It might just have been a random occurrence not to do with anything - maybe I needed to save the Pearl game again or play it for a while before shutting it down, but in the meantime I've been too pissed off to want to play Pokemon. So all my efforts have been going into Sims 2, although I still don't have any brain for creative stuff. Instead, I have been installing downloads and updating hacks - and trying to clear space off my hard drive by deleting some of my more compulsive backups. I managed to delete all my backups older than November 2006 from all three drives. Now I only have the CDs *lol*. I also deleted all my Sims 1 stuff off the file server downstairs, except for the things I'd made myself, and freed up over 4 GB of space!
My paranoid backup system was, however, justified over the weekend: when someone else suffered a catastrophic hard drive failure and lost everything - including a 1.52GB shared Neighbourhood made by someone who has since died in real life (genuinely!). As I am a Compulsive Hoarder (TM), I still had the original file, and was able to extract the useful parts, rezip it, and upload it to my Sims 2 site. I spent around 7 hours working on the thing plus another 10 hours of computer time uploading (without me needing to watch it), but it was worth it to make someone happy. I mean, I wasn't feeling well yesterday & was planning to spend the day fiddling with Sims stuff anyway.
Today, I went to a shop that exchanges games for other games or cash, and traded in my US copy of Pokemon Ranger for a European edition. I was worried that I'd get a save game with the Manaphy egg already extracted, but the guy whose save game I have is right at the end, so it'll only take me an hour & a half or so to get the egg again, rather than 10+ hours if I had to start from scratch! That is definitely A Good Thing.
I note that I still need to acquire enough spoons to finish writing about the situation in Burma :/ I knew there was a reason I have a livejournal rather than a blog :/ No one cares if I don't update this thing, as long as you know I'm still alive, whereas people expect blogs to get updated.