Sims stuck in an action can be fixed using "resetsim Firstname Lastname".  AwesomeMod, being full of awesome, stops households from randomly vanishing (among a million other must-have fixes). 

Since I went through the challenge and formatted it for my own purposes, I figured I might as well share it with anyone else who wants it.  All I've done is add in some formatting, fixed the line breaks and cleaned up a few minor typos.

[Updated to reflect rule changes]

I think talking just raises the Sim's social motive.  I have not seen any benefit for the plants.

A Sim's wealth is usually one of the first things my Sims learn about others.  I don't know of any way to stop them from finding out - it's not like "Ask about career" or "Ask if Single".

I'm going to be a pain in the ass and suggest some bolding and spaces between paragraphs because try as I might, I cannot get myself through some of those walls of text.

More relevantly, maybe I'll actually get around to doing a proper legacy this time around, though adjusting to non-epic lifespans will be a challenge in itself. 

Workaholic Sims have the option to "Work from home", which allows them to raise their performance outside their work hours on a computer.  

Stolen stuff can come back on community lots, yes.  There's a park in Sunset Valley where there are a few chess tables.  I had one of my kleptos swipe one of the chairs and a few days later, it was back.  I think at every reset, there is a chance of swiped goods being replaced.  I do not know whether goods stolen from other Sims are ever replaced though - perhaps that can only be accomplished via "Return stolen item..." on the mailbox?

The game is full of typos and errors.  At least the boss wasn't greatful.

One neat feature - if you name a star after an existing Sim, you get the option to tell that Sim about "named celestial body".  There's even a wish that pops up to tell the lucky namesake that a star is named after them.  In a game that can be lacking in depth, I thought that was a nice little detail. 

(In all cases where this worked, I'd named the thing something like "Lorenzo's Light", so the fact that it recognized it even with the apostrophe added surprised me.)

If you click on the opportunity icon, it should either be available or greyed out.  If it is greyed out, hovering over the greyed out text should display a tooltip that may give you more insight.

The ones he is looking for are NOT under skilling.  I don't know where they are, or if they even exist, but the only books under skilling are for cooking, charisma, gardening, logic and handiness.

I've never had these particular wishes come up.

ETA: Have you tried fingerpainting 101, Don't Stay Within the Lines or Handprints of the Masters? 

Yeah should have known it was just observer bias.  Oh well - like I said, it's not like I had any performance issues anyway.

When turning on anisotropic filtering yesterday in the Nvidia control panel, I came across an option to optimize multi CPU (not GPU) usage and while I haven't had any serious performance issues to begin with, I have to say it's made a noticeable difference. 

There's definitely potential for event spam, but my concept confines information to the newspaper, which is where you already find out about most of these events anyway.  (Not to say that the paper couldn't do with some serious improvement, because it could).  But key events - deaths, births, marriages - should get a popup of some sort, at least for Sims to whom your actives are close.  Major life events don't happen every day, and there are rarely multiple in a single day, so I think major life event popups would be fairly unintrusive.  

That cracks my shit up.  I need to kill a coward Sim just to see this. 

This thread opens my eyes to the potential usefulness of NPC ghosts, though; I may just let a few of them stick around now rather than plopping them around the graveyard.

Are you talking about TS3 or TS2? 3 has neither influence interactions nor aspiration levels.The only direct influence I've seen in 3 is the ability for adults to tell teens to do things like go to bed or improve their skills.

The amount of computing power that would be needed for the game to actually render all the Sims doing actual things would be staggering.  Why bother when you're not looking at them half the time?  However, I agree that it would be nice to be able to attend key events, at least for the Sims that your actives have a high relationship with.

I don't know how feasible it would have been to implement, but I could handle the sheer randomness of Story Progression if there were, as Pescado says, some sort of build up.  For instance, in a better world:

The game does its randomizing, and determines that Martha and Bob are going to be partnered.  The newspaper could say, "Martha and Bob spotted getting snuggly at the movies."  For pregnancies, "Has the flu hit Sunset Valley?  Rumor has it Martha Random was seen puking at the park!" Or for mutilations, "Bob Random shares his secret diet tips!" or "Our snoop spies Bob Random pigging out on ice cream and cookies."  Where relevant, these reports would happen a day or two before the actual event hits.

For those stupid made up deaths, they could go a step further.  The game could mark a Sim for death, and hint in the newspaper that "Bob Random is off to Pleasantview to represent Sunset Valley in the Lightning Rod challenge, the world's most dangerous sport".  A day later, the game flips a coin to determine whether Bob actually dies or not and reports the results accordingly in the paper.

This at least creates the illusion of some actual story.  If they can't show us, they could certainly do a better job of telling us.  In an ideal world, I'd love to see something like a gossip channel on TV with still shots of key moments from the previous week - Bob Random blackened by lightning or Martha slumped over a toilet, but I imagine that would be harder to implement.

I'm sure someone would say "Well, you make up your own story" but if they're taking the storytelling out of my hands by creating these random events, then they should finish the job.

It was a bug.  Community lots are set to "reset" at 3am every day - all garbage gets deleted, any stolen furniture has a chance of being replaced.  The bug was making it so that the resets weren't happening.

Rumer is the one on the left.

When you create a Sim in CAS, or when the game creates a random Sim, the fitness and fatness levels that you (or the game) assign at creation define the Sim's genetic physique.  This is the "norm" towards which Sims will always trend if you do nothing such as exercise or overfeed the Sim.  To use an example, imagine a Sim who is set in CAS to the far end of the fatness and muscular scale.  If you put them in the game, work them out until they are at the low (skinny) end of the fatness scale, and then do nothing, over time they will normalize back towards the far (fat) end again.  In other words, the changes brought about by exercise or eating are reversible.

Now, Story Progression in the unmodded game can "mutilate" the Sim, in essence giving them a brand new genetic physique. This would be like bringing the Sim back into CAS and moving the sliders. According to Pescado's figures, this change can occur within a range of .5.  But for illustration purposes, let's say it doesn't have a limit.  At some point, at random, Story Progression could then theoretically move the Sim to the "skinny" end, permanently redefining their physique - the new norm towards which they will trend.  This is the change that Pescado says is permanent and irreversible.

I don't think you're following.  There is a chance that a Sim will, as part of a specific Story Progression event, be changed from their genetic physique.  This change, when inflicted by Story Progression, is irreversible.

Changes that occur because of ACTUAL events, such as working out, or overeating, ARE reversible.

The default Awesomemod config setting stops these "Bus Mutilations" from happening.

Yes, but she was probably "just fat" rather than mutilated via StoryProgression.

Considering that the title of the thread is "Can we talk about the 64bit...version" and that you claim the "Russian x64 work perfectly", how were you not saying it was a 64 bit version? 

From his first post, it appears that he has a perfectly good retail version anyway, so I'd think all he needs is either a NOCD patch or Awesomemod (with the "Disable CD Check" option enabled) and he's good to go.

I'm still running the original RLD version, unpatched, and have had absolutely no problems.  I even have all store content installed, including Riverview.

Do you have Awesomemod installed?  I had this problem (community lots not resetting every day) between builds but the latest one appears to have fixed it.