It's always a bit depressing when I see a TV Tropes page for something that looks possibly cool...

...and then it turns out that the potentially cool thing apparently stopped existing entirely at some point between the time when the TV Tropes page was made and the time when I first happened across the TV Tropes page.

Here is the most recent example of this. Yeah, not even archive.org has anything. And the only things that are on Google are links to other pages similar to TV Tropes which talk about the thing (and there's even a fanfic of the thing, apparently)... but not the thing itself, outside of the first chapter of it having been posted to Spacebattles, but then was shot down supposedly for "potentially objectionable content" or whatever. (I don't know how "objectionable" it was, because I didn't read it. I suppose I could read what there is of it there, but I don't think I actually will, because why invest time in the start of a story that I know isn't finished and evidently never will be finished? Hell, just writing this whole-ass post about it here on my Dreamwidth page has taken far more time than it was probably worth.)

Seriously, I'm kind of imagining what it would have been like if, say, I'd found the TV Tropes page for Worm (which is, indeed, how I first heard about it), only to then see that it had been scrubbed from the face of the Internet. Thankfully, that's not the case for Worm, because Worm still exists, obviously. (...at least as of the time of me writing this here post, it does, anyway, but who knows about in the future?) But this kind of feels like that, in a way. As for this new-to-me thing that seemed like it might have been cool, for a few seconds or so, before I learned that it simply doesn't exist anymore... well... I just kind of wish now that I'd never even stumbled across that page for Deviant at all, because I think I'd have possibly liked that in a way that's similar to how I liked Worm, given that what tiny bit I've seen about this Deviant thing, it feels like it might've/could've had Worm-y vibes to it, and the fact that it's essentially lost to the ether is... melancholic. (I'm starting to lose the thread here here, but no, really... if you can make the time for it, go read Worm, if you haven't already done so. It's good. It starts dark and gets darker, but it's good. I liked it, anyway.)

Anyway... this definitely isn't the first time that I've experienced this weird Internet phenomenon. The whole "hear about a cool website only to find it 404'd" thing was a thing long before TV Tropes ever came along, but it hits particularly hard when you see an entire TV Tropes page for a thing, talking it up, and then, instantly, blam, thing is gone before you even get a chance to see it for yourself. So... just generally speaking, I wonder what the TV Tropes policy is concerning pages for works that literally no longer exist, assuming there even is such a policy at all. Is it standard to just leave the pages up in perpetuity, regardless? Do the pages get nuked once site administrators find out about the lack of existence of the thing the page was about, thus rendering the page utterly pointless? Hell if I know. That said, given how many times in the past I've come across this very scenario, it seems more the former than the latter. If the latter has ever occurred at all, I'm unaware of it. In some rare few cases, I've seen pages that have some kind of brief notation about the cessation of existence of the thing the page was about, so maybe that's the policy. In this particular instance, though, there's just an orphan page that still talks about the nonexistent thing as though it was still a thing that existed, and that's... dispiriting. (Granted, I could always edit the page myself [in this specific case or just generally speaking] to make it known that the thing doesn't exist anymore, but... I simply don't feel up to doing that, at least not at the moment, not for this.)

...

(God damn it, I'd planned to go to bed before fucking 4am tonight, for once, but OH WELL I GUESS. *sigh*)

"Chris Avellone accepts 'seven-figure payment' to settle libel suit with those who accused him of se

Full headline, due to Dreamwidth's inadequate subject line length: "Chris Avellone accepts 'seven-figure payment' to settle libel suit with those who accused him of sexual misconduct"

I almost made a post about this whole thing, back when Avellone initially posted his denial (a year or so after the claims against him first appeared, prior to which he'd remained mostly silent about the matter), but didn't.

Now, though, I'm posting about it. And... all I'm going to say, really, is that this sadly shows why one actually should not always simply knee-jerk #BelieveWomen when claims of sexual misconduct like this come to light. Sure, granted, in 99.9% of the cases, it turns out to be correct to #BelieveWomen about these things, most assuredly. But then, we have the .1% cases like this, in which it turns out that the women were just straight up lying about the whole thing, and it turns out that the man in the situation was unjustifiably dragged through the mud in the "trial by media" by the "court of public opinion."

It's fine and correct and good to not automatically knee-jerk assume that women coming forward with claims of sexual misconduct are lying about it, for whatever reasons. That's what #BelieveWomen is about. However, it's also fine and correct and good to not automatically knee-jerk assume that all women coming forward with claims of sexual misconduct are telling the truth about it, either. The problem here is with the word "assume." Each case is going to be unique. My own, personal stance is that it's really not any of my fucking business, for the most part, because I don't have all the facts. But because actually coming out and saying that is too dangerously close to the alt-right/Irredeemably Toxic Shithole playbook of invariably screeching "nO pRoOf!!1!11!!!"/"BuT bUt BuT wHeRe'S tHe EvIdEnCe?!?!?!?!" whenever such stories come up, I usually opt to simply keep my mouth shut entirely on the topic. The rare exceptions being extraordinary cases like this one here, or, to go in the other direction, ones like that of Vic Mignogna where his legal "defense" (or, rather, to be more accurate, his legal "offensive" attempt to silence his accusers) was such a clowncar trainwreck that I couldn't help but comment on it.

"Former Sims lead says men would lie about how they played during focus groups: 'Actually, what you

Full headline, because Dreamwidth really needs to increase the subject field length: "Former Sims lead says men would lie about how they played during focus groups: 'Actually, what you did is you redecorated that bathroom'"

I'll tell you how I play The Sims games. I typically turn off full autonomy entirely for any Sims I am in control of, and I micromanage pretty much every aspect of their lives. I tend to focus on skill building, completing Aspirations, and upgrading items and creating things to either sell or to pretty up the house. Also gardening. Lots and lots of gardening. And I tend to play as the occult Sims, like in my current The Sims 4 household with a vampire, werewolf, spellcaster, mermaid, alien, and robot. All my vampire Sim[1] does is paint, write novels, play the violin/piano/pipe organ, and cast vampire magic on my other Sims to give them moodlet buffs as needed. (And, occasionally, feed on trespassing paparazzi, though for the most part he just drinks blood packs and plasma fruit.)

Outside of having my vampire eat paparazzi, I don't go for all the sadistic stuff at all (though that shit is funny to read about, sometimes). In fact, I usually go out of my way to do everything I can, up to and including using cheats as necessary, to keep my Sims (and their neighbors, when it's possible for NPC sims to die) alive. In The Sims 3, I would go around to the homes of Sims that I liked and make them plates of Ambrosia, and I would sometimes invite ghost Sims over to my house and then leave out plates of Ambrosia for them to eat, too. In The Sims 4, I've been both using in-game spells as well as straight up cheats to bring a few ghosts back to life. The only things I haven't been going above and beyond to keep alive have been the chickens and cows and llamas I'm using for farm stuff. But even with them, I'm still giving them Healthy Treats whenever I can. And the rabbits... they die fairly quickly, too. :( I could just turn off aging for them, I guess, but... eh...

(EDIT 2) As for the whole "your Sim as an extension of yourself versus your Sim as just a character you're controlling" bit, unless my Sim is explicitly based on me (i.e. he looks like me and usually has traits like "geek," "bookworm," and "lazy," etc.), I don't play them as I would actually act IRL. Even with the Sim that is explicitly based on me, more and more lately, I've tended to just release him into the neighborhood as a NPC, rather than actively play as him myself. He doesn't even exist in my current Cryptid Buddies game. (/EDIT 2)

Anyway, as for this new Life by You game, I'd already seen it pop up in my discovery queue the other day, and I've already wishlisted it. I'm definitely intrigued and will be keeping an eye on it, for sure.

(EDIT) And of course, unsurprisingly, the comments under the article are full of banal bullshit of the "hargle bargle political nonsense hurr durr agendas herp derp fake story durkadurr" variety. (/EDIT)

(EDIT 2) Fucking oh well, I guess. (/EDIT 2)

[1] - He's explicitly named Vlad Tepes and looks as close to that portrait of him as I could get with Create-A-Sim.