Testing, 1, 2- Is this thing still on?

Hi everyone. I just wanted to see if anyone familiar has been around lately. How has everyone been? I tried finding my old "crowd", but I only found Vidkid and The Mare's Nest (so AE and FuryRed got some 'splaining to do!).
I'm doing alright, I guess. My life has gone another complete 180 since last year. My Father was diagnosed with lung cancer last fall and then he passed away last month. It's been really hard lately and we're trying to take it day-by-day, but I guess that's all I want to say about it because it still feels weird thinking that he's gone. I've spent a lot of time with family lately and that's been helping so far.

My brother and I got accepted and enrolled into college (I'm not naming the college for privacy reasons, once again, but I'll tell anyone who's curious privately!). I'm not exactly 100% sure what I want to major in yet, but I'm thinking about economics right now. We both got a ton of scholarships, both from outside the school and from the school itself, which is really great, because until April, we weren't even sure if we would be able to go to college due to financial issues. Insurance companies are mean, basically, so our college funds were used for hospital expenses. But thankfully we at least still get to go to college without taking out loans (at the moment *knocks on wood*). I'm just glad I'm leaving high school because basically from the second half of junior year until May of senior year I was trapped in a circle of drama and toxic people (hint: Just because you have self esteem issues doesn't mean you get to treat people like sh*t and not get called out on it or any of your rude behavior ever) and I'm glad I left before it got to me even worse.

I still play The Sims 3. I like it a lot more now than I did a while ago (like last winter or even last summer, I think). I now have added University, Supernatural, and Seasons to my collection. I bought Supernatual and Seasons on sale, because I still don't really like EA. For University, I bought it on Amazon using gift cards I earned from Swagbucks.com and Bing Rewards. You basically do online tasks like filling out surveys, watching videos, or searching phrases, and you get gift cards when you reach a certain amount of points. It's good because I don't really have any money left to spend on The Sims 3 or video games (I still can't drive, so that means no job, either), so at least I could still stay updated on my hobbies. The main Sims blog I have/go on/forget about now is Sims-etc on Tumblr. As you can see, I only have a handful of posts on, so I'm still not that active. Tumblr's CC community is way better. Here's a tip. Google "sims 3 base game compatible" for some cool stuff. They also have a lot of more diverse hairstyles, with curly hair, afros, braids, and dreads, to make up for what EA never did. I don't think I'm getting the Sims 4. It would have to come with diamonds and rubies sewn into the box for me to play. Not because I'm bored of The Sims or anything, but I'd rather just complete my TS3 collection than start completely brand new and wait for my favorite EPs to come out. I mean, if they have cool features or whatever, I might check it out, but if it's going to have more and more "goal themed" EPs like World Adventures or the Future thing, I'll pass.

Wow, I'm just looking around on my old posts over here, and I was seriously such a little kid when I wrote these stuff! So many of my complaints/issues were so small back then! Why did I have entire tags devoted to Farmville and iCarly? The only interests I still have from when I blogged here is Degrassi, The Sims (of course), Friends, and The Nanny. And this entire blog is 3 years old... I have relatives younger than that! Wow, time flies. I might actually stick around to Blogspot because I liked their format more for blogging, or if I ever need to get away from Tumblr. I wouldn't actually count on it, but yeah, hope everyone is doing well!  

For anyone who's wondering

Yeah, I guess I'm leaving this part of the Sim Blog world. I haven't been on in forever and I've realized I'm more into pictures/stories of Sims rather than the forum drama. After a while, I felt like I tried too hard to fit in with everyone else by writing in a pseudo-Nancy Grace tone. No offense, but when FuryRed vanished (seriously, where have you been?) I stopped checking these blogs daily, then weekly, then monthly, then I uninstalled Windows Live Writer, and I haven't been on in months. I'm more of a Tumblr person now, especially for their Simming community. There's never any drama there and it's easier to blog over there. It's more microblogging than original posts but yeah.

Anyway, thank you everyone for coming here for two years and for accepting me as a part of your community! This was the first fandom where I conducted myself as a (semi) mature adult (you really wouldn't wanna see me during my Pokemon phase :P). Thank you ShinyShinx, FuryRed, VidKid20, XXAngelicEvilXX, TheMaresNest, Mike, Kami, and everyone else I have met in the past 2 years! I definitely won't be forgetting you for a while! Even if some of you deleted your blogs or we never actually talked, I enjoyed coming home from school everyday knowing there would be new posts waiting for me.

When I started this blog, I was a shy and awkward 15 year old boy trying to fit in with the athletic crowd at school. Now, I found my own comfort zone and my own friend circle and I feel like I found my own voice as a person. I'm not gonna lie and say it's all because of everyone here but you definitely helped shape me as a person.

I won't be deleting this blog because one day I want to look back at my old posts and my melodramatic high school life. Not to mention, maybe one day I will come back. It probably won't happen, but as long as TheSimsResource keeps being jerks, or Newsea and Peggy keep making weird hairs, or EA acts horrible, I could always have stuff to blog about. I'd love to give my Tumblr URL out here but I have personal info (or at least my name and my picture) up there and I'd feel weird putting it up on Blogger, which I feel is a more public website. And some of the stories I've written here definitely would do more harm than good if anyone knew I wrote them in real life. So maybe I'll privately tell anyone who wants to know, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.

Oh, and out of curiosity, I decided to search myself on The Mare's Nest. I was surprised when I was mentioned in a few new posts.
I got involved in some Rud3bwoy scandal, apparently? I assure you, as bad ass as that would be of me, it definitely wasn't. As much as I tried staying updated on all the drama, I definitely wouldn't care enough to go that far to rat someone out. And I was in school December 23, 2011 1:PM. :P

Then came an interesting turn of events. Someone out there decided to give the beleaguered cage builder a little tip off – our prime suspect being Armenian Twin – which led to our incoming links page getting hammered with all roads leading to Fauna Classified, and hence how we were able to go over in time to watch the fun.

Quoted from that link; it's cool that I'm being remembered as someone who would try to stop a scammer, especially after being extremely irrelevant and contributing nothing to the Sim Blogging world for 2 years.

Jen is really TtnFn04?  I was surprised when I read this. Not gonna lie, I skimmed through most of it, I didn't bother clicking any of the screenshots, and I haven't followed The Mare's Nest at all in 2012, but apparently this blogger I befriended is a bad person (or at least, in the first world- blogosphere definition of the word bad)? I mean, we never really talked other than commenting on each other's posts, but yeah. Again, it's cool that The Mare's Nest remembers who comments on an irrelevant blog's two year old blog post.

And the other posts were me being mentioned in my tirade against Jarsie9. Not too bad of a legacy, if you ask me. :P

If anyone's curious, we gave up on the Timbersons. We had a chapter all ready to be uploaded in October but then Windows Live Writer wasn't working so we kept trying for a few months but it never got uploaded. :( If you're wondering, most of the heirs remained pale brunettes with a new purple hair streak. I realized that I like playing legacies more than I like uploading them. So I guess that's the 'real' challenge of them.

So yeah, if you want to remove my link from your sidebar, I completely understand! Maybe I'll pop in once in a while to check up on everyone. Thanks for a great 2 years!

2 Months

2 months ago, one of my close friends passed away. We were in school. I unfortunately didn’t have lunch with him that day, but my brother did. He said Eric seemed fine. I found out from a phone call from school that Thursday night. I was really hoping for a snow day, but instead, they said a student had fainted in class and passed away on his way to the hospital. My brother told me about Eric fainting, on our way home from school, but I didn’t make anything out of it.

While SS was having a hard time that night, I somehow kept it together. When we went to school the next day, they had grief counselors in the library. I started to cry a lot during my English class because of how everyone was talking about Eric, like ‘I heard he just pass out and hit the floor… their ribs break if CPR works…. no autopsy’, and so on. Like he was a CSI character rather than a part of our community. I went to the grief counselors, crying, for 2 hours. A lot of my friends were also there. We were all close with Eric.

I went to his wake and that gave me some closure. The guidance counselors got all of Eric’s closest friends and the GSA club (Eric was a member) to plan a memorial for him. I went there thinking I would be an active part of it but then it was just GSA members who I know Eric wasn’t close with planning everything out. They had a lot of teachers and administrators speak at the memorial and only a few students. I wrote a letter to Eric, but I backed out at the last minute because I don’t think I’m good at public speaking and I’d get especially choked up considering it was for a close friend. Some of his other close friends also didn’t read because they felt too upset to read. So in the end it was a lot of GSA club members who he wasn’t as close with and like 3 of his friends.

I still feel like I haven’t moved on. My family members called and texted me that weekend to check up on me, but now I think they’re all thinking that it’s time for me to move on. I don’t feel like I’ve moved on anymore since the wake. I’ve started hanging out with friends more but I still feel awful about it. I know I’ll never wake up smiling about this, but I feel like I can’t talk about it without tearing up.

I think part of it is guilt. We both were a part of our school’s animal welfare club, that’s where we met. And he’d always ask to hang out but I didn’t know if he was the mall type. And I couldn’t get rides to out of school events so he’d usually go alone. I don’t even have him as a Facebook friend. I always kept forgetting about it, until about a week before. I feel like I wasn’t that close of a friend to him, and it makes me more upset. I don’t know if I can talk to my friends about it because I don’t want to bum them out. My guidance counselor told me the school child psychologist is offering grief counseling, but I don’t know if it’s too late to join, and I don’t want my parents to think I’m a complete mess.

Rest in Peace, Eric. I miss you and love you. We’ll never forget you. Sorry for not hanging out enough. 1.5.12.

Junior Year

I know I haven’t been on for like a month now. But you know how it is with school and stuff, and junior year is a double whammy of stress. I’ve been working harder in school which means less time online. And I’ve been going on Tumblr more, so yeah. I’ve joined the Spanish club in school in addition to the animal welfare club, and I might join another volunteer club because I need service hours for National Honor Society. I know it’s not exactly great to join clubs just for service hours but I’ll still be going to the meetings and participating so it’s not like I’ll just be getting other people to sign in for me all the time, unlike other people in my grade. And I’m in 5 honors and AP classes, and I don’t feel out of place in any of them, so that’s a good sign. I don’t know why I’m making this post, other than giving some kind of explanation for where I’ve been.

I don’t know if I should drop one of my electives, Contemporary Issues Honors, for Math SAT Prep. I’m doing some practice math SAT questions now and most of them are hard, and I don’t really like my CIH teacher (okay, so I’ve never had her, but compared to the other teachers who taught it, she seems to be the worst possible choice.), but if I do switch, I’d have to change all of my classes which sucks because I like/tolerate most of them. Even though SS isn’t in most of them, I like being alone because it’s making me a little more independent and outgoing then I was last year. Maybe I could switch out of CIH, switch around some of my classes like gym and my current elective, and get to keep most of my classes. But then again, guidance counselors aren’t magicians.

In my Simming news, our game got screwed over because of… actually, we don’t know. We think it’s some custom content we downloaded (just wings for Halloween. ), but we uninstalled it and it still didn’t work. So we reinstalled the games and tried getting the patch but only one specific household works, and it crashed for the other households.

Earthquake?

Wow, there was an earthquake over here. Well, not here here (NJ), but in Virginia. Virginia is like 8 or 9 hours away from here, but we felt it here in NJ. Even people as north as Rhode Island felt it. It was weird because it was a 5.9 which is something California would be getting. My couch was shaking and I didn’t think anything was going on. Then all of the news stations started covering it and I was like ‘oh my gosh, that was an earthquake!’. Thankfully everything is alright so if there aren’t any aftershocks, we should be safe. But I have to cancel my plans for today (just going to the mall ) because of earthquake safety stuff.

Did you feel the earthquake where you live?

The Drive to Drive

I don’t feel like driving yet, even though I turned 16 in January. Over here it’s a big deal if you can’t drive because you have to take the bus to school or your parents drop you off, so if you get a study in senior year then you can’t leave the school. And all the part time jobs are literally highways away so it’s not like you could walk to work. But everytime I think about getting my permit, it just feels like one big panic attack. For starters, I don’t think I’d be a good driver. I can’t even stay focused in Mario Kart Wii without flinching or pausing to let go and look around for a few seconds (It’s just keeping my hands on the wheel that’s annoying. I could pay attention in school and stuff). And a lot of the ‘etiquette’ sounds complicated. Like the 3 car distance rule thing. Apparently you have to be 3 cars behind someone on the roads. How do you know? What if I suck at visualizing the 3 car distance? Or the intersection stuff. There were a lot of factors for intersections. Like waiting for the other car, realizing if you go first because of distance, how to turn the light thing on that says which way you’re going… . And I actually did pay attention in Driver’s Ed. It’s just been a while.

And then getting my permit seems like a long, impossible process. Do I go to the DMV first? A driving school? Is the driving school just a fancy way of driving in an empty parking lot with your parent? How long does it take to get an appointment? What if my driving instructor is rude? In my Spanish class a kid was talking about how his driver was really rude to him, and then a bunch of other kids were like ‘Oh, you got stuck with him too?’. What if I get stuck with someone who’s too nice to tell me I’m driving incorrectly? Google hasn’t helped answer my questions. I know I just have to ask someone, but anytime I tell someone I don’t have my permit yet, they look at me like I’m an alien.

Then the entire thing against people with driving anxiety bothers me. Over here in NJ, you need your permit for 6 months before you get your license. But it has to be 6 months before your 17th birthday (I suck at explaining things) so my birthday is January 31st, so I needed to get my permit by July 31st if I wanted my license on my 17th birthday. However, I have midterms on my 17th birthday, so I’d have to go to the DMV and wait for my test, do the driving test thing and then come home and study for 2 midterms and then celebrate my birthday. I already celebrate my birthday on the weekend closest to it now because of midterms and the driving test would be the last thing I need to make my birthday more stressful. Not to mention, the roads are covered in snow, ice, and slush, so the driving test thing would be harder. But when I told my cousin this, she acted like I was being so high maintenance! Honestly, just because she doesn’t care about school or grades doesn’t mean I don’t. And what if I failed my license test thing? Then I’d be depressed about that on my birthday, lose time to study, be upset about that for the rest of my midterms and the week, then I’d have to reschedule. I know this is all melodramatic and stupid but people act like if you can drive you have to drive. And my other cousin (lower 30’s) acted surprised when I told her I didn’t get my permit yet at a family party. She was all ‘driving isn’t scary’ and stuff, but later at that same party, her mother told me that she didn’t get her permit until she was in her 20’s because she was scared of driving. Now she lives in the city so she just uses public transit. And when she has to drive, her husband just drives for her. So yeah. Her advice wasn’t helpful at all.

And apparently Hollywood and other show producers have no idea how getting a car works. I hate how every character could drive perfectly at the age of 16 and gets their own car during junior year, too. My cousin (notice a pattern?) got an average (I don’t know. I’m not a car person.) looking car that wasn’t pimped out and stuff for her graduation. The only reason her sister (cousin 1 in this post) got a car at the beginning of senior year was because her Mom or Dad or someone was buying a new one and they didn’t want to get rid of it or something. Heck, when I walk near the student parking lot at my school, most of the cars look average and from the mid-2000’s, with maybe one or two pimped out brand new car each row. But on Degrassi, any character who could drive not only drives, but has their own car! Eli Goldsworthy has a hearse, while Jake Martin has a pick up truck. Peter Stone had a brand new convertible. And all three were only juniors! I think I remember Peter’s Dad being a car salesmen, but still. I remember my driver’s ed teacher telling us to get average first cars because we’d be first time drivers and accidents would be really likely then, so it wasn’t worth it to get a pimped out car. I could think of way more fictional high school students who had a car then didn’t.

And people act like just because I don’t have my permit now, I never want to drive and I’m gonna live in my parents’ basement for the rest of my life. Obviously I want to drive. Just not yet. And saying ‘you could go to the mall 24/7!’ isn’t a great promise because I need to be with a licensed driver over 21 until I’ve been driving for a year or something, so basically a permit is useless. I mean, you could only have 1 licensed passenger with you, so why not let them drive?

Okay, I think I’m done.

Edit: Oh yeah, remember how a few weeks ago I said that 90’s Nickelodeon took over Twitter?

Here’s that screenshot. Only Sister Sister wasn’t from 90’s Nickelodeon but it was still from the 90’s so it counts. And Mano A Mano in el Bano was promoted so yeah. They still haven’t changed the lineup, though.

Sims 2 Things I’d Want in The Sims 3

I’ve never played The Sims 2 but there are several features I’d really want in The Sims 3.

Career Rewards- Career Rewards look really fun and interesting. It makes careers useful after your family doesn’t need the money anymore (which happens after a few generations in legacies). The Obstacle Course one, the plastic surgery one, the pinball machine thing, and the koi pond look interesting. I like that there were goofier rewards, too.

University- Maybe I’ve been watching too much Undeclared lately, but college looks fun on TV and it probably would be interesting in TS2. I guess it’s probably because I’m going into my junior year at high school and everyone is all ‘omg college SATs scholarships!!!!’ and stuff but the scholarships and majors intrigue me.  

The old supernatural stuff- TS2 had more interesting life states, in my opinion. Plant Sims, Witches, Werewolves, Zombies and Aliens look more interesting than what TS3 offers, IMO. And apparently they have hybrids? The TS3 Simbot and Imaginary friend are really similar to me, but then again, this is EA that we’re talking about. And does the Mummy even have any advantages?  Maybe EA is saving all the good ones for last. And apparently Pets is bringing a unicorn? Honestly? That sounds so stupid. You could bring a unicorn with a magic EP but you can’t bring a werewolf with any other EP. And as least the other ones were human-shaped. I swear. EA’s next life state is gonna be a rock or something even stupider.

The usual stuff- seasons, old careers, less glitches, a company that cares, etc.

Okay, so this entire rant could be summarized as ‘If you want these features, play The Sims 2.’, as Jarsie would say. That’s a good point, actually. Especially with all the collections that are 20 dollars. I could own the entire series for less, I could skip EPs that I’m not interested in, and the game would probably work better on my laptop. The only thing I’d miss would be Create a Style and the trait system.