For some reason TumaSims has deleted her TS2 Random Thoughts thread. It was too good a thread to be without, so here's a new one. I promise I won't delete it!

The purpose of this thread is for any random thoughts you may have about The Sims 2, that don't justify a thread of their own. It's similar to the Stupid/Random Questions thread, but for thoughts that don't require an answer. You can of course respond to anything interesting that another user posts here.

[EDIT 4th March 2016] The original thread TS2 Random Thoughts has now been reinstated as a locked thread, so you can read all the old posts in it.
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I'll start it off by trying to continue a discussion that Charity, joandsarah77, myself and some other members were having in the old thread about Sims greeting each other with a kiss. Both Cyjon and gummilutt have written mods to stop Sims kissing inappropriately. When I think about it though, I don't think I've ever seen Sims use a kiss as a greeting unless they were in a romantic relationship. So I got to wonder if it only became a problem with an EP.

So I did a little experiment. Andrew Jones is best friends with Jack Gill. Both are gay teens. Andrew (Knowledge) is in a long term monogamous relationship with Julian Moltke. They've been going steady for nearly 3 years now. Jack (Romance) is in relationships with about half a dozen boys. Andrew and Jack have in the past had romantic wants for each other, but they both resisted the temptation. Andrew really values his relationship with Julian, and Jack respects that. So I got Jack to invite Andrew round for a chat to see how they greeted each other. They had one bolt, so there was some "chemistry" between them. Their relationship was very good -- about 96/96

Well, Jack greeted Andrew with a friendly hug, which I think is fine between good friends who aren't interested in each other romantically. But... when they hugged, the bolt disappeared! It didn't come back even when I got Jack to give Andrew two more friendly hugs and admire him. Andrew accepted all these interactions and their short term relationship quickly went to 100 both ways. But the bolt didn't come back. Then they both went round to the back of the house, and got into the hot tub (which is actually a love tub with the candles long since burnt down). I left them there to deal with Ravi who was "entertaining" Gordon Cornton in the house. Eventually Gordon went out and joined Andrew and Jack in the hot tub, leaving Ravi playing with his radio-controlled toy car in the house. Jack and Andrew were chatting and splashing each other in the hot tub. I'm sure they weren't doing anything actually romantic but somehow the one bolt had come back. Sometimes I just don't get this whole "chemistry" thing! Andrew left of his volition at about 2 a.m. because it was so late, so I didn't get to see how they would say goodbye.

Anyway I still haven't seen any inappropriate kissing as a greeting in my game, and I still wonder if it's EP related.

I would have been interested to see how they did say goodbye, as that's been when they're more likely to kiss in my experience. On the other hand, part of me was saying nooo, don't screw up your relationship just to test something for us, Andrew. :O

Kisses of greeting and farewell aren't perceived by the game as romantic, so they're no danger to the relationship. I never noticed it happening till after I added M&G, when I also started getting a lot more autonomous flirting between unattached sims.

When bolts come and go it's generally down to a turn-on/turn-off that is conditional. When Rhett Hart and General Fizz Grunt meet, they have no bolts; when she puts on a swimsuit, they have one bolt, because that's one of Rhett's turn-ons.

The hello and good-bye kisses have never bothered me (and I am quite sure my Sims are not bothered by them, they seem quite happy to kiss or be kissed ) -
As for turn-ons and turn-offs - I try to go for long-term ones that will suit most of my Sims. Since they all learn to cook at some time, cooking is often chosen.
Cleaning sometimes gets chosen when I have a lot of single neat freaks - and it works.
I also go for beards, because I kind of like them myself (so, yes, all my male Sims walk around with facial hair ).
That is why I do not use formal, swim- or underwear as turn-ons or turn-offs - because the bolts come and go. And I want the bolts to stay

Too bad about the thread being deleted. Had some good laughs over people's thoughts.

Random thought of the day ...

... I really need some male body hair and facial hair. *Goes to the WCIF forumn*

Will be back with more random thoughts. *Peace*

Yes Peni, that explains it. Andrew and Jack are both turned on by swimwear. Andrew of course arrived in his everyday clothes. Jack had been working out with the TV, so he was in his gym clothes. So they lost their bolt when they greeted each other. And when they changed into swimwear to get into the hot tub, it came back. It's a relief to know that they didn't have a furtive cuddle (or grope!) when I wasn't looking! It might also explain a real oddity on my game, when I've had two Sims with 3 bolts, but it's dropped to 2 when they've started flirting!

I appreciate your concern for Andrew's relationship, Charity. That relationship is pretty important to Andrew, to Julian, and to me! So it's a relief for me to know that the game won't see it as romantic if they do kiss when they say goodbye. So I think I will play Jack's lot for another day, ask Andrew round again and see what happens when they part. All the same, if there's any chance at all of Jack starting to French-kiss Andrew, I'd rather that Julian isn't there to see it.

This is a random thought I have every day. I love this game! With all its quirks and hiccups, it's as close to perfect as we are ever likely to see. And thanks to all the great creators who allow us to make it even more perfect in our own individual eyes.

OK, I'm finished, or nearly so, with several of the projects that've been taking up a lot of my design time, so I've decided I'll make another pass at making a decent bar.

First step? Go to my RL kitchen and get a double bourbon! (apparently I'm a method designer today...)

I could really do with a neat Sim in my kitchen right now. And a double bourbon
And a new bar for my military Sims!

I have a Pleasantview in danger of being 'flooded out' by 'climate change'. Well, obviously poor sims are stuck til the end, get evacuated by the government, stuck in shoddy housing--but they have nothing much to loose by leaving when they see the news. But would they? Wealthy sims of course have ages of family history they're loathe to abandon, and nice homes . . . but they have the resources to leave early and comfortably. But would they abandon the family graveyard and go? (Of course, I'll handle graves properly.) So maybe middle class sims would be the first to flee. But it's not a sudden disaster, and actually, they will take the biggest whammy to their standard of living, leaving their nice homes for whatever, not much, they can find available.
Well, I'm going to go ponder that while running Clean Installer through all the Katrina Cottages by Phaenoh. What makes people see what's coming down the pike and react appropriately, what makes others wait until the last moment, and which sims are which? (The Pleasantviewies are a particularly traumatized bunch, actually, a lot of them have to leave their homes with all their memories of a lost beloved.)

I have that same thought too nearly every time I boot up the game. Another frequent thought is, how long will we all be here? If TS2 can still be run on computers in 2020, 2025, etc, what changes (if any) will we see in the community? My thinking is that as long as another life simulation game as good as TS2 hasn't arisen, people (or at least I) will always flock back. I hope that's the case anyway.

I don't think I've ever taken a break from playing due to boredom. It's always been because of technical issues and such. For me the game is too diverse, unique and hard worked on to ever get bored with.

Well, I am not bored and I have been playing for 10 years now, so let us see if we can do 10 more

Agreed Petro

Hmm, another random thought. I was just watching a doco about a ghost town and thought, has anyone made a hood based on one? Just to clarify, they are different from apocalypse hoods. They are towns that were once abundant but gradually residents moved out for whatever reason, bar a handful or even one person that stayed. There's quite a few in Australia that happened mostly because the local mine was exhausted.

Could be interesting to make a hood on them. Lots of buildings but only a few sims. Could even make it a tourist location for daring sim teens that vowed to their mates they're not afraid of ghosts.

It would need an abandoned mine, which would be tricky but not impossible to make. That's where ghost towns mostly come from in America, too - the mine makes a boom, the place is flooded with prospectors and the people who fleece them, the vein plays out, and there's nothing else to base an economy on, so everybody runs off to the next big strike. Decades or a century later, the houses attract tourists, hippies, survivalists, and the occasional criminal, all of whom make use of the abandoned infrastructure for their own purposes.

I still play games even older than the Sims 2. The new ones just don't match up.

Wouldn't necessarily have to be an abandoned mine... just an abandoned something that was pretty clearly the main industry of the town- something that, when it folded, the town went with it. A factory or a powerplant would probably be easier to realize in TS2 than a mine would be, and it's certainly still fitting- there are entire sections of manufacturing cities that have been abandoned- Detroit seems to be getting famous for it! Could be interesting...

Former railway towns - we have some of those. Obviously connected to mining, but these towns closed down because the train is not running through them anymore. People working for the railways were mostly transferred - the local businesses and schools had to close down - you get the idea.

Yeah I just gave mining as an example. Could be an abandoned old west town, something similar to Chernobyl, Atlantis on land, the list goes on.

What about the base game 'hoods? Not so much Pleasantview perhaps, but Veronaville and Strangetown both have a bit of a ghost town feel to them. Veronaville because of the sheer number of empty houses -- complete streets with nobody living in them. I've been playing it for 3 years now, and there's still no one in Poet Place. Strangetown too has a real ghost town feel. You only have to visit the community lots to know that the place has seen better days. Not so long ago it was a busy military base. General Buzz can clearly remember when the place was heaving with soldiers and he longs for the order that was part of daily life when the army ran the place. A general without an army, he tries to put his family in its place, and is increasingly failing. I actually have considerable sympathy for him, as a man whose world has fallen apart. He could restore order to the place, if only the authorities would give him the military resources he needs. I think Strangetown may have been a mining town before the military took it over.

I would say it has more to do with education than how much money they have. Granted, money often comes hand in hand with education, but not always. Education gives you the tools to get the information you need to make the call, to understand the information and it's implications, and pick a course of action to deal with it. Perhaps less so the case with areas that have a recurring problem, since people have more experience, but if it's the first time something of that magnitude happens, I would imagine people with educations will have an easier time understanding what's about to go down and what consequences it'll have, because they can inform themselves.

Of course there will always be exceptions, but if I were in your situation, I would go by education in order to determine how likely people are to get moving. I'd also look at their interests. Someone with a high interest in environment may be well informed about things like natural disasters, for example.

Strangetown certainly qualifies as a ghost town - people left, in my opinion, when the aliens started landing!

Economy ; the railway towns I mentioned above. If the one and only industry that keeps a town going vanishes, who will be left to buy cake from the bakery or have a drink at the bar? So businesses close down because their clients had to move. I think that could be enough of a motive, even though there was no big tragedy.

There have been attempts to restore some of the older towns in the Northern Cape, SA - I am not sure how successful they really are, but some houses were restored and sold again.

Highly-educated people can get caught by pending disasters, too! They'll just deny that it's really going to happen if they're sufficiently motivated; or if there've been enough false alarms in the past for that jaded "boy crying wolf" effect. Look around you (especially if you live in the US). We have high politics based on denial of all kinds of slow-moving disasters.

A more or less politically neutral example is flooding. People insist on building in flood plains, sometimes quite expensive houses, too. In San Antonio, we have an entire high-end historic district in the flood plain of the Olmos Basin, and our entire downtown is in the flood plain of the San Antonio River. But when the flood of the century came through in October 1998, no one died. Why? Because we have serious flooding almost every year, and we take flooding seriously. So we always vote for flood engineering projects, we have experienced high-water rescue personnel, and we have year-round reminders of how bad flooding can be, in the form of poles at low water crossings measuring the height of the highest known water for that crossing. There's one on the Olmos Basin that's 20 feet high. So when the River Authority started putting up barricades and notified businesses and homes along the San Antonio River that they needed to open up the flood gates on the straight part of the river, and close the ones sealing the bend where most of the Riverwalk businesses are located, everyone cooperated. When the police knocked on doors in the Olmos Basin and told the people in the million-dollar houses they needed to evacuate because water was slopping over the dam and it would have to be opened, those people did not say they'd ride it out, they did not go back for the family silver, and they did not delay - they packed up the kids and the dog and they left for the high ground. Meanwhile, in other parts of South Texas - including places where flooding was less severe - people weren't warned, or shrugged off the warnings, or they drove through low water crossings (sometimes going around barricades), or they decided to wade into the water to rescue the JetSki that had been whirled away in the rising water, and they died. Flooding was less of a constant presence in their minds, so they didn't take appropriate precautions even when they had a reliable authority warning them - which not all of these places did.

So consider the nature of the disaster. Is it something that has happened before with no negative consequences? Is it something unprecedented and scary but visibly real? Is it something nebulous that people have been warned about for years before it got to the crisis state, so that a warning that crisis has arrived sounds like hysterical alarmism? How big are the emotional and economic investments in the place and things that would have to be left behind? Is it something that the family in question is used to taking precautions against? Is the authority warning of the disaster a trusted one? Are they universally trusted or is there a segment of the population that has, or thinks it has, a reason to believe the authority corrupt or in error? If General Buzz sent out an alert warning of hostile aliens with ray guns, I doubt the Curious-Smiths would follow the protocols he'd laid down for the situation, though they would bear them in mind when devising their own protocols for protecting PT9, Lola, Chloe, and Pascal's baby from trigger-happy alien hunters like the Beakers.

I'm in that annoying funk where I have time to play the game, and I've been looking forward to playing, but when I open the game I don't really want to. It's such a good opportunity, but I guess not today.

I don't think I'll have the chance to finish my current rotation before leaving for vacation in a few weeks.

Wishing all of you who are going on vacation a highly enjoyable time! I am working. I will have some Sims Christmas celebrations, I think, since I have not done that for a while now