Sim Sunday: Back to Work

It's been a couple weeks since I was able to do anything with the Sims, so I don't really remember what my goals are, so today I'm just going to make sure everyone has a job and try to get Odelia attracted to SOMEBODY so she can marry them and start a family, since things don't seem to be going well with Michael.

We pick up at midnight. Odelia's out working and doesn't get home until 2 a.m., at which point I'm going to put her to sleep on the couch. Everybody else is sleeping. Dsean is DEFINITELY NOT DREAMING ABOUT EGGS, according to his thought bubbles. Or maybe he's dreaming about how much he hates eggs. Michael dreams about himself a lot. Barbara and Lysander dream about each other. (Aw.) Kali is dreaming about... baseball.

Odelia comes home and goes to sleep, and I realize that the couch doesn't offer as much good sleep as the beds do, but since Odelia is always at work when everyone goes to sleep, she's always going to be stuck with the couch. So she may just be perpetually tired, unless I make everyone else go sleep on the couch instead. Well, not EVERYONE else. Just one at a time. I *actually* fix this by moving her to a bed when everyone wakes up at 6:15. There. Now she can sleep a bit before she needs to wake up and flirt with people.

Nobody's hungry. Why is nobody hungry? No breakfast for them, I guess...

Dsean needs to work out, which can usually be done with a TV, but he freaks out about something or other when I try to make him work out with the TV, so I decide, ya know what? I'm gonna give these guys a pool. I spent $3000 of their $4000, but now everybody can work out without having to clutter up the house jumping around in track suits.

Oh, hurray, there's a Slacker career in the newspaper today! This means Barbara and Lysander can both get jobs as golf caddies. How cute. They can carpool. Still no job for Kali - she's the only unemployed one so hard. It's OK, though. Medical jobs are hard to come by.

Lysander meets another Sim in my Simworld who is quite enamored of him.

I feel like Lysander's goals of SLEEPING WITH EVERYONE are going to be difficult with Barbara being in love with him and all. And he and Barbara have the same job, so it's not even like he can sleep with other people while she's at work... It is ridiculously hard for my sims to cheat on each other!

Odelia wakes up, and I decide to go send her to flirt with Dsean, hoping for a spark, but, uh, Dsean and Barbara are busy fighting with each other. They're taking turns slapping each other.

Finally Barbara bursts into tears, so I send Odelia in to do some flirting. She and Dsean definitely do not have chemistry, though. Well, that's all the guys in the house. She's mildly attracted to Michael, but not enough. Time to hit on the girls.

Whoa. That was fast. Odelia and Kali have crushes on each other now. Maybe they can even get married by the end of the day, and then adopt a kid or two. Well, no more than two, because I can only control eight Sims. (Laura and Lindsay, these are your Sims - if they do adopt a child, which could happen by next week, what would you like to name it? Laura names it if it's a boy, Lindsay names it if it's a girl. Go.)

I just spent a bunch of money on a chess set, since Michael needs a logic skill point to get the next promotion in his job. Now the Sims only have $610 total. (The cheapest chairs in Sims are $80 apiece. I just spent $160 on chairs to play chess. Also, since there's no room in the house, the chess set is right by the pool. That wouldn't be annoying in real life at all.)

Incidentally, this is Dsean's awesome mascot that he gets to wear for his job.

OK, no wedding today. Odelia and Kali are best friends now (which means love is the next step), but Odelia has to go to work and won't be back until 2 a.m. So the wedding should happen next week, aka Simtomorrow.

Man, everyone in my house is EXHAUSTED. Barbara and Lysander are sleeping and it's only 7:30. But they do have to get up at 3 in the morning, since their golf caddy job starts at 5, so I'm going to let them nap. And Kali can nap too, I guess, since she doesn't have a job and doesn't need a regulated sleep schedule yet.

And, triumph! Dsean has been promoted to Minor Leaguer. No more dumb mascot costumes for him!

Michael brings home a friend from work (who, uh, incidentally, is "Benedict Texan," aka Benedict Cumberbatch from that house I made awhile back of me and my friends who were all going to move to Texas together. This was before I had a real life boyfriend to match up to my Sim self, so I got Benedict) but he is way too tired to socialize, so I'm going to have him to go sleep while Barbara (who has woken up) can go flirt with him a little bit.

And then, before I realize, it's midnight in Sims and this day is over. So next week, we will most likely get Kali and Odelia married to each other so Odelia can start acquiring babies. Also, hopefully Kali will get a job. Oh, and Dsean should make some friends. He hasn't done that in awhile and that's kind of his aspiration.

Sim Sunday: Love Is In the Air

Today's goal: Have at least some of them get jobs. For real. If there's still nothing in the paper, I'll buy them a computer so they can do some more job searching, because this lounging around doing nothing all day thing is not good for them.

Everyone but Kali and Odelia wakes up at 6 a.m. Kali went to bed late and Odelia's sleeping on the couch, which isn't as efficient, so this makes sense. They wake up just a couple hours later.

Barbara makes everybody cereal for breakfast, but Odelia's fun level is really low, so she jumps on the couch while everybody else eats.

Job success! Michael is now a test subject, making $217 a day. For six hours of work. That's $36 an hour. That's pretty typical for a sim's entry-level job. Then Dsean got a job as a team mascot. He's not quite as well off as Michael - he only makes $25 an hour. And, finally, Odelia got a job as a security guard, making... holy crap, $56 an hour. I want to be a security guard.

Whenever Lysander gets a free minute, he cleans. He must have a huge amount of neatness points. Here he is passing the time by scrubbing the toilet.

Kali wanted an easel and she hadn't gotten ANY of her goals met today, so I went along with it and bought her an easel. Lysander and Barbara immediately ran over and stared at her as she painted. It's not easy to create under those conditions!

Oh, my. Barbara is flirting hardcore with Lysander. Out of nowhere, she grabs him and kisses him up his arm. And she's not even the one who needs to get married so she can have a baby! (That'd be Odelia. I'm pretty sure she's going to marry Michael, since she has at least a bit of chemistry with him. When he gets home from work today they can flirt for a couple hours until she goes to work.)

Michael comes home from work and after a single day, he's been promoted from test subject to lab assistant, making $53 an hour. He is JUST THAT GOOD. He now works in the evenings, which is great, because that gives him more time to flirt with Odelia.

Oh, crap, I moved too fast there. Odelia tried to flirt with Michael and he rejected her. We may have to take things a little more slowly here. So they just talk and chat until she leaves for work. This is moving very slowly. Barbara and Lysander, on the other hand, have cleared developed crushes on each other. That is not the romance I'm rooting for! However, since it happened, we'll go along with it. Lysander asks Barbara out on a date and she eagerly accepts. I decide to take them downtown to the community lot so that I don't have to deal with their other housemates at the same time.

They go to a diner and spend their time telling each other dirty jokes about, uh, apparently money and the Statue of Liberty? They also make out at their table.

Eventually they're done and head home, but now because they heart each other, they can share the bathroom instead of yelling at each other to get out. Unfortunately, they just got into a fight because Barbara flushed the toilet while Lysander was in the shower and it scalded him, so he ran outside and yelled at her. 

Then everybody kind of winds down and goes to bed. Looks like we've got a budding romance happening here, although there's definitely not going to be a happy ending to this story - Lysander's greatest fear is marrying Barbara, so I'm afraid the poor girl is destined to have her heart broken.

Sim Sunday: Roommate Drama

All right, time to play a day in the life of the chosen sims! Let's get this party started.

First thing, before I really even start playing with them, is I need to get their house set up. They have a place to live, but they'll need a few essentials. Right now I'm going to go with the absolute bare essentials and get them beds, a trash can, a fridge, a smoke detector (because nothing is more frustrating than your sims killing everyone in a fire started when they tried to make grilled cheese), a phone, a couple chairs, and a couple lights. Their place already comes equipped with a stove, a toilet, and a shower. As they demand more things, I will get them more things, but this is what they really need before anything even starts.


There are so many people living in such a small house here that I didn't have room to put in six beds, so one of them is going to have to sleep on the couch. Or they'll rotate their sleeping schedules so that the six of them aren't sleeping all at once. As it is, we've got a pretty funky bed pattern going on:

We have two in the smaller room and three more at very odd angles in the larger room. I'm pretty sure I have enough room for everyone to get to all the beds, but if not... sims aren't known for their ability to maneuver around things. If there's a dish sitting on the floor between them and their goal, they will stop, yell at me, and then just give up if I don't move it.

In the living room, I put a couch so there's at least one more place for someone to sleep, and then decided I needed some chairs. I went with the creepy panda face chairs. Just because. And then I decided to surround the couch with creepy panda face chairs so that the pandas are guarding the sleeping person because that's not terrifying at all.

All right. Now that we have the essentials, time to get everyone jobs. Any minute now, people are going to show up to welcome our crew to the neighborhood and help them make some friends (which should be great for Dsean, whose popularity aspiration means he absolutely loves meeting new people and making new friends), and I want at least some of you to get some jobs before you have to devote your time to... ugh... socializing.

(Whoa. While Michael was looking for a job, Dsean tried to hug Barbara, and she got very mad at him.)

The newspaper only offers three career options a day, and today the options are military, business, and political, which I don't think anyone in our group wants, so we're out of luck until tomorrow. (Unless I buy a computer and give them more job options, but I don't think that's going to happen.) So today might be a lazy day.

Whoa again. While I was busy checking on everybody else (Michael and Kali are both cooking and I do not want to start a fire already), Dsean and Barbara were building up some serious bad blood. I went over to check on them and their relationship is at -29. I decided to push this a little further and had Dsean irritate Barbara by "grossing her out."

She's clearly pretty displeased. However, one of Dsean's fears is being enemies with Barbara, so I made him apologize and then set him on a track to try to get onto better terms with her.

However, Lysander and Kali are getting along great... In fact, Kali's pretty attracted to him, and flirts with him a little bit. She caught him at a bad moment, though - he was taking the trash out and when she interrupted him to flirt, he just dumped it all on the ground, so I'm going to have to make him pick it up later. This picture is of him swooning in response to her charming him.

Eventually, some visitors arrived to welcome us to the neighborhood. These visitors actually turned out to be myself, my brother Nathan, and my sister Bethany. I forgot I had made sim versions of us awhile back. So I guess I'll be featured in this game occasionally now too. Everyone interacts with them a bit and then it gets overwhelming having that any people around and I send myself and my siblings back home.

This is sim me.

Lysander continues to flirt with everyone he encounters. (He and Barbara apparently have pretty strong chemistry, so expect something to happen there soon.)

Oh, great. Kali sets the kitchen on fire while making macaroni and cheese.

While the firefighters arrive rapidly, this is all too much for Odelia, who had "fire" listed as one of her fears. She collapses to the floor. A therapist comes down from the sky and reassures her. As soon as she seems to have collected herself a bit, he leaves.

She's apparently not worried at all about fire again, as he goes right back to the kitchen to make herself some food.

The fire has made everyone gross and smelly, so they all go off to take showers. Uh, Odelia continues to have problems, as she cradles and sings to a bag of flour. I don't remember what that's an indicator of in Sims, but it can't be good.

The rest of the evening is pretty low-key. I buy Odelia a bookcase because she's still pretty depressed about the fire, and that helps. Lysander does some reading but apparently decides he'd rather sit on the floor right in front of the TV. Then when he does, he thinks some rather negative thoughts about Michael. What? I'm not sure he and Michael have even interacted yet.

I send everyone to bed at 11 p.m., and it's been a pretty long day, so they all go along with it (except for Kali, who decides she needs a snack first).

Tomorrow/next week, I *really* hope I can get them some jobs. They've got to do something besides just sit around the house all day. And making money would be good.

Sim Sunday: Introducing Our Characters

A few weeks ago, I decided I wanted to do a series on my blog about my (silly) adventures playing Sims 2. I put out a call on Facebook for anybody who wanted me to create a sim for them and set them loose in my simworld to report on every week. I had quite a few adding themselves to a waiting list, so if any of my characters in here die (and it is a possibility - Simworld is a dangerous place!), I can eventually replace them with those on the waiting list.

I think I'll play one day per blog entry. That should have enough happening to keep it interesting, but move it along at a good speed.

Today I'm just introducing you to the sims. In alphabetical order, because that's the way they show up in the game.

I forgot that whenever I take a picture in Sims, it's always much further away than I think it is. Heh. So these full body shots are all rather small. But here they are.


This is Barbara, created by movie blogger friend Travis. Her life aspiration is pleasure, which means she wants to get as much pure fun out of life as she can. Pleasure aspiration sims like to party and go new places. However, it's worth noting that she's also on the grouchy and serious side, which may make her a terrible party person. We shall find out. Her lifetime goal is to become the best in the Slacker career path, although her short-term goals are to get a job either in the Criminal or Culinary career paths, so, once again, her lifetime goals conflict a little bit with the rest of her. It's also worth noting that right now one of her biggest fears is using a public toilet. It seems we have a bit of a germaphobe on our hands.


This is Dsean, created by my New Life Drama Company traveling buddy Ebenezer. His life aspiration is popularity, so he wants to have as many friends as possible. His fears right now include being enemies with everyone else in the house, which, right now, are the only people he knows. He ultimately wants to be a chef, although right now he wants to be an athlete, but it seems his favorite thing to talk about is fashion, so I think the culinary arts are at least a closer fit for him. I'm not sure he'll make many friends talking about fashion at sporting events.




This is Kali, created by my Rinkie friend Kalimeris. Her life aspiration is fortune, so right now all her short-term goals are things like, "Buy a sculpture! Earn $100! Buy an expensive stereo!" She wants to be a doctor. However, despite having a fortune aspiration, she DOES NOT WANT to talk about money. At all. So I think she just wants to be a secret money hoarder. She is also afraid of public toilets. Perhaps she and Barbara can bond over their love of the toilet in their own home.





This is Lysander, created by my college friend Paul. His life aspiration is romance. This basically means he's a sleaze who wants to sleep with as many other sims as possible. In fact, his goals right now are to sleep with someone and to buy a double bed so he can sleep with someone. He wants to get on the Slacker career path as well, so maybe he and Barbara can be Slacker workers together. He hates talking about entertainment and fashion and would much rather talk about money.




This is Michael, created by my Rinkie friend Randy. His life aspiration: knowledge. He instantly wants to buy a bookcase and a telescope and get a job as a doctor. (Apparently RinkWorks breeds doctors.) As with a few of the others, his favorite talking points kind of clash with his goals. He hates talking about health. Hates it. Which might make medical work uncomfortable. He'd rather talk about crime and the paranormal. So ghost vandalism is probably his favorite conversation topic ever.




This is Odelia, created by my community college friend Laura. She wants to be a lawyer, which is fun, because we seem to have a couple duplicate job goals in he game so far, so new is nice. Her life aspiration is family, which means she's going to at some point want to settle down, get married, and have a kid. All sims are bisexual, so there could be a budding romance between her and any other sims in the house. Or someone else she randomly meets and then invites to live with all of us in the house. Who knows?

Next time on Sims...

I will try to buy them some furniture (their house is pretty empty, as you can see) and get at least some of them jobs. That's about it.