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Academy of Siminalism

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Have you become an elephant inside a fish bowl?

IRVING BIG STOP WEB CAM!
OUT-TAKES...

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10:51:01 November 21, 2000. Bella implores Stan to
take her with him to Allentown, PA She needs to
see the world.

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10:53:47 November 21, 2000. Stan says he'll take her to Allentown if she'll help him load up the Reduced Fat Orea Cookies from the basement.

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10:59:00 November 21, 2000. Bella realizes the boxes of Reduced Fat Orea Cookies are expired overrage, and that Stan has no intention of taking her to Allentown, PA.

Irving Big Stop, off Rt. 269 near Chechnya, ME.
10:41 p.m., November 20, 2000. Panorama changes hourly.
Rory helped Jack to do some re-decorating.

It's now so much like the real Irving Big Stop
off Rt. 269 near Chechnya, ME...
it's downright scary...

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Irving Big Stop, off Rt. 269 near Chechnya, ME.
10:43 p.m. Panoramic view of the truckers' lounge.
Jack has been doing some redecorating.

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Irving Big Stop off Route 269 outside Chechnya, ME.
5:41 p.m. November 20, 2000.
Panoramic View of the truckers' lounge. Changes every hour.

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Irving Big Stop. 5:48 p.m. November 20, 2000
Panoramic View of the Diner. Changes hourly.

SIMAHOLISM: BOON OR BANE?

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I'm being sucked in! Is Sims-playing sucking 4-6 or more hours out of every day of your life?

Help! Do you feel like you are Simming around aimlessly day after day with no way to stop?

PUBLIC LECTURE: "Simaholism: Addiction or Inspiration? Twelve Steps to Moderation Management of Simming" by
Prof. Ilhr Perfektnet

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The Twelve Steps are ladders
out of your pool of misery.

TWELVE STEPS FOR SIMS PLAYERS

1. We admitted we were powerless over The Sims, that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity and that Livin' Large will be out soon and we just have to wait a few days.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of Will Wright of Maxis *as we understood Him.*
4. Made a searching and fearless inventory of the 10,000 families on the Exchange and all our object, walls, and skins folders.
5. Admitted to Will Wright, to ourselves, and to another poster on the BBS the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to remove all defective files and defects of character in our Sims personalities and to remove all user-designed skins and objects screwing up the game from our Sims folders.
(to be continued)

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change...

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Change the things I can...

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And the wisdom to know the difference, or use MOO.

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Illustrations on this page from Bonez, Harrison, Single Mom, Vorhees Families.

STAGES OF SIMAHOLISM: LEARN TO RECOGNIZE THE SIMTOMS:

1. NON_EXISTENT (0-2 hours of Sims playing or Sims-related activity a day): You are still in tutorial house, or you are enjoying the wacky antics of the Pleasants, the Goths, and the Newbies and your albums have a few "fire" and "burglar" shots. You're devoted to getting a better job for your Sim so that dang beater car will stop showing up in the a.m. You've posted one query to the BBS about how to get your Sims naked. You've stopped playing other computer games, but you still have a Real Life (RL) in the Real World (RW). Most people in your life think the Sims are some kind of city/architectural game.

MILD (2-4 hours): You've put 3 families on the exchange, you're on the BBS every night, you've learned how to delete the social worker, your Sims are going to work every day?? so are you. Your lot is divided between "cheat" and "no-cheat" houses. Your co-workers stare at you at the lunch-table when you talk animatedly about how you dl'd super user-designed objects like the Claw Lamp for your fantastico house on lot 9, or you enthuse about your autumn-gold kitchen cabinets created with the T-mogger. You find you gravitate more to friends who play the Sims, too, so you can exchange cheat ideas. At the family dinner-table, you chuckle to yourself, and when asked by your puzzled kids, you smile knowingly about your great idea for getting rid of Mort Goth---forever. You still have a friends, kids, and outdoor recreational skills but your hubby is joking about needing to talk more, eat more, and get into the hot tub before you'll pay attention to him, and your living room has a few more diet Coke cans than usual at 1:00 a.m.. as you look for the right Victorian-era wall to fit in your Wild West 1880s story. Increasingly, you find yourself going into the RW merely for Sims story ideas.

MODERATE(6-10 hours): Your Family Album pages have 300 stills, you belong to every listserve and the only reason you go on the BBS is because your computer at home is too slow, or you're at work. Your company network administrator has approached you, puzzled by all the files on the shared drive with names like Pleasant_9_jpg or userobjects. All your conversations are distracted because you're either keeping a Sims game going or surfing the Exchange. Your living room is a sea of potato chip bags and Murine bottles at 2:00 a.m. any given day and your computer feels actually hot to the touch. You've seen the sun rise over the 59th Street bridge 3 days in a row, yet you *aren't* a member of Teamsters Local 467 going to Queens for the morning shape to deliver the Daily News. In the RW, your friends have learned to avoid you because you bore them silly with how you managed to avoid the social worker with bought babies or installed all the coped flowers and suffered the guinea pig disease syndrome. The guy down at Compuworld is really annoyed at your constant begging for LL, so you find you're putting the kids in the back of the station wagon and driving hours to the big Galeria mall near Poughkeepsie, NY because somebody says that LL is on sale at the Walmart there.

SEVERE (10-22 hours) You just spent 12 hours trying to design a user-object workable Murphy bed for the Sims based on the gym workout object. Six hours flew by while you T-mogged a kitchen counter teal blue, and 10 hours into making your favorite preRaphaelite painting into a cheesy Sim rendition on Art Studio, you realize It Can't Be Done. You got 6,000 jpgs on your hard drive from Family Albums, you're submitting your Taj Mahal house to the Exchange with a story about serial child/adult killings committed by Sims in Darth Vader and Hannibal skins, your Sims haven't gone to work or had a love relationship in weeks because now you twist them into embarassing poses with move_object_on and used the delete key and the teleporter for action instead of the game. You look up over your computer terminal and see your children's hair is red, a classic symptom of starvation, and you automatically reach for the mouse to click on them and wait for a pie chart suggesting pizza action. No one will talk to you anymore; your phone is turned off and cable has been cut, too, because you never watch TV. 3:00 a.m., 4:00 a.m. most days finds your living room knee-deep in Jolt cola cans and Almond Joy wrappers and you trying to get the perfect shot for your Sim rendition of Cider House Rules. You have the right wall panel for the migrants' house, but what object can you use for the Doctor's ether bottle? You now only ask questions on the BBS about map_edit_on.

NEAR DEATH (days on end binges): You won 10 Sims contests, your house has been declared "family of the week" 3 times, you have built three fan sites with 10,000 hits each, you created 50 new objects (taking particular delight in the set of golfclubs created out of the default rubber plant). All your familes have rich houses, maxed out skills, you have 20,000 jpegs and you no longer ask questions on the BBS, you answer them. And yet you realize that the sharp pain in your left arm isn't carpel tunnel syndrome but an impending infarction. In the RW, you find your house is empty of furniture, and the sheriff is pounding on the door to evict you. Your legs look atrophied. You find yourself typing "AFK" then unable to take the next step. Dimly, you're conscious of the urine-soaked stench of your clothing and chair, yet you thought you had taken care of it by sending several Sims for long spells in the expensive bathtub. Towards the end, you no longer play the Sims or surf the net because your eyes are blinded from macular degeneration and kidney failure, but you stare into the night darkness, hallucinating little Sims children getting out of brightly-painted wooden beds, getting into their jammies, emptying the garbage, and waiting for Mom to bring breakfast, while your finger makes a few, weak Mouse clicking motions into thin air. Let's hope your neighbors call Bellevue Hospital for a pick-up! Don't wait for a PIP indicating a Failure State!

A few too many hours playing the Sims, a few too many hours in Homecrafter, Transmogrifier, or Art Studio designing stuff and you're well on your way to Simaholism.

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INTRODUCTION: Good afternoon Ladles and Jellyspoons, my name is cafitz1, and I welcome you today to another Academy of Siminalism public event. Today we're here to talk about an increasing alarming problem, Simaholism, and how we should address it.

First, what is Simaholism? It is often said that your friends and family members will define it best, when they begin to complain to you. Does your husband no longer laugh when you call the CD drawer in the computer "the Sims jewelry case?" Is your living room a sea of empty potato chip bags and empty Murine bottles? Or is the repo man at the door, red bill envelopes are piling up on the table, the neighbors have called the social worker, your older kids are sending terse post cards postmarked West Point, NY, and this isn't a Sims story you're working on but *your life*?

You need help. The Twelve Steps for Simaholics is designed to give you a ladder out of the bottomless pool of The Sims and thesims.com and get you back to a balanced, safe, entertaining, but productive life. The Academy would never accept Moderation Mangement as a solution for RW alcoholism, since it is notorious abused. But let us listen to Prof. Perfektnet this afternoon, who has designed some steps and tips to fit our situation.

Prof. Ilhr Perfektnet: Thank-you cafitz1 for that introduction. Symaholism is a problem bringing all of you here, but it is also a source of Inspiration and Art and like many phenomena, it is important to learn the difference. We scientists have learned that playing the Sims increases endomorphins in the human body, and yet unlike drug or alcohol abuse, it does not destroy the serotonin-uptake inhibitators in the brain like Ecstasy or other harmful drugs that at first mask as apparently harmless pleasure-inducing substances. Sims players stay at home or their office to play the Sims, so we have only a handful of cases of Sims-related activity leading to road accidents or fights in public places. So play the Sims, but avoid the Simaholic syndrome with my revised Twelve Steps program, and my two keys for success: 1) Pacing and 2) Diversity.

With pacing, you say to yourself: "I will now suffer a time-suck of two hours, from 8-10:00 pm and will accomplish these 3 things". Then limit your Sims game-playing, site-surfing and frustrating utilitary tinkering both in time and scope. Pace yourself. One hour of game playing, no matter what happens in your house, and one-hour of creating your family album. Keep an alarm clock by your computer terminal. ZZZING! Time's up. STOP and close it up and put it away, promising yourself that you'll have another session at a certain time later that same day. Then force yourself to play the Sims at that exact time even if you don't feel like it, e.g. deliberately wake up at 3:00 a.m. to play instead of playing until 3:00 a.m.

With 2) diversity, you diversify the types of Sims activity so that you are not on 12-hour jags with the Goths Family vs. the Pleasants in a mad scramble for high-income jobs and neighborhood block parties, or 6 hours of t-mogging Tiffany lamps. You spend, say, an hour in actual game play; an hour making your website; an hour on utility use. Then basta, call it a day. By diversifying the activities, you reassure yourself that "the Sims are always there, I can take them or leave them at any time" because you have left and gone to another Sims activity. Now apply this to Real Life, and leave ALL Sims activities at once. Voila! You'll find a round of diverse Sims activity spaced throughout your day will prevent irritation and eyestrain.

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If this is your idea of a "chat room," then make sure you're the one sitting on the bench!

Audience Question: How can I get my Sims naked?

Prof. Ilhr Perfektnet: Obviously your Sim addiction is non-existent and you need to get into it a little more. Next?

Audience Question: My husband has left me because I'm playing the Sims 12 hours a day. I don't have a job or kids so it hasn't been harmful yet...but my husband isn't going to send any support checks unless I get counselling.

Prof. Ilhr Perfektnet: You don't need *counselling* madame, you merely need to start playing not hard, but smart. If you need that many hours to play, you obviously haven't learned MOO (see our terminology page) and you haven't studied the cheats codes! Ask yourself some questions. Do you want stories, do you want a Family Album worthy of the Academy of Siminalism? Or do you want a gorgeous 2DI4 house? When you find your goal for Simming, everything else will fall into place.

Audience Question: Why are you promoting Livin' Large in Step 3? I thought Academicians weren't supposed to use LL or play it.

Professor: As a recovering Simaholic, you have to live in the Real World where everyone around you is buying and playing LL, and you have to face temptation and accommodate yourself to it. Use it for story ideas in your Basic Sims. But reconcile yourself to the fact that is is Bigger than You and you will lead a happier life. Each half-day at a time!