Apologies for the Whiplash

If you tried to load my venerable Blogspot blog and found yourself here, apologies for the confusion.

Over the last…. year? Maybe? It might not be that long… my Sims blogging friends have been referencing comments they left on my blog that I’d never seen. Then I started getting a handful of test comments of the flavor, “Hey, is it working this time?”

The straw on the camel’s back was chat on Gryffindork’s blog, where she mentioned that she’d tried to leave several comments that didn’t seem to have appeared. She did some testing at my request and it looks like there was a MAJOR problem with comments being dropped. I don’t know how many comments failed to make it to my blog(s), but the implications are staggering (where “staggering” must be defined as a factor of the number of comments you’d expect on a fiction blog about a video game).

I spent this week converting all three of my Sims challenge blogs to self-hosted WordPress. This has been a surprisingly emotional transition. I started Sims blogging on Blogspot at the beginning of 2010. I like Blogger. Plus, I was really afraid of losing my absurdly long archive or even one precious comment. I was super cautious, but it turns out there are very good plugins for this.

So, if you’ve tried to comment in the past and couldn’t figure out what happened to your comment, please try again.

Thanks, folks.

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1.18 Life for the Moment

Everyone helps with Wesley. It means a lot to me.

Even Roselyn, though she doesn’t talk about it much. There’s a look of such longing in her eyes when she looks at him.

I’m getting a lot more sleep than I expected to.

Our little tame puppy grew into an amazing dog.

We had one terrifying evening when the wood stove went up in flames. Jesse acted very quickly. I think it’s the first time I really saw the soldier he was in his other life.

After that, I think we all felt just how mortal we are.

Roselyn really went on a rampage for days. I’m not sure what set her off.

Wesley was terrified by the fire, and it was a long time before he really felt safe. It was probably useful in the end, though. We didn’t need to yell at him to stay away from fire

Jesse is so sweet with his son that it brings tears to my eyes. I think he was made to be a father.

Samuel also got into taking care of Wesley.

He built him a little cow toy from metal scraps.

Wesley loved it, and Samuel was so proud of himself.

When I’m with Wesley, I can let out an inner child that doesn’t get much outlet in our hard work to live here.

Who knew that being a mother actually could make you feel younger?

———-

After a system crash and a mad playing/posting spree on my primary legacy The Samples, I’m back here on Waypoint. I’ve been playing a lot in the last few days, so there’s plenty to catch up on.

Outtake:

Apparently, the bathtub thinks that Samuel is an adult. Hmmm….

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1.17 More Beginnings

Here’s the terrifying part.

Forget pain reduction. We’re on our own if something goes wrong.

I’m on my own. Jesse knows some military field medicine, and I’m grateful for that, but it isn’t going to help if things go badly wrong. Plus, he’s so freaked out, I’m not sure he remembers his own name.

I’d like to console myself that women have been giving birth for thousands of years, but I know better — women have been dying in childbirth for thousands of years. This is the single most dangerous thing I can be doing with my body.

What was I thinking? All I had to do was visualize this moment, in waves of pain, sure both I and the baby will die horribly from a breech birth wedged in the birth canal, and I’d’ve put the breaks on me and Jesse the first time we kissed.

It’s a boy wow.

I named him Wesley. I always liked that name. Jesse didn’t protest. I’m not sure he even heard the name I picked because he was still gaping at the fact that a baby came out of my body.

I’m going to sleep now. Jesse can figure the next part out.

Since Wesley was born, Roselyn has been on a tirade about the crying in night and the helpless mouth to feed.

She’s also given Adelle a hard time for the chronicle she’s been keeping of life in our camp. She insists that the whole thing is a waste of time because nobody will ever read it.

The only time she seems to be happy is when she’s working in the garden. When we see her there, the rest of us just stay out and give her privacy.



Samuel has been reacting to the tension by building an elaborate fantasy world.

That’s probably smart because tempers do get tight when nobody is getting normal sleep.

Meanwhile, Adelle quietly entered adulthood herself.

Timi certainly noticed.

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1.16 Unconditional

I can’t say my pregnancy was a huge surprise. Of course, I couldn’t have known when it would happen, but Jesse and I haven’t exactly been taking precautions.

Still, I broke the news to him with no idea how he would react.

Wow. I guess he’s happy about it.

I’m not sure, but I think he had a child before who is now dead.

Roselyn, on the other hand, is furious. She thinks it’s selfish to force the camp to take on the responsibilities of a baby.

I’m really trying to be patient with her. I am.

Meanwhile, Samuel has been hard at work with all that scrap metal. Timi has been helping him with designs.

We have indoor plumbing! The sun keeps the water hot, and the water barrel is insulated enough that we can have warm showers even in the evening.

And also baths. Sheer luxury!

More importantly, they built a greenhouse for the garden that protects it from the elements. Though the weather is warmer here than I was used to in my old home, it does get cold enough sometimes to kill or damage plants. Perhaps more importantly, this also shelters our crops from insects and wildlife.

We also have a crazy contraption we can use for sharpening and polishing stones for use in knives and tools.

Adelle made a very different discovery.

She named the pup Moonshine. She’s some sort of wild dog whose mother died. Adelle has always been searching for someone to love her unconditionally, and Moonshine seems to fit the bill.

———-

I failed to mention the obvious — the junkyard is the first lot added to the world. Inventing, ho!

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1.15 Simple Gifts

Now that Samuel is more comfortable in our camp, he has started exploring all over the island by himself.

He made one really startling discovery.

People must have lived here at some time, long ago. Perhaps prospectors? The structure could is clearly decades old and might even be as old as a century.

What it does have is piles of old ancient scrap metal. We have a source of metal!



When Jesse isn’t keeping the camp so clean it would pass military inspection, he is creating beautiful, wistful art of his homeland.

I’m sad to say that while Roselyn has been better behaved overall, she and Timi are still oil and water.

One evening after a long diving expedition, Timi caught me alone in the barracks. He looked shy and almost embarrassed.


He said that without me, everyone in the camp might be dead or worse. He wanted me to have a token of what I mean to the refugees here.


It’s a coin he found in a sunken pirate chest. It’s breathtaking.

He gave it to me on his birthday. It seems so wrong that he had such an amazing gift for me, but I didn’t have anything to give him.

And I didn’t want to even think about it until I was sure, but now I am.

I’m pregnant.

———-

Outtake: Timi really got it bad for his age up outfit.

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1.14 Another Try

Night passed, and the morning dawned foggy and gray. Still Roselyn hasn’t returned. I started to worry about her. Sure, we hadn’t SEEN anything terribly dangerous on this island, but that didn’t mean a young girl out alone wouldn’t find something. Or fallen from a cliff in the dark.

I didn’t say anything to Timi and Adelle. They didn’t need to worry. Jesse squeezed my hand to let me know he knew.

When it was starting to get dark, Roselyn finally wandered back to camp.

Trailing behind her was a wan little boy who watched her with huge, adoring eyes.

His name was Samuel. It took Adelle days to draw him out enough to learn that. At first, he wouldn’t talk to me or Jesse at all, and even Timi seemed too adult for him to trust.

Samuel was quiet and frightened, and he followed Roselyn around like a puppy. We had no idea where she found him.


Once we found him sleeping on the ground outside — as close as possible to Roselyn’s bed, but where she wouldn’t be able to see him.

Roselyn, on the other hand, was a different person when she was around him.

She was relaxed and cheerful, even child-like.

Timi, meanwhile, was recuperating from his run-in with the shark and worrying about what everyone thought of his mermaid story.

Eventually, he confronted Adelle, begging her to believe him.

She told him not to worry. She trusted him completely, and she never even considered the possibility that he was lying.

His face lit up like a lamp.

While Roselyn was gone, I had plenty of time to think about what I would say to her when I saw her again. We all have our own demons from what happened before we came here. She came here as a little girl, without her parents, and I can only guess what she might have witnessed before she washed up here. Most of the time, Jesse acts like he hasn’t a care in the world, but sometimes under the moonlight he has delusional war flashbacks. We probably all have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in some form.

So it is my job not to let her outbursts get to me. When I had a chance to get her alone, I took her aside and told her she was always welcome here, and we would care about her no matter what.

I don’t know what she thought of my little speech, but the next day she came out to work with me in the garden. She didn’t say anything in particular, but it felt sort of companionable.

I’ll take it as a note of encouragement.

———-

I’m trying to catch up here. I still have quite a bit to catch up, and this game is up on the rotation for more playing.

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1.13 Mean Girl

When Timi recovered, he couldn’t stop talking about what he’d seen. A merman! A real merman! At least, that’s what he said. I didn’t know what to think. He’d been in pretty bad shape when he dragged into the camp. He could have hallucinated it.

But something went very wrong when he talked to the girls about it.

I wasn’t there, so I can’t say exactly what happened.



All I know is that I heard banging and yelling, and Adelle started screaming for Timi and Roselyn to stop it.

They were fighting! My kids were actually throwing punches at each other!

Jesse started running when he heart the first scream. He got there first. Roselyn wouldn’t look at him.

He dragged Timi outside and started shouting at him. How dare he attack a little girl who depended on us!

It was so hard to believe that Timi would do something like that. Had the attack addled his senses? My first priority was to make sure that Roselyn was all right.

But as soon as she saw me, Roselyn started shouting. “That boy is a lying moron! You’re all selfish incompetent idiots!”

“What do you think you’re doing anyway,” she demanded. “Helping us? You ruined our lives, you fat old bitch! Leave me alone!”

She shoved past me and ran out into the wilderness. At least she couldn’t see me crying.

———-

Roselyn came to the camp with Coward, Social Butterfly, and Loves the Outdoors. That was a hard enough combination to begin with, but upon aging up, she added Mean Spirited.

Our little refugee family just added a lot of disfunction.

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1.12 Shark Bite

In spite of myself, I had to admit that I was happy.

And maybe a little bit loopy.

I think Timi has found something dangerous in his underwater salvage expeditions.

He came home very late one night. His suit was torn and he was bleeding.

I was so upset to see him that way that I barely listened to him when he tried to tell me about what he’d found.

He was so excited about something that he was barely talking sense. I think he might have been hallucinating from blood loss.

It was frightening.

———-

This fellow is the only mermaid that generated for the game. I’m annoyed, and I’m going to consider it acceptable to add more mermaids to the “mermaid household” as per Twallan’s instructions.

Echo is a Gatherer, and she should be able to gather a lot of high-value minor pets, but very few of them seem to spawn on the island. I’ve added all the spawners from all the expansions someplace in the world, and this is still the first minor pet Echo has found. Fortunately, it was a rare turtle :).

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1.11 Honeymoon

One thing that timid Roselyn was passionate about was gardening.

She talked about it more than she actually helped, but she did dig around in the dirt and help me harvest. Our camp was getting to be pretty comfortable about food. That felt good.

I could relax more and enjoy the beauty of living in untainted wilderness.

Jesse took over cooking. He was both good at it *and* he was very creative with the ingredients we had.

It started to feel like we were eating at a resort instead of a refugee camp.

And Jesse and I…. we took our own sort of honeymoon.

Timi was starting to find some really valuable stuff in old submerged pirate wrecks.

Roselyn grew older and began to look more like a woman.

She seemed to grow more confident.

And she also began contributing a lot more to the camp.

———-

Sorry I took so long to get this up! I finally made myself sit down and sort through the tangled mess of pictures from the last several play sessions. I should have several posts out pretty quickly. Waypoint is about to come up again in my play rotation too, so there should be more to post about soon!

But in all fairness, “soon” could still be a couple of months. I have a big vacation coming up in a little over a week, and then the holidays hit :).

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I’m not dead!

Sorry this challenge has gone without an update in so long! This is entirely my fault — I got into a quagmire of pictures that I was trying to sort into something that made sense. Then I got really fired up about my long-running Pinstar legacy, the Samples, and played almost a generation there.

There are probably a good three or four posts of pictures left here, and I’m eager to get back to playing. Now I’m really feeling the pain of running three challenges because I want to do all of them, and I don’t have time!

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