The Wages of Sim Is Death

As I suppose you know if you follow my LiveJournal, I purchased The Sims 3 this weekend, along with the Pets and Late Night expansion packs. As someone who logged a lot of hours playing the first two Sims games, I figured some thoughts on the pros and cons of the newest installment (which really isn’t all that new at this point) would be appropriate. First, the graphics aren’t really that much an improvement over the second game. They’re better, but not exceedingly so. I was impressed by the graphics for the first Sims game, and even more so with the second, but here it’s not all that amazing. I also haven’t noticed that much difference as far as items you can purchase, although admittedly I haven’t thoroughly explored the Buy Mode yet, and there’s probably more new stuff on other expansions.

One major point in the game’s favor is in assigning personality traits. In the first two games, you allocate a number of points to various characteristics. This results in some Sims being grumpier, neater, and such; but really doesn’t differentiate them too well as far as actual personalities go. I usually had some idea as to how the Sims I created should act, and they often went totally against the character I wanted them to have. Not that I can blame the game for this, but what I’m trying to say is that it was limiting. In Sims 3, you can assign specific personality traits, and the Sim will act according to them. Also, you can find out the traits of other Sims by talking to them, and use them to socialize accordingly. It makes that aspect of the game more both more fun and more strategic, rather than being based largely on luck.

An aspect that has both good and bad elements is that the entire neighborhood proceeds at the same rate of time. In the original Sims, the characters never aged, with the exception of a baby growing into a child. In Sims 2, they do age, but only when you’re actively playing the household in which they live. The way Sims 3 does it is better in that it means that the kids’ friends from elementary school aren’t going to remain kids when your active child Sims grow old, but at the same time it gives the player less control. Sims 2 let you preserve a household until you were ready to work with it, while a household in Sims 3 that you’re not controlling will continue to age while not making any progress toward the family members’ goals. I’ve heard they can sometimes even leave town entirely, although I have yet to see that happen. That brings me to another negative point, which is how much of a hassle it is to switch households. Unless I’m missing a shortcut, it can only be done in Edit Town mode, and once you switch it erases all of the wishes and promises for their previous household. Not a huge deal, but certainly less convenient than in previous games. I don’t know that you can say there’s any right way to play an open-ended game like this one, but it really does seem to be designed with the intention of the player controlling a single household until he or she is finished with it, then starting a new one from scratch. As one reviewer on Amazon put it, Sims 2 essentially made the player a god. Not omnipotent, but very much in control of the entire neighborhood. That’s no longer the case in Sims 3, which adds an element of challenge, but means less power to manipulate everyone. The neighborhood operating as a single unit also means that your active Sims can visit anywhere in town without having to take a break from the action, which makes things more complicated but also more fun. You can actually visit other Sims’ houses, and not have to invite them over all the time!

Personally, I’ve been playing with a single-character household, and have apparently covered enough Sim-days for her to age from a young adult to an adult. The player has some level of control as to how long each stage of life lasts, and I chose the maximum for every stage except babies and toddlers. As far as I know, though, there’s no way to reverse aging. In Sims 2, I made liberal use of the Elixir of Life, but I haven’t seen anything of the sort in the third game. Actually, I know one of the expansion packs says something about a fountain of youth, but I don’t have that expansion and hence don’t know how it works. Fortunately, things usually progress pretty quickly, so you can get a lot done in a limited number of Sim-days. My character’s lifetime wish, however, is to adopt a certain number of stray animals (maybe six?) and I haven’t even figured out how to adopt one. Is there any better way to do this than befriending the strays who arrive on your lawn, and how friendly do you have to be to have the option to adopt? That’s something I never quite figured out in Sims 2, either. I did play another three-person family that I created for a little while, but I think I’m going to set them aside until later. While there’s no way to stop Sims from aging while they’re in the neighborhood, I think it is possible to keep a household in storage until you’re ready to use it, but I’ll have to look into that. I tend to get really immersed in the game, and while it can sometimes be cathartic to make the Sims get into fistfights, get caught having affairs, or drown in the pool, for the most part I really want them to succeed. That’s why I’m reluctant to let any of them die until I’ve done everything I can with them, and even then it’s not easy.

We Support the Status Quo

The issue of things not changing much in the Oz series has come up a few times recently, with both Gregory Maguire and John Troutman saying they preferred the first two books because there’s more of a sense of change and historicity to them. There’s really no denying that this is true. After Ozma takes the throne at the end of The Land of Oz, new characters appear and have new adventures, but Oz itself remains largely the same. Ozma is on the throne, and people live forever (well, mostly) and don’t age unless they want to. If anything happens to alter the status quo, it’s generally restored by the end of the book. Even when it looks like something significant could occur to change a major character or the political situation, it rarely does. Nick Chopper’s search for his old love in Tin Woodman could potentially have resulted in a big chance, but he ends the book the same way he started, just with one more issue resolved. Ruth Plumly Thompson played a little bit with the government, but not much. Her Lost King brings back Ozma’s father, and Giant Horse removes the Good Witch of the North from power and introduces new rulers for the Munchkin and Gillikin Countries. As it happens, though, Pastoria has no interest in taking back the throne, the Good Witch was largely forgotten after the first book anyway, and the quadrant rulers don’t have a whole lot of power.

In a way, the restoration of the status quo is much like in many television shows, where everything is reset between one episode and the next. Remember what Fry said in the Futurama episode “When Aliens Attack”? “Clever things make people feel stupid, and unexpected things make them feel scared.” It’s kind of a chicken-and-the-egg thing, though. Are TV viewers afraid of the unexpected because that’s not generally what TV gives you, or vice versa? Certainly, some shows that have made major changes throughout the course of their run have been successful. I think part of the reason why many shows shy away from this is so it doesn’t really matter which episode you watch first, and it’s more or less this way with the Oz books as well. Sure, reading the books out of order is going to mean coming across some unfamiliar characters, but for the most part that isn’t going to hamper your enjoyment. I certainly didn’t read the Oz books in order; with me it was more of a case of reading them in the order I could find them.

Another factor in the unchanging nature of Oz is its utopian nature. In a land where people don’t age or die and there are plenty of resources to go around, I don’t know that change is all that necessary. That’s not to say that nothing happens, because then it would be boring, but adventures in Oz usually come across as more fun than scary. As a reader, I find some of the appeal of Oz to be that so much remains constant. It’s easy to imagine going there and meeting the same characters who appear in the books, which would be difficult if they’d all aged and grown tired of adventuring. Mind you, I have to suspect that characters like Dorothy have changed somewhat in a century, even if she remains a perpetual child. It also seems a bit unlikely that Dorothy would keep stumbling upon unexplored parts of Oz. The country isn’t that big, and I’d think it would have been fully charted by now. It seems like Oz readers aren’t typically that keen on major changes to the status quo, except sometimes ones they make themselves. There’s also the consistency issue to think about. I suppose I’d say that Oz not changing much is a mixed blessing, but since I loved the entire series and quite a few apocryphal stories as well, I must have been all right with it.

The Tiddlywink Squad

Today, we take a look at a game with a name that suggests it’s not all that serious, but that actually has organizations centered around playing it. I’m referring to tiddlywinks, based on the simple principle of using a disc to flip another disc into a cup. The piece used to flip the others is called a squidger, something I didn’t know until recently. Oh, the things you learn when researching old games! Also, if you cover an opponent’s wink with one of your own, it’s called squopping. You aren’t allowed to play a squopped wink, although this rule is apparently not always recognized when kids play.

The game was first patented in England in 1889 under the name “Tiddledy-Winks.” Apparently saying that extra D was too difficult, because it was eventually dropped. It was introduced as a simple parlor game, but picked up a greater level of renown in the 1950s, when Oxford and Cambridge Universities began playing tournaments against each other. Soon, the English and North American Tiddlywinks Societies had formed, proving that there’s no game that can’t be turned into a national or international competition. There’s even an official journal of tiddlywinks, called Winking World. While I didn’t realize that some people took tiddlywinks so seriously, is it really any odder than doing the same for other games? At least tiddlywinks doesn’t result in as many injuries as, say, football.

Semiramis Kind of Life

Looking back at this Chick Tract dissection, I thought that Jack Chick’s obsession with Semiramis might be worth a post. So who’s Semiramis? And is she related to Harold Ramis, who played Egon in Ghostbusters? I don’t know about the latter, but Semiramis was an actual historical figure, the wife of Shamshi-Adad V of Assyria. A more accurate representation of her name is Shammuramat, but like many other historical and mythological figures, it was through her Greek name that she is primarily known today. Anyway, after her husband died, she served as regent for their young son, and hence was in charge of the Assyrian Empire from 810 to 806 BC. I get the impression that her fame might simply have been due to the fact that nobody knew the names of most other Assyrian queens. As such, many landmarks in the Middle East came to be named after her, including the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the artificial banks of the River Euphrates. Much of the legend of Semiramis was written by the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, who lived in the first century BC. According to his account, she was the daughter of a fish goddess, and was fed by doves until being adopted by a shepherd. When she grew up, she first married a soldier, but was later seduced by Ninus, the legendary founder of Nineveh. It was typical in Greek mythology to credit the founding of cities and kingdoms to legendary founders like Ninus, but he wasn’t a real person. She ruled as regent after Ninus died, so there is a bit of the actual Semiramis in the mythical history.

Chick’s ideas about Semiramis can be traced back to a more recent source, a nineteenth century Scottish preacher named Alexander Hislop. In 1853, Hislop wrote a pamphlet that he later expanded into a book, which claimed that Semiramis was the consort of Nimrod. After Nimrod died, she claimed that her baby was Nimrod reborn. Semiramis eventually became the source of pretty much every form of goddess worship in the world. Hislop’s main goal in this rather fanciful account seems to be simply to cast suspicion on Catholics, claiming that the Catholic idea of the Virgin Mary is really just Semiramis worship in another form.

It’s not too surprising that Chick, who is fervently anti-Catholic and quite eager to latch onto conspiracy theories, would have picked up on this.

I don’t doubt that the Catholic emphasis on Mary was influenced by goddess worship, but it’s not like the Protestant denominations are free from pagan influence either. It amazes me how eager people can be to attack other people’s religions without bothering to use the same standards on their own. Besides, archaeological evidence suggests that fertility goddesses were worshipped long before Semiramis’ time. But I guess you’re not going to accept that if you think God has to be male, so let’s just blame it all on Nimrod.

Shark Raving Mad

I recently came across this post about shape-shifters who take animal forms, and I noticed it mentioned that Pacific Island mythology included shark-men. Considering the proliferation of sharks and werewolves in the modern media, you’d think were-sharks would be more popular, but apparently not. Maybe they just need a better publicist. And while that publicist probably isn’t me, I’m still going to tell the tale of the shark-man Nanaue.

Our story begins with the shark god Ka-moho-aliʻi. While sharks are generally feared, this one was mostly beneficial to humans. He was Pele‘s brother, and a quite popular god in his own right.

Picture by Dietrich Varez
It appears that his only real flaw was a drinking problem, and even that could work out well for humans. The legends say that he would swim around lost ships until they gave him a drink made from roots. He’d then lead the ship back to civilization. Nice enough guy, but unfortunately the same can’t be said of his son. This son was the product of a tryst between the god and a beautiful woman named Kalei, who lived on the Big Island of Hawaii. As opposed to Zeus with his one-night stands, Ka-moho-ali’i was apparently more serious about his love for this mortal woman, and he actually married her and lived with her for a while. When their son Nanaue was born, the god realized he couldn’t keep up the charade any longer, so he returned to the sea. Before leaving, however, he warned Kalei not to let her son eat meat.

Namaue was a good-looking child overall, aside from a hole in his back that resembled the mouth of a fish. Kalei hid this deformity, and did her best to keep her son away from meat. Since it was typical at the time for men and women to eat separately, however, she couldn’t watch him all the time, and eventually he ate some pork and became ravenous. After this, he turned into a shark whenever he entered the water, and frequently killed and ate the other children of the area. Upon being found out, he left for other parts of Hawaii, and kept doing the same thing until being discovered. His end came when a fisherman saw him changing off the coast of Molokai, where he was unsuccessfully attempted to overcome his addiction to human flesh. The people of Molokai burned his body, thus killing the shark-man.

Carving by Tevita Kunato

When searching for information on this were-shark, I came across this Wikipedia page, which indicates that Namaue, usually known simply as “King Shark,” appeared as a villain in DC Comics. He apparently fought Superboy and some other heroes, and eventually ended up as an unwilling helper to Aquaman. While I’ve never really gotten into comics, I often find myself impressed by how educated some comics creators obviously are. And people used to say that comics would rot your brain.

Me and Charles Manson Like the Same Ice Cream

I found this post from Alan Cook to be rather interesting. It’s about how Charles Manson interpreted the lyrics from the Beatles’ white album to be about a coming race war, somehow also tied in with the Second Coming. “Helter Skelter” in particular has come to be associated with Manson, as that became his name for the apocalypse he thought was coming. Not that this is at all fair to the Beatles, as there’s nothing in the actual song to support Manson’s interpretation.

It seems like his obsession with this album is mostly just because it was released around the same time he was first planning out his crazy schemes to bring about Armageddon. With people like him, it can be literally ANYTHING that serves as a trigger. I remember coming across someone on Usenet who thought he was getting secret messages in the songs of Weird Al, of all people. There’s a common theme of people with schizophrenic tendencies thinking that popular songs and the like contain messages meant just for them. Not that all of these people are anywhere near as deranged as Manson, but the freaky interpretation in and of itself is not that uncommon.

Manson was very much obsessed with the pop music of his day. In many ways, he was basically a hippie, except without too much fondness for the whole peace thing. He had also studied Scientology, which I’m not sure I knew before. Manson managed to befriend Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, and the two of them would hang out and jam together. The Beach Boys song “Never Learn Not to Love” was a reworked version of something Manson had written.

Incidentally, Black Francis has mentioned that the Pixies song “Wave of Mutilation” was inspired by how Manson had written for the Beach Boys.

The original title of the song that became “Never Learn Not to Love” was “Cease to Exist,” and the first line of the Pixies song is “cease to resist.”

When Manson got on his Helter Skelter kick, he started trying to contact the Beatles by mail and telephone, exhorting them to come join the Manson Family in Death Valley for the upcoming revolution. He also had an interpretation of Revelation in which the locusts of Chapter 9 were the Beatles, which I guess isn’t much weirder than other takes on the book that I’ve seen.

Speaking of “Helter Skelter,” does Paul McCartney still perform it? Having heard samples of his newest album, I don’t know that I could imagine him singing it now.

Getting Goosed

An interesting post on Tumblr today inspired this post. And people think Tumblr is just for pictures of naked girls! Okay, it’s for that too, but this particular post was about the fairy tale “The Goose Girl.” I’d read the story before in a collection of Brothers Grimm tales, but didn’t remember it too well. Looking over it again today, I see what Molly Crabapple means about its being a class warfare story, although it’s told from the perspective of the upper class. The protagonist is a princess who goes from riches to rags and back to riches. She begins the story with a talking horse, a waiting princely bridegroom, and a handkerchief with three drops of her mother’s blood representing protection. On the way to her groom’s kingdom, she orders her maid to get her a drink, but the maid refuses. When getting water for herself, she loses the handkerchief, and hence her mother’s protection. The maid then forces the princess to switch places with her, and when they get to their destination she claims to be the bride-to-be, while the princess is forced to work as a goose girl. That’s where the title comes in, you see. Eventually, the king finds out the truth, and has the princess elevated back to her former station. The maid he has put to death by the means she herself suggested without realizing the question was about her, namely being pulled by a horse along the streets in a barrel lined with nails. I think I saw something similar in the movie 2000 Maniacs.

We never really learn the maid’s motivation here. The way the story is written, it just makes her sound greedy, and the narrative suggests that the lower class should know their place. Maybe the maid is just nasty, but in a class-based society she would have no way to get out of her station in life, and I can’t totally blame her for being pissed off. She goes too far, certainly, but I can understand Molly’s desire for a happy ending for this character. Personally, I also feel that the talking horse was wasted. The maid has the equine beheaded, but its severed head continues to speak.

It never says anything particularly useful, however, instead just reminding the princess not to despair. Worst episode of Mister Ed ever!

Since I’ve now covered the story, I might as well say a bit about the maker of the Tumblr post that inspired it. Molly Crabapple is an artist based in New York, who is a friend and compatriot of musician Kim Boekbinder. I actually first heard of Kim when she and her sister Zoe opened for Amanda Palmer, so that’s how I know of Miss Crabapple. I actually quite like what I’ve seen of her artwork, and she’s done quite a bit of stuff for the Occupy Wall Street movement, so it makes sense that her mind would be on class inequality.