I prefer to imagine that every time I use Inteen, God bitchslaps somebody who didn't read the directions.    Twice if they don't even know what half the hacks they have do, they just downloaded them because someone said they were awesome.  (Is it crazy that I only download hacks that do something I know I want?)

I actually prefer having the abbreviated reference right there in the text, at least for scientific works.  If it says something like "early studies seemed to indicate these effects were caused entirely by the gamma radiation (Jones, Begonia and Brown, 1995), but later experiments with heat stress caused similar phenotypes to occur in the second generation (Jones and Begonia, 1997)" then I can actually get a lot from the references themselves.  That it seems to be the same research group, and the time scale they're talking about.  Footnotes just mean I'd have to stop sometimes two or three times per sentence and try to find who/when they're talking about.  I guess it's just practice but I don't find the parenthetical references at all jarring anymore, the sentence still flows in my head and the reference turns into a kind of associated tag. But a "studies indicate" kind of statement where I have to go hunting for the details is going to frustrate me and make me mistrust the source.

When I was a doing an undergrad research assignment one guy's name kept appearing at least once in every article on the subject after 1994, even though a lot of the references were minor.  Even when I was skimming over stuff (so I wouldn't have bothered with footnotes or full references), I kept seeing his name somewhere.  It would have taken me a lot longer to realise how important his work was with less obvious indicators that he was The Man, since his papers were originally published in Portugese and didn't show up in my searches.  (I also learned that one semester of Spanish did not really improve my ability to read Portugese by any significant amount, but that was a whole different problem.)  I like that after just browsing in an area for a while you start to recognise the big names and when it was all going on just from the references in the text.

Yes, I am an enormous dork.

Good to know I can do something about our feral cat problem beyond just neutering my own cat.  *uninstalls and reinstalls inteen a few times*

I'm suspicious of that review, since they didn't actually play the game to test it, just moved around the house while it was running.  Maybe it's just me, but if I'm hunting through the entire house then I've probably got the game paused anyway because I've lost something/someone.  Playing a five-person family for six hours without saving and then the birth of twins, now that would be a test.  Or seeing what reduced the loading time, or how many people you could get onto an object-heavy lot before it started to really lag.  Framerate is not the be-all and end-all of gaming, for heaven's sake.

Myself, I've only really played on my desktop which has a 3.0GHz P4 processor and handles Nightlife quite easily.  The computer next to mine also plays Uni for someone else without any apparent problems, and it's a 3 year-old Athlon.  Upgrading her graphics card made it prettier, but it always played fine as far as I could see and I never heard her swear about loading or lag.  What made a difference for me was when I blew part of my tax refund on upgrading the RAM from 512MB to 1GB.  Loading time halved or more, lag on lots with a lot of objects and/or people almost disappeared.  And I've never had a problem with restricted party guests or people on community lots.  (ATI Radeon 9600, 256MB graphics if you wondered.)

So, yeah, I think you can safely ignore the review since more than 512MB RAM makes a big difference to actual gameplay.  I may buy another stick this August, just to see if it still gets better and I can have even more things running in the background as I play than I do now.  (Not only do I not turn everything off, I queue up a bunch of downloads as well.)  The nice thing about RAM is it's easy to keep upgrading it, and as long as you have the right type for your motherboard it's pretty straightforward to put it in yourself whenever you can afford it.  I would suggest staying away from Celeron processors in future, though.  The shop where I bought my computer has stopped selling them completely, apparently they make the owner want to hurt people.  The hand gestures he made were very convincing.

I'd like to pay for private school as well.  Not just to get rid of the excess cash, but it makes a lot more sense and would add to gameplay.

Aside from those rational reasons, my parents couldn't afford to send me to private school so damn right my sims should pay through the nose for it.  I walked thirty miles to my state school uphill both ways IN THE SNOW!  Well, rain.  Okay, I live in a sub-tropical paradise and I caught the bus.  They should still have to pay school fees.

Those are lovely, and the green is green!  Thanks.

Thank you all for the links and the SimPE tips, now all my sims will have lovely Enayla skins.    Beautiful without being too realistic and looking ridiculous in-game.  And they're not anatomically correct, which I prefer.

My default replacement eyes are a few steps behind in realism, but I can live with that.  At least until somebody who admits that grey and green are both valid eye colours makes a better set.  Most of the ones I've seen have either blue or pinkish-grey (why?) for grey, or some dark hazel instead of green.  Which irritates the crap out of me, since my eyes are light green.  They really aren't that unusual, Lance Bass and Jensen Ackles spring to mind.

Yeah, I'm a little bit bitter.

I left mine on all the way home last friday.  And I wondered why I didn't get asked for proof of age when I bought wine, probably because it was prominently displayed on my pants.


Weird, my last day is also friday - my contract's up then.  And I have that same list of questions at my desk.  *suspicious*  You don't work for Justice, do you?  It's entirely possible the popup when I log on warns me about porn, I never read it...  (I do, however, refrain from porn at work.  Since our internet access is almost entirely blocked.)

We have a boring set of levels without colours as far as I know - low, medium, high and extreme, although we only use medium. But I work for the Queensland government, so for a while when we started work and opened the department homepage we'd see a notice header saying something like "Terrorism: Orchid Alert".  It turns out that Orchid Alert was actually the code name of an anti-terrorism exercise. Which we would have found out had we ever bothered to read the notice, but we were too busy making jokes about how if it ever changed to 'Righteous Daffodil Alert' we all had to duck and cover.

This is why the 1800 number didn't work very well. If even those of us who work in large, unpopular government departments and got caught right in the middle of the public transport bomb hoax can't take it that seriously, I doubt anyone else can. I loved the posters, though.  Beware of shifty people giving each other cash or mysterious packages in the street!  And people buying inexplicably large amounts of fertilizer!  Terrorists!  Because we don't at all have thousands of people in this country producing outrageous amounts of pot or anything.

Thank you for the link!  This is exactly what vampires (and my superhero neighbourhood) needed. 

Excuse me, I have to go kill Thomas and Martha Wayne now...

Thanks for the link, I was starting to get really annoyed at having to grab control of all the townies and make them change their clothes.  The hideous blue female politics/business suit is showing up on three or four women on a lot at once, making them look like the secret sisterhood of dumpy dumpster-divers, colourblind chapter. I wouldn't mind if it was just the ones that make some sense, like the business (except for that bloody blue suit) or military careers.  I used to live near the Enoggera barracks, you constantly saw people in camo and uniform hats shopping there.  But I also hung around scientists for years and none of them would have been caught wearing their lab coat down at the pub.  It's bad containment practice and more importantly, you look like a dork.  As for the criminal mastermind and captain hero outfits, well.  It's not very mastermindy and protecting of the secret identity to be caught grocery shopping in the super-suit.

I had a similar problem a few years ago.  I just kept dropping weight for no reason and I was skinny to start with.  I looked awful and people kept asking if I had an eating disorder, which I certainly didn't.

My best friend was visiting some mutual friends overseas and they were always asking her to cook for me and make sure I ate.  She got sick of saying 'but she eats ALL THE TIME' so she said she would.  When she got back, she took me out for yum cha.  I ate chinese food constantly for over an hour while she giggled, then we walked the eight or so blocks back into town.

I made her stop for icecream on the way.

... Yeah, EA are really hurting for cash.  I expect to be dodging a guy collecting for empoverished game designers in the CBD any day now.

Please, everyone knows that if they needed the money that badly they'd have released the Halloween pack.

On the one hand, you've now given me the stupid hope that one day there might be mutant sims and I could finally make a complete Marvel Universe neighbourhood - they'd be too different (they'd have to be if only to avoid Marvel's utterly insane business partners), so I'm set up for inevitable disappointment.  On the other hand, if they do it and are cunning enough to make it moddable so copyright violation can be added in by a non-profiting third party, I'd have to give you my sister's firstborn or a kidney or something.

I hope it's running people over.  Even without any new animations... add a 'Commit Vehicular Homicide' option to the car menu which calls up the phone list (and maybe a 'random townie' option), the sim drives off and returns after an hour with said unfortunate's urn in their personal inventory.  And one of those happy corner messages.  "Ralph has earned §348 by robbing Kennedy Cox's corpse!"

I don't kill sims much, but I probably would if there was a less passive-aggressive option.  I blame too many comics in those important teenage years.  If I'm going to have a neighbourhood villain, I'd prefer a hand-on psycho to my current option of 'I shall miraculously and instantaneously move you into a small exitless room by the mysterious power of my utter disregard, then become frustrated because I can't get at you to play kicky-bag until you die - when I gain nothing and cry like wuss'.

To the best of my knowledge, neither are gender specific.  Sodomy is just a more technical term and can be a more polite way to refer to the old anal intercourse, while bugger is a derogatory word and so always rude.

I had the same problem with the installation that wouldn't show custom content or open Bodyshop.  They reset ever single time, I was only saving at 6am.  If they have a car they can still drive themselves back to work, though.

Thanks for the clarification, I took your advice and tried it in BodyShop.  BS crashed attempting to load, so I went ahead and uninstalled the entire game and reinstalled again.  The hair/makeup etc. shows up now and I did manage to enable my hacks again (I hate playing without same-sex marriage, it's just not as much fun).  There was not a single difference during the last two installations though, other than one worked and one didn't.  That makes four dud intsallations before one that worked (so far, touch wood), three of which finished fine but had corrupted files.  Nothing really to be done about it, I know, but I've never had problems like that with Uni. 

Aside from the tendency to crash and/or corrupt files during installation (which I'm willing to admit was probably partly my fault since I didn't defrag) I have one Nightlife bug which is irritating the crap out of me.

The option to enable or disable custom content is a good thing, and I can understand why it's been included.  But it would be better for me if it would actually turn off.  Not everyone seems to be having this problem, but even on "enabled" I can't get at any of my custom content.  I've tried it with no hacks, and any sims that had custom content before NL still have their hair and makeup and aren't naked so the content's compatible.  I just can't add any, or change the appearance of any sims that have the custom stuff without it reverting to Maxis-made.  No matter how many times I play with the clicky boxes there's no difference and no pretty lipgloss.  The switch is still there, but the lightbulb is dead.

If it still won't work by the weekend I'll reinstall, but given that it took me four hours last time I'm not looking forward to it.