderful- hope you had a great time at the pride events.


This is always the problem! I love to make two sims with quite disparate faces in CAS and make offspring with them, playing with the generator is such fun to see the combination of faces you can get from two sims. I always want to keep them all!

I'm also a natural light and ambient light girlie in real life and in the sims. I used to not care and only placed white ceeling lights and now you can't catch me using ceeling lights, they're only for deco and for dining room tables. In Sims 3 I was even more specific and made almost all lights warm white or yellow depending on the vibe of the room. I also tweeked with intensitiy. I swear I accidently changed intensity in Sims 2 by pressing some key but there's no info on google. I hopped on to that led light trend (around Covid lockdown) and made my teen's bedroom lights dark purple.