Ronnie the Sim

I know science takes patience, but…

Posted on Month 5, Day 21, 2011 by ronnieJune 11, 2011

I have not noticed any cataclysms in Sunset Valley all day long. According to this Web-based time zone finder, the time has now reached 6 p.m. or later at all longitudes from the International Date Line all the way west to Brazil. There are only two possible implications:

(1) Sunset Valley must be even further west than Brazil, or

(2) There is a bug in the End Of The World, and it isn’t really happening today.

Neither of these is very encouraging. If Sunset Valley is west of Brazil, we can rule out a lot of very lovely Continue reading →

Measure twice, cut once?

Posted on Month 5, Day 21, 2011 by ronnieOctober 24, 2011

Well, friends, my plan to determine the longitude of Sunset Valley will succeed or fail in the next several hours.

Here is the issue: to reckon longitude requires an accurate clock, and Sim time does not track Outer World time very well. A breakthrough came recently when I discovered — via Internet, so I know it’s true, because computers don’t make errors — that the End Of the World will come tomorrow.

Key to the whole project is the time that it will come: Continue reading →

On the Web, no one knows you’re a…

Posted on Month 5, Day 6, 2011 by ronnieOctober 24, 2011

A correspondent asks, “Are you really a teenage Sim?” — doubtless alluding to the fact that Sims seldom operate their own Web sites, and particularly not at my age.

I hate to disappoint, but this is a good time to remind everyone of an important point about safe surfing: there are no actual teenagers on the ’net. A person who presents herself as a teenager invariably turns out to be some creepy old guy pretending.

Accordingly, I am some kind of creepy old guy.
I must be, oh, at least fifty. I really look like this photo.
Usually I do not like to disclose too many personally identifying factoids, but in this case I think a greater purpose is served.

Trying to get in the “Zone”

Posted on Month 4, Day 26, 2011 by ronnieDecember 3, 2011

* I’ve decided to use foreign-style dates (month/day/year) in this page, so that Outer World readers can make out what they mean.

To my Sunset Valley readers: I regret that I cannot supply an equivalent in the familiar form (e.g. “Week 1, Day 3”) because Outer time does not have a fixed relationship to our own. In the Outer world they have a concept called “time zones” which I am still struggling to grasp. The basic problem seems to be that there are so very many people that they cannot all use the Sun at the same time, so it has to sweep around the Earth lighting up different parts of it in turn; as each part is lit, the people in that part say “oh, this is the morning of such-and-such day”; and they just can’t all be right. I will post more about this puzzle as I get it figured out.