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Best TS3 news ever: someone finally worked out how to fix the store content!!! So I'm gonna move to the plain fixed items because why not. It means I'll need to double install at some point so I can clone colours off the things I need to replace, but then it'll all be done and fixed forever and I WILL HAVE SEASONAL LOT MARKERS!!!!!!

I loaded up TS3 today after donkey's yonks. I've been busy modding FNV. But now I have TS3 disease again, of course just after I deleted all my desktop shortcuts 'cause I hadn't used them for months and it was just visual clutter. But absence makes the heart grow fonder. Now I'm wondering about editing MV. I'm going to have to apply ella's fixes to my new version of the world anyway. So why not get rid of some of the stuff that winds me up - like the brown road in the middle and basically the entire 2nd town section (especially the roundabout)? I don't know, though... I still have to work out what I want to do with that area. (Actually, I'm thinking monastery on like 2 64x64s or something - hospital-spa-science-nectary and university... )

My church is sooooo nice. And the new graveyard/underground mausoleum I'd been working on. (Separate lots so sims don't shit themselves about ~being married in a graveyard~ stupid yanks...) The tennis club looks amazing. (And I'm glad the floor doesn't use store floors, because rebuilding it even 3 times so far has killed me lmao, it's so fiddly). And I'd been rebuilding the old town hall (the castle) and it looks sooooo good. Past me has impressed me. I'm wondering, maybe I should make the castle a home of a (new) aristocratic family :)

... maybe I want to redo the hospital. It doesn't need 18 seats in the waiting room, two GP's offices, 10 beds in the wards, 16 seats upstairs for the wards and treatment rooms... I'm not entirely sure the population of Monte Vista could actually fill it lmao

I want the main town to be more dense. Like half of it is roads and gaps and it's just not necessary. The ring road wastes sooo much space all by itself. Things to place:

• Church 25x25 next to...
• Graveyard + mausoleum 20x20
• Shops + restaurant + school + mini square 40x50

I keep getting my head turned by Northeney and Lago Simiore but that's just the devil talking. I'd have to do just as much to get them exactly how I want, and at least I have a headstart on MV :)

I have so much building and cc management to be doing, so instead I'm doing my age spreadsheet again. I might go for a 24 day year (= 2 years of real lifespan), just to be able to have "months". And I want to massage the age brackets now I remembered that sims can get their midlife crisis at the start of adult age, which is given as 40. I need to do more working out of the elder death chance to get the right mix of living enough but not living forever...

I'm going to upload a nice rabbit hole resource table as soon as I've finished compiling it, but here is a note on after school activities for teenagers (not counting boring study club):

• Mo We - Debate, Music
• Mo Th - Art
• Tu We - Shop
• Tu Fr - Drama
• We Fr - Newspaper
• Th Fr - Sports

Possible combos:

• Debate/Music + Drama/Sports
• Art + Shop/Drama
• Shop + Sports

I can't find any really good solid information on whether it's safe to delete sims in this game (especially if you have overwatch and errortrap). So I guess I'm just gonna do it. MV has the best premades, but I still dislike so many of them! Shitlist so far:

• The Giordano sisters. (3) Ugly even if I make them brunettes, and I'm not sure it would stick genetically. Plus I'd need to redo their ages which will be fiddly (they work out as like, 45, 28 and 13 or something, not very realistic!)
• Florence Taylor. Ugly and I have a grudge from constantly minding her 5 kids she had with that criminal who kept knocking her up and then leaving her. So many crying babies and toddlers!!!! It really interfered with Simona's own love life!!
• Pepe Moretti. Ugly and boring! Plus he's one of the Giordanos' lovers, so it's tidier.
• All the Montys/Pantalones!!!! (8) I hate that ghost man. >(
• The Perry sisters. (2) I always thought they were ugly, but they're okay with makeovers. I saved them to the bin and I'm gonna revamp them and give them a third sister seeing as I got rid of the Giordanos. Easier than making my own sims :) Also, none of them are going to be called Noel or Brian or anything else lmao.
• Seng family. (4) Ugly :(

Staying:

• My precious Simona Valenci (YAF). Beautiful and patient testing sim.
• Almeria family (EM, YAF, PF). The old husband is hideous, but I love Adora
• Giacomo Modena (YAM). He causes problems, but he's good-looking!
• Lia Rasi (EF). What's not to like about her and her fancy house
• Luis Toledo (EM). I don't like or dislike him. He can stay for Gino and maybe Lia :)
• The GilsCarbos (YAM, YAF, PM). They're pretty! I have no attachment to Goopy though.
• Sebastiana Russo (EF). She's funny :)
• Ricardo (Romano) family (AM, YAF, CM). She's beautiful, he's okay!
• James/Haynes (AM, AM). I wasn't sure about them but Nicoletta likes one
• Nicoletta Lombardi (YAF). I wasn't sure about her either, but I gave her an 80s makeover and now I'm sold lmao
• Bianchi family (YAM, YAF, PM). They're slightly unfortunate looking (worst is the woman's missing eyebrows lmao) but they're okay
• Stefani-Chang family (AF, AM, TF). I like them :)
• Jalissa Rivers (YAF). I like her backstory, and she's really pretty with new hair and fresher makeup. Oh, and this kinda 70s-beach outfit I just made for her. Her normal outfit is so boring, I didn't get that she was supposed to be a head-turning it girl
• Rossi family (AM, AF, pregnancy). She's pretty, he's rather unfortunate-looking...
• Erika Lin (AF). Really pretty if you change her hair!
• Gino Ferrari (AM). He's okay-looking. (A lot of these MV sims seem super attractive with their huge sunglasses on, it's a useful technique haha. But some are actually genuinely the best-looking sims in the whole game! (Not Gino though.))
• Mancini family (AM, YAM). Older brother is ugly (and nearly an elder), younger brother is cute though.
• DeLuca family (AF, YAM, TF). Mom and daughter are fairly pretty. Daughter is a fortnight away from growing up
• Costa family (AM, YAF, CF, PF, pregnancy). Giovanna is pretty, especially with a beehive :) I'm gonna give her 60s clothes to match. Her husband is slightly minging, but I like the family.

I've been playing and modding loads and not posting :) My husband helped me edit my first .dll! I changed Sims MX's appropriate zodiac mod to have better seasons ie Feb Aquarius, Mar Pisces instead of the mod kind of insisting spring starts at the beginning of April (I don't get why people claim this about the equinoxes lmao, what do they think midwinter/midsummer means?). I'll upload it when I correct how the script name comes up in the list 'cause I don't know why it just says "zodiac" (this was in a script error log, I already turned off the mod warning one). But it works perfectly! Unlike NRaas instant baby ageing up which doesn't and caused me so many crashes and more testing. Cmar NYC's pregnancy controller worked perfectly though! (It's such a shame she's no longer with us.)

I was looking for some tuning mods to replace some of my retuner stuff, but I got sidetracked. (Can't believe twoftmama is gone, too...) In the past week or so of renewed simming, I've found lots of people's simpler-than-NRaas story progression mods. That thing is such a beast to tame and so busy even if you play on glacial age settings like me. So, I'm trying to put together a list of what SP does that I'd miss, and if I can replace it.

• The big huge one? The reason I started with these mods at all? No disappearing my neighbours and friends in the middle of the night!!! But everyone feels the same, thankfully, so no emigration is a given. And no immigration is also pretty standard.
• I think I need something to allow inactive same-sex romance and definitely to allow lesbian pregnancy. Now I'm already getting cold feet wondering if EA SP cares about all the traits like "hates children" when it gets a sim pregnant for the 5th time
• I also need something to simulate menopause during the elder stage. This might be tuneable - something must tell the game not to let a sim get pregnant if they'd still be pregnant as an elder
• I want sims to keep their names on marriage
• And I want them to have the summer off school and not get got for "curfew" bullshit

... this seems surmountable? Maybe?

If I get simler90's mod, I can delete Arsil's great party fix. And, going through the changelog:

• rachelem1ly says "If you use Nraas Overwatch, change ‘MaintenanceFixMissingSims’, ‘MaintenanceSendYoungstersHome’ and ‘MaintenanceTurnOffElectronics’ all to false."
• set MemoryAutomaticScreenshotsAllowed to false
• set BabyInactiveAllowImmediateAging to False to prevent the game from aging inactive babies born through a regular pregnancy to toddlers in one day
• Set RandomizeUndecidedGenderPreference to True to make the game assign a gender preference to inactive, teen or older sims with no gender preference in your game once a day.
• Set InactivePetsLearnTrainedTraits to True to enable this feature which makes inactive resident pets roll a low chance once a day to make progress towards earning/losing traits
• Set EldersDyeHair to True to make it so that newly created elder sims and inactive sims who age up to elder will roll a chance to dye their hair. The chance depends on their gender, homeworld, some of their traits and so on. Male sims are very unlikely to dye their hair. If the chance succeeds, then male sims will have a 90% chance and female sims a 50% chance to dye their hair their genetic hair colour, otherwise they will randomly pick a colour. | This update changes my feature that allows elders to dye their hair. Now there are two tunable values based on gender: MaleEldersDyeHair controls whether male elder sims are allowed to dye their hair, and FemaleEldersDyeHair controls whether female elder sims are allowed to dye their hair. This update also prevents elders from dyeing their hair their genetic hair colour, as I think this leads to the impression that their hair didn't turn grey at all. Finally, when a sim decides to dye their hair, there will be a chance for their root colour to show their elder hair colour.
• SetSameZodiac tunable feature is now enabled by default - probably turn this off for my new mod
• PROBLEM: UPDATE 150: In an unmodded game, whenever the game gets two inactive sims married, it has a 50% chance of picking either sim's last name as the new family name. This update adds a new tunable feature, which is disabled by default, that makes it so that, instead of rolling a 50% chance, the game performs a large number of checks on both of the sims in order to pick the new family name. I made it so that the game has a very high base chance of picking the male sim's last name if the sims are an opposite-sex couple. Tuning: Set MarriageLastNameCheck to True to enable this feature. Set to False to revert to original EA behaviour.

This mod fixes the glitchy UL cafe bar!! I NEED IT

I want to be able to turn off adoption. And I need to check if this mod actually touches the xmls. I'd like to use it with shimrod's tuning. It does similar mermaid stuff so maybe not. I really don't want SP killing off sims or moving them out!

Apparently it conflicts with Traveler, but fixes what it fixes, so that's fine. I never really send my sims anywhere but the WA worlds, it just sounds cool to, but I won't actually miss it! ProtectusCZ says it's okay with "Woohooer, Debug Enabler, Master Controller, Overwatch, Portrait Panel and Register". Deanwinchester66 says it seems to be working (but they're not sure it's installed lmao) with "Master Controller with Career (along with all modules for Career,) Decensor, Go Here, Master Controller Cheat, Once Read, Overwatch, Register, Relativity, Returner, Second Image, Sleep Freedom, Tempest, Traffic, Traveler, Woohooer (along with all modules that go with Woohooer)"

What are my NRaas mods right now, anyway?

• Career (need it I think only for HW uni)
• Decensor
• ErrorTrap
• GoHere (I think same things are fixed, but I want "Rude Guest Liking Gate")
• MasterController (Cheats - I assume fine?)
• Overwatch (need to turn off stuff in simler90's)
• Register
• Retuner
• SecondImage
• StoryProgression (Career, Extra, Money, Population, Relationship, Skill)
• Tempest
• Traveler

Might conflict with icarusallsorts.Scolding.package (but might not lmao)

Phew okay. So like, a few days before my cat died last month, before she even seemed ill at all, I decided to get back into TS3 and finally go back to my original world idea which is basically St Agnes, Isles of Scilly. I worked out it would fit at either real scale or bloody close on the largest world size (with or without the Gugh, I can't recall). I never intended to recreate it precisely, but I thought the real island shape would be fun, and I wanted Scilly vibes generally. That was like 10 years ago - that was maybe even before my cat was born - it's fucked up and I'm still fucked up even though it's been 3 weeks (today or tomorrow? depends if you count driving to the emergency vet at like 3am to put her down as saturday evening or sunday morning)

...I'm not necessarily meaning to type about Flea actually. But I can't seem to help it!

Anyway, the sims news is that I'm definitely doing it, and it's going to be called St. Fleaby's :) And I've been planning and plotting and scheming for the last few weeks, and not getting terribly far. I finally perfected my ageing/seasons (need to update it on here) and I'm making real headway with my cc archives actually. I've even roughly planned and named all the sims I'm going to make? (but I wonder if 38 is enough; if I want more single sims; mermaids)

My big huge problem (apart from my fat cat is dead obvs) is that I want 2 or maybe even 3 things that don't actually go together. I want something hyper rural, like St Agnes, or maybe more like St Agnes 50 years ago or something - a couple of stone fishermens cottages on a windswept yet warm beach - but I also want something flashy and fun, amusement arcades, rides (like the store rollercoaster and carousel, and this adorable ferris wheel). Maybe on top of that, or maybe it does actually go with both, I've gotten obsessed with those 30s ocean liner kind of art deco houses, all smooth curves, round windows, ship railings, I wish I knew the name (but it's okay, I have a nice collection of pics now!) That one's kind of easy for sims 3 (if still somewhat impossible) because of the Roaring Heights build set. It's interesting that it was a glamorous seaside style in the US, too :) Well, I guess the ships were transatlantic, too!

I also really really want a theatre/cinema/one of each. I wanted this generally already because I love classic cinema style (... I guess they are art deco too huh?) and because of the research I'd been doing for Monte reVista, also rural but a billion times less, and I'd found and fallen in love with with the tiny Teatro della Concordia. I was searching small cinemas and theatres for this new project and found so many beautiful examples, especially the Little Theatre Gateshead which I think is juuuuuuuust small enough to miniaturise along the lines of my miniaturised Teatro della Concordia but like... this is all for a world much bigger and more bustling than my little row of cottages!

I thought about underlining the touristic nature. Yeah fine, you can have a theatre that seats ~40 in your town of 38 if it's filled by the hundreds of summer sims. But there's no way I'm aware of to have tourists only in the season, let alone something kinda realistic where there's loads of them and they rotate. And a tourist town without tourists would be bizarre. The nature of The Sims, and also how I want to play to an even stronger degree, is that it's a neighbourhood of settled families, and maybe you occasionally move someone else in.

So... I'm stuck! Super stuck. I don't want my rural villagers living in a weird skeletal Blackpool, but neither do I want to give up on either my amusements and piers dreams or the serenity of the quiet paradise island...

The big reason I gave up on St Agnes back in the day was that I suck at CAW. So this time I'm using Northeney as a base. I didn't have all the EPs so I have to replant the island anyway and I have a feeling I'm going to repaint at least the water with Nilxis' tutorial (I would totally have used one of his worlds, probably the astonishingly beautiful Sa Pineda, if only it were bigger!), and I feel I'm going to do more than adding roads and altering the town terrace. I basically kind of want to put Sa Pineda where the town is lmao, like on the item-rock part, I need some high ground! I'll put a squat little lighthouse up there :)

I'm really looking forwards to making something British instead of fighting my instinct to britify poor Umbria, which is beautiful enough how it is. I want to finish my Monte Vista some day, I really do! But I'm having so much fun with all this seaside charm, Cornish cottages, 30s architecture, tropical flowers and palms in amongst the heather and gorse! :D

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The other problem is that I want a million fun things for my sims to do, which means a thousand lots, but also I want a very limited number of community lots so that they're well used (and not just in the creepy stalker way - basically I want a pub that's already full when I get there, reliably, every night!) So the simplest is a lot for adults and a lot for children, or combine it with a playground outside a pub, but I think I can do more than that. I want shops too. I just can't work any of it out!

I keep going backwards and forwards on resorts. I don't want them because they're dodgy. I can fix stupid ugly towers, I can fix general dodginess and beach towel placement (and I have installed a general fix for dodgy sunbathing), but it doesn't fix everything. I read that you can't place a guitar on a resort lot, for example. Wtf?? It's just mental and I am not going to bother with it. It's a shame, because it would be fun to make an old-fashioned seaside hotel, or even have the b&b I'm definitely making as a resort.

I have to decide where the b&b is! And what it is. Is it a large house or a small inn/hotel on the seafront, or a small mansion inland with the gardens? And is it a residential lot I hope the proprietress doesn't get booted from by SP, or a community lot with no-one to butter the cold toast triangles in the little holder? (note: I need little toast holder!!! okay, Sandy is always a decent bet, and I've had it since 2018 lol, but it's not triangles)

I know who lives there: it's Lara Croft's mom haha. My Lara sim is called Victoria Trevellick, and her elderly mom is Cecily Trevellick. They're posh but have fallen on hard times (no butler to lock in no giant fridge, very sad, pray for them; then again, this Lady Croft has lived to a ripe old age, so...) I need to decide if she runs it with her daughter, or maybe her daughter lives there but has another job, and if so what is that, or maybe she doesn't live there at all. Also I need to decide if I want to move one of the fisherman's sons in (one is a gruff fisherman like his dad and they live on his fishing boat together, one is bookish and maybe seasick haha so maybe he rents a room on land)

So I already changed my mind about one thing from the last post: who runs the B&B. I decided to increase the population by another quarter or two quarters (from 2x my demographic ratio to 2.5x or 3x, I am sorry but I literally cannot think of a sensible way to phrase this lmao). I liked the 3x but it was just too many sims at 56 (to be bothered to make, and also considering I want pets and Appaloosa Plains has 47 playable sims and 26 pets instead of the ~59 playable sims most other EA worlds have), and I had to invent another entire family and I just couldn't really have been doing with it lmao. So now it's 47 sims and idk how many pets yet, but this gave just a little more slack in terms of designing the families, so the Trevellicks can now live in a half boarded-up/sheet-covered manor in the middle of the island with their horses, and the elderly fisherman's even more elderly mother now runs the B&B with her grandson. And they have some new and some, hm, introduced relatives in my Ian-from-Fallout sim and his new useless (but nice) brother and mother (the fisherman's sister). There are lots of grandparents on the island, but now Irene Mortimer is a great-grandma :)

I decided the fisherman's sons - Ben & Jon Mortimer - have/had a mermaid for a mother. Maybe I should make them twins?? It's fun for a super different siblings story anyway. If they're not twins, their dad Bill repeatedly shagging this mermaid knowing she's going to leave a baby on his shipstep 9 months later gets sillier and siller. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing :) I ship Ben, the one who takes after his dad, with posh Victoria Trevellick - but can she tame her irresistible hot-headed sailor? :o Jon, the brave yet socially-awkward bookworm, ought to end up with one of the party-loving Fairchild sisters, again because it is funny to meee!

I have all 16 of their households sorted out, which means 16 houses to build - well, 15 and a boat :) I'm not planning to make any empty houses, but half of them only have an elderly person/couple and their unmarried child, so that's fine. Now I'm working on their traits, as you might have guessed. I'm trying a system I read some people use - a good trait, a neutral trait, a bad trait, and a trait each from their mom and dad. That gives some leeway in making better and shittier sims on top of making them all both individually varied and having some sense of actually being brought up by their parents! I'm slightly constrained by not wanting any of mean, evil and grumpy, solely because they are apparently rude to sleeping cats which I cannot tolerate whatsoever! So my worst traits are hot-headed and snob, probably, but I have an entire column labelled "mental illnesses" as well as the flat "negative"s :) I have 10 out of 47 all betraited. It's complicated! I'm sooo glad I have my nice spreadsheet.

There are two big connected families, the Frosts and the Evans..es. In my first idea they were two retired couples, maybe already friends, who moved here next door to each other. But I didn't want stray retirees, even though it's in keeping with the setting, because a sim's only family is what actually exists in the world and that would just be sad and lonely for them! So they are your classic seaside retired couples except they settled here young, young enough that one of the Frost girls married the neighbour Evans boy she grew up next door to. Let's say one set inherited the house they kept for sentimental reasons and the others bought theirs with a lottery win, though god only knows why because it's not the place most people would choose to rear their kids! (Well, I think they are your typical seaside-obsessed Midlandsers who maybe can't tell different degrees of rurality apart because it's all so foreign.) With the expanded population, I was able to add the 2nd Frost sister, along with a wife and 2 kids. This family lives in the 90s, but just don't dwell too much on the details. I wanted to break up the symmetry between the two families, add a lesbian couple to go with the gay couple I already had, and add 2 more kids, so I ticked a whole bunch of boxes at once! So this big family has 2 young-ish couples with 2 kids each, 2 unmarried adult siblings (who can maybe copy their big siblings or maybe get the hell out!), and 2 sets of grandparents. I think they'd be really fun to play!

I love all these little sims already. I don't want to leave any out. I'll do a proper write up at some point - I'll make a page for each character and everything - but just for now, just a ~sims diary exclusive~ haha, who have we got! There's the Tregarthens, an old local family, along with the Mortimers and the Trevellicks. Widowed granddad Colin lives with his unmarried son Jason, and he's glad his other two kids have settled here with their spouses. Michelle met her husband Simon Rosevear on the mainland, and they pounced on the rarity of a St Fleaby's house up for sale. It's a tight squeeze for them and their teenage Jessica and little Samuel, but Michelle loves being home, and Simon's used to the quiet life anyway. Eldest son Daniel came back with his husband Michael Strawbridge because they felt too old for the city, because he missed home, because his husband loves the sea and also because they both love their niece and nephew! That's a cozy little life in 3 households for the Tregarthen-Rosevears. Someone has to live in the old lighthouse, and I'm thinking it's one of these couples actually haha, but I'm not sure.

Andrew and Deborah Green retired here early after accepting that they'd never have the family they wanted. Then Deb got some really worrying menopausal bloating...! Their teenage son Lee doesn't feel the full weirdness of having elderly parents because there are only 10 kids on the island lol. Anyway, they're a happy family!

Christopher Goldsworthy's grandparents were all from St Fleaby's, but they left because there were no prospects even back in the day. He wasn't even born in Sim Cornwall, unlike his late parents, but he's always gone back for holidays. He talked it up so much to his girlfriend Sarah Patel that she insisted on honeymooning there. It was surely cheaper than travelling to where her grandparents were from - and nearly as sunny! She fell in love with the Isles of Simly, and especially the beautiful art deco palace on the St Fleaby cliffs; kept in contact with the local estate agents; and the minute it went on the market, she informed her husband they were buying it. He pointed out that it was a wreck. She countered that that was why they could afford it - if her parents also sold up and joined them. Absolutely none of this had been what he agreed to when he married her, but that didn't stop him, and he has to admit both that it's a truly beautiful home - especially after all the work Sarah's put in - and that Rani and Deepak have been great helps with young Matthew, who they absolutely dote on, and who worships them in turn. Now that the mansion's foundations are stable, and so are Chris and Sarah's finances, maybe they'll work on filling up all those bedrooms!

I briefly mentioned the Mortimer-Thistletons, but here's the whole deal. Widowed Irene runs the B&B alone, which isn't terribly different to when her husband was alive seeing as he was mostly at sea. She's just older now and has grandkids and a great-granddaughter she wishes he'd met. Her son William is just like his old man, and his son Ben is just like him, but Jon only resembles him in bravery. Even Jon's love for the sea is different, because he likes swimming, not so much fishing. He also likes reading and cats, which is useful when you live with your grandma and help run the world's sleepiest little hotel. Irene's daughter Ann also loves animals, and everyone - she's very friendly, just like her mom, and a great cook like her too. She's also a couch potato mooch whose 'help' with the B&B never seemed to improve its finances, so Irene's glad she stopped. Now she spends all day on the sofa watching telly with her son James Thistleton, a childish slob who dreams of a great romance, and whose only hope of finding it is his great sense of humour. He's nothing like his brother Ian, who actually achieved his own romantic dreams with his very young marriage to Natalya Dubrovskaya, a refugee to Sim London he met at a gig. She was complaining about how everyone's, like, a total sellout these days, and he was lamenting the fact that televisions exist, and they hit it off. He's a friendly family man and a great kisser, and she's a genius athlete, so let's overlook that she's also a daredevil with sticky mitts :) There is probably little trouble for her to get into on St Fleaby's, and anyway, her hands are full with their toddler, Catherine. Grandma Ann loves her, but that house is too messy for Catherine to spend a lot of time there, and the young couple's finances are too tight to have Ann around much; great-grandma Irene is a famous neat freak, which is just the opposite problem with a toddler, but luckily she's not too frugal to help out. Natalya was worried her snobby grandmother-in-law would dislike her, but instead she goes around boasting about how her great-granddaughter is the prettiest baby the island has ever seen!

There are two other young women from Sim London on the island, but they have a totally opposite lifestyle. Samantha and Charlotte Fairchild directly inherited their maternal grandparents' beautiful little retirement home due to their mother's death, and Sam fled here when her studies fell through with the stress of her dad marrying a woman her own age - and maybe also because she was too much of a party animal for the conservatoire. Her equally party-loving 17 year old sister followed shortly behind, to their dad and "stepmum"'s fury which doesn't even make sense because Lottie was going to be an artist anyway, just like mum, and you don't need A levels for that, and she can totally do that by the sea because it's so inspiring!! Everything inspires super excitable Charlotte, but especially romance, which she'll surely find in short order as she's so charismatic. Sam, for her part, is totally irresistable, but she's also a flirty snob, both of which might make lasting love more difficult...

:) I'm really looking forwards to decorating their house. It's going to be exactly their grandparents' home as it was, but with their handmade decorations in small patches, maybe stray walls painted pink or with murals before they got bored, and as much party clothes thrown everywhere as I can manage without too much cc :D

The other families are mainly from the 50s (or even 20s) up to the 90s, but the last family is maybe modern... or maybe they fled Sim!! Hong Kong in advance of the handover. Carmen Wong and Ashley Chan have business reasons for being in St Fleabys that I'm yet to work out seeing as nothing happens here!!! Maybe it's to do with the amusements?? Anyway, they live here with Carmen's mom Marjorie and their little daughter Emily. A cute little family! I don't want Ashley and Marjorie to have in-law drama, so unless I think of something with the traits, they are just cute, an easy family to play seeing as Emily is already a child and she has her grandma there to look after her too on top of that. But hopefully they have more kids!

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...I love them! I don't know who I'll play as!

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My husband read this and had some ideas I think I'm going to incorporate. Ben & Jon don't necessarily have to be twins if it's that their mom returned to the sea selkie-style! And maybe the weirdness of sleepy St Fleaby's amazing amusements can be partially resolved if it's that Carmen and Ashley have invested in ruins they aim to revitalise! Maybe I'll make a former hotel that they live in... competition for Irene's B&B and also the rooms I was planning to put in above the pub - and yeah, if we squint at that we can have a rollercoaster!!