This is the industrial wasteland city I was talking about in the post about Thaylambar.

Out in the farmlands of the city of Thaylambar, a strange shape appeared in the crops... Is it the work of aliens, or divine pasta?

I figured out I could use avenue roundabouts as the meatballs and road roundabouts for the eyes of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The city of Thaylambar has been touched.

Thaylambar is another of my cities I've been working on. It has a population of 99,000; yet the majority of the land is used as farmland.

Click image to view full.

I'm keeping the population poor and dumb. The reason is I'm working on a large industrial wasteland in a neighboring city, and I needed the demand for dirty industrial. As it turns out, only the poor and stupid are willing to work in a heavily polluted wasteland where you have to wear a gas mask to get to work. Who knew?

As a result, I cleaned up the industry in Ishau. I moved all the dirty industry to my wasteland city. Now there is only clean high-tech industry in Ishau. Also, the people in Ishau have proper schools are are fairly well off.

Let me say right up front, I'm not being paid by Dropbox for this review and I am doing this on my own accord. You can sign up for it with my Dropbox referral link.

Dropbox allows you to sync files across multiple computers and share files with other Dropbox users, or even the public (at your discretion). You can install Dropbox on your own personal computers (Windows, Mac, and even Linux), and any file you put into the "My Dropbox" folder will sync across all your computers, along with being uploaded to the Dropbox servers. There appears to be no limit to how many computers you can sync across.

Dropbox provides an off-site backup of your files. In the event of a fire or harddrive crash, your files are still secure on the Dropbox servers. In addition, you can login to the Dropbox website from any computer (at work, for example) and download any of your files you may need. It also saves previous versions of your files for 30 days (forever, with the paid version), so if you make a change or delete something that you later regret, you can restore an old version. The files are transferred using a secure connection; even the Dropbox employees can't access your personal files. And don't worry, there is a way to truly delete a file if you really want it gone forever...

If you have an iPhone, there's a free Dropbox app that allows you to access and read files in your Dropbox account. You can also take pictures with your phone and upload them to Dropbox with the app. Currently, any file you view with the iPhone is read-only. However you can delete files from within the app, and they are still adding features.

The free account gives you 2 GB (up to 5GB, see below) of online storage. There is also the option to pay for additional space: $9.99 per month/$99.00 per year for 50 GB; or $19.99 per month/$199.00 per year for 100 GB.

There is a built-in Public folder. Anything you put into this folder gets assigned a web address and you can give this link to others (they don't even have to be Dropbox users!) so they can download the file. There's also the option to share any folder with another Dropbox user. This is an excellent way to collaborate on a project. Anything that either of you put in that shared folder is automatically sent to the other person's Dropbox folder. You can share the folder with more than one person if you're working on a group project.

If you sign up using my referral link, you'll get a free extra 256 MB of online storage. Here comes my personal gain part: so will I... For the first 12 to sign up anyway; you can get a maximum extra of 3 GB, making a total of 5 GB possible with a free account. So we both win.

I travel weekly between houses, so Dropbox has been insanely useful to me to keep files in sync between my computers. And I've set up a shared folder between my dad and I. It seems reliable, I haven't had any issues with it.

I've been wanting to play a city simulator again for a while. I haven't read very good reviews of Cities XL, and from what I've seen I don't like how zoning works in it anyway. So I've went back to SimCity 4. Click an image to view full.

I started a brand new region, so right now my biggest city only has a population of 15,000. I named it Ishau.

As you can see, I'm using the Network Addon Mod. This is what allows me to have all the roundabouts and that odd highway intersection (among other things).

Because the roundabouts are a new feature to me, I went a little overboard on them.

I always have a tendency to build things with a symmetrical pattern, so I've been trying my damndest to avoid patterns, especially in the industrial district. I was going for a dirty, messy, chaotic look.

I've finished Borderlands completely with a character now (a Siren). Gone through Playthrough 1 and 2. When I was doing Playthrough 2, I saved most of the sidequests for the unofficial Playthrough 2.5.

In Playthrough 2, you start the game over with your character and gear intact from the first Playthrough. The enemies are tougher and the "Badass" enemies are renamed to "BadMotha".

Once you've beat the main quest in Playthrough 2 and reload your saved game, you're in the unofficial Playthrough 2.5. In Playthrough 2.5, all enemies are between level 48 and 52. And "BadMotha" becomes "SuperBad". The maximum level for a player is 50, so it's common for enemies to be higher level than you are.

Now that I've completed every quest, the only thing left to do is collect rare weapons and search for secret locations and Easter Eggs¹ hidden in the game. Or start a different type of character. And there's always online play with other people.

^1: An Easter Egg in a game is not literally an egg (usually). It's just something hidden in the game. They usually require the player to go out of their way to discover.

I've been playing Borderlands multiplayer with a couple of my real-life friends. We're on the 2nd playthrough now, and the 3 of us make a pretty well balanced team.

We've got a Brick (that's the character's name) who is the team's tank and damage sponge. He rushes into battle in a suicidal rampage and gets the attention of all the enemies. He likes to punch things.

We've got a Mordecai, he's our sniper. If something randomly dies out of nowhere, it was probably his doing.

It took me a while to figure out what part I wanted to play. At first I started as Lilith (I always seem to chose to play the woman). However, she didn't really play well with others. When one of my friends would go down, the only thing she could do was phasewalk and run away to save herself. I didn't feel like part of a team playing as her. So I switched to Roland and became the team's medic. I'd like to think it's because of me that Brick can go on suicidal rampages and not actually die.

I've picked up a special skill (called cauterize) that allows me to heal teammates when I shoot them¹. Brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "friendly fire". I usually like to find a position above the battle and shoot my rocket launcher at Brick. Since the rockets explode on impact and hit everything in the area, I can simultaneously heal my teammates and kill the enemy. I'm also durable enough to run into battle and revive a downed teammate, if needed.

Because of my constant barrage of friendly rockets, this allows my teammates to hold nothing back. Even Mordecai can go out-of-character and run into the foray Rambo-style. I also enable the team to regenerate ammunition, so we should never run out. I feel important and useful to the team now.

¹ That's right. I heal people by shooting them... With rockets.

This is the introduction in Borderlands when you start a new game. The part on the bus is actually what the graphics are like in the game. Almost looks like you're playing inside a comic book. But it's a fresh new graphic style for a game, I actually like it.

Borderlands intro and character selection

There is an abundance of Borderlands servers that show as available, but any attempt to connect to them results in a time out. This is because the person hosting the game did not open the correct ports in their router's port forwarding, and Gamespy is too stupid to know.

In a futile attempt to improve the available servers out there, I'll list the ports that need to be forwarded when hosting Borderlands:

7777 (Both)
27900 (UDP)
28900 (TCP)
28910 (TCP)
 

...Because it borders the next year... Yeah ok, that one's a stretch.

Last post of the year, and I'm too busy playing Borderlands to bother to write a meaningful post. Yeah, I just got Borderlands.

So umm, have fun with whatever you're doing for new years!

Up to generation 8 in my Sims 3 Legacy. Little Emily was born!

Stacy grew up and got married to Alex. Alex reminds me so much of Fabio Lanzoni.

You've got to wounder why Apple's lawyers felt it necessary to include this in the license agreement...


I guess Apple software is a lot more powerful than I could have imagined.

Once again, this is about my Sims 3 Legacy¹.

The Grim Reaper just acquired another plutonium rock, and when he sent it in to get smelted and purified, he got 5 ingots back! That makes a total of 7 bars of plutonium, I'm aiming for 15 of each metal. Click an image to view full.

As you can see, I have 15 of every metal now, except plutonium.

I think the public has taken notice. I found a group of sims in front of the city hall protesting radiation.

No worries, the Leader of the Free World (aka the Sim President) is David, and he's secretly evil and in league with Grim. He'll make sure this little protest goes nowhere.

^1: Why do I keep saying that this is about my Sims 3 legacy? Because there's always that one person that didn't read any of my other posts and they ask what game this is in.

Recent major events in my Sims 3 legacy. Nearly a lifetime has passed since I've talked about the family other than Grim.

Vernell became a Master Thief for the same organization that my Grim Reaper is the leader of. Grim was so proud of his granddaughter. Grim never really got along with his daughters, but Vernell and Grim were best friends since she was a baby. When Vernell was 88 days old (an elder), she managed to steal the priceless Golden Llama statue; long believed to be theft-proof. The statue now sits in Grim's chambers within the organization. She received an amazing $209 an hour raise for the feat. But alas, she died of old age the very next day.

Vernell and Buck had children obviously, named Cindy and Lori. Lori is the older sister and is the heir. She grew up and married a Smurf. No, I'm not joking...

In the Legacy rules, you're not allowed to marry any sim that you create, but their game-generated offspring are fair-game. I created a blue-skinned couple with the last name Smurf. They had a child named David Smurf, and it is David that Lori married. They then had twins, Nora and Stacy. Nora has regular color skin and Stacy has blue smurf-skin. Both Lori and Cindy did not inherit the jet-black skin color from Vernell. I wanted to keep things interesting, so I went for another odd color.

Cindy, being the younger sister and having both the Great Kisser and Commitment Issues traits, turn out to be quite promiscuous. She obtained the Heartbreaker lifetime wish: to have 10 different boyfriends. Let's just say she went through 10 guys pretty quickly... She's already achieved her lifetime wish!

Again, this is about my Sims 3 Legacy.

Grim has re-focused his time to his collecting, and it paid off big-time. In one very good night, he found a Trilobite Beetle, a Rainbow Beetle, and... Plutonium! The plutonium was the only metal he was missing, so now he's completed the Metal Collector challenge. He will now routinely get additional ingots returned in the mail. Too bad you can't do anything more than put them on display. Grim is the Emperor of Evil, I'm sure he could find some nefarious use for plutonium. Click an image to view full.

He just so happened to get an extra ingot of plutonium in the mail, they are the green bars¹ on the table.

The two beetles completed his beetle collection, and he's already completed his butterfly collection. How that helps him dominate the world I have no idea.

The beetles...

...And the Butterflies, a collection to make even Looney envious.

^1: Yes, plutonium in real life is a silvery white color. But so are most metals. In the game they gave it a green color to make it stand out.

I changed 2 of my Grim Reaper's traits. It just didn't make sense that he was the Emperor of Evil, yet didn't have the Evil trait. I know, changing traits is probably against the Legacy Challenge rules. Strictly speaking though, it is not specifically listed in the rules that you can't use the Mid-Life Crisis reward perk. Besides, they're more like guidelines than actual rules, right?

Now Grim can get to plotting his evil domination of the world.

The Grim Reaper in my Sims 3 legacy is not without a few glitches. I don't think it was ever planned to be able to have the Grim Reaper in your family like I do.

First off, he has no head when in some work outfits! For example, here's Grim in his work outfit as the Emperor of Evil.

Vernell (from my Sims 3 legacy) is well on her way. She has a beautiful set of traits, and I am taking full advantage of them.

I've always wanted a Grim Reaper statue in my family's backyard graveyard. However, the statue can only be bought on community lots (not household lots). There is a way to get it though... You need a Kleptomaniac sim, and it just so happens that Vernell is one. I sent her to the town graveyard and after stealing some random guy's remains, she stole the Grim Reaper statue in the graveyard. Then you can go back home and into buy mode, where you copy the statue with the eyedropper tool. You can then return the original.

So, in my Sims 3 legacy the ghosts of dead family members are starting to get in the way. Every night they all come out. I liked it better in the Sims 2 where only some of the ghosts would come out in a given night.

Vernell had a birthday and 8 ghosts swarmed into the kitchen. They all wanted cake. By the time the ghosts took their slices, there was no cake left for my regular sims.

So it turns out you should never trust a sim named Ferby. He cheated on Annabel Lee and had a child with someone else. If she were to have married him, I would have been forced to take the bastard child, too. So Ferby will not be in the family tree.

Instead, Annabel Lee hooked up with a firefighter named Jerad. Here I'm trying to size down the family and they go and have twins (Carla and Vernell). She actually wasn't even married to him at the time of their twins' birth. Both turned out jet-black like their mother.

Sabrina moved out and she took one of the twins (Carla) with her. So I'm left with just Vernell and a slightly smaller family I have to take care of. So I'm happy.

As far as Jerad is concerned, he has served his purpose. He's useless to me now. I've already achieved what his lifetime wish is with a different sim, so I can't get that point from him. Looks like even though Jerad has the Lucky trait, great misfortune will come his way *wink* *wink*.

Oh and Vernell's two traits, Evil and Genius: randomly selected as per the Legacy Challenge rules. I swear...

Elvira has been fed to the timestream (in my Sims 3 legacy). That means she's left the household (and thus my control). She accomplished everything I needed her to quite quickly. So I let her get married to a sim named Loren Meador and move in with him.

I was getting too many sims in the family anyway. There is a maximum of 8 at any given time. I needed to make room for Ferby and the next generation (when she's born). Besides, I'm getting tired of controlling such a large family.

I've read that some people had a tough time achieving the Golden Tongue, Golden Fingers lifetime wish within the 90 day lifespan. Elvira completed it while still a young adult. The key is to start with playing the guitar for tips in the park. You'll end up being friends with nearly everyone in town. Then you don't have to worry about the friend requirements to master the charisma skill. Just read the charisma skill books.