The Grouch's Trash Pile [Baldur's Gate 3]

My sim’s best friend married Judith. I was obligated to redecorate quite a bit even though I didn’t intend to do a whole big home makeover. It just needed that much work for me not to feel bad about best friend leaving his previous, very nicely decorated family home with a lot of personality to go live in a giant box with one (1) entertainment. It gave the marriage itself an uncomfortable vibe, like this woman had literally nothing of substance to offer.

The house does have the dichotomy with very different color schemes split down the middle, which could be interesting to explore more if I decide to do that later. I wish they’d done more with it themselves, because as a paint job with not enough furniture to add much suggestion of character or story, it almost makes it worse, like a worrying idea that she has another side. It just all comes across as a bit concerning if your point of view is via the best friend of her new spouse. But it could be something about struggling to balance a personal life that doesn’t match your image, or even more easily a story of a history with someone who’s no longer there. Maybe that’s what they were going for. I honestly can’t tell.

The new husband is a vampire, so that’s a really obvious angle for decorating the light and dark sides of the house if I wanted to use that.

 

I didn't even notice that about her house! I just saw that it was big and mostly empty and promptly found a house from the gallery to replace it. ... Thinking about it, that house kind of has the same split down the middle thing; there's a Very Manly den and bedroom decorated with much more contrasting colors on one side, and then a very lavish, princessy bedroom on the other.

I replaced all the lots in Del Sol, but my favorite replacement is for the currently empty celeb home. It's very big and very pleasantly cluttered in a way that suggests a big family with lots of interests and a little bit of a homey, hippie vibe... but then there's a vault door in the basement of the two-story garage that leads to a room with all sorts of awards and stuff (makes sense), and a bookcase door in the vault that leads to a deep basement... with a coffin.

Naturally I need to come up with a celeb vampire and their family to inhabit this place!

 

Oh, and if you're looking for sims to fill out your neighborhoods, tacochickenwings and MissRubyBird both have some great ones. Turn include custom content on; you'll have to re-hair and re-dress some of them but they're worth it.

 

Going to all this effort for a base save file is kind of ridiculous because the chances I'll get bored before it's done and not touch it for a year are high, but eh. At least I'll have it?

 

So this is kind of filthy hipster of me, but a few? days ago I saw a Venn diagram of some major Homestuckian elements in some newly published books by known and suspected former Homestucks, and was glad that I didn't hit anything in any of those circles. Good on them for breaking into the publishing industry, seriously, but it seems like a kind of... insular group, and I know one of those books is full of meme references and fandom in-jokes. It's going to age poorly, and be unnecessarily impenetrable for a lot of readers.

Not that I'm some bastion of expertise or writer of timeless prose or anything. I guess I'm just glad I came through the Homestuck Fandom Experience with some fun ideas and a character I salvaged, but still sounding like me and writing my own weird little stories that ultimately don't have much to do with Homestuck's influence because they came from my own pre-existing worlds. At least a part of that is while I do enjoy a certain amount of convoluted bullshit, I ultimately appreciate and strive for straightforwardness and clarity. When I have things to read between the lines for, I want their presence to have meaningful weight, which can only be accomplished by actually following up on them. I'm not here to confuse readers while being impressed by my own bullshit. The Lost method of obfuscation and handwavium that Homestuck eventually and inevitably* devolved into does not appeal to me.

Blah, I'm rambling and should get back to actually working.

* Once long ago on his Formspring Hussie talked about Lost being a big influence for Homestuck. If I'd seen that much sooner than I had I would have put MUCH less faith in him to be able to conclude a story at all, much less in a satisfying way.

 

(I think your prose is pretty darn timeless myself.)

I’m honestly really excited to see Homestuck’s influence spill into the wider world. I’m a complete sucker for convoluted in-jokes, weird cultural moments stuck in amber, and self referential disaster plots that may not go anywhere but sure have fun on the way. I was hooked because of the data structure jokes. That’s what got me. That’s the kind of fan I am.

I will always be grateful to Andrew Hussie for teaching through example one method of writing in second person that doesn’t feel awkward as hell, because I’m not sad to see the other side of the years when it was a defeatist creative challenge for people who don’t mind failing in the pursuit of something inherently pretentious. Hussie’s text game inspired second person doesn’t feel pretentious at all, and it hugely popularized the style. I guess he aced the hopeless creative challenge for all of us by reminding huge numbers of people that games were already doing it, and it was fine?

I want to have my cake and eat it on this one, and there is so much delicious cake available that I think I absolutely can. I’m really glad it didn’t negatively affect your writing, because that would have been a horrible crime. It is a very captivatingly assertive style, and I can see how it might consume one’s own if they were still finding their footing. I just hope people meander their way back to themselves as needed. Homestuck certainly didn’t succeed by preemptively succumbing to popular ideas of valid writing, for better and occasionally worse.

 

YOU'RE GONNA OVERINFLATE MY EGO... ty ; ;

I do appreciate Homestuck for what it is... well, was prior to Game Over, to be completely honest. But I'm glad it was like, "See? Second person can and does work." It just turns out that the things second person works best at don't fit very well into the boxes professional writers were largely trying to squeeze it into, so it was declared largely nonviable. Which always struck me as a weird stance, and after Homestuck struck me as a stupid one.

I think my whole kind-of-pretentious-hipster thing about being glad my stories aren't something people can point to and go "Ah, obviously a Homestuck" is that I've always been more or less an outsider, and I've long since planted my flag there and made it my Thing. Even with kind of outsideryish stuff like Homestuck, I will still end up on the fringe for whatever reason, so... so be it! It's my fringe!

(Also -- and this might be totally a me thing -- but like Taz's work in particular started feeling really... mean, I guess. Mean, witty people being wittily mean, and lots of Suffering. Her books sound like more of that, and, well. No thank you. I enjoy fictional assholes and enjoy writing them, but I don't enjoy a General Vibe of Cruelty, which is part of the reason Homestuck lost me after Game Over. Purely a personal taste thing.)

 

That all makes perfect sense to me. Having to work extra hard to have confidence and carve out an identity only to be lumped together with a group that a lot of people seem to see as a vaguely identifiable monolith sounds pretty depressing, really. Fwiw, I first discovered your work through Homestuck, but I’ve never thought it felt like Homestuck outside of when you were writing Homestuck.

(Big hat about Vibes of Cruelty. I can tolerate it basically as far as I can reasonably ignore it, which is not a short distance by any means, but I’ll have more fun if I don’t have to. It’s not as big a problem for me personally as Did Not Plan for the Regrettable Reality of an Audience and Doesn’t Improvise Too Well It Turns Out, or my absolute least favorite thing, Seems Convinced Everyone Secretly Agrees with A Very Specific Matter of Personal Preference or Is Lying to Themselves, which tends to feel either desperately out of touch with reality or even gaslighty to me, depending on how likable the work is. (Porn doesn’t count because I feel like that’s a reasonable and well established plot contrivance there. I don’t think it’s unfair to assume the audience likes the thing, or to ask them to accept a story that *really* likes the thing and maybe an entire world wherein everyone likes the thing. There’s other exceptions. Pretty much anything presented in a way that only makes sense if there’s a least some awareness that not everyone is hype, like educational children’s programming.) But yeah, all very much matters of personal taste.)

 

Ngl, I’d be interested in seeing that diagram if you come across it again—I’m not necessarily opposed to people seeing my writing and going “she was Probably A Homestuck Back In The Day,” but I definitely have my concerns about...being pigeonholed, I suppose? (Tbh I think the biggest Homestuck tell in my writing is my propensity for writing in second person, but I’m never entirely sure of anything, so.)

 

I'll keep it in mind, but fair warning that I have NO idea who I saw it from or even where so there's a good chance I'll never see it again ; ; I checked a couple of likely sources last night but came up empty-handed.

 

The subreddit for FFXIV whenever NSFW mods/housing builds/RP comes up: EWWW! Degenerates!! Go to horny jail! People in this game are so grossssss!
The subreddit for Sims 4: oh yeah my sim is also a town bicycle who's knocked up 20 women and today I caught him banging the global superstar in the karaoke bar restroom
Also the subreddit for Sims 4: I got so sick of the peeping tom sim the naughty sex mod spawns that I tried to feed him to my cowplant but then he wouldn't show up, so I got the extreme violence mod and had my sim crack his skull open with her booty!

Pixel doll players are more hardcore than any srs bsns MMO raider.

 

Allllmost got my base neighborhood completely set up; right now it's to the point where I still need to fill some houses and make some batches of homeless unplayed sims to populate jobs (MCCC has a habit of grabbing the worst possible fit for a locale npc from my saved sims, which meant some recolored white people with suddenly garish makeup), but I'm getting super bored of it. I need some really out there wacky characters; I usually make sims who are soap opera drama strange at most. T_T

Once I have it populated enough, I'll split off a save to do some gameplay challenges with. My plan is to run four challenges simultaneously by setting lifespan to normal, season length to 28 days, but keeping aging toggled off until the last challenge in the rotation, then turning it back off after that household's turn is done. Of course the question is which challenges... I had a bunch shuffled off to OneTab for further perusal, but guess what ate all my fucking tabs and won't restore from backup. >:T

Anyway, definitely the so-called 'asylum' challenge for one, but with a slightly different premise because the original one is fucking stupid. Basically the same rules, but have it be like... a reality tv show, and no requirement for them all to have the erratic trait because it doesn't seem that exciting. (Stupid 'erratic' trait. It's a lazy and stupid take on mental illness; they may as well have called it the 'lolrandom' trait.) I want a good spread of personalities, and have some custom traits that, if they work as advertised, should add some interesting chaos.

I kind of want to do one or two legacies -- like the 100 baby challenge, which is a weird premise for human sims but a fantastic one for like, alien sims -- but literally EVERY TIME I've tried any sort of longform challenge I get bored on generation 2 and stop playing. Actually keeping to some rules might help... >_> Especially if they're rules that get me to try out different gameplay features. Nothing to do with University, however -- I sent two sims through it on my previous save and it was b o r i n g.

 

I'm thinking... 100 baby challenge with a mermaid. I've got a lot of awesome occult mods by Zer0 that I want to see gameplay with. And maybe some occults in the survival house -- the premise for that will be that it's ostensibly a reality tv show, but the controllable sim knows they're all trapped there until the controllable meets certain goals. Good luck, suckers!!

OMFG I should make a mad scientist. I tried to read these out to J and kept dissolving into laughter. If I can find an appropriate challenge for a scientist, I'll make one for this save.

A list of potential challenges/ideas to turn into challenges for safekeeping/tweaking:

Cinderella -- not sure how it'll work out in Sims 4 but worth a try. MCCC can be set to allow children to 'quit' school so that's covered.
Abandoned children -- maybe combine it with some Hobos to Heroes rules and have two younger siblings, one a toddler. Maybe whoever grows up with the best stat spread/traits gets to be a legacy founder.
Astronaut challenge -- the premise is kind of stupid (which should probably be taken as a given for most sims challenges, tbh) and the rules are a mess so they'd need tweaking, but looks like it's potentially fun.
Back to Nature -- needs extensive tweaking but I like the idea of a sim building up a legacy of starting their own food co-op while living off the land. Might pair nicely with the eco pack, and I have a mod that allows sims to run businesses from their homes.
The Bank of Mum and Dad (is now CLOSED!) -- The premise isn't stupid! Looks like fun but a lot of set-up work, even now that there are more mods and expansion gameplay options to speed up setup.
Blood's Thicker Than Water -- looks really interesting, but would be really fussy to maintain. Might save this one for a longer lifespan save.

... whoops now I'm bored. That's enough looking for now.

Checking out these challenges, it's kind of funny how many have fussy, nitpicky 'rules' about what sims should wear. Like, okay, maybe there are some players that need to be told that they might want to dress their raggedy hobo sims in raggedy clothes so it feels more genuine, I don't know, but it's dumb to make it a rule. If I want to make my hobos run around in ballgowns and high heels, then by god I'm going to do that. ofc that's not as dumb as the ones that have completely arbitrary 'you must dress this sim in such-and-such clothes' rules -- if I want to dress my sim in white and green rather than black and red, what fucking difference does it make? (It doesn't, some simmers are just control freaks. Which I suppose is why they play this game...)

 

Oh riiiight, Zer0's Vampires Can Kill mod has an addon to allow vampires to make sims into cattle! With that the vampire challenge might be less fussy than I thought. :3

 

Two more challenges for the list:
Vampire's Slaves -- poorly titled but interesting challenge. I'd personally cheat the relationships so the player vampire has a really poor relationship with Vlad and then have them duke it out once the player vampire has their nice house/has built their powers back up.
Hoboes to Heroes: Rotation Transformation -- annoying setup, but potentially hilarious. Relationships can be tanked with mods, but I'm not sure if needs can.

I couldn't find the funny mad scientist one I remembered, which is disappointing, but I could probably recreate it if I really wanted to -- it involved befriending sims, cloning them, then having them befriend and move in with the sim they were cloned from. And also the Tragic Clown was involved somehow?? Ah well.

Going back to filling up that save, I noticed that Maxis has remakes of sims from Sims 2 on the gallery -- like most of the cast of Strangetown! So of course I'm plunking them down in Strangerville to fill it out (especially since it gives me a whole bunch of scientists to populate that career, so any of my sims who end up scientists can have coworkers). I also realized I wanted to solve the Strangerville mystery at some point, so that can be one of my four families to focus on for this save. That does leave me a lot short, however, so I've put the Smiths and the Specters into Oasis Springs.

 

Also, I'm tweaking the lifespan duration because the default lifespan annoys me. It's 2 days for sims is the equivalent of about a year, age-wise, so they spend a year and a half (3 days unless you age them early) as a useless larva (the babies in sims 4 are technically objects, that's how useless they are), three and a half years (7 days) as toddlers. Ages 5-12 they're children, 13-20 teens (14 days each). Then young adult and adult life stages are both 24 days each -- that means you go from young adult to adult at 32, then you're a plain old adult until you're 44 -- at which point you're elderly and have one foot in the grave already, because you have a minimum of 6 years before you'll keel over dead.

Dying of old age at 50! I know it's for ~game balance~, but... how incredibly stupid! Especially since people are often elderly for far longer than they were children.

Sooo I tenatively have it set for babies to get 2 days max, toddlers to get 8, children and teens are unchanged, then young adults get 30 days (so up to age 35), adults get 40 (up to age 55), and elders get another 30. That has them dying of old age at around 70, which isn't great but it's far better than 50. Maybe it'll mess with ~game balance~ but I'm okay with that; I'd rather feel like I have enough time on the legacy families to just goof off and have them throw parties and mess around rather than just grind toward goals.

 

Save: finished. Playthrough: not started. Why? Because I spent literal hours making sims last night and took so long I'd only gotten half the household made before I had to go to bed. orz

I don't understand what is taking me so long. I do a lot of customization, sure, but this is ridiculous. Where did the time go??

No progress made tonight because my free time was taken up by a live letter for FFXIV (the producer previews content for the upcoming patch -- 11 days!) and nerding out about that, and then I decided to finally try to get caught up in ACNH after basically not playing for......... months. I'm not even really bored of it, it's just that the holiday doldrums hit and I was too sad to play for long enough that getting caught up felt daunting. And it is because I feel the need to hit any birthdays or events I missed, which means I'm only back up to Muffy's birthday/Valentine's day. I'm trying really hard to not even look at the mess of flowers that I hadn't gotten under containment that are now resuming their takeover of my island...

 

Keeping some notes here on the sims I want for the challenges so I don't forget:

100 baby challenge: anglerfish inspired. Not sure what they'll look like in human form, but merform will have... idk, dark red skin?, the all-black eyes, needle teeth, and head tentacles with glowy tips. Maybe I'll make their face horrifying in merform too. May or may not give them the siren abilities from Zero's mods.

Reality TV house:

• The perky princess -- she's energetic, childish, and disturbingly perky. Is used to getting her way. Wears cat ears e v e r y w h e r e. Is sure that her adorableness will make the audience love her the most!
  
• The sad clown -- gloomy and paranoid but trying their best. Really wants to be a comedian but when your jokes are shit like "Why did the chicken cross the road? To escape her existential crisis!!" it's hard to keep an audience. The creepy clown paint stays on at ALL times.
• The mean girl -- derives joy from being cooler than you and letting you know it at every opportunity. Likes making people squirm. Is really looking forward to having a captive audience to torment!
• The trust fund kid -- being rich means you're important, right? Do you KNOW who his father is?! Is convinced his wads of cash will make people want to sleep with him.
• The conspiracy theorist -- aliens, vampires, and mages are 100% REALLY REAL, man! He can prove it with these charts and diagrams and 100-page essay -- hey wait, where are you going?
• The wellness pyramid schemer -- namaste, friend! Can she interest you in some essential oils?
• The Perfectly Normal Person -- is perfectly normal in every way and is definitely not something else in disguise. Perfectly normal in EVERY. WAY.
• The nerd -- an insecure and awkward nerd whose 'friends' dared/pressured them into auditioning for this TV show. To their shock and considerable distress, they got a slot, and their 'friends' wouldn't think of letting them back out of this one.

I have the first three made and ready to go. The rest I'll have to make, but now that I know what I want to go for it should go faster than last time. The nerd will probably be my controllable sim, but the sad clown is also a contender. The Perfectly Normal Person will be either a vampire or an alien; with my vampire mods the vampire could cause some interesting chaos since aliens are kind of boring, but we'll see.

Then... idk if I actually want to do one or two additional challenges, this has been such a pain to set up. Mmmaybe still the Strangerville mystery since I already have a sim of an OC made for that; I tried it ages ago but I progressed the stages too fast and got really annoyed when he ended up having to spend all his free time clearing vines from his plumbing. And/or the abandoned kids challenge, since I do have some kids I recreated from my last attempt at a Sims 2 legacy (that, ofc, didn't make it past the second gen :')) and I really liked them.

 

Actually played yesterday! Probably played too much, but whatever. Meet the SimReality TV household:


Our hero! Selwyn is cute, fashionable, very caring and sweet, and has social anxiety, which makes living in a house full of strangers an... interesting experience for them. :')

Spoiler: The rest of the crew

Penrose Perkins, who is as stupid as his family is rich. This wouldn't be a problem if he wasn't also a selfish asshole oblivious to the hurt feelings he leaves in his wake.



To the left we have Symphorosa Bellamy, who is a big evil tough girl who cackles to herself and grumbles at Selwyn, and... that seems to be the extent of her evilness, as she mostly keeps to herself?? Weird.

And to the right is Marcel, who is twitchy, nervous, and currently wins the award for most times passed out because he stayed on the computer too long. Nice enough guy, though.



Beatrice Monday, who has aspirations of being at the top of a pyramid scheme and is supposedly obsessively neat, but she never cleans a damn thing and mostly sits around scowling.



Hugh Mann, who is perfectly normal! It's perfectly normal to be terminally perky and talk about what you're doing as 'normal human activities', right?



Antoinette, who has an obsession with pink, cats, and looking cute. Extremely spoiled and doesn't seem to realize it. Her personal hygiene is fine but she makes huge messes wherever she goes and is absolutely oblivious to the concept of 'cleaning up after yourself'.

Last but not least, the sexiest person in the house, the guy 5 out of 7 sims lust over...

.

...

.....

.......



Guysbert B. Vroom, the sad clown that never takes off his facepaint and ends up, somehow, the hottest piece of ass amongst them all. ?????????




And then, the house itself. Looks... nice...

I knew things were going to be interesting when, in the first hour of them arriving, Guysbert tried making a cake and set the stove on fire. However, after a moment of panic he was ON THE JOB with the fire extinguisher, as was Hugh, who came rushing in to help:





Someone is pleased by his heroism. But, wait a minute, what is that look on Guysbert's face...?



UM.......................

The cake turned out fine, but nobody got to have a slice because Guysbert stuck it into his inventory and forgot about it. (???? intensifies...)

 

By the end of the week, three sims had passed out at some point, quite a few had wet themselves because I'd failed to notice the toilet was broken in time, they'd had three stove fires that were put out promptly, Hugh mindwiped Guysbert once (I didn't see what happened there), Penrose had gotten it on with Antoinette and Hugh (and seemed really pumped he'd banged an alien, who didn't seem to care he'd been found out), and Selwyn, Antoinette, Symphorosa, Beatrice, and Hugh made eyes at Guysbert (who was happy to oblige all but Hugh), Marcel largely kept to himself, and everyone found out Hugh is an alien and... didn't really care. :| (Maxis, why.)

Nobody died and no fights started, although that might just be a matter of time. Other than being frequently stinky and being constantly exhausted due to refusal to just use a damn bed, already (there's only 5 but it seems like most of the time there's at LEAST one free, no matter how exhausted they all are), everyone is... fine? I may have to put the cursed lot trait back on the lot and/or remove some mods, they're too smart for my entertainment (when they aren't sitting there idling). I think also a few of them that are working need to quit their jobs because money hasn't been a problem, and Guysbert the Inexplicably Charismatic keeps getting promoted.

Some highlights:


Symphorosa and Marcel generally share the same expression of vague distress.



Beatrice, on the other hand, generally looks pissed off.




Selwyn fails to make friends with Symphorosa. He's been having a hard time making friends with any of them, to be honest. Poor guy.



My very first alien abduction! Guysbert came back pretty thrilled by the whole thing. Kinky.



I made a Fool's Day, which included holiday gnomes. They reminded me why I fucking hate holiday gnomes. Poor Selwyn.



Marcel frequently goes to the park across the street after work to play chess by himself, which may be why he's one of the most well-adjusted people in the house, even though he's a neurotic conspiracy theorist prone to not sleeping.