With Autumn Comes the Long Night

 

    In the early days of their marriage, life for the Lassiters was good. Cora's garden was flourishing, and she had even won an award from the city for her contributions to the local food scene. Yves was an aspiring sculptor, so he spent most of his days in his studio in the basement, working away with clay or wood. Cora quickly learned which crops sold for more and started focusing on those, while Yves toiled almost endlessly to improve his skill, coming up from the basement only for what amounted to the basics of survival. They barely saw each other, even though they both worked from home and were on the same lot 24/7. 

    

First moments of labor

    Even with all that work, there was time enough for other activities, and it wasn't long before they found themselves expecting their first child. The birth kinda snuck up on us all, and once again they were pitifully broke, living bill to bill, harvest to harvest and sculpture to sculpture. 

Even in sleep, Cora dreams of work.

 They were both exceptional parents from the beginning, taking turns to watch over their son, Jean, who for a sim baby seemed remarkably fussy.  He demanded a lot of their time, and Cora began to see her garden fall into decline as she had less time to care for it.

   Cora and Yves were two ships passing in the night, and barely spoke or acknowledged each other. Even with Yves having 'workaholic' as one of his traits, he began wanting to spend time with Cora more than he wanted to sculpt or sell his work, and that was how I knew they were really falling deep into their own isolation.
  

    
     Autumn was marching stolidly onward, though, and many nights covered the garden in a layer of frost so thick that it took a few warm days to remove. So, when she could not garden, she spent extra time with Jean, doting on him. As they saved up some money, she also purchased some planter pots and moved some of her more valuable plants inside, to continue the growing season even through the increasingly colder days and nights.

Cora and Jean among the plants of her tiny conservatory.

    Even as her food harvests diminished and their profits (or in many cases, barely breaking even) fell with it, so too did their budget, and more and more of her harvests began to find a home in their own larder instead of being sold at the local market. Their home, though poor, was a beacon of warmth and love, a pool of golden light sheltered from the increasing frost and meager meals.

A quiet book on a frosty day.

 
      Jean was never hungry, though many nights his parents might have had less than they wanted or eaten leftovers for the umpteenth time in a row, keeping careful track of which were oldest so that nothing was spoiled or wasted. Jean knew nothing but love and attention, and Cora doted on him.

Yves worked

And worked.

And he worked. Exhaustion was a regular thing for him.

The new second story, with Cora enjoying a rare warm day.

        More and more, Yves worked while Cora raised Jean. While there was plenty of love, the labor was not quite shared. His sculptures were regularly bringing in about 1300 simoleons each. With the extra money, they scrimped here and there where they could, and with a little work they added a second story to the house, literally a wall or a room at a time as they could afford it. Even when 'finished' with paint and flooring, many of the rooms sat empty, devoid of furniture or light fixtures, or anything except the hope that one day the whole house, not just their few little ground rooms, would be full of life and light.

Jean's birthday and a cake they couldn't afford

 And a good thing too, Jean was having a birthday and would soon be starting to school. As a present they bought him furniture for his new room.








 But Cora was still worried about money. Yves tried to reassure her, confident in his growing skill and too prideful to admit that they might be struggling. Also maybe a little too focused on his work to realize he wasn't even really getting dressed each day, just stumbling down the stairs to the studio in whatever he had passed out in the night before.

     All I could think of while watching them fret was of the common meme making fun of the HGTV show "Househunters." Click the link if you're unfamiliar with the joke.

"Hi, I'm Cora, a home gardener and this is my husband Yves, a freelance sculptor."

You get the idea.

To compensate, he spent even more time in his studio, and she saw him only for a few minutes here and there, in passing, at night, in the early hours, whenever they could squeeze in a cup of coffee together. And once again, even those few fleeting moments were enough to add another small, looming reason to be worried: she was pregnant again. 
      In a moment of frivolity she had taken Jean to the autumn fair and gotten her face painted. Now, in the early morning, with the reality of a second pregnancy and even more bills piling up in the face of the oncoming winter, that one tiny act seemed stupid and wasteful.

Cora with Rickard.

     Their second son, Rickard, was born in the last week of autumn. Her garden was barely producing, spending more time dormant than workable. Yves, too, like the roots of her garden seeking nourishment below ground, spent more time in his basement studio than above it, frequently napping on a small futon down there instead of coming up to bed. He would come up to grab a plate of leftovers from the fridge, or to shower or use the toilet, but then he was back at work.

Then, the unthinkable happened.

 

A New Legacy

     It's been a while. Four years, give or take. I recently decided the Sims itch was unbearable and decided to load up the Sims3 to give a legacy game another whirl. Hopefully without a corrupted save this time.

     Unfortunately, my computer has been rebuilt/wiped about three times in the intervening years, so the old save is completely gone, and I decided to start a new legacy instead of trying to recreate the chaos that was my last game at gen 13 or 15 or wherever it was.

     So, I present to you all, the vast desert of the internet - Cora Lassiter.

     To give her a headstart, I sent her right off the bat to the library to stock up on a level or two of some relevant skills. Her life's ambition is to have a fantastic wine collection (or nectar, to keep the game within ratings), so first thing would be to learn gardening. While there, scoping out an eligible bachelor so we could get a jumpstart on gen2 wouldn't be too much to ask, would it?

     As it turns out, there were lots of guys in the library, handsome ones, well-off ones, even not so likable ones. Only problem is..... none of them were single. I had her prowl the library like a creature in heat and not a thing came of in fact, most of em didn't take too kindly to her overly-forward introductions. Time to go home, I guess.

      With a level or two of gardening under her belt, she quickly got to work setting up a full garden in the side yard. She registered as a gardener with city hall, so it would be up to selling produce to supply income. I forgot that plants take a while to grow .... so things were a little slim for a while.

The dreaded repo-(wo)man

    So slim, in fact, that she couldn't afford to pay her bills. What's that? Sell the GIANT nectar-press in the background to make money? NEVER. She scrimped and saved just to afford that trip to France. If stuff is getting repossessed, she better have a darn good reason. And as it turns out, the trip turned out to be far more fruitful (pun intended) than messing about with wine tours and varieties of grapes.

Adventure? Wine-tours? Husband-hunting?

     But yes, France. Champs le Sims, a quaint village in the countryside. She had enough set aside after her ticket to pick up a cheap second-hand Vespa, and in between learning all about nectar, she kept up the search for a husband.

     Again, just as in her hometown, lots of guys. Handsome guys, wealthy guys, talented guys.... but none of them were single. And if they were, none of them were nice. (Seriously. They all had evil, mean-spirited, or insane as traits. She was insulted, heckled, shoved, and slapped. Not the best way to start a relationship.)

Poverty, sims3 style: reading the manual for the nectar-press in the dark.

The garden was taking shape.

      The vacation was over all too quickly and she was sent home, loaded with knowledge of nectar ... but not much else. Also, broke. Completely broke. The repo-(wo)man came three more times before she was consistently getting enough income to stay ahead of the bills. But to stay ahead of the bills, the garden needed constant care and attention, and was maintained at a size that was just above unmanageable for a single person.

   I tried a few more times to find a suitable suitor, but she was always so exhausted from caring for the plants she had just enough time to introduce herself before she passed out in the street. Not the best way to make a good impression.

     I was starting to panic. She had gone longer in game than I had ever managed without finding at least one person to accept a flirt, much less return it. It was like the Sims world was completely devoid of romance or love or even just mutual attraction. (and as far as going after non-single sims .... I'd been down that road before, and I didn't want to start off my legacy game with that kind of bad juju.)


 
     So, she saved up, and went back to France. No nectar this time. No adventuring in forgotten ruins. Husband. That was the goal. Her hometown was devoid of any eligible bachelors, so it had to be somewhere else.

    And then, she met Yves.

     He was perfect.  He was intelligent, he was handsome, he was as penniless as she, but he was single. It was enough.

Things were looking up.

    Once back in her hometown, she invited him to visit her, and love (or at the very least, infatuation) swirled thick around them both. They decided to have a private wedding on the beach, impulsively, at 11 pm, to seal the deal (also he had only about an hour before he was going to be deported back to France, so you know, technicalities and such).

Finally, she's not alone.

The End of It All

My Sims Legacy game is irreparably glitched. Weird things keep happening, and I feel I am moments away from a corrupted save message. I am just going to end it here, as much as that pains me.

And yes, just like that, it's over.

Maybe one day I will pick up where I left off, with some family in a sort of pseudo-resemblance to the current generation (13? 15? I lost count) and pretend nothing bad happened.

Can of Worms

I finally had generation 13, Eloisa Bates, grown and ready to be married. She had met this guy, Gerard Bion, back when she visited France, and had really hit it off with him, so she invited him over to visit.  Since relationships progress at a headlong pace in the Sims, it wasn't but a few hours before they were engaged.

After scouring the town for a nice location to get married, I finally decided that there was a really pretty garden back at Champs Le Sims, in France, and that it would be great to fly them back over there to be married and have a short little honeymoon.

No sooner had they arrived in Gerard's quaint little hometown than I realized I hadn't yet taken any sort of peek into his family history, which was odd since I'm so fond of tracking that sort of thing for my legacy game.

Little did I know that clicking that tiny little button would open up the biggest can of worms I'd ever seen in a Sim's backhistory.

I am used to Sims having parents listed, if they aren't townies, or maybe sometimes grandparents or even a cousin listed. Maybe. Rarely. Not anything to be used to on a regular basis; it's more like something to be pleasantly surprised by whenever you do find it.

This guy, though, he had a monstrous horde of people, all vaguely related to him.

Now when you look at a Sim's family tree in-game, it doesn't show you everything at once. You get maybe two or three generations at a time, and if you want to see further up or down (or left or right), you need to click on other faces to reveal two or three more generations at a time and hide the ones you just were looking at. All that to say that figuring out who all these people were, and how on earth they were related to poor Gerard, was a horrible exercise in patience.

I mapped the whole thing out on paper, and then took screenshots of everyone's faces, and updated the family tree, which you can see here. Come to find out Gerard and Eloisa are ... step-cousins? Once removed? I'm not sure what the relationship is there.

I guess the tree's finally looped back on itself.

Wordless Wednesdays: Gemyndsted

The Journal of Gonff, page 3

The next morning I resolved to turn myself in for what I'd done. I marched myself across town to the city jail, and after taking a deep breath, went inside. It was crowded inside, and the guards appeared to have their hands full. After waiting my turn in line, I approached the desk and cleared my throat. The woman behind the counter looked up and asked what my business was. 

"I ... I would like to turn myself in."

She raised an eyebrow, and the guard standing nearest the counter stiffened. "What did you do?"

I hesitated, then announced, "I killed a man. Some men. Several."

By now the guard was on full alert and looked ready to stab me with his spear.  "Who did you kill?" The woman asked, dipping her pen in the inkwell and preparing to write in her logbook.

"I ... I don't know their names." 

"How many did you kill?" She asked, not looking up from her logbook as she scribbled down information.  Her handwriting was small and angular.

"Seven or eight .... it .... it all runs together a bit." I don't remember how many the farmer had asked me to kill. I just know that once I had settled into the idea that they were vermin and I was seeking revenge for my hometown of Archet, the killing had come easy and I ... I had lost myself.

The woman looked up at me, obviously surprised at the number. "Where did this happen?"

"Outside of town, in the ruins south of the Road." I answered. 

"Blackwolds?" she asked, skeptical.

I nodded. 

The guard standing by the counter relaxed visibly, and the woman laughed - a warm, throaty sound. "You mean to tell me you're trying to turn yourself in for doing the city a service?" She scratched out everything she had written in the logbook with bold strokes. 

"But I need to be arrested. I killed those people. I'm ... a murderer."

This last statement made her angry. She stood and pointed to the jail cells on either side of the room, which were full. A few were probably holding more than the intended number. "We are full up of people who actually deserve  to be in here, and you want to tell me you are trying to turn yourself in for clearing vermin? You don't need to be locked up, I need to give you some livery and put you on the Town Watch. What do you say?"

I blinked and stumbled backwards, tripping over the uneven floorboards. I scrambled to my feet, shaking my head, and ran out the door.

Outside, there was a woman kicking and spitting on a Blackwold tied to a post. I stood for a moment and watched them both, and saw the hate, the fury, in the woman's eyes as she abused this nameless man for who knew what sort of crime.

Maybe they were right. Maybe the Blackwolds weren't really people anymore.

His Last Painting

The last painting of Caspian Bates, son of Fedaykin Bates. Died peacefully in the garden at the beautiful age of 121 days. Succeeded by his son, Jupiter Bates, and his grandchildren Seth and Chani Bates.

It's Not Exactly a Tree...

Just in case you guys hadn't looked lately - I'm over halfway to my goal of playing through 20 generations of Sims. You can take a look at the family tree here. As I was updating the page with the newest generations, I got to thinking .... it's not exactly a tree. When you see pictures of people's family trees on big genealogical charts (especially those charts that are trying to prove some sort of important something), well, they actually look like trees, because they show both sides evenly, or as evenly as possible.

I was going to include some sort of pictoral reference point here - maybe the family tree of some country's monarchy, but the more I looked at all of them, the more I realised that theirs don't really look like trees either... more like tangled, mish-mashed webs. 

My sims? Well, I mainly just trace the heir's line, and show who they married, and any siblings, but that's about it. A lot of the time I can't show any more for the spouses' own personal lineages, as they are usually random townies generated by the game who don't have any parents at all. If they do have them, it only goes back one generation, and that's not much to add to the tree. Plus it makes it messy-looking. *** Edited to say I went back and added all known relatives, just to make it as accurate as possible. It looks messy, but the completionist in me is happy. The link above should still take you to the updated version. ***

I'm beginning to think they shouldn't look like trees at all.

It's also really rare for me to marry off the siblings as well, but the one or two times it's happened I was sure to show at least their spouse and any of their children - but again, with only an eight person limit to households, and never mind the fact that most of the time I've got at least three, if not four generations in the house at one time, it's hard to include everyone and their siblings. Hence the reason why most of my generations are only children, because I just don't have room for more than one. Let's not talk about Aegon's children. That was a fluke.

Yeah, we'll just call it a family vine.

Pirates and Plonking Along

 So my husband surprised me this Christmas with a new graphics card for my zombie of a PC. As a fun surprise, a copy of Assassin's Creed IV came with the card. I loaded it up, just to see what all the fuss was about. I finished the first AC a long time ago, and made it about halfway (?) through the second one. Then we moved, and my husband unplugged most of the consoles, and .... we never really plugged them back up. So I never finished the second one. I never touched brotherhood or the third one. Okay, I didn't touch the third one mostly out of principle. Anything involving the American Revolution is usually painful. Well, a lot of history I find painful. Err, not history, the visual representations of it. Not that the AC games ever claimed to be accurate representations of history.

Ohmygosh. Getting back on track. The first thing that jumped out at me was that this game loves to randomly capitalize words. In every. Single. Line. Of. Dialogue. I will refrain from making any too many doge jokes, but yeah, many capitals. Such grammar. Wow. Seriously though, every single line of dialogue has these capitals. Even when you are outside of the Animus.

Then there's the matter of the controls. They are clunky, loose, and in some places a bit counter-intuitive. Granted, I have not played an AC game recently, and I suppose if I had that things would be different. Easier, perhaps. But that shouldn't be how a game is designed. A game should pull you in and be so smooth and fluid that you forget you are even playing, instead of frustratingly bashing your hips and knees against the crates and ladders and other climbable paraphenalia because ... not everything is climbable. Or you're doing something wrong. You are probably doing something wrong.

Other than that though, well, let's just say the game is gorgeous. I find it odd that so much of the intent behind this game is to run quickly and jump up walls and dodge and roll and hide here and there - but all I want to do is amble slowly along, taking in the sights. It doesn't make any sense for the game to be about speed and running blindly ahead when so much of the beauty of the game lies around you.

Then there's the characters. Yes, I am only just past the intro, but I am really loving the characters - the interaction between Edward and this guy ... whatever his name is. Yes, I realize I can't make a very strange argument for characters when I can't remember his name. But it was the interaction between them that caught my eye (ear?). Maybe we can attribute that to writing and voice acting more than characterization itself. But look! More Random Capitals!

In the end though, I'm determined to enjoy it, despite the clunky and sometimes vague controls, and consider it the only tropical cruise I'll probably ever have.

A Slap in the Face

I said once in an earlier post that I was thankful Sims never had fertility issues or miscarriages. I never considered child death to even be a possibility. I knew that if you didn't take care of the children, social services would come and take them away, but I never knew that the children could actually die. Even pregnant women seem to have a sort of immunity against death.

I say all this because the other day, I watched one of my Sim children drown. No, I did not trap him in the pool intentionally. In the Sims 3 you have to actually build walls around the pool to trap them in, since simply removing the ladders does not prevent them from exiting the pool (they are able to climb out of the sides of the pool). No, he just floundered and died.

Truthfully, I didn't even know he was in the pool. I was on the other end of the house, watching Fedaykin teach baby Marcus how to walk, and occasionally glancing over at Caspian painting in the living room. It was an otherwise calm and collected Sunday afternoon. Suddenly, the event camera jerks me over to the pool, just in time to see Pye slip beneath the water. I paused the game to stare in shock at his corpse, just suspended in the water. The knowledge that there was nothing I could do, that he was dead, that I had played for several hours without a save so I couldn't reload, that all the plans I had made for him were now useless. Pye was gone.

 I un-paused the game and watched as the Grim Reaper showed up and most of the family ran outside to mourn and cry in shock. I have decided that this shot is one of the saddest and most horrifying screenshots I have ever taken in any of my Sims games. Pye, the child, begging for his life from the Reaper, who watches coldly while the child's grave lies between them. I will admit, I cried a little bit, not because I particularly liked Pye or anything, but because he was a child. A child.

Forgive me if the deaths of children hit me particularly hard.

Forgive me as well if the idea of a child, who for whatever reason must die, dies by drowning - is also particularly painful - I had a close brush with drowning as a child and was narrowly saved by one of my little sisters and my dad.

I suppose I had been living in this dreamworld where I felt the Sim children were immortal, unable to be harmed by fire or flood or famine, and that the worst thing that could happen was to be placed into state care. It was quite the slap in the face to learn otherwise.

Not something I ever wanted to see.

The Journal of Gonff, page 2

I woke up this morning and sat on the steps of the Comb and Wattle. I had slept in the stable, for I had no money left at all, and my belly was rumbling with hunger. I didn't know what to do. I had tried everything. No one had any work for me. 

I watched as people went about their business. Mostly common townsfolk, nothing interesting. Then, a stranger rode into town. He was rough looking, but he looked like he came from money, what with that big fancy horse of his and that green enameled armor. It was obvious he was a foreigner. I watched him for a moment as he rode slowly up to the inn and looked about, checking something in some little book of his. So, he had business here.

 I leapt up and offered to  watch his horse for him while he went inside. Foreign type like him should be easy enough to fool into thinking his horse needs to be watched. These might be troubled times, but no one is desperate enough to steal a horse yet. I just had to hope he didn't know that...

I must not be the wonderful salesman I always thought I was. Guess folks just used to buy my sister's salves and potions cause they actually needed em, not because of any great charisma on my part. The blasted fellow saw through my ruse, I think, and wouldn't even get off his horse while I was near! I wasn't going to make off with it, you miserable ....

In the end though, he gave me some pretentious speech about trying to always do good no matter your circumstances and not resorting to petty thievery just to get by. While I saw his point, I didn't need a sermon. He tossed me a few silvers and sent me on my merry way. I picked them up (stars above but I was starving) but I also didn't want to be some charity case. 

I didn't stay to see what he did. I went to one of the shops in Combe and bought some food, and then wandered south a ways out of town, where I sat under a tree and ate.

Turns out the tree I was sitting under belonged to some local farmer and I had unknowingly wandered onto his land. He didn't have any work for me, of course. But! His brother, a lumberer on the east side of Combe, did. That work consisted of clearing out some wolves and a few of the Blackwolds from the Chetwood. 

I am not a fighting man. I have a pair of knives, but one I've had since my boyhood, and the other I only picked up from a dead villager in the attack on Archet. I had never killed a man before. 

At first, even after doing what the man asked me to do, I still felt as though I had not yet killed a human. These Blackwolds were a pest. They destroyed my village, killed everyone I knew. Stars know where my sister is. I even relished the feel of my knife slipping between their ribs, watching their surprise as they fell. They were evil, and deserved to die.

At the end of the day I found myself with a fat pocket full of silver - the foreigner's odd coins mixed with those from the grateful fellow at the lumber camp. 

I went back to Bree and got myself a room at the Prancing Pony, completely overlooking the prices the innkeep was charging for both. I was a wealthy man now, with more silver than I'd had in years. But as I was eating, the reality of what I had done hit me. They may have been Blackwolds, but they were still humans. Still people, with lives and hopes and dreams. They were not like the mindless wolves I had killed, or the bear that chased me on the outskirts of Staddle. The food turned to ash in my mouth and the crackling fire suddenly felt like the Icemaw itself. Everyone was watching me, I knew it. They could see it on my face, could see the blood on my hands. Was there blood on my hands? I thought I had washed ...

I ran from the inn, guilt bearing down on my shoulders and grief clouding my eyes. I ran blindly, stumbling through the streets, until I could run no more. I retched up the little food and drink I had already consumed and fell down, exhausted. 

When I woke up the next morning my pockets were empty. I had been robbed during the night. Good. I didn't want that man's pity money, or the blood money from what I had done. Better to starve and die.

I stood, slowly, and dusted myself off. I wandered aimlessly through the streets of Bree, and by nightfall found myself in this place known as Beggar's Alley. Here was where I belonged, among the thieves and the rabble and the ... the murderers.