July 2085: how to make castles

Paige Roberts is 11.


It had rained all night, and the morning of her eleventh birthday, a heavy fog settled over the neighborhood. "We can do whatever you want later," Paige's mom said. "Do you want to go out for dinner? Or I could take you to the mall?"

“Can I ride my bike?”

“Not now, maybe later if the fog clears.”

“Can you drive me over to Tara’s house?”

“Sure, I'll drive you over when the fog clears.”

Her mother liked everything to be safe. Her mother liked to see where everyone was and that they were okay.

"Why don't you go try out your new barre for a little while? Your daddy spent a whole night installing that for you."

"I know," Paige said. "I like it."

goldfish, pt. 3: playing cupid

This is something that has been plaguing me since I started playing TS3. Attraction scores. You guys know how much I used to love using them in my TS2 stories, and how useful they are as a numerical representation of something that is otherwise pretty intangible—human compatibility.

Well in TS3, attraction is pretty much useless. For some reason, all of my Sim couples chart a 10/10, and they roll pretty much zero wishes to indicate any preference for one romantic choice over another. And though I know TS4 is coming along in a few more months, I don't have much confidence that the attraction system there will be any better, at least not to start. And I won't be playing it in any real capacity from the beginning anyway, because I like to wait until there are a few EPs out. So I'm going to be sticking with TS3 for a little while here, and I'd like to make this work for me.

I've been working on a little project. It requires a basic set of calculations using traits, aspirations, and zodiac, which are factors taken from both TS2 and TS3, because I do note both for each of my Sims. Because of that, perhaps this system will be completely useless to anyone but myself. But if any of this is useful to you at all, by all means, feel free to mix it up and use it!