Delve Into Lunacy

Janelle couldn’t have possibly spent her time as HoH any better. I expected drama from this episode and they provided it in spades. It is interesting that now that the Friendship is in a position where they don’t have a common enemy that they can try to toss into the line of fire their true colors show through. The folks watching the live feeds have been saying for weeks that the group is only a friendship in name considering how they treat each other, but it’s only now that those of us only watching the episodes finally get to see it.

What continues to baffle me is why Ivette burns bridges every time someone leaves the house or might potentially leave. She did it by over reacting with April and then she did it again with her little comment to Maggie later on. If you didn’t catch it Maggie made a comment to Ivette about how Ivette said she would take her to the final two. As a reply Ivette said something along the lines of “Yeah I did, but you haven’t heard me say that recently”. Who knows what she actually thought she was saying since I’m sure in her fantasy world she viewed it as something innocent, but Maggie seemed to have the same reaction to it that I did.

I know Ivette’s dumber than a bag of hammers but seriously, how stupid do she have to be to not realize that these people that are leaving will be voting as to whether she wins or loses if she makes it to the final two? The only thing I can think of is that once the jury started forming she figured it would be leaning the Friendship’s way and due to the fact that she “needs the money for her family” they would automatically make her the winner.

Continuing the theme of bitching about Ivette, the thing that is driving me completely nuts about her incessant whining about how much her family “needs the money” comes from the fact that I don’t think she understands the difference between “needing the money” compared to “being able to use the money”. I’m not saying they don’t possibly have money problems but when she says “need” she makes it sound like her family is literally starving to death while she’s on the show and if she doesn’t win then they will immediately perish upon the crowning of the winner. The kicker is that she says all this while wearing designer clothes that she brought into the house with her. Maybe I’m missing something, but if you can’t afford the basic staples in life, which to me would define needy, then you shouldn’t be able to afford name brand clothing as that’s far from being a necessity. She’s also talked numerous times about how much partying she does and in my experience partying costs a sizable amount of cash if you’re doing it very often.

As far as “being able to use the money” goes that would pretty much define anyone in the world that doesn’t view $500,000 as simply pocket change. I would venture to guess that everyone in that house would fall into that category. So what if she thinks April wanting to use the money for building a deck isn’t important, does that give more value to her desired use for the money (which she conveniently has never given specifics on)? Unless she is wanting to use the money to have her mouth permanently wired shut then I would say that it doesn’t since what is trivial or not is a personal opinion. If Ivette’s family truly needed money that badly and she actually gives a rat’s ass about it then she never would have gone on a show that would keep her from working for three months with no guarantee of getting paid anything for that time.

Anyway, moving on to the first round of the final HoH. I don’t typically read what is happening from folks that watch the live feeds since I prefer being surprised by the episodes, but I accidentally ran across a comment within a story today that mentioned that Ivette had won round one. This really surprised me since as expected it was a stamina challenge and I figured Janelle would take it without any problem. After they started spinning the thing my guess was that Maggie and Janelle would be the last two on it. Janelle had the height which would help in that but Maggie had the better strategy of walking sideways while it was moving slowly since that provides a wider center of gravity and therefore less of a chance of losing your balance. Here’s hoping Janelle can pull out a win in the next two rounds. If she doesn’t I would guess she’s going to be the final jury member.

I’ve been playing the Swipers more than any other family but I haven’t updated their family album recently or given an update on them here for a while. I believe last time that I left off the whole crew had moved into a new home and Brandi and Don had finally gotten married. Since then a lot has happened.

Brandi has died at the ripe old age of 76 days. It killed me since she was less than half of a bar away from maxing out charisma and then she would have had them all maxed. Not too shabby since I didn’t get to play her through childhood and what not. As much as I miss her I do have to say it was getting a bit boring when she didn’t have anything to do except trying to max out skills and once a week pull weeds in the yard.

Dora has just headed off to college which occurred right after Brandi died. She’s pretty much kicking ass and taking names at this point. She got five scholarships: the one for an A+ in school and the ones for having charisma, cooking, creativity and logic at 8 or higher. I looked it up and with the exception of one major she already has either all the skills needed for each of the majors or only needs like one more mechanical point. I’m still torn as to whether I want her to become an artist or go into show business after college. Show business makes more money but she just seems more like an artist to me.

I still hate playing Don, but since he’s close to reaching the top of the medical career path he’s at least now bringing in some decent money. Beyond that he doesn’t do much more than simply exist in the house. While Brandi was alive and Dora was at home he wasn’t allowed to interact with them and even for social boosts I either made him to wait to go to work or call someone outside the house to talk to. I originally planned on having him hook up with Dina Lothario but I have a feeling that by the time Carl is dead she’ll be awfully close to being an elder and unable to have more kids. So I think I might have Don score with the maid at this point. Not sure what her name is but her little French maid outfit is pretty hot.

There are a lot of new Swiper family album pages now (pages 6 through 12) which can be found in the “The Sims 2 - Family Album Collection” post.

I had read somewhere that it was possible to get gender specific features, such as facial hair, to show up on the other gender if you simply switched the gender after adding the feature in the Create A Sim window. So that gave me the idea to create the Freak family where I could have a bearded woman, Bat Boy with the pointy ears like off the cover of Weekly World News, etc. I tried it and it didn’t work so I decided to just create a trailer trash kind of family.

That’s how the Biggins came about. This was the first time I created more than just one guy to start the family with but I basically wanted to start having kids right off the bat. So Clancy is the guy and Gerta is the girl. Both are large body types and I’m going to work on keeping them fat even though Clancy needs the body skill since he went into law enforcement. I set both of them to the family aspiration and luckily when it was randomly picking lifetime wants they both ended up with “Golden Anniversary”. So they should be able to hit that want pretty easily.

Like I mentioned before, Clancy went into law enforcement since I figured that went well with his helmet that he wanted to wear so badly (I argued with him about that helmet for hours before finally giving in). Gerta I don’t plan on ever getting a job since her primary reason to be added to the family right off was to be a womb and live in nanny. Once a kid gets within a day or so of being a child so I can control them manually I’ll have Clancy get her pregnant again. I’m curious to see just how many kids I can get them to crank out this way.

The money situation kind of sucks with these two, but since I went with the trailer trash theme I guess that is more fitting. I’ve gone ahead and dropped a bunch of money trees in their living room so that should be enough to get them by when added to Clancy’s paycheck. My only concern now is beds for all the kids they’ll eventually have. I guess I could chuck them out into the back yard.

Anyway, at this point the Biggins have had one baby girl, named Puddin, that just switched to being a toddler. Surprisingly, it’s the first baby I’ve had in the game that looked somewhat normal. Pretty sad considering each of the other kids had at least one attractive parent whereas both Clancy and Gerta are pretty homely. Maybe she has just successfully avoided the ugly stick so far and things will change once she becomes a child or teenager. I’m hoping their next kid is a boy for two reasons. The first one is that none of the families have created a boy yet and I’d like to hook some of these kids up once they become adults. Secondly I really want them to have a kid named Herbie.

You can find the family album for the Biggins in the “The Sims 2 - Family Album Collection” post.

Since I’ll be updating the family albums for the families I play in The Sims 2 fairly often I wanted to create a post that links to all of the albums and that I can just add to as needed instead of making people search through multiple posts for links to the individual pages. When I add more to it I’ll just create a small post notifying people of the update and have it link back to this post.

WARNING: I’ve removed the censor blur in the game and replaced the default “doll” skin textures with ones that are a little more realistic. Personally, I think seeing nipples and body hair is a lot less creepy than everyone in the game looking like a naked Barbie doll. So for that reason some of these images are more graphic than they would have been with the default game setup.

The Biggins Family (still active)

The Lothario Family (still active)

The Swiper Family (still active)

Wow…what a game. I always make the mistake of paying attention to pre-season and despite knowing that it’s mainly people playing that probably won’t even be on the final team it always skews my opinion of how well the team will do. So needless to say when the Chiefs were 0-4 in the pre-season I wasn’t feeling too hopeful. Now that I’ve seen the first string play for an extended period I’m much more excited. I don’t think they’ll make it to the Super Bowl or anything, but they do look vastly improved compared to last year.

On offense they look pretty similar to past years. I do think Priest is running a little slower than before though. With the exception of the 35 yard run in the first drive he didn’t really do a lot that lived up to his legend. Hopefully that will turn around. Watching Johnson was like watching Priest a few years back. Nearly every time he got his hands on the ball you just knew something interesting was going to happen.

On defense they looked better than in past years but I don’t think they are as good as the low score for the Jets would make it appear they are. Against the run they were looking pretty top notch which is a nice change. I’m also liking that Gunther’s influence finally seems to be showing in regards to how aggressive they are with blitzing the passer. The weak point though remains their pass coverage and once the Jets figured that out they stuck with the air and only ran a few more times the entire game. The defense was better but they had lots of help from the Jets.

My only remaining concern is regards to injuries. Despite the Chiefs being a fairly large team overall they continue to be somewhat frail. How many starters did they lose that game…four or five? The biggest concern is they don’t have much to fall back on after the starters (with the exception of running back) and it was very visible in this game once those guys were out of it. Thankfully, they all seemed to be minor injuries and I’m guessing all of them will be back next week. It does bring up the specter from past seasons though where starters were getting hurt frequently and then the whole season went to shit.

As far as next week in Oakland I’m going with the Chiefs to win by 10. I didn’t watch the game against New England but it sounded like the Raiders got pretty much trounced and never put up much of a fight. The biggest impacts on this game will be the fact that Oakland gets a long rest period since they played on Thursday night and whether all the Chiefs starters are back or not.

For the game in Denver in two weeks I have no clue what to guess yet. Denver was looking pretty shoddy down in Miami today but considering it’s the first week and they have a history of never winning there I won’t use it to just what they’ll do going forward. Despite how good or bad they are they always gives the Chiefs trouble be it in KC or Denver. I’m guessing it will be a close game all the way through. Next weeks games should give me a better feel for what might happen.