A Sim Life

I’ve been playing “The Sims” since the very first game came out years ago. So, when the third instalment of the series came out this year, I switched to Sunset Valley and the newest version. Currently, while I’m waiting for the first add-on which is due to be released in Germany this week on Thursday, I’m playing a little more than during the last month or so.

On Friday, I spent most of my afternoon and evening with the game, going through most of the adult life of a new Sim, Bella Black. Bella has moved into one of the houses (instead of buying my favourite estate by the sea) and had the intention of becoming the big boss of the Sunset Valley crime world. (I’m not sure if it’s the same in English, but the German wish is to become the Empress of Evil.) So I made her train regularly (athletics is an absolute necessity in the crime career) and later on work on logics as well. Working on logics is not a hardship for Sims – the best ways are playing chess or gazing into the sky through a telescope, both is considered fun. After she had maximized both abilities (and was that close to being Empress of Evil), I had her take a course at writing, too. So after she fulfilled her life wish shortly before reaching old age, she has now quit the job with a nice little pension and is currently working on her third Science Fiction novel. I had her write those for various reasons. First, she’s got the character trait ‘Genius’ and those are good Science Fiction writers. Second, three Science Fiction novels unlock the possibility to write a Fantasy novel. And, finally, she wanted to write a Science Fiction novel.

There were two secondary abilities she developed as well: cooking and mechanics. Cooking is developed a little bit every time a Sim cooks something (and as she’s a single and didn’t have that much money at the begin of her career, the only way to get something more than just ordinary to eat was to cook it herself). Mechanics is the result of having to rely on cheap equipment (toilet, shower and basin, mostly) which tends to break down every now and then. Doing repairs herself saves money.

Bella is retired and concentrating on her writing career now. The money for the novels and her pension will definitely keep her afloat until the end of her days. And the ghosts of two dead friends will keep her company, as she has put their gravestones into her garden…

Weekend Update

Yes, I know I’m late, but I went online very early on Saturday and didn’t go online on Sunday, so I couldn’t publish this post earlier.

So, what have I done this weekend:

• DVDs to watch: “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” and “Ghost Rider” again.
• Book to read: nothing special.
• Game to play: “The Sims 3.”

In addition, I was writing and relaxing. I’ll have a few posts up during this week, I promise.

Depression in the spotlight

When a famous sports star – the keeper of our national soccer team – killed himself last week because he suffered of depression, there was finally a spotlight on a disease most people look down upon.

Most people think depression is just feeling sad or lonely or something. But depression is far more than that. Feeling sad or lonely is just being sad or lonely (or maybe both). If you have a depression (and I had a slight one coming with my burn-out), you’re not feeling anything. The world is bland, there’s basically nothing left to live for. That’s the full-blown depression, but that’s not where it starts. In the beginning you might experience a loss of drive (you know, the motivation that gets you out of bed and going in the morning and keeps you from just sitting somewhere and staring into thin air). That’s what happened to me.

Even though I’m not glad someone took his life, I’m glad the case of a well-known and well-to-do person suffering from depression has shown it’s not just something for ‘losers’ or weak people. Everyone can get a depression and the more stress you suffer (like, for instance, from being a manager or other important person), the more likely it is to get one.

If a soccer star can get a depression, everyone can. And if everyone can get a depression, then it’s nothing to be ashamed about. After all, there’s no need to be ashamed for catching a cold, as an example.

While depressions aren’t common colds, there’s nothing wrong about suffering from one. It can happen and they can be cured.

Garden Work

Nice, isn’t it? That the final garden I was able to build in the casual game “Gardenscapes.” What you see in this picture is the best of the best – in other words, always the most expensive of everything.

The game reminds me of another game from the same company: “Fishdom H2O: Hidden Odyssey.” Both are hidden object games, in both you earn money by finding things and in both you invest that money to build up your own version of something (the garden of the house you inherited in “Gardenscapes” and three fish tanks in “Fishdom H2O”).

You’ve seen what the finished gardens look like, but how did I begin? Like this:

Yes, that’s the sad start of your own wonderful garden. No dog, broken fountain, no pond, not even any plants apart from grass and, possibly, weeds. It took me a whole afternoon to build it up. And by now I’m used to finding things quickly in a hidden object game. I might have been quicker, had I not aimed for the most expensive objects for the garden. It’s not as if the others don’t look good as well. This, for example, is a garden with the cheapest objects:

It’s nice, too, isn’t it?

I was doing virtual garden work this afternoon. And that reminds me I should be checking out my plants at home, too…

Sparkling Vampires

Vampires have been among the most interesting creatures of the night ever since “The Vampyre” by John Polidori. During the last two decades, though, the vampires have experienced quite some changes. The ‘sparkling’ vampires in the “Twilight” series are just the current high point (or maybe low point) of this development.

The first ‘good’ vampire I came across was Louis from Anne Rice’s novel “Interview with a vampire.” But the first ‘good’ vampire on TV was Nick Knight in the series “Forever Knight.” He was a vampire who wanted to be human again and fought beside humans (especially his partner at the police who had no idea he was working with a vampire … and also had a liking for garlic). But at that time (until far into the 90s), vampires like Nick, Louis or Angel were an exception from the rule.

Today, at least by the look of it, they seem to be the norm. While I can live with – and like – the occasional ‘good’ vampire, I prefer the bad ones, actually. And, judging from the number of captions about ‘sparkly’ vampires of celebrity lol, so do most other people as well.

Fact is vampires are monsters. They are dangerous and feast on human blood. That’s the basic idea (well, the most basic idea is that they feast on human life energy, but blood is traditional by now). Their character is one of the main reason why they are so interesting. Vampires seduce not to bed (even though some may), but essentially to kill. They make people fall in love with them (or at least burn with lust for them) in order to drink their blood later on. In most vampire novels (before “Twilight,” that is), the drinking of blood and the subsequent killing of the human being is a vampire’s equivalent not so much for food, but for drugs and sex.

When Jonathan Harker in “Dracula” not falls victim to the count himself (even though it is hinted that Dracula, too, drank some of his blood), but to the three “brides,” this is a subtext for sex. The three ladies (if this they can be called) basically orally rape their victim – and to a certain degree he enjoys it, because this is part of the vampire myth as it exists today as well. Dracula himself preys on women, on Lucy and Mina who react differently to him. Strangely enough, the first really hunting vampire in literature isn’t Dracula or the vampire in Polidori’s novel, it’s a woman: Carmilla from Sheridan LeFanu’s novel with the same title. But Carmilla preys on women, making her not just the first very active female vampire, but also the first lesbian one (she still is, in movies, together with Elisabeth Bathory, a real person from history and one of the few female serial killers). (By the way: Elisabeth appears in the sequel to “Dracula” written by Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt, “Dracula The Un-Dead.”)

I just hope I won’t see the ‘evil’ vampires as an exception from the rule in the future, that would really be a shame. Where’s the dark and dangerous lover ready to suck your blood when you need it?