#echo complains

I avoid politics and current events here not because they don't interest me, but because they interest me too much, and I need someplace to escape. I think about it a lot and have complicated opinions. Simplistic groupthink pisses me off. My take on trans issues is even a bit more complicated than you might think. Mostly, I get enraged at refusal to treat people with compassion, and I'm aware of the irony.

I know there isn't going to be pathos and characterization in every moment of a sim's life, not even if I boil it down to the highlights (which I'm bad at doing), but if I'm going to try to write a narrative story, it would be nice if it felt like there were more narrative.

And it's not that the characters don't feel like they have a lot of personality. They're just fine in my head. I don't think, for example, Vickie's introversion or Jonah's motivations are very well expressed, but *I* know what they are.

My current freeplay style, where I treat myself as an outside observer of a bunch of individuals who both have free will AND exist inside a game, seems to flow more smoothly, though it's intentionally more goofy that my Samples style. I've always treated the Samples as more of a fiction story from their perspective, and I don't really want to change that.

I'm not like many of you who have a story in mind that you are building. If I want to build a story for itself, I'll write fiction that isn't attached to a game. In fact, my sims narratives were originally built with the goal of keeping creativity flowing through low-stakes game-prompted stories while life changes and parenthood pushed my more "serious" writing to the backburner. That writing is still there, and I work on it intermittently. Its time to take center stage again is coming, but it isn't here yet.

I guess I'm just grumbling about how I'm not being the storyteller I want to be. I guess that's not so uncommon in this fandom 🙃. I don't want to try to make the Samples something they're not. I just want their story to feel as rich as it does when I'm playing them. I think that sense of disconnect has made it difficult to write them recently, and that's no help either.

Something is borked with Woohooer, I assume, since SP shouldn’t affect TFB on the active household.

With the Samples, the active household is fine but the town won’t have babies.

I’m contemplating seeing if I can just roll my SP back to before castes were introduced.

Argh.

I guess it’s a good thing that I’m running on a longer lifespan than usual...