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ALPHAVILLE HERALD HOAXED!

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INTRODUCING SELENE MOON, TEENAGE WITCH

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Dyerbrook and friends make a spoof Sim and
get Urizenus to interview her!

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Maybe you saw her at Creek Cooking, chillin' and skillin'...Perhaps you were behind her in line at that tatoo joint, where she giggled as she got a moon and a pentacle etched on her right breast? Or was it left breast? Were you LOOKING? Then you saw her prancing around some of the top wiccan lots, asking lots of endearing, innocent questions? You may have danced with Selene under the Sim moonlight, whispering sweet nothings into her ear....played at a pool table with her to green yourself up, while admiring her lovely leather outfit.  Maybe she IM'd you, "hi hon how r u" and you asked yourself -- how old is that girl?
 
Now you don't have to wonder about Selene anymore, or ask, "Selene, what's your story?" Because Selene is a hoax, made up, a Sim, a simulated being, who is not run by a 15-year-old girl in suburban Houston who's dad works at NASA (she made that stuff up about the Mars rover), but by Dyerbrook, a 29-year-old unemployed warehouse clerk dividing his time between jobs in NYC and Chechnya, ME....otherwise known to you as the bartender at that seedy Motel of Last Resort, Flamingo Court in Alphaville. There were a couple others involved, but we will protect their names for now so they won't be hassled.
 
Yes, Selene Moon is an utter fake! A group of three-four players got together and thought her up one evening as a way to spike the Alphaville Herald. Selene Moon is our spoof Sim! Well, sure, as the great Hiawatha Bray, technology reporter for "The Boston Globe" reportedly asked another Sim we know, "Aren't all Sims spoof Sims?" Why, yes, of course! But this Sim is more spoof than most:  there is no 15 year old girl in Texas (yes, Uri, we know you always check the ISP addresses), there is no aunt, there is no cousin in JP, no witches, no spells -- they are all pixels. *There isn't a grain of truth in anything that Selene has said because it's all made up.*
 
Why did we do it? AV Herald's editor, Urizenus (Prof. Ludlow at University of Michigan) wants everyone to believe he is engaging in serious research. He gets paid to do what we spend money on! He's writing a book, so he says, about how people form groups in games, and these interviews he does on Yahoo Messenger or in the game are the material he is using to make judgements about what goes on in the game. We thought it was high time to pull the rug out from THAT bubble-machine dream....and show him the power of the individual, the role of one Sim who tries to do something different, and doesn't fit in the group or the crowd or the pattern sought by the scientist...
 
Let the academic world -- and the public at large -- beware!  It's shockingly easy to create a Sim, make up a story, and tell it to Urizenus and have him publish it -- no questions asked!  *This is his research material -- the stories of simulated characters!*
 
How did we do it? One night a few of us were tossing back a few pixelated punches at a well-know AV gathering place and we said, "What kind of story could we make up to perpetuate a hoax on AV Herald? It better be something credible..."
 
Your faithful correspondent wanted to have some migraine-addled middle-aged soccer mom dressed as a young Sim hottie wih a headline like "I Was Will Wright's Love Slave Bot" -- but my co-conspirators threw cold water on that one.  The real Will Wright has *long since* left the game -- he was taken off further TSO design -- and doesn't make story bots or any cheat bots for that matter and doesn't care.  That was a non-starter.  Hmm....how about the story of Walt, age 55, a Walmart store clerk in Kenosha, WI, who unwittingly takes up with a 12-year-old girl in Tightwad, MO dressed up in Bella Goth's leather jacket who says she is 32 and is a very good speller? "I Was a Kiddie Diddler--And Didn't Even Know It!" Um...the cybering cradle-robbers bit had already been done a bit ad nauseum already in AV Herald. Certainly nothing about BDSM -- yikes, THAT's been done to death...
 
What's left? We wracked our brains. How about Selene Moon (heck, Selene *means* moon), teenage witch? Thus, Selene, age 15 (we were all careful to memorize that birth year of 1988) was literally born under the light of the full moon last month -- SUCH a coincidence! (As Selene would say, careful wat ur playin' with hon!)
 
One of our number said she better be in leather...oh, and a tatoo would be nice...and for pity's sake, don't let her spell TOO well...in fact, make her a bad speller. Another of the co-conspirators helped out on teenage Internet chat slang and witch lore.  A different person was 'driving' Selene at different times, so we had to keep frantically IM'ing each other with updates to keep her credible -- and then AV would be busy and someone would flub their lines!
 
Thus Selene tripped her way through Alphaville, and in a surprisingly short time, had befriended some of the top witches and pagans of AV, picked up all kinds of lore about witch stuff, and got to work.  We aged her out a bit, picked up some skills -- cooking and charm (that's what the kids call it so they don't have to spell charisma LOL) to raise folks from the dead -- and before long, she showed up on the doorstep of the AV Herald. "how come u nvr write about witches?" she tapped out to Uri in an IM.
 
Uri, pretending he was "just a friend" of Urizenus (who happens to operate the same Yahoo Messenger address) *immediately* asked to interview her. It was THAT simple!
 
We made sure that the person who dialed into Yahoo Messenger was in another state, not with the same ISP as Dyerbrook in New York LOL (yes, Uri, we know you're always snooping on people's addresses). The interview was given, and some more titillating material delivered later in IMs (if only we had the patience to wait for THOSE particular chestnuts to roast on the fire! mmmmm!)
 
And walla, the deed was done. After what seemed like days of blogging about BDSM and what-all, and a few stories about other games and issues where we began to get worried that Urizenus had forgotten to "write more about wiccan," bingo, there she was, "INTERVIEW WITH SELENE MOON" at www.alphavilleherald.com. It was just that easy.
 
 

Calling into question integrity of Professor's research

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So now that you see how easy it was to prank AV Herald's King of Sleaze, why did we do it? For one, we wanted to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that all his interviews must be called into question. For another, we wanted to see whether any of the readers would buy it. Uri whores after interview subjects -- he doesn't do the slightest thing to check their bona fides because they are all just subjects in an experiment to him, not real people. And we'll bet that any future publishers of his book might want to check out the actualities of these Sims he has interviewed, to see if they are remotely resembling anything in RL -- at least better than the journalists have checked out his claim to have been "censored" from TSO. In fact, as TSO players know, he snuck back in under another Sim's name, as we all have done when banned, and he only got more attention, not less as a result of his banning from the game. Maxis/EA took him out of the game because he persisted in putting his URL to his site on his Sim profile -- it has happened to SimsOutofLine and hundreds of other sites mentioned in TSO -- and because his blog links to sites that sell third-party bots and cheats for the game.
 
Note to Uri:  there are other hoaxes in the mix of your cut-and-paste Yahoo Messenger chats disguised as journalistic interviews on AV Herald, but you'll have to guess which ones muahahhhhhaaaaaa....But we'll give you a hint. NOT Evangeline. God, no. Still, we don't believe you've ever actually picked up a phone and actually talked to anything resembling a 17-year-old boy in Florida, have you???
 
P.P.S. And there may be more hoaxes to come. Who knows?
 
And to all of you Sim players out there...be careful...that sexy Sim you are hot-kissing right this minute could be...Dyerbrook!   EWWWWWW!!!!!!!
 
Be Somebody Else. Challenge Everything.
 
 

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I do want to take the time to say that this hoax was perpetrated in order to puncture Uri's balloons, much like Mia Wallace's balloons began to be punctured when someone made a spoof Sim called Mia Wallace- --remember?
 
It was not done to expose wiccan, witches, and paganism. Old Hippie -- we stand by what we said about you -- you *are* a sweetie!  And Piper -- if you feel you've given out $20,000 for balloons unfairly, we will cheerfully give you a refund.  And P.S., yr house *is* rly kewl.
 
Those of you who have watched my philosophical debate with BDSMers and those who have already called me a "witch-hunter" will wonder if I am now yammering on about wiccan. I personally don't want anything to do with the devil, Satan, paganism, and wiccan and witchcraft.  I do find them all disturbing, and even evil, and I find it profoundly troubling that young teenagers and children are exposed to these things in this game.
 
But they surely have a right to exist, and I agree with Cocoanut's blog on the AV Herald that BDSM seems about substituting God for worshipping man, having power over other people, and sexual pleasure, whereas with wiccan, you feel at least it is about searching for some higher power.  At least people seek some kind of truth, even if in error. It happens that I've seen some people who are quite broken as human beings turn to wiccan, meaning that I wonder about their psychological health, and it happens that I've seen that people who were into it left it, and became bitter about it. That makes me wonder about how good it can be. Yet the purpose of this hoax was not to spoof wiccans and pagans in AV. They do their thing, and pretty much keep to themselves. I do not see them actively recruiting people in TSO as BDSMers do. Rather, the purpose was to show that Urizenus will publish anything, and doesn't care about the truth. So caveat emptor, let the buyer beware...

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CENSORED!
 
LOL Urizenus has now banned me from posting on his blog. The ultimate irony!

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