talesfromlittlecarping

[talesfromlittlecarping]

3. Early Days - The Goths

So you might be wondering why Mercer was so bad, what happened to Cecilia and how did the Sororah sisters end up with one dad apiece.  It all started in October 2004.  I managed to get a whole lot of play in in Little Carping, before the release of University in March 2005 when, finally, I brought in some new characters so the following stories are about the early residents of Little Carping.  The Goths, Vaughans and Phoebe Sororah all moved on quite considerably during that very brief time just after the game released and the arrival of the University expansion.  It’s kind of strange writing up these stories more fully after so much time.  The original events were much more fragmented of course, and I kind of melded the sims responses into a story for each family based on my interpretation of what they did.  When I talk about Randolph’s response to Cecelia’s boredom and frustration below, for instance, he did actually have the gall to lecture her one evening.  If I had been Cecelia I would have punched him but she just apologised at the time.  Still, Cecelia’s frustration stuck at home looking after Gunther, as a knowledge sim, was very apparent at the time.

-------------------- The senior Goths quickly settled into a large square house (based on their house in TS1) on the most exclusive road (Buckingham Road) in Little Carping.  They had almost no money left after the purchase of the house and grounds and much of the interior was not even furnished but they still just managed to buy it.  Randolph though thought that it was important for them to live in a property commensurate with his social standing and Cecelia’s for that matter – Randolph had married in Cecelia, a scion of the Crumplebottom family of course.

The house has an impressive entry with two story windows and a double stairway to the upper level.  To the right is a large dining room at the front and a kitchen behind.  The kitchen had some furnishing (in blue!) but the dining room was unfurnished at first.  To the left of the hallway is the lounge (or drawing room probably for the Goths), furnished in red and cream.  This was also unfurnished at first.  Behind that is Randolph’s study and then across the back of the ground floor is a music room (nothing in there at first, LOL) and the downstairs bathroom.  Just in front of that is a set of stairs which lead to the cellars.  Going upstairs, there is also a large landing space with five bedrooms to the sides.  The master bedroom is at the front of the house to the right with an en-suite bathroom.  There is another large bedroom on the left frontage.  Three smaller bedrooms are at the back of the house.  Only two rooms had beds at first – there was nothing else up there apart from bare wooden floors and one small wall light on the landing – they couldn’t even afford to decorate the walls.  Randolph and Cecelia got depressed just going to bed.   I’ve always liked having sims earn absolutely everything they have – I don’t use money cheats all that often.  In buying the plot of land and building the shell of the house, the Goths were practically broke.  They had one toilet and a fridge, counter and sink downstairs and a bed and crib upstairs.  There were several rooms where the windows had not been put in and the upstairs landing had no bannisters (so watch your step in the one light dark up there – sadly sims don’t fall off edges).  So although Randolph had a place to live that was sufficiently impressive and reflective of his status as a representative of the Goth family, they were flat broke and he had to get to work pretty quickly. 

Randolph naturally went to see his father

“I need a job, father”, he said, “or Cecelia and I won’t be able to manage.”

“You will need to learn the ropes my boy, if you’re to be any use to the firm” said his father

and so Randolph started at the very bottom in the mailroom at the family firm and started bringing home a small salary with which to keep the family afloat.  For the first few years, they were living hand to mouth buying food and paying bills and occasionally buying some décor or furniture to open up a bit more of the house to use.  Most evenings were spent studying for the skills and knowledge Randolph needed for work leaving little time for his wife and son.  After that, he also had to spend quite a bit of time socialising and pressing flesh to develop the necessary friendship network in order to advance.  And advance he did, as time passed, Randolph was a success at work, earning several promotions in rapid succession.

In the meantime, Cecelia stayed at home.  She spent most of her time reading cookery books with the aim of not incinerating her entire family at dinner time.  She did wonder why she had spent all that time at school studying hard and doing well when what she ended up with was caring for a small child all day, doing the housework and not a lot else.  Little Carping offered her little in the way of distraction and entertainment.  The only community spaces at that time were a grocery, a clothes shop and a – albeit nice – little park.  “There only so much shopping and strolling I can do,” she complained to Randolph one evening, “and you can’t have an intelligent conversation with a small child.” 

“I really think, as my wife, you need to remember what I am trying to do for our family,” Randolph responded pompously, “I need to come home to a quiet well-ordered house and to be able to get on with preparing for work.” 

Cecelia then became pregnant again and barfed all over the place – apparently Randolph didn’t need to spend absolutely all his time pursuing knowledge and skills.  The physical toll of the pregnancy, her constant hunger and tiredness, plus looking after Gunther’s needs, meant she hadn’t time to get round to everything and much of the housework got left undone.  Randolph was often doing his studying surrounded by dirty pots from breakfast which meant the socialising he had to do was done outside the house since it was not a pleasant place to invite people over.  Cecelia was miserable and found herself thinking back to when she was at school.  “I was such a good student,” she thought, “I enjoyed it so much.” 

Poor Gunther was stuck between a bored and increasingly fractious mother and a father who had no time to spend with him. 

On the other hand, Randolph’s success meant more money coming into the house in wages and a series of bonus payments.  This meant that completing the build by inserting windows and the occasional door and decorating and furnishing more spaces was possible.  They furnished the lounge (in the aforementioned red and cream) and bought a TV so Cecelia had at least something to watch and pass the time.  They bought an easel to stick in the study though that appealed more to Randolph than Cecelia.  He needed the creativity points.  They were even able to afford a new bed for Gunther when he aged up which was fortunate as Marianne arrived shortly after.  She was a brown haired, grey-eyed baby like her mother.

Then, while partially furnished (they may have had the piano by then), they invited the Headmaster of the local public school (one Vince Walter*) over and Cecelia gave him Mac n Cheese for dinner (not burnt).  Both Randolph and Cecelia schmoozed for all they were worth and Gunther showed Mr Walter the piano.  Gunther got into the local public** school – probably more on the Goth name than how impressive the Goth residence was at the time I should imagine.  The Mac n Cheese was probably good though – Cecelia is pretty clever and practical after all and she had several points in cooking by this point.

So Cecelia was bored and being lectured to by her ambitious distant husband with a small baby to look after, Randolph was out most of the time with work concerns and Gunther went off every morning in his natty school uniform.  Randolph tried not to show disappointment in Gunther’s slow academic progress.  Because he was a bit slow.  Poor Gunther. * This is the early days of the game remember, so I still had all the regular Pleasantview townies in the game.  I got rid of them all later ** yeah, I know private school in America but I’m British so I’ll call it public school.  Actual schools for the public are called state schools here.

#sims 2 #sims 2 stories #Little Carping #Goths

[talesfromlittlecarping]

2. Little Carping Original Concept

This was originally posted at tflc: https://littlecarping.com/mybb/showthread.php?tid=34

So this is a copy-paste of a post I wrote elsewhere a good while ago telling about how Little Carping came into being.  I decided not to update the text (some of the information is a little out of date now) but it gives a good overview of how Little Carping started and what I was thinking and introduces the initial founding characters of the neighbourhood: the Goths, the Vaughans and Phoebe Sororah. I got TS2 the moment it was available here in the UK (probably a couple of days after it came out in the US). I had been playing TS1 since it was released.  TS1 was my most played and enjoyed game ever (though SimCity 2000 gave it a run for its money). Anyway, I installed TS2 and had a look around. Pleasantview didn't attract me (I think I had a look at the Goth house) but Strangetown looked more quirky and interesting. I played the Curious brothers first for a short while and that was pretty fun. It was obvious the game had taken a huge leap forward and I think, even then, I realised I wouldn't go back to TS1. I never did. EXCEPT - I realised though that I wasn't ready to give up my TS1 characters. I played Neighbourhood 1 almost exclusively in TS1 and had filled EVERY SINGLE LOT with sim families. I had left the Maxis families in there and, in my head, had built an entire sim community. So in the first week of having TS2, I decided I would try to recreate the neighbourhood I had developed in TS1 BUT that I was going to grow it not just make it. It's interesting to me that even then, I was able to recognise the potential in the game to develop a neighbourhood over time and give it a real history. So I thought about it and planned. The oldest residents in TS1 had been the Goths (senior) and a couple of sisters - Sororah - I had created to run a kennels (when Unleashed was released), followed a little later by Ginia Katt and Mama Hick. I'd also created an older couple called Porter who were the janitors/caretakers for a hall of residence I built for some student sims. Remember TS1 didn't having aging so although the Sororah sisters were later additions to the neighbourhood (coming in with Unleashed) as they were created as elders, they - well - stayed that way and were some of the oldest residents of the neighbourhood.  I developed a schedule to introduce them to Little Carping.  It helped that the senior Goths were my favourite characters from TS1.  A bit unusual, I think, but then I just loved subverting their respectability.  The other thing to say is about where I use EAxis sims.  It should be remembered that this is my version of those sims - not the canon version.  I don't follow the EAxis stories and there's significant deviation later on.  Though some things are the same - Mortimer does marry Bella (eventually).  Cornelia doesn't really like her though.  But that's getting ahead ... I wanted history (and possibly hysteria). I decided to bring in the Goths first along with Sororah. BUT I wanted the family background for Gunther and Cornelia so I pushed the timeline of the neighbourhood back and made a family for each of them and a parent family for the Sororah sisters too. First I made Randolph and Cecelia Goth. Randolph was a businessman (fortune) and, in my head, was to develop into a very successful financier (which he did). Cecelia was clever (knowledge) but, the origin of Little Carping being set some time ago, she was stuck at home with the kids while they were small.  That was Gunther to start with (made as a toddler in CAS), then the first born-in-game child arrived (after Pascal's in Strangetown), Gunther's sister Marianne.  You can see Gunther is blond in the picture (as is Cornelia, also born to dark-haired parents).  This, of course, doesn't gel with the in-game genetics (at all - silly maxon).  You have to bear in mind that they were created in CAS in 2004 and we -I- had no idea about how the genetics in-game actually worked (semi-realistically as it happens and is something I like but whatever).  Although both children have genetics generated from their parents (in CAS), I changed the hair colour.  I had to retro-fit that by pretending both parents carried a recessive blond gene.  

The first Goth family

Randolph went on to be very successful and Cecelia, once the kids had grown up a bit, went back to work and into politics and eventually became mayor (the actual story of that is quite complicated). The storyline developed of Gunther growing up in this high-achieving, competitive climate but always feeling he didn't quite measure up: he had a clever mother and a thrusting successful businessman father. It made his character more interesting to me than the original version in TS1. He's always been morose and bitter (though with some surprising talents - he learnt to meditate and levitate and to move around lots like a ninja - a talent he needed). Gunther in TS1 had been Dean of a college but in TS2 I decided to send him into business following his father in an attempt to impress him (Gunther is also fortune) but Gunther was not as successful and never got the helicopter to go to work. His situation was not helped in the slightest by his wife.

Cecelia and Randolph - as they were at first.  There's a recessive blond gene in there - yes, there is. One thing I loved about the senior Goths in TS1 was that Maxis had given us this apparently conventional and respectable, high-status couple and I spent hours and hours disrupting that - mainly via Cornelia. She had affairs right, left and centre. She picked fights and made enemies. She drank and partied. If they'd had shop-lifting in TS1, she would have done that. Cornelia was hopeless at concealing affairs, mainly because she had me to deal with and I set it up so that she'd get caught every other day when Gunther came home at 3pm. Gunther was forever coming home to find her in bed with some man or other. He'd stand in the bedroom and stamp and shout and pull his hair out and then they'd have a stand up slap fight. Ah, fun times... So, Cornelia needed to get that from somewhere and so the Vaughans were made. Cornelia's mother was Amelia: a loving, patient woman (family) who had married a dashing and charming advertising executive who worked for Randolph Goth: Mercer. Mercer was a sleazeball (romance). They came, along with Amelia's mother Isabella Briggs and a toddler Cornelia, to live in Little Carping.

Amelia and Mercer - my favourite sim ever I've written elsewhere about how Mercer took me by surprise and behaved incredibly badly (though the unanticipated behaviour of romance sims played into the plotline in a most satisfactory way).  He romanced just about every adult female in Little Carping, except Cecilia Goth who always saw through him and disapproved (but then she ended up with a lot to disapprove of).  Poor Amelia was permanently depressed throughout (until she met Kennedy Cox – more on him in a bit). Cornelia, poor girl, is like her father (she's also romance). She got pregnant by Gunther as a teenager (the only time I have used InTeen for its intended purpose and also, yay, the first Inteen was out around the time University was released) and had to marry him before Mortimer arrived. It was a very quiet affair at the Goth house though she got the memory of marrying into money. Afterwards, she felt trapped in her marriage (she eventually had four kids though one of them wasn't by Gunther – something that hadn’t cramped Mercer’s style (he had seven by the time he died)) and was jealous when her two younger brothers, Henry and Horace (twins) went off to university. So she started misbehaving and poor Gunther was back to stamping, shouting and pulling his hair out. Fun times...

The Vaughans - the name Vaughan always makes me think of advertising execs and sleaziness.  Poor Amelia got saddled with that I'm afraid.  Well she married him.  Her lookout I say. The other 'family' was Phoebe Sororah - also a romance sim. I'd envisioned her as a silly romantic woman waylaid by Mercer into an extramarital affair. Well Phoebe's romance sim inclinations soon put paid to that but she did have an affair with Mercer (you get a more straightforward answer if you ask who *didn't* Mercer have an affair with) and also had an affair with Randolph. So the Sororah sisters who had originated in my TS1 hood (Cecily and Clarissa) turned out to be half-sisters rather than full sisters. Phoebe had a string of amorous adventures too (between her and Mercer, Little Carping was a seething hotbed of lust) and eventually had five children by three different men. She died a while back after having moved in her latest (and newly adult) lover (a townie: Amin Sims) who now is about to die but lives in her house keeping it open for when her youngest child (Chloe – his daughter) returns from university.

Phoebe

That's how it started. Mama, Ginia and the Porters came along shortly after - Ginia just in time to have a romance with Mercer and bear his seventh child (Stephen, still at school but only just) - and Little Carping has grown and grown from there. It's still a hotbed of lust though there's plenty of envy, jealousy, ambition, greed and all the rest of it too. I found recently that Fergus Crims wishes to see the ghost of Maddy Jayalapan (an EAxis generated apartment neighbour) because they had a fight - well series of fights - their relationship is -100/-100. He just bought a gun and will be laying a nice new concrete patio in his back garden shortly. The Curious brothers and Nervous will come to join us eventually because I do have a soft spot for the Curious brothers. I went through Little Carping’s screenshots folder and realised that when I started in 2004, of course, the quality of snapshots was horrid.  So I’ve taken some new pictures – remaking Randolph, Cecilia, Mercer, Amelia and Phoebe from clones of the originals in Little Carping.  The pictures show them with my newer defaults (of course) and I tried to get the spirit of their original homes though it’s inevitable I’ve forgotten details or used the wrong stuff.  The original lots only used EAxis content of course, it was a while before we got recolours for objects (CC skins were available before the game was released – I even have some still.  Well one or two).  They all had custom skintones which they’re still wearing and Phoebe has custom eyes.

#sims 2

[talesfromlittlecarping]

1. Little Carping introduction

This post originally appeared on tflc: https://littlecarping.com/mybb/showthread.php?tid=33

So I thought I might post something about my main neighbourhood, Little Carping.  I'm not sure my stories and ideas would be that attractive to others since playing the game my way is a pretty personal thing for me.  I have my particular obsessions and interests and simply won't consider any other way of doing things.  I'm aware I don't do things like other people but then again, what's attractive about the game is the enormous possibilities.  That's why it's still going strong 18 years after its release.  The bottom line is I just like fiddling about with stuff: stories and ideas (not to mention the CC I make).  Also, perhaps I should warn you all before we start that my sims are not always pleasant individuals. That sometimes seems to be an issue.  I like drama.  Lots of it. On the other hand, the idea of making a thread about Little Carping is attractive to me. This is because I have a love of documenting and recording stuff and the notion of using this forum to do that with Little Carping – a project of 15 years now – is enticing.  I guess we’ll see how this works as we progress but the next posts will give an outline of Little Carping’s concept and history, its geography and built environment (I got that phrase from one of my students) and then the families who live there.  These posts are going to be long - and I don't blame anyone for not wanting to read through them all.  Remember, I'm mostly indulging myself here.  I'll post pictures though. 15 years?  Yeah that’s right.  I started Little Carping the month the game was released in 2004 and I’ve been playing it ever since.  Though actually, that sounds more impressive than it is.  I haven’t played with the sims in Little Carping on a regular basis for quite some time now.  I do go back every now and again and progress a story here and there but regular play has not happened for several years.  Progress, therefore, is VERY SLOW.  BTW, although I’ve been playing Little Carping since 2004 (when it was called, unoriginally, Great Bay), I rebuilt the neighbourhood in 2007 and so the files for Little Carping are only 12 years old (only - LOL!).  I rebuilt it when we first started to learn about corruption of neighbourhoods and how you could build them with empty templates.  The current version of Little Carping, therefore, started with no townies or NPCs though it has acquired them since – I made them all myself!  The main characters though were rebuilt in 2007 from scratch – it’s when I learnt a lot about how to clone sims, create empty neighbourhoods and edit memories (and other stuff) in SimPE.   So I say I still 'play’ the game and, if I’m not playing with my sims, what am I doing?  Well, my main interests are two-fold.  In the first instance, I like making things and fiddling with game settings.  I have uploaded some CC for others to download and use, here on this site (and elsewhere), but the amount of stuff I’ve made for the game (for my own use) is much, much more than that.  There's piles of it.  I particularly like fiddling with hacks and mods, usually just adjusting BCons or BHavs and I’m known to hacks/mod stuff myself from scratch.  Though for most things I want, someone else has had a go at it long ago so I will use that (with edits).  Having said that, I think I have edited, in some way or another, practically every CC file in my game – well maybe not everything but a lot of stuff.  I change catalogue settings as a matter of routine and will do things like replace base textures in objects if I don’t particularly like the original, slave stuff and so on.  I also fiddle about with meshes and textures though I will say here what I’ve said elsewhere, that I’m not a natural skinner or texture maker.  I can do crude stuff but nothing like the subtle stuff some people do (which I admire immensely).  Secondly, a favourite thing for me is trying to create a sense of place for Little Carping.  This is a long term project and there have been several phases already.  Basically what I mean is remodelling the neighbourhood.  I’ve been fiddling with the current version for a couple of years but I think I have decided to have another complete overhaul, especially in the light of some of the newer neighbourhood objects and graphical improvements we’ve seen lately – but more on that later.   You might say that neither of those two things is playing with the game but I would disagree with that.  I’m playing with the game as an object in its own right here rather than playing sims.  Maybe you don’t agree but I keep myself occupied doing this.  People do play in different ways – some people play sims and families, some people like to build, some people like to create neighbourhoods, some people like to make meshes and textures – I like to do all of those things but I like to play with the game as well.  If that makes sense.  TS2 is a wonderful thing really.  Will Wright said he created it as a toy rather than a game and he did – but it’s perhaps more of a toy than even he thought it was. The picture is of Little Carping as it is now.  Little Carping has a shopping district, Carping Magna, and Sirencester, the downtown.  There are also two universities attached to Little Carping (Redbrick and Metropolitan) and three vacation destinations (Noboku, Yellerstone and St Neots).  I have no idea how many lots there are but the vast majority are custom built, either by me or are something I downloaded.  There are 489 sims in Little Carping, 173 of which are playable in 40 families (at present – that does change fairly regularly) with 27 cats and dogs (200 playable sims and 286 NPCs (I know that doesn't add up).  At the time of starting this series of posts, it is 6am on Saturday the third day in Summer – how do I know?  I play in strict rotation and everybody is at the same point in the year, plus I religiously save at 6am in the morning.  It’s always 6am in Little Carping. NB I've posted a version of some of these first few posts before and there's some copy-pasta going on. Just so you know.

#sims 2