So many things! The types of community lots in the 'hood - actually having corner shops and community centres and pubs and vaguely tatty takeaways with flats above them is lovely; and... yes to garden fences, yes to semi-detached houses and terraces and flats above shops, houses actually being next to each other instead of having huge swathes of empty land between the buildings, CUPBOARDS, flats that are converted houses or council estate blocks instead of all being fancy built-for-purpose things.

To be fair, I don't know if all these things are strictly American weird. Some of them are probably just weird, even in the US.


Not very many - the former is mostly just empty lots at the minute, and the latter will probably just be empty lots forever :p

I did post some pics of the first venue I finished building, a somewhat crummy music/comedy venue, on my tumblr. It was small enough to give me a break from trying to furnish the four storey neo-classical central library... heavily inspired by the one in my current city, which is sadly now too expensive for the council to maintain, and will likely be turned into a hotel.

I also posted some pics of the first batch of sims I've made for the 'hood - I'm particularly pleased with Vik the Corner Shop Man (who had to anglicise his perfectly lovely Indian/Pakistani name because of racism, and I know that's awful; but in my brain, Indian Corner Shop men have first names which are single syllable contractions of their real names... and nothing will convince my brain to let go of that idea); and Madeleine the economics student.

And the house I used to showcase my English windows will be almost identical to the houses in one area of the 'hood, too.

Not just America, I'm Australian and agree with it and we have single sex schools and dorms and possibly hostels. Not that I agreed with it when my parents sent me to an all girls highschool but I do now. They have studies showing that girls under perform academically when around boys plus there are less distractions and more focus on studies. I think most teenage girls would feel more comfortable showering and dressing knowing that boys are not around to possibly spy, because they do, at least some of them.

We mostly have single houses over here but the houses and grounds around them tend to be smaller. Where I am from most of the houses are wood clad and up on short stumps.

If you share it, I'll write an ode to you, or give you my first born or something. I'm sure we can work something out.

I think people are more confused by the nature/function of Greek Houses and why anybody would want to be sorted like that than by their gender exclusivity. In Australia we have colleges, which is our name for "dorms" they aren't segregated by nothing (though the larger unies do have dorms that cater to a specific subgroup of students) and I must say I prefer it that way. Those colleges theoretically have logos and college words and colours and stuff, but nobody really gives a crap about that. We have events and colllege parties and boat cruises and nice, comfy common rooms and its nice and chill and relaxed. Though yeah, it's drafty. Especially in winter.
Same with hazing and initiation rites. Theoretically it can happen but in practice a college could get into a lot of trouble if they forced someone to do something they don't want to or that causes them stress. I know I shat square over all the (very minor) attempts at hazing I encountered and everyone accepted that I never did anything I didn't want to and I was an elected member of our college council. Once I had to raise my voice to get someone to back off and that little men knew to stay far out of my way after that. haha.
The most "initiation/hazing" like thing that happened at my college was that at the beginning of the year the college council would wake everyone up with music march them up a nearby hill and supersize with a nice, hot breakfast there. And even with that you could tell them to leave you alone without repercussions. Apparently in the 70s our college had something a tradition of assembling the newcomers for a photo and then emptying a huge bucket of water over them, but by my time they had long been barred from doing that.
And the biggest "tradition" my college had was that you had to skull your drink if you held it in your left hand (which didn't matter to me anyways since I don't drink)

When I started Uni a college belonging to a different university received negative press because some students there decided they'd invent some initiation rites and force them on the newcomers. So I'm pretty sure any university related organization around here would get in trouble if it tried to enforce initiation rites or exclusivity. In contrary, my experience with things at uni was always that they went out of their way to be inclusive and open for all.

So yeah what freaks me out about Greek Houses is that exclusivity,cliquishness (as you already pointed out) and all those weird traditions and stuff.

Yeah, I found that even while I played my Greek house without any hint of segregation, there was still that cliquishness... inherent to the pledging process and so on. That's what made me feel uncomfortable.

Anyway, I might as well show you my hood, too. I've started it before installing Nysha's windows (thank you Nysha!!!), so I'm still using old, draughty windows -- but I'm upgrading them to "Free, No Obligation" windows complete with sexy workers, as my families get enough dough to pay for them. It's definitely messy, and a work-in-progress and all that. Aside from my DIY, somewhat clunky houses, I use Zarathustra's Fisk's Bar (which is all sorts of OMG! AWESOME), his shack at the end of the world, and PopeBarley's British Terraces flats which are also a-ma-zing.

Then there's a totally random beach lot on one side -- not pictured. It came from Cornwall, fell through a hole and landed here. But hey.

Residential row houses and hood view (tumblr)
My shopping lane (tumblr)

I didn't at all care for what I saw of fraternity and sorority life for real. The frat house a few blocks from where I lived in high school threw obnoxiously loud parties. I went to exactly one frat party while I was at my first university, and that was because one of the guys in the D&D group was having to pledge because of his dad (business connections, son! And you're a legacy, they can't blackball you!) and asked me to go to a mixer because he was supposed to bring a date and I was the only girl he knew. We both found it dull.

Initiation rituals are an ancient human thing and have considerable psychological and cultural value. Hazing, however, is just ritualized bullying. We did not have a hazing problem at either of the campuses I attended; those tend to arise in the more prestigious schools where the Greeks are part of larger power structures and the entitled rich white boys know they can get away with anything.

Greeks in the game, however, are delightful. Pledging consists of being influenced to do things at 0 influence cost, and interacting with individual members to get to know them and drive up the relationship score. You could invent hazing rituals - I think the propeller beanie is in the hairstyles at all because of a widespread early 20th-century tradition of making pledges, or in some schools all freshmen, wear them - but there simply aren't any built into the game. Perks include free electronics, pizza, and cheap furniture. Togas are treated like any other rowdy party by the cops, and though theoretically graduated members are still members and still have those connections (you can ask an adult to let you join the frat and become a pledge that way), the Urele-Oresha-Cham business tycoon is no more inclined to do favors for the Urele-Oresha-Cham in the mail room than he is for anyone else.

I agree that some of it is fun! I might find the right crowd for a Greek house at some point; but I love dorms. In fact, I especially like the non-playable dormies -- thinking back, that's what I was missing the most when I played a Greek house.

Gods I miss England!

I'm an expat living in the US now and there's always a bit of a weird collision of cultures when I'm playing. My brain is fully half and half at this point (I was born in the UK though) so I end up building English-style small homes with separate loos that are close together and have small differentiating features, and then creating these huge american unis! (I went to uni in both Britain and the US so there's no hope for me guys. None at all).


...What was this thread about again? <derailed> sorry!

I went to an all-girls high school here in the US, but it's unusual here these days. (Also a year at a woman's college, before I transferred to a coed school - which was Baptist and had the men's and women's dorms on opposite ends of the campus. We women got the better of it - we were by the lake and they were not.)

I liked having several years of that kind of education - it taught me to speak up in class.

"Freshman beanies" (little round hats with propellers on top) used to be a tradition at a number of schools here in the US, but men going to school on the GI Bill, fresh from WW2, refused to wear them. Their children and grandchildren are grateful.

I had NO idea those little hats were a real thing! I always used to wonder why on earth something like that was included!

For real? I thought EA included those propeller hats as a kind of kids dress up and just included them for adults because... well, they are EA. So much stuff in this game is American but most of it sails past my head probably because I think it's a joke.

They're ancient history even for me and I'm hardly a spring chicken. I was familiar with them mostly from watching old cartoons (and everyone in America watches old cartoons), and only knew about their history on college campuses because of reading old teen series in which it's referenced. So they were digging deep, there. I doubt anyone who didn't need to for an acting role has worn one of those things in decades.

My mother wore the "Freshman beanie" - both as a Freshman, and when she transferred, in her first week at the new school. (She was not a fan.) My father is the same age, but I don't know if he wore one or not.

I think it was a very mild, semi-official, form of hazing. Also it helped to spot new students on campus very quickly, just by looking at them.

Their discontinuation, and the reason for their discontinuation, marks the transition between college education as an elite privilege and its becoming more widespread and accessible. Having something silly and harmless to mark freshmen was reasonable, when most of those freshmen were coming from being the top of the heap at their old prep schools and needed reminding that their social and academic status had reset to a bottom from which they must work their way up. A little humility on their way to the top tiers of American society would only be good for them and it was all in fun, anyway, in most places, though upperclassmen (who had the privilege of bossing beanie-wearers around, at least at some schools) may be assumed to have abused the tradition when they could get away with it.

When grown men fresh from liberating concentration camps, blowing up cities of culture and refinement, and vicious island-hopping battles full of hand-to-hand fighting, sleepless nights, and stark terror started as freshmen, though, they'd already had their fill of wearing silly hats and answering to wet-behind-the-ears kids who happened to have higher rank. They were fighting off their PTSD, finding their footing in a world that wasn't in constant imminent danger of exploding, and trying to build that Better Life they'd been dreaming of by taking advantage of their new educational opportunities, and the tradition was meaningless to them and to the middle class students who came after them, seeking higher education as a right and not a privilege.

This apparently was a big conflict on some campuses. I don't remember which book this was in, but there is an interesting sequence in one of the Beany Malone books (written in the late 40s, early 50s, and set in Denver, Colorado) in which Beany's veteran brother-in-law is in the middle of a dispute with his college administration over his and other veterans' refusal to wear the beanie. IIRC, Beany, who is in high school, has a wealthy friend who doesn't see what the big deal is, which is one of the signs that this character has some growing up to do.

Interesting history!

As others have posted, the beanie hat's association with colleges and universities is no longer well-known nowadays. I think that it's more likely that somebody at Maxis included them either as a geek reference ("propeller-head", a term which originally was applied to science fiction fans who wore such hats, now refers mainly to science or technology geeks) or as an homage to "Beany and Cecil", a popular American children's television program in the 1950s in which one of the main characters wore such a hat.

https://todayinsci.com/Events/Paten...opellerHead.htm

http://www.networkworld.com/article...ler-beanie.html

There's still time to buy some for your friends and family as Christmas gifts too!
http://www.geekculture.com/geekcult...store/caps.html

I'd quite like to redo Pleasantview as a Moroccan-esque seaside village/town, as well.....

So many ideas, so little time!

(and also so little ability to actually stick with an idea for long enough to actually make it happen!)

**ETA** With vacation destinations based on a Moroccan city, a Spanish hillside village/town and an Egyptian village/town with one (or several?) museums!

I repeat: so many ideas, so little time!

This post inspired me to create the town I live.
Well, I just made a new hood on SC and going to test it now.. if it looks good, I will start to create all lots and places I like in town, and 2017 will be the year to play it. I want to make my sims more realistic with dates, and so, I am going to use a mod for longer seasons, base the age of my sims on it (I like the on 30 days of season like this each season got 3 months . would be nice to have the calender from its based on this season mod(the one with the holidays in it). I wish I would know how to edit it I really like the calendar!