(Note: Oh crap, I’m sorry, people! For some reason this got saved as a draft, instead of published yesterday!)

Last week I mentioned that I was having some problem with gameplay glitches. Every 10 minutes by the game’s clock, the game would pause for a count of three.

I usually play at double speed, which is 10x, meaning that 50 Sim hours pass in one real world hour. That’s 300 incidents of pausing in one real world hour of game play.

I tried, I really did, but I just couldn’t stand it. Fortunately, I found a new way to restore Sims 3 from backup. I’ll put the details at the end, for the other players.

Long story short, my most recent backup was from February 3rd. When I restored Riverview from backup, guess what?

Klango was restored to life, as well! That dude has more lives than a cat.

Pelikan was downstairs, awkwardly thrashing the martial arts training dummy.

I couldn’t handle going through the martial arts thing again. I set her to reading the cookbook. The Lifetime Wishes seem to be related to whatever your Sim does a lot before her birthday.

And so life continued. There’s a weird thing where every time Pascal goes out to play with the sprinklers, he gets stuck in the mud and I have to use the “ResetSim” cheat to get him free.

“Does this all seem kinda familiar, sis?” “Yeah, a little…”

Soon it was their birthday. The game changed Palatino into what I think of as “Napoleon’s outfit.”

In The Sims 2, when a household member moved out, everyone else would rush to the door and say goodbye. In Sims 3, they just… leave. No one even looked up when Palatino left the house forever. Kinda sad.

Now that she had moved to Young Adult, Pelikan had selected a Lifetime Wish: “Culinary Librarian,” to learn all of the recipes. This involved a lot of reading.

While Pelikan was reading her eyeballs raw, I changed Klango’s Lifetime Wish (which you can do if they have accumulated enough happiness points). Now his wish was to max out the painting skill (already done) and the writing skill.

One benefit to having your Sims write novels is that they earn a residual income. By the time Klango hit his Lifetime Wish and maxed out the Writing skill, he had written seven novels, which earn him a royalty check of §5,320 every Sunday at noon. Not too shabby!

Of course, he still enjoys painting. Here’s one of the odder ones he produced this week.

Pascal started painting, too. After a few of the early ugly paintings, here’s the first decent one:

What are they putting in the Riverview water supply?

Meanwhile, Pelikan read, and read, and read. She literally sat reading cookbooks all day long.

Earlier this week, Ryan asked how I can get so much knitting done while playing the game. There’s your answer.

Not long after I snapped this picture, Pelikan maxed out the Cooking skill, and won her Lifetime Wish. Hooray! Maybe some day I’ll pay enough attention to get a screenshot AS their Lifetime Wish is fulfilled. It’s a pretty quick animation, easy to miss if you’re slow on the draw with the P key, say if your hands are busy knitting a sock.

Restoring JUST A Neighborhood From Backup

Obviously, you can restore your entire game back to the last save date just by swapping out the entire Documents/Electronic Arts/The Sims 3 directory. This is great if a patch has botched your game, because it literally turns back time to the save date. Any patches you have installed will be magically rolled back to the state your game was at when you backed up your files.

But you don’t always want to do this!

In my case, there were two reasons:

1. I had two weeks of really awesome gameplay in Sunset Valley, with my Splines family. I didn’t want to lose that.

2. A patch had come out which had fixed a really annoying problem with the Launcher. I didn’t want to lose that.

3. When I switched over to play with the Splines for a bit, I realized that the pausing problem was NOT affecting Sunset Valley. Only Riverview was broken in this way.

To restore just a neighborhood’s files (i.e. not affecting the game engine, patches, or the other neighborhood) you just replace the neighborhood files in the Saves folder. There will be two folders and a file for each neighborhood.

In my case, I replaced the Riverview.sims3 and Riverview.sims3.backup folders, and the Riverview.sims3.legacy file.

Before you do this, change your system configurations to “show hidden files” and “show file extensions.” And make a backup of these files first, just in case!

Tags: Sims Sunday

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(I shouldn’t joke – half the time when I title a post “X [day of the week]” it becomes a real thing, like Sims Sunday or the erstwhile Puppy Wednesday.)

Loaf #3 turned out considerably better. It’s shaped a little oddly, because I baked it in a casserole dish.

It has a great sourdough flavor, and a pretty good texture. Next time I think I will let it rise in the pan for a little while longer, because it turned out a little on the chewy side.

Mozzarella, ridiculously expensive vine ripened cherry tomatoes from Mexico, salt, pepper, and olive oil. Oh it’s SO hard to eat these vegetarian meals! THE DEPRIVATION.

Tags: Makoto, sourdough

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About this much:

The aqua stitch marker on the unfinished sock is marking round 30 of the cuff. That’s the halfway point on the ribbing. One more evening of gameplay and I think these socks will be finished! Must be some kind of record!

Speaking of Sims 3, just wait until you see what happened! I couldn’t believe it myself.

Tags: Online Super Socks, Online Supersocke 100

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These didn’t turn out terribly well. But instead of re-doing them, I’m just going to call it good.

The entire concept hinged on my ability to free-hand embroider a design on knitting. As you can see, my ability in that department is somewhat lacking.

If I wanted to re-visit this pattern, I would put together an actual chart, and work the design in duplicate stitch.

Tags: Constantine Gloves

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Evidently Cat Bordhi has an instruction in one of her knitting patterns that you should check the fit of your sock toe by trying it on. If it’s too big, “pinch off N stitches” meaning literally pinch the extra fabric with your fingers and see how many stitches you need to remove to get it to fit.

Needless to say, this instruction – and the concomitant Ravelry thread, titled “What does pinch off mean” – sends me into fits of hysterical giggling. Particularly when people posted comments just to clutch their pearls in horror and say, Well I never!

I think you can see where I’m going with this.

I made a loaf! Would you like to see a picture of the loaf that I made?

In all seriousness, this loaf did turn out better. I wouldn’t call it “a success,” but it was definitely “less bad.”

You see, the thing is that bread-baking people are crazy for weighing their ingredients. Not weighing your ingredients – or committing the sin of asking “How much is that in cups?” – is almost as bad as making a poop joke on the main Ravelry boards (the “Big Six”).

For the first recipe, I diligently weighed out so many ounces of starter, so many ounces of water, and so many ounces of flour. Turns out that if you weigh out the ounces of starter and flour, but measure the ounces of water in a measuring cup, it works out better. Less sloppy-wet.

After all, no one likes to pinch off a sloppy-wet loaf.

Tags: Makoto, poop jokes ahoy, Ravelry gossip, sourdough, yes I am eight years old

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