I got into a weird mood (it's been A Month) and decided to throw together a hood solely to play in ways foreign to me. I took a beach-heavy map and named it Turpitudia. Since all my stealth neighborhoods are currently turned off, it had no bin sims, so I attached Bluewater Village, made everyone sell their businesses, and used houses I had in the bin (except the the Ramirezes, for whom I had nothing suitable) to move them in. This started most of them with oodles of money. I gave them all Romance secondaries and as many of the Freetime perks for their primary aspirations as I could afford. Before playing anybody, I built community lots, some of them for home businesses, the rest to fill needs or just to provide places to go on dates, outings, and cruising. Lots of cruising, because the entire concept of Turpitudia is that these sims about which I have no intimate knowledge at all are all hedonists who have decided to move to a prime woohoo tourism hotspot.
Some time ago I downloaded some mattresses and a shower which allow different forms of autonomous woohoo, and quickly decided I didn't care for them, as they attract very highly, have very little programmable nuance, and are specifically designed for literally anonymous woohoo - sims who interact with each other using them carry away memories that affect their woohoo count but do not add each other to their relationship panel. This I found squicky, especially when they drew sims who, in normal play, had exhibited what I had interpreted as intense faithfulness, asexuality, or other characteristics that accorded ill with the mechanical behavior of these devices. But I didn't get rid of them, because they did create opportunities for certain kinds of interesting behavior in other sims and I could see where there might be possibilities for their use if I experimented more. Well, Turpitudia is that experiment. I put at least one of these items on every non-owned community lot and started out with the rule that I didn't direct playables to use them but I didn't stop them, either.
The other major rule guiding the neighborhood is that nobody gets any kind of rabbit hole career. They earn money by owning businesses, by busking, by painting pictures, by selling novels, and indirectly from dating, because they can sell date rewards if they need the money or it's a duplicate they can't really use. Malcolm owns and operates a new electronics store, Electronic Boogaloo; the Jacquets have the Banana Bakery; Florence de la Rosa has Arts and Flowers (but hasn't opened it yet because I'm trying to get her to the gold badge and build a lot of stock before I open it); the Tinkers have Tinker Toys (but have barely opened it because I was trying to do the gold badge; but when Wanda had twins and outgrew their original house I had to spend most of their remaining money moving them so Stephen and Melody opened it once and played it till they got to level one, which gave them enough cash to go on with); and the Ramirezes have Furnished Needs. The Larsens and Chester didn't have enough money to buy a business, but had to earn enough to get them. Anyone who needs an electronic device goes to Electronic Boogaloo and anyone who needs furniture, apart from beds and baby items, goes to Furnished Needs.
There's no formal rotations and sometimes if I feel I need to I'll play two days instead of one. Malcolm, Florence, and the Ramirezes, as the most wealthy, buy and give away anti-jealousy potions. Many of the community lots have gender-preference selection kites and I make everyone massively more attracted to both available genders.
The results have been as interesting, in their way, as my normal playstyle while being less demanding. Fascinatingly, Jason and Chester turned into the town bicycles almost immediately; but whereas Chester also set out to form friendship networks and connections Jason has been purely promiscuous and feckless. Jodie, despite being identical to Jason in all but gender, is more circumspect and selective in her use of the devices, and also far more focused and practical about her quality of life. She has written three mystery novels and did most of the housework, until she and Florence - who is trans, and much more inclined to use the mattresses - spontaneously pair-bonded and decided to get married. Jodie was also in a relationship with Malcolm, who is, not surprisingly, a bit of a user. He pops up constantly and makes lots of friends, but didn't seem to notice when Chester got a crush on him and started following him around. Malcolm met a completely awesome Family sim named Dolores and married her after a whirlwind courtship; she has had twins and gotten her Romance secondary and anti-jealousy potion, but the twins seem to have settled Malcolm down a lot. Or maybe he's just running out of new sims to get memories of. He still gets around in the backgrounds a lot, but I don't as often catch sight of him using the devices.
Of the Ramirezes, Lisa is the more adventurous, and she's the one who established Chester in a solid threesome with her and Checo. Chester still gets around, often in a group with her and Checo or with Malcolm and Checo, but he has also settled down to his writing career and saved up enough to buy and build his own bookshop, where he sells his novels and Jodie's. He and Jodie are great friends, but though he tries he and Jason cannot seem to get close.
Jason was a big problem for a few days after Jodie moved out. I don't direct them to clean, and he wouldn't; he has lots of creativity points but has to be in high aspiration to stick to anything long enough to make money out of it; and the time Malcolm tried to give him an anti-jealousy potion he refused it! I keep forgetting to have Jodie give him one even though she's given him lots of tropical produce (harvested on community lots by everybody; I've plunked many Castaway harvestable trees onto community lots) and a computer so he wouldn't starve. Finally I decided he needed a housemate, and he's got one - fellow Fortune sim Kennedy Cox, who some of you may know is a world-class grouch. He does clean, though, and he has enough drive for both of them, as well as a bronze hairdressing badge and enough money to build and open a salon. Which is...not going very well, alas. Even with the "owner assignment" rock I recently downloaded that lets you click it when visiting the business from another household and tell the owner to stop futzing around and do their jobs, he would much rather poke his customers than give them haircuts. And he seldom gives a decent haircut, either. Even with Jason working sales they're having trouble getting stars, and if I don't watch Jason every second he'll get into a water balloon fight with customers instead of tending to business. Without anti-jealousy potions, Jason's now blown two relationships that could have helped him a lot, with Denise and with Malcolm, and it's only by a miracle - since Kennedy now has the Romance secondary but no potion - that he and his new roommate are still getting along. Kennedy wants to marry him but Jason has no such thought in his head. He wanted to marry Denise for her money for about five seconds, once.
The Jacquets, now - whoo boy. Denise uses the devices constantly but she makes no playable friends. Gilbert also uses them, but not nearly as much as you'd expect. He takes the bakery seriously and keeps wanting to improve his cooking. He also wants to date more than he wants to improve his number count, which I find very interesting. They both are keeping their casual woohoo lives very big secrets from each other, though when Denise dates someone and falls in love (Malcolm, Jason, and Komei Tellerman) she brings them home for proper woohoo. Denise is very disappointed with her boy and the only way to get them to be friends was to give Gilbert his own bathroom - every time she started liking him, he'd take a shower and leave a mess for her to clean up! They could easily afford anti-jealousy potions, but when I observed how diligently they were sneaking behind each other's backs I decided it would be more interesting if they had to learn to accept themselves and make some solid hedonism mentors before they could become fully integrated into the culture of the place, so I've withheld them in the interest of seeing what happens. Denise is friends with Lisa Ramirez but they've never encountered each other while out on the prowl, and she's so volatile the relationships with Malcolm and Jason didn't last long enough to help (and Jason needs to drink a potion himself before he can give one away anyhow). Gilbert just...isn't making playable friends at all.
The Tinkers have an interesting dynamic. Stephen seldom makes use of the autonomous woohoo options, but when he does he settles in and goes for the long haul. There's either no new woohoo memories in his panel when I open his lot, or there's half a dozen in a block. Wanda will wander around lots in the background of other people's trips out, doing All the Fun Things, including one or two stints on the woohoo devices if the active sim's visit lasts long enough, but spending just as much time dancing with townie children, getting into water balloon fights, pushing people on swings, or looking for shells. Casual woohoo is clearly just one of the many earthly pleasures she's enjoying constantly, with no particular weight on its own. She and Stephen date each other primarily, but it took a surprising number of tries to conceive her twins, and when she kept rolling have baby wants and not conceiving with Stephen after Harmony and Threnody were born, I let her date Checo (three bolts) and get pregnant with him first time out the gate. Stephen wants a baby of his own, and therefore has developed a great interest in stars.
Melody is a very busy girl. Since she has a Romance secondary like everyone else (but won't get an anti-jealousy potion till she grows to adult) she has an active dating life, but she also wants to skill a lot, has to work on her toymaking badge, and has twin toddler siblings. She's had to date exclusively townies. Tessa is a teen now, too (Fortune/Romance) and they double bolt, but the age difference is too great for my taste, so Tessa will also be stuck with townies. She's still finding her feet, but she knows all about her parents' swinging lifestyle (she likes Chester, who is very careful not to get too handsy with her parents in front of her, and several times observed Checo and Lisa taking advantage of the adult facilities on family visits to the beach and playground) so I'm not imposing any additional rules on her. The devices can technically be used by teens, but autonomy does not seem to be enabled for them and I'm fine with that. Tessa wants to date and flirt, but she and the only townie friend she made as a child, who grew up with her - Orlando Bertino - don't bolt at all and appear not to think of each other that way.
I can tell that the emphasis on one aspect of sim life over another in this neighborhood will wear thin for me soon, but I'm hoping to sort out Jason and the Jacquets before I abandon it and go back to real simming. At the same time, I am anxious for my life to hit a point at which the prospect of real simming doesn't seem straightforwardly exhausting to me.
Ugly is in the heart of the beholder.
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