#buddychead

A quick note about the latest Raiders, with a bunch of other new characters many of you will have gone 'who?' over.

Trust us, there is a purpose to this (actually some may have guessed ...)

We’re going to guess that with the exception of Buddychead and i3urtongirl perhaps, the rest of this gang of Grannyeaters will be unknown to most of you.

It would have been too easy to resurrect some of the old ‘big bads’ from that era rather than take some of the ‘side’ characters from that time and incorporate them into the story instead: same as we’d done with Tygercat.

In real life, it tends to be Ordinary Joe Public, the Poor Bloody Infantry, the Innocent Bystander, etc. who suffer the most from implementing or the implementation of someone else’s 'vision’ - and they’re usually the ones whose fates are forgotten.

Knitgirl of course appeared before in Grouchy Old Bat, Sleeping Dragon. As she and LiveByBooks had uploaded their Simselves as households with their ‘brothers’ to the Sims 3 exchange, we decided to use them for a plot twist: no way would Aarin and Chyla have carried out their highly illegal activities in Twinbrook’s hospital and science lab unless she’d her own admin team in place to keep things organised and do all the necessary paperwork jiggerypokery.

The ridiculous Wonder Woman meets Dame Edna Everage outfit was part inspired by Professor Spiro in 'Captain Zep: Super Space Detective' - a particularly shitty Children's TV show even by 1980s standards (a bunch of actors talking to 'aliens' which were drawings - even so, the series somehow managed to get cancelled after two series because of its 'astronomical' budget - ever get the feeling there was some top grade accounting fiddling going on?).

This show was something else J.K. Rowling ripped off (the catch phrase was 'Stay Alert!' - which she changed to 'Constant Vigilance!' for the Aurors). Originality never was her strong point.

Yes, that really was Professor Spiro's outfit!

LiveByBooks was one of those who went down with the Jazz-Hands forum ship in August 2010, and turned up at all the failed ‘successors’. Like i3urtongirl, she’s a Canuck.

Most of them had uploaded Simselves to the Exchange with custom content which broke the old Sims 3 Launchers if anyone tried to install them (usually borked accessories, hairs, or both). What followed was tedious weeks of unpacking each Simmie, extracting the .sim part and junking the rest, before finding the correct hair, etc. to ‘rebuild’ them. The Sims 3 Hairs website was a godsend, particularly for Raspberries and iFreakdom’s hairdos.

(iFreakdom as a British based player - actually Lithuanian born but never mind - ergo does not appear with the above, same as xFunkychick93x, CashingTheFame and IrishChick. Raspberries is a British based player nowadays, but for the sake of the timeline decided to leave her as SimNation based, although there was that time when she ... ah, but that’s for later!).

LiveByBooks, Knitgirl (and their ‘siblings’), Cranly and Unsecretcrush come exactly as they were fresh off the Exchange, some people being a little bit more responsible towards their fellow Simmers than others. That doesn’t mean to say we won’t change them later - Cranly's hair in particular doesn't go with someone having a face that long, and we're not having her wearing PollySim's signature black polo and jeans any longer than necessary.

Over the course of our rambling researches, it was rather heartening to learn how things had worked out for some of the others who dropped out of Simming site (in a few cases, not so much ...). For instance, Unsecretcrush dropped out before World Adventures due to that old staple of marriage, setting up a new home, etc. Her energies are now devoted to somehow effortlessly juggling real life with a billion crafting or gaming hobbies (including, of course, Animal Crossing) - do some people out there have bloody time turners?

DanteTheDark

DanteTheDark’s original Simself was awful: black hoodie top and baggy pants like most of those dorks you see on campuses because black really shows up best on their clothes all the crumbs from those maize snacks which make up 90% of their diet whilst checking conspiracy websites and playing World Of Warcraft.

There really is a case for Speltavore to be added to the dictionary as a de facto diet - certainly one worthy of scientific investigation into the gut flora of these specimens to see what’s in their protozoans that allows them to continue to function as at least semi-sentient carbon based life forms. It can’t all be down to the endless carbonated caffinated drinks used to wash them down.

But anyway, we decided to make him look more geeky and dorky - that way he didn’t look like someone who still didn’t know how to dress himself properly after two decades of life (again, like too many you see on campus). If you are going to geek and dork, go the whole geek and dork. The bad taste tops either too loud or too bland. The bottoms with a billion pockets. Make self-styled fashionistas’ eyeballs bleed at the very sight of you. That way you pull it off.

Xander and Willow (the Adam and Eve of geeky dorkdom fashion sense) knew what they were doing ...

DanteTheDark was a Simmer and WoWhead who decided late in the day to join the ‘bad kids’ long after Aarin’s Jazz Hands forum had peaked, by which time a pecking order had been established and like so many others struggled to be noticed by the ‘regulars’ (making posts to which no one replied to) and to little surprise drifted away: a tale too familiar on most gaming forums. These days, Dante is more likely to be found running around in Skyrim.

i3urtongirl and Buddychead

We decided to overhaul i3urtongirl and Buddychead completely. Both Simmies both looked too generic, too much like CAS premades with a few cosmetic changes and that week’s Must Have Shit From Peggyzone added (it's a 2009 thing ...).

If you’re gonna do it, do it right, and after some research, came up with newer versions, including changes to their character traits, more befitting how they’d be potentially all those years later, so if they ever do come wandering back to the Simming community and blunder into this, they’ll get a good laugh out of it hopefully.

i3urtongirl went from being a moany emo type (there were a lot of them down the EA forum and Garden of Shadows back in 2009 ...) into an athletic girly girl (sort of ...), while Buddychead went from being a model contest and ‘wannabe popular with the Popular People, maaan!’ airhead into a responsible and very talented nemophilist - Cloverstardropper’s area of the world could certainly be doing with her services for the next fifty years the way they keep barbequing their outback. The real Buddychead saloned the living daylights out of her hair so it looked concussed, so we decided just to hide her Simmie's under a headscarf more befitting one suiting to agri pursuits.

JadenThorn

Every Scooby Gang has its Dawn, doesn't it?!

We had to include her if for no other reason than she had the best proto super villain/secret agent name of any Jazz-Hander, the one you could picture walking away nonchalantly whilst a massive explosion happened in the background. or at least thinks they’d walk away nonchalantly.

That of course and making a good parallel to Tygercat's own unhappy time as a Jazz-Hander discovering being in with the 'bad kids' wasn't as 'kewl' as it's cracked up to be.