www.simsforums.com - the Sims series, computer games & other nonsense since March 2008.

Ah supermoon. One of those big moons occurred once while I was down in Cornwall and the bus driver did a little detour and stopped the bus at the top of a hill so that he and all the passengers could sit for a moment and admire it. Top bus driver and a really beautiful sight with the massive moon lighting up the sea.

At the moment we are being intermittently pelted with horizontal rain, high winds to a soundtrack of thunder, apparently representing the tail end of hurricane Bertha - what a brilliant name for a hurricane! It is an excellent day to stay inside the house, although I thought I'd be working today, but plainly am not, so have nothing here for dinner. I think a mad dash to the nearest Italian restaurant is going to be necessary in an hour or so. They'll definitely have food there!

The play last week was really good. Very funny and accessible. There were quite a few kids in the pit and they seemed to be having a good time. That is a good thing about being a child somewhere like that - if they get tired of standing then they just sit down or lean against an adult. I was up at the top of the tower, where we were treated to extra entertainment in the form of a fly-past of dragonflies! I think that the top suits me best - then there's plenty of fresh air and I don't pass out.

I hope your interviews this week were OK, Minty, with no naked/drunk interviewers gazing intensely into your eyes during questioning!

I probably half agree with you on Gaza. Let's leave it at that.

Right, I'd better go and do something about this dire lack of sustenance.

Forces of all evil 1 - 2 Hearts Already the piggy eyes are demanding new players, even though they've the 2nd most expensive squad in Scotland. Not sure what they've got to complain about - the referee tried his best (6 Hearts players booked, including Danny, yet about as many fouls committed).

Don't think Liverpool have much to worry about after that drubbing they gave Dortmund. Suarez was more trouble than he was worth. Louven's looking like a bargain for that £20 mill already! Arsenal look better than they did in the FA Cup final, or was it Massive Transfer Kitty were simply that bad?

Thick cloud so no supermoon Sunday here. Pah!

Off to play TS3 now

Yes, what was going on in that match? I was following it vaguely on the computer and every time I glanced up another Hearts player was being shown a yellow card! The football's been fun to follow recently. I've enjoyed the Liverpool ladies' games and things are looking more hopeful for Marine this coming season as they managed to play reasonably well (it's all relative!) during the pre-season friendlies.

Aw, no super-mooning for cloudy Minty. Shame. I do always enjoy a full moon, even at non-super normal size, as it looks so very much like a delicious pancake.

I am pleased to hear that I am not the only one here who still actually plays TS3!

In other news, the official EA simming forums have moved to forums.thesims.com and have combined the TS3 and TS4 versions. You have to reattach your avatar and you might want to at least check the notifications on your profile, as mine seemed to have defaulted to emailing me about everything under the sun. I don't expect to visit that site very often and I certainly don't want it spamming my email!

In other other news, if anyone was a member at Boolprop, they've moved as well, to boolprop.net, and you need to re-register.

Any other business? No? OK, then, break for lunch.

I re-registered at Boolprop & haven't even got a bloody duck.

Aw. It takes a while for them to issue the ducks. I'm sure one will be quacking your way soon.

Do you know what I will miss though? Your scary kitty cat picture from thesims3.com! I thought that was a lovely avatar.

Anyhoo, tonight I'm off to see 'Wolf Hall'. They're staging 'Bringing Up The Bodies' as well and it has been quite tricky to get tickets at all, never mind to see the two plays the right way round! Nothing like a bit of Thomas Cromwell on a rainy Thursday evening.




It's my shiny chain! No it's mine!

'Wolf Hall' was really good. The stage was completely bare, but they had a lot of lighting/fire effects and of course terrific costumes. I haven't actually read the book, so I wonder whether it is as funny as they made the play. I would think it would be far more serious. There was also a bit of singing and dancing, which I liked a lot because I love medieval music. Lutes rock!

This has been a very relaxing weekend. I have achieved many things on my to-do list, which always makes me happy. I thought I'd play lots of Sims yesterday but when I loaded up the game I realised I didn't feel like it. Then the time just disappeared and I was mesmerised for a while by GTA - you can steal and fly a military jet and the clouds looked so amazing.

In other news, the new official forums are overrun with spam and trolls and pawn. The TS4 gallery is also featuring naked sims, which makes me think that EA may now start to regret opening their arms to modders for this iteration of the game. They are going to need a lot more moderators if they want to keep that forum and that gallery clean. A handful of gurus in the USA isn't going to be enough, especially when they don't seem to be around at the weekend, which is when most people are posting surely! They need a big bunch of people in different time zones. I would despair of them, but it would be a waste of my energy. I shall instead channel that energy into cake-eating.

nomnomnomnomnom...

... mmmmmmmmmm

But, most importantly, I see that Minty has now been awarded his duck.

On the way home I was hit on the head by an object falling from a tree - first conker of the year!



I brought it home to keep as a pet.

Took a stroll through a bookshop this lunchtime. Yes, a real bookshop filled with books! Actually they also had a bunch of e-readers wired to a table so people could buy (or just read?) electronic books. Very newfangled. I have decided to try very hard to avoid buying things from Amazon, although I am sure I will fail occasionally. I bought myself two books and nearly had to sit down at the till when the guy told me the price. I guess that's the price you pay for avoiding the massive online discount. Oh well.

If you want to read ebooks, you're better off with some sort of tablet device as they can do more for the money spent. I've got loads of pdfs on mine.

I've read the reviews of Wolf Hall - forgive my envy, it sounded brilliant. The English Reformation was one of the most interesting periods of any nation's history (& like all interesting periods this means deadly), in some ways the last act of the War Of The Roses as a number of outstanding scores were settled under the excuse of religion & treason, including Countess Margaret Pole of Salisbury, whose execution was one of the most horrific botch jobs ever witnessed.

Everywhere today the wasps are going crazy, which I was delighted about when trying to water the garden at 6 in the morning. Believe it or not it was scorching up here today by noontime. One last hurrah in the weather before psycho wasp & black ice season starts.

Oh yeah, I rescued an Ichneumon fly (which is really a wasp) today from indoors. They're tiny but they've a sting which packs a real punch so it was the glass & paper treatment for sending it back outside. I still can't understand why the back garden was overrun this year with hoverflies & sawflies, but now it appears there's been another odd insect for the area taking up residence.

There was also a battle with an orb weaver whose response to being chucked out was to run back in the window before I'd managed to close it & disappear inside the underlayer of the curtain in Commonwealth Gold winning time. I decided I'd get him when he reappeared later. When I checked the room an hour after, he's spun himself a large web between the curtain & the windows.

(btw you know that journalist who was beheaded, I saw the unedited version of the story on before it was deleted, & really wished I hadn't. It wasn't a beheading, it was sawing the still living victim's head off slowly with a breadknife. Horrible horrible people, & I hope the British guy responsible meets a equally nasty end.)

I think ebooks are great in principle but I just don't enjoy reading a novel on a screen as much as I do in paper form. I have a bunch of free ebooks downloaded on my iPad (mostly Sherlock Holmes stories and some classics that I've read a dozen times already) in case of a reading emergency such as being stuck on a delayed train or running out of books while travelling. However I find that reading on a screen instead of a proper book with pages is a bit like the equivalent of eating compressed food tablets, instead of regular food, in a futuristic sci-fi film. They may contain the same nutrients as a traditional meal but the format is less appetising! Maybe I'm a book snob but I can live with that. I did get a genuine thrill yesterday when I got home and unpacked my new books. I realised I've hardly read anything this summer because I didn't go on holiday - which usually represents two solid weeks of reading while hiding from the sun, watching everyone else turn into a lobster. I will have to catch up somehow. My book about the Salem witch trials turned up as well (my last book from Amazon, if I can keep my resolution) so now I've got all these things to read and no time to get to them!

The only advantage I can think of with getting a dedicated ebook-reader such as a Kindle, rather than just using the book app on an iPad, is that the battery on a Kindle lasts about a month without being charged, so I guess if you daily read a lot of things electronically it might be worthwhile just to save constantly charging devices or running out of power while on the move. Other than that, I think Minty is right - you might as well just get a tablet and then you can do everything in one place. I'm addicted to my iPad! He has a name and everything!

'Wolf Hall' was brilliant and I can't wait to go to see 'Bringing Up the Bodies' on Saturday. I normally don't like to travel into the city at the weekend but it was impossible to get tickets otherwise. I think you'd have really enjoyed it, Minty, being a history person and all. It's a shame you couldn't come too. You could have helped me out when I mix up all the people named Thomas!

I am still trying to find someone who has read the book (despite being a prize-winning tome, not many people seem to have actually read it!) so I can ask them whether the humour is confined to the stage or whether the book was amusing too. A few people have said that they tried to read the book but could not get into it. It would seem that there was difficulty in reading the dialogue because of the formatting, which sounds very odd. I'll have to take a look sometime.

I have become amazingly proficient at capturing and putting out spiders, to the extent that I have gained yet another nickname - "Spider Bane"! We've got a few of those false widows kicking about the place - they are the biggest scaredy-cat ever and flee at the first opportunity. There's just one I cannot seem to bane - he is living behind a book case that I cannot be bothered to empty and move just to get at him and he is super-speedy. But one day I will triumph!

I am immensely glad that I did not see the video with the bread knife. I am sure it would give me nightmares and whereas most people seem to be becoming desensitised to disasters/suffering, I seem be getting more sensitive about them somehow. Psychopath murderers. I can barely watch the news anymore - it seems indistinguishable from an apocalyptic movie and is likely to turn me into a nervous wreck.

I will now go and distract myself from thinking about that and earn my daily bread in spreadsheet land.