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Spiritbw 2nd Feb 2013 10:33 PM

The Scumthorpe Files
 
Okay, so if you don't know, MinghamSmith has been for some time now posting for us the tales of his evil legacy family the Scumthorpes. Their Wacky and Dysfunctional family has provided many a mad cackle in the readers of the "OMG WTF ARE YOU DOING" thread and occasionally in the "What's happening in your game right now?". So much so it's been suggested that a thread or blog for the family should be started.

We are now on page 84 of the thread and the posts of the Scumthorpes' life have been going on since page 42(the earliest post of them I can find with a search). So for the new readers to enjoy, here is a compiled thread of the Scumthorpes and hope that MinghamSmith will continue to give us many more tales to enjoy.

In the interests of not having everyone wait as every single picture in the thread loads(and there are *alot* of pictures) I'm putting the pics behind spoiler tags. Further editing to be done as needed.

Without further ado, the first post with recognizable Scumthorpes (PS: had to not do it as quotes to show the pic)s:

---------------------------------------------------

EDIT: Couple I missed, thanks to BL00DIEDHELL for the links: Baby Sprog Expressions and An introduction to his parents

-------------

MinghamSmith: 17th Jun 2012, 02:16 PM I had a woman announce her pregnancy to the father. This happened:



erm

what

--------------------------------------

MinghamSmith:14th Jul 2012, 05:31 AM Recently, my cartoonishly evil joke family, the Scumthorpes, converted their entire backyard and most of the land surrounding their disastrous mess of a house into an elaborate mining operation based around diamonds and Tiberium in an attempt to make more money. Even though they were already wealthier than the Altos and the Goths by miles.

In response, logic and sanity threw up their hands and took a holiday.



As you'd expect, about half the neighbourhood dropped in to complain about the noise over the next few hours, with aliens, elves, a singing telegram girl and some very confused-looking EA premades making an appearance.

But does family patriarch Larry Scumthorpe give a damn?



No. No he doesn't.

oh god why is he doing this in his underpants




Even more disturbingly, mining toxic alien space rocks for hours also caused him to roll a want for 10 children and frequently get himself in the mood for babymaking.

Guys, I think he might have a fetish for mechanised industry.

---------------------------------------

MinghamSmith: 21st Jul 2012, 11:21 AM So after rolling an inexplicable want for 10 children during a Tiberium mining operation, one of my main evil sims managed to father his sixth, seventh and eighth children with his embarrassingly young trophy wife in one go. In saner, more conventional families, this would be a happy occasion, marked by baby showers, congratulations and slight concerns about how to ensure your triplets all get enough love and care.

Being the worst person in the universe, however, Larry Scumthorpe instead spent the entire evening drinking himself into oblivion and then welcomed his new progeny to the world by heckling them following a messy home birth where they all spawned in a disorderly puddle on the floor.



So what did these babies grow into upon becoming toddlers?

Well, perhaps it was a predictable side effect of their parents making their fortune mining toxic alien space rocks with mutagenic properties, but some of the new members of the villainous Scumthorpe dynasty turned out to be... more than a little off.

Meet the relatively normal-looking but very unfortunately-named Lolita Scumthorpe-Trollope:



Her sister Carrie, who kind of looks like Alma from F.E.A.R grew up and had a baby with the Phantom of the Opera:



And their brother Lester, who OH FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WHAT IS THAT THING



More to come as I dig them up from the threads of history.

BL00DIEDHELL 2nd Feb 2013 10:40 PM

This is going to be an amazing thread.

Can I suggest that you link to the posts in the OMG WTF ARE YOU DOING thread though? Otherwise the OP will be huge. I have a bunch of links to the vast majority of Mingham's posts because I am a creepy stalke- uh, I mean, been super amused by the family's exploits.

lil bag2 2nd Feb 2013 10:41 PM

I love you for this!

Spiritbw 2nd Feb 2013 10:44 PM

MinghamSmith: 23rd Jul 2012, 03:43 PM Earlier, one of my sims was teaching his baby half-sister to talk. Aww, good for him, stepping in to act as a parental figure in the absence of their evil, useless excuse for a father!

So what new words and ideas did he introduce her to that afternoon? What were his main priorities when trying to help a young mind to develop?

Well, among other things:



Chicken!



Nachos!



fuck the police



DEATH

The guy took a break after his attempt to explain human mortality to the under-fives in order to feed his hungry little half-sister a bottle, but for some reason they immediately began talking about death again afterwards. He then apparently introduced her to the concept of money.

I'm not seeing any coherent logic in his teaching style at all.

Unless-

...Wait, did he just offer to pay a toddler to assassinate somebody?

----------------------------------------------------

MinghamSmith: 25th Jul 2012, 02:05 PM Having grown bored with her bland diet of formula milk and processed baby food, little Carrie searches for something tastier.

And stronger.



should i be concerned about this

----------------------------------------

MinghamSmith: 26th Jul 2012, 05:24 PM


godammit Lester you're the creepiest baby ever



yes you are



Well, at least you're sticking to devouring the souls of imaginary beings rather than those of actual people. At least, I think that's what you're trying to do here. Frankly, I don't really want to know.



HATERS GONNA HATE

------------------------------------

MinghamSmith: 29th Jul 2012, 10:15 PM
Earlier, 2/3 of a set of triplets (named Lester and Lolita Scumthorpe) learned to talk and started chatting with each other, having figured out how to do so a few days after their sister Carrie. The resulting conversation was... precocious. And more than a little disconcerting.



What's this? Oh, just some babies discussing the economy. Nothing interesting to see here.



Along with a debate over... domestic violence? Current divorce rates? The breakdown of the nuclear family and its implications for the current generation of sims? I'd normally be shocked that a couple of 1-year-olds are even fully aware of the concept of relationships going down the toilet, but given how horribly dysfunctional the Scumthorpe dynasty is I guess the only surprising thing here is that they're articulate enough to have a coherent conversation about it.



what are you planning here babies

what are you planning




An engagement ring?

An engagement ring?

Ok, Lester, I need to highlight a couple of very important issues here: You're far, far too young to be discussing anything even vaguely linked to romantic relationships, and unless I'm very much mistaken you're proposing to your own sister. Please, for the love of god, talk about literally anything else before this post goes from baffling to downright nightmarish-



-Yeah, ok, jellyfish. That doesn't sound creepy or incestuous. Just have a nice, normal toddler conversation about jellyfish and other poisonous marine lifeforms.

Wait, what the hell?

ButchSims 2nd Feb 2013 10:44 PM

OMG, I was just thinking the other day about how someone should do this. But I agree with Bloodiedhell, linking to the posts would probably be a better way, as then they could all be listed in one post, and then just edited to add new ones.

Spiritbw 2nd Feb 2013 10:46 PM

Quote: Originally posted by BL00DIEDHELL
This is going to be an amazing thread.

Can I suggest that you link to the posts in the OMG WTF ARE YOU DOING thread though? Otherwise the OP will be huge. I have a bunch of links to the vast majority of Mingham's posts because I am a creepy stalke- uh, I mean, been super amused by the family's exploits.


I'll edit in links to the posts in my responses but I'm going to try and break up the posts over several of my own. As you say, otherwise the OP is going to be to big to load.

BL00DIEDHELL 2nd Feb 2013 10:48 PM

Alright, I'll go grab the links and send them to you via PM. :3

Spiritbw 2nd Feb 2013 11:02 PM

While we're waiting and editing links, more posts dug up:

MinghamSmith: 31st Jul 2012, 09:14 PM And now, more QUALITY PARENTING from my town. Along with another case of animations working perfectly for totally different scenarios to whatever they're meant to represent.



Go on, idiot, play with your baby. I know you're a depressingly corrupt industrialist who loves nothing else in the world so much as money and power, but it's not exactly hard. Here, I'll guide you through it.

Left click ---> Attack With The Claw.



That's it. Even you can't screw this up.

Hey, what's that on your hand-



OH GOD



I DIDN'T MEAN THAT LITERALLY



And so the psychologists of SimNation were granted a golden opportunity to research the previously-unknown effects of PTSD on 1-year-olds.

Every cloud has a silver lining, I guess. Even if the cloud in question is a horrifying claw gauntlet being gleefully waved around at a baby girl by her own father.



CONGRATULATIONS, YOU ARE THE WORST GODDAMNED PARENT IN THE UNIVERSE


--------------------------------

MinghamSmith: 1st Aug 2012, 05:43 AM *Editors note: The first part was in response to someone asking if the Scumthorpes were on the exchange for downloading*

I haven't yet, though I guess I could try uploading them to somewhere. Master Controller would be necessary to edit their family relationships, though, there's way too many of them to fit in a single household. Just what SimNation needs, a powerful and influential family with a genetic predisposition to evil that tend to breed like rats.

If nobody has a problem with me spending a post explaining it, their family tree is... complicated. To avoid getting too off-topic, though, I'll include some silly pictures of the lesser-known members of the family for everyone to laugh at:

Original couple: Larry and Honoria Scumthorpe


Compared to the rest of the family, Larry Scumthorpe's first wife Honoria rarely appears in screenshots on account of being dead. Having been fatally shot by Larry when I tried testing Desecrate's Weapons System, she occasionally shows up as a ghost to bicker about things and annoy him.



Amusingly, they're listed as Old Enemies in the relationship panel whenever she appears.

Before the disastrous collapse of their marriage, Larry and Honoria had the following four children, all of whom are now young adults:

- Alice Scumthorpe, the only genuinely nice member of the entire family and the only pretty one. Seriously, how did the absolute cesspit that is the Scumthorpe genepool produce someone like this?



Alice spent a long time dead just after becoming a young adult (she glitched out, froze in place and starved to death, which I chose to interpret as a mental breakdown resulting from having to live with everyone else in the family) until one of her brothers stole her urn from the family home and made Ambrosia for her, thus making her simultaneously the oldest and the middle child. Since then, she's started dating a female elf. Good for her, unlike most of her relatives she's actually capable of a healthy relationship. :D

-Spurgin Scumthorpe, a fat, neckbeardy internet troll who up until recently lived in the family basement and wrote crappy sci-fi novels for a living. He's since made the major lifestyle change of moving out of his dad's house... and into someone else's basement.



Notable works: A dreadful 15-book series known as The Adventures of Thrust Rogerson, an unsuccessful fantasy novel I can't remember the name of, The History of 4chan, vol. I and an incomprehensible pregnancy book called how is babby formed.

-Rick Scumthorpe, an obnoxious, moronic douchebag who literally nobody likes. Usually left to feed the babies because neither his dad nor his stepmother can be bothered, has a personality roughly equivalent to a Romance sim but has yet to actually lose his virginity. He's Mean-Spirited, but ultimately too pathetic to be genuinely hurtful.



I know the game refrains from mentioning alcohol to keep the rating down. But there is no way he isn't drunk here.

-Darius Scumthorpe, an outright supervillain. Who still has the moral high ground compared to the rest of his family, and usually goes by the name Darius Victor in an attempt to deny that he is a Scumthorpe at all. And also so he has an excuse to use variants of "history is written by the victors" as a cheesy villain catchphrase.



Here he is after paying a visit to the house he grew up in and detonating his dad's car.

He also resurrected his big sister as a young adult, owns a black cat called Ishtar and due to weird science is the "father" of a clone-son called Alexander and two Simbots called Killbot I and II. This probably makes him the most successful of Larry Scumthorpe's offspring so far. The irony of this is not lost on me.

Second couple: Larry and Kathryn Scumthorpe




After murdering his first wife and getting away with it, Larry married Kathryn Trollope, an embarrassingly blatant gold digger who at the time was younger than his own youngest son. Of course, being over twice your new trophy wife's age doesn't stop you from producing more kids. For whatever reason, this is where the really awful children began to show up:

-Sprog Scumthorpe, a miserable little ball of hatred and rage who goes far, far beyond his dad's cartoonish horribleness to the point where he's more or less an outright psychopath. As a child, his traits are Evil, Insane, Mean-Spirited and Pyromaniac, resulting in him frequently rolling creepy wants to watch his own family members die, openly rejoicing at the misery of others, suffering from a rebellious (good?) hand that frequently tries to strangle him and autonomously hissing and barking like an animal. Here he is somehow gaining the red Emperor of Evil glow despite being an elementary schooler.



(Well, an elementary schooler in theory, anyway. Mercifully for the rest of the town's children, he's never actually bothered to go to school. It cuts into his busy schedule of pointless violence, cruelty and sadism, and when it comes to the automatic Generations punishment system he just doesn't give a damn)

-Lester, Carrie and Lolita Scumthorpe, the bizarre Tiberium-addled babies seen in most of my recent posts. Lester is the emaciated, freaky-looking one, Carrie is the long-haired one who openly facepalmed at the rest of her family as a newborn and Lolita is the hilariously unfortunate one with pigtails. All three have imaginary friends at the moment, though for variety's sake I think I'll have Sprog snatch at least two of the dolls and throw them in the fire in front of them. It sounds like something he'd do.

So that's eight mostly-appalling children by two wives, with an age gap of multiple decades between the oldest and the youngest in real-world terms and one son who wants nothing to do with the family at all. It's like a modern comedy version of the Borgias at times.

Finally, there's also Larry's younger brother, Sid Scumthorpe. Sid is a lecherous middle-aged man who struts around in a leisure suit like it's still the '70s, drives a blatant midlife crisis car called the Compensator, has a hideous combover and may very well be the least trustworthy-looking man on earth.



HELLO LADIES


Sid is also connected to a planned future addition to the family who'll probably show up when Supernatural comes out. Watch this space...

-----------------------------------

MinghamSmith: 3rd Aug 2012, 11:25 AM In the last week, I've noticed something bizarre: For reasons that probably only make sense to people with whatever horrifying genetic predisposition to insanity the Scumthorpes suffer from, EVERYONE hates Lolita Scumthorpe.



No, this is not a staged pair of pictures or a couple of separate incidents placed side by side. Within about 10 seconds of one another, both her parents stormed downstairs in their underwear and raged to the heavens about how much they despise their own baby girl.

A bit later, so did Sprog. Because Larry and Kathryn just didn't provide enough misplaced hatred and anger there.



In addition, Sprog automatically does a triumphant fistpump whenever he hears his little sister crying, and sometimes stops to laugh mockingly at her tears. Ok, he's Sprog and the sound of weeping children probably seems like the sweetest music to his vile little ears, but jesus christ. Even by Scumthorpe standards, Sprog is completely irredeemable.



As far as I can tell, this is the only time Lolita was ever actually held by her mother. Given Kathryn's obvious opinion on the matter, that's probably a good thing.

But don't worry, Lolita isn't a totally helpless figure in this household. As much as the Scumthorpes manage to violate virtually every rule of human decency in SimNation, they're still bound by certain conventions. Like the difficulties sims have always had with getting up stairs if anything's blocking the top or bottom of them.

Now guess where Lolita decided to sit down and play with her Imaginary Friend?



Trollita!

Also on a more topical note, a much happier bonus picture: Rick Scumthorpe apparently telling his baby half-sister about Seasons.



Awww!

Spiritbw 2nd Feb 2013 11:09 PM

MinghamSmith: 3rd Aug 2012, 05:51 PM
fairycake89 @Mingham Smith .. why is it seem to me disgusting that Larry sleeps in his socks and totally appropriate that the missus sleeps in her stockings?

Well, basically nobody can avoid looking awkward in nothing but underpants and a regular pair of socks. I admit, it's a deliberate costuming choice on my part. It makes screenshots that outfit appears in funnier, because as you point out it's not flattering at all.

That brings me onto a big part of the way I design sims: The most important thing to me in most cases is conveying a personality, not making them aesthetically pleasing. Larry Scumthorpe, for instance, is an over-the-top caricature of the sort of ruthless, greedy, slimy social climber that you love to hate, and so his outfits (particularly his sleepwear and his trademark leopard-print smoking jacket) are designed to look as awkward and tasteless as possible so you can immediately see the ridiculous, contemptible person he is. The same principles apply to his face, which owes more than a little to the sort of old-timey villain who ties damsels in distress to railroad tracks and is designed above all else to be expressive and well-suited to cartoonishly evil facial expressions.

He was actually my first ever TS3 sim, you know. Considering how much practice I've had making sims since then and how much CC I've accumulated, he and the other original Scumthorpes like Spurgin and Rick hold up shockingly well.

As for new thread content, earlier an Imaginary Friend doll teleported into a nursery to be nearer to small children, as they tend to do. Now, many people have pointed out the creepy, unsettling implications of those things lingering throughout their owner's life and becoming flesh-and-blood beings, myself included. But perhaps we're mistaken. Perhaps we're assuming the worst about an innocent little toy who just wants to love and be loved in return. Look at it, doesn't this picture just fill you with a sense of magic, joy and childhood nostalgia?


Why, yes, that's not ominous or sinister at all!

---------------------------------

MinghamSmith: 5th Aug 2012, 04:54 PM So recently, the Scumthorpes realised they all absolutely suck at housekeeping and hired Gerry, who has to be the most smug-looking, lecherous butler I've ever seen. Every time Kathryn was nearby, he'd inevitably pull a face like this and start leering and flirting away:


It was at this point that I knew exactly what had to be done.


Butler affair!

Hey, if you're stuck in a loveless, purely financially-motivated marriage to an aging sleazeball with multiple undiagnosed personality disorders and a questionable moustache, nobody's going to blame you for making out with the hired help just a bit, surely? Just keep things discreet and everything will turn out fi-



-Oh.



On the one hand, I should probably feel at least a bit bad about the sense of heartbreak and betrayal inevitably felt by anybody in this situation, along with the fact that a child just personally witnessed his own mother cheating. On the other hand, Sprog is a soulless abomination whose ability to feel anything other than rage, aggression and sadistic glee is questionable at best and AHAHAHAHAHA BEST LARRY EXPRESSION EVER


And so Larry Scumthorpe's second marriage came to an abrupt and ridiculous end. That's not hugely surprising, and at least nobody died this time around.

But what I was not prepared for was the single most nonchalant response to a divorce in the history of the universe:

"Eh, fuck it."


DON'T CARE, PLAYING TEMPEST


"...Erm, wow. Seriously? I mean... seriously? Damn, that's COLD."

And these aren't just coincidental pictures of funny expressions they made- I checked all their moodlets afterwards. Kathryn didn't get a negative breakup moodlet. Larry didn't get a negative breakup moodlet. Sprog didn't get Witnessed Betrayal despite being right there next to them. Even the babies didn't seem to care that their parents just suddenly left each other within the space of about 20 minutes, in a game where babies and toddlers normally have a bizarre psychic ability to detect this sort of thing and get mad about it. NOBODY in the entire Scumthorpe family gave a damn about this divorce.

Well, except for Carrie.

Carrie noticed. Carrie took such a mood hit from it that she instantly dropped into the red and continuously cried for the next 6 hours. When I hovered over her mood bar with the mouse, it didn't just say "miserable" or "uncomfortable." It said "depressed."

There are incompetent sims. There are evil sims. And then there are the sort of sims that inadvertently manage to give a baby depression.


QUALITY PARENTING

--------------------------------------------

MinghamSmith: 9th Aug 2012, 03:51 PM And now, a look back at an earlier period in the Scumthorpes' long and glorious history of being bizarre and terrible: Sprog's baby photos!

As I've previously demonstrated in places like the Sim Expressions and Emotions thread on the pictures board, baby Sprog had the uncanny ability to make otherwise cute and innocent toddler animations look shockingly unnerving purely through his inherent creepiness and limitless capacity for evil. But as time went by, I discovered that this ability wasn't just the result of a few fluke expressions and odd facial features, but ultimately extended to every single toddler action in the entire game.

For example:


That's not reading. That's plotting.


That's not pouting. That's a death threat.


That's not playing. That's showing off your latest murder implement.


and for the love of god that expression does not belong on a baby


One day, Spurgin managed to set himself on fire, and Sprog just sat there in his high chair, and watched, and laughed.

Because some babies aren't looking for anything logical, like love or care. They can't be bribed, scolded, reasoned, or negotiated with.

Some babies just want to watch the world burn.


no comment


...Oh, great, now he's Zombaby too or something.


WHERE DID YOU GET THAT


GODAMMIT SPROG


NOT THIS AGAIN

---------------------------------------------------

Also, for those of you interested in sim genetics, around the time I took these screenshots I also went into CAS with Sprog and briefly switched to Young Adult to see what he'd ultimately become. This is apparently what future Sprog will look like:


One the one hand, considering half his genetics come from Larry Scumthorpe he's surprisingly not outright hideous in this picture.

On the other hand, this music goes unsettlingly well with it...

Spiritbw 2nd Feb 2013 11:16 PM

MinghamSmith: 9th Aug 2012, 09:31 PM
vhanster@MinghamSmith He's carrying a HAMMER? Don't tell me that's the same hammer from the "Bash with Hammer" option from Dexter the Bear...

It is. Guilty as charged.

(It didn't work, and I didn't expect it to)

Amusingly, though, upon getting the "children can't kill, hold your grudge until he's a teenager" message, he immediately responded with this priceless expression of disappointment at being unable to make anything die:

"Once I learn to walk, you will all learn to fear me."

On a related note, I tried that again more recently with him as a child. Again, it does actually work for screenshot purposes- he holds the weapon correctly and walks normally with it for a bit until the error message displays:

I'm kind of surprised, actually. Usually, this sort of thing inevitably leads to that horrifying stretching glitch, or some other graphics problem-

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!

--------------------------------------

MinghamSmith: 13th Aug 2012, 07:33 AM To keep things from getting too Scumthorpe-centred, allow me to introduce another recurring comedic figure in my town.

Ever looked at the pink/red skintone slider and wondered what you're meant to do with it? I suppose there are many ways to utilize it depending on what you want out of the game. I know, for instance, that it'll probably be used for some fairies in Supernatural, and that a lot of people have already used it to make what I've seen referred to as Berry Sweet sims.

Being a rather more cynical person with a seemingly-inherent predisposition towards black humour, however, I made this instead:


Meet Malphas the Eternal. He lives in an abandoned concrete bunker on the outskirts of town, has a name nicked from Collin de Plancy's Dictionnaire Infernal and yet still somehow manages to be both the local Casanova and the sim with the highest celebrity rank in the area. No accounting for taste, I guess.


4-STAR CELEBRITY RATING, PATHETIC MORTALS! COUNT THEM! COUNT MY STARS!

On most days, you can usually find him strutting around town boasting, starting fires and hitting on anything without a Y chromosome. Occasionally, though, he does let his sensitive side show through all the swagger and hellfire:


JUST BECAUSE I COME FROM THE NINTH CIRCLE OF HELL DOESN'T MEAN I CAN'T CRY AT WEDDINGS


EVEN IF I DO SPEND HALF THE TIME STARING AT THE BRIDE'S ASS

...Ok, maybe not.

So you may be wondering, with all these bizarre inhuman entities running around my version of Sunset Valley even before the release of Supernatural, what happened to all the EA premades?

Uh, yeah, about that...

Let's take Lisa Bunch as a case study. Like many unfortunate sims in the aftermath of Late Night being released, Lisa Bunch was arbitrarily converted into a vampire by story progression despite being part of an extended Brady Bunch parody and therefore probably the least vampiric person in existence. She then ran across the aforementioned demonic counterpart to Don Lothario, had a one-night stand and was apparently somewhat careless about it.


Because three days later, this happened.

Immediately afterwards, though, I discovered that the rapidly-declining needs of pregnant sims do not mix well with vampirism. At all.

Why? Well, in the space of about 5 seconds after giving birth she lost control of her bladder, hit 0 Thirst and instantly crumbled to dust...


...leaving a bemused half-demon newborn stranded in a puddle of his own dead mother's ashes and wee.

And so Lucifer Bunch, aka Doombaby came into the world.

Aww, what a cute little hellspawn! Look how much he takes after his dad!

Of course, Doombaby wasn't an isolated incident. At least four more red, imp-like half-demon toddlers have appeared in Sunset Valley since, three of them being a set of triplets born to an already-married woman with a human husband who dislikes children. One can't help but be concerned for the future of the local genepool- due to a combination of this and my stubborn insistence on including alien babies several months prior to the release of Seasons, the town's human birthrate has almost totally collapsed and been overtaken about four times by the number of inhuman/mutant births.

When the only human babies born in recent memory were all Scumthorpes. you know your community is doomed.

------------------------------------------

MinghamSmith: 17th Aug 2012, 04:36 PM Given that most of my posts revolve around the recent escapades of Larry Scumthorpe and his hopelessly inadequate heirs, some of you may be wondering: What happened to Darius Scumthorpe, Larry's hated third son who ditched the family entirely, changed his surname to Victor and began a successful career in professional supervillainy?


Well, after blowing up his first evil lair before the Altos could stumble across it while building all the Showtime venues in Sunset Valley, he moved into a hidden base under an ordinary, unassuming suburban house with his cat, clone-son and robot henchmen, resurrected his dead sister Alice with Ambrosia and took to amusing himself by repeatedly detonating his dad's car at inopportune moments.

In the middle of all this, he also began dating an aspiring actress named Veronica Vale. And yesterday evening, he decided to propose to her.


Hey, supervillains need love too, I guess. And it's about time the Emperor of Evil found his empress.


So you've got yourself engaged. Your partner's ecstatic, your future seems brighter and thanks to the ring your wallet is lighter. Surely the first thing to do is to call everyone and tell them the good news?

Well, not in this case. If you're Darius Victor, first you'll have to painstakingly explain the basic concept of marriage to a mechanical bodyguard called Killbot I.

...This could take a while.


WHAT IS THIS THING YOU CALL LOVE


ROBOT APPROVAL: CONFIRMED


Alice Scumthorpe seemed delighted with the news of her brother's engagement too. This would have made for a perfect happy family moment if she hadn't spent the next hour or so unable to take her eyes off her future sister-in-law's cleavage.

Godammit, Alice!


So everyone went into the lounge, Killbot I put some music on and the newly-engaged couple shared this cute moment. Now, how best to celebrate the occasion? Perhaps open a bottle of champagne, drink a toast, then share a romantic dance together-

-Oh, wait, Seasons isn't out for another three months and slow dancing hasn't been added back in yet.

What to do?


FUCK IT, LET'S DO THE VICTORY DANCE ANYWAY


AIN'T NO PARTY LIKE AN EVIL ENGAGEMENT PARTY

And then this happened.


I've seen many, many strange scenarios play out in this game. Ghost drivers, men threatening babies with claw gauntlets, aliens probing each other rather than humans, the list goes on. But I still never expected to witness an evil clanking doombot doing a guido fistpump dance while staring longingly at his creator's sister.

Well, at least Alice didn't seem to mind-


-Wait, is she giving flirty looks to a robot?


...I guess that answers that question.


Then they paired up. And their dance went on. And on. And on.


Oh, for god's sake, you two, just kiss already!

And so a supervillain, an actress, a resurrected dead girl and a robot all danced the night away together until sunrise the next morning. Logic and sanity be damned, they were celebrating.

...You know what? To be honest, I find that strangely heartwarming.

With considerable emphasis on "strangely."

Spiritbw 2nd Feb 2013 11:35 PM

MinghamSmith: 22nd Aug 2012, 07:57 PM And now, another set of absurd screenshots from a while back documenting how Lester, Carrie and Lolita Scumthorpe came into the world.

A word of warning: It isn't pretty.

We've all seen less than ideal Sim births. Pregnant sims cycling to the hospital, husbands in the passenger seat of cars while their wife's in labour, everyone else in the family apparently far less calm and far more freaked out than the poor woman who's about to have a baby, the list goes on.

But all of these stories pale in comparison to the cringeworthy tale of Kathryn Scumthorpe and the worst birth ever.

I should have realised that this entire pregnancy was headed for disaster one day into it when Kathryn first discovered she was expecting triplets and then immediately headed for the bar. But hey, I also learned something that evening:

There is absolutely nothing stopping pregnant sims from drinking alcohol, regardless of the fact that they can't do things like skinny-dip or seek employment.


I can only assume it's a product of all the euphemisms the developers used in an attempt to keep the rating down. It seems they were so intent on not mentioning alcohol that it led to them overlooking the fact that they'd allowed virtual pregnant women to happily pour it down their throats as much as they like. And that's so ironic it's glorious.


QUALITY ANTENATAL CARE

My feelings of impending doom were not helped one bit by Larry's subsequent reaction to his wife announcing her pregnancy:


...Yeah.

So the second and third trimesters went about as well as you'd expect for anybody involved with this bunch of idiots, and on the third day Rick Scumthorpe witnessed Kathryn's water breaking. At this point, all notions of logic, reason and basic human decency went right out of the window.


"ohgodthebabiesarecomingthebabiesarecoming HELP"


"Oh, hell no, you're on your own here."

And then Rick just wandered off and left her there. While more or less pulling a literal trollface.


DITCHING BIRTHING MOTHERS LIKE A BOSS

He then followed up with what has to be the douchiest sim expression ever:


Are you there, Rick? It's your sim god talking: You are an asshole.

Off-camera, a 4-year-old Sprog happily sat around watching this catastrophe and repeatedly pointed and laughed at his mother's plight. My god, could this situation possibly get any more horrendous?

And where the hell's Larry in all of this-


YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS


And so Kathryn was left in the lounge screaming bloody murder and having to simultaneously cope with three full-term foetuses and one full-capacity bladder while Larry and Rick drank themselves into a stupor in the dining room.

Rick apparently felt this was an appropriate time to hone his bartending skills...


...Even though he doesn't have any.

Larry, meanwhile, decided to talk business with an executive from his hideously unethical mining corporation and still totally failed to notice his trophy wife trying to give birth in the next room:


WHAT DO YOU MEAN O.S.H.A COMPLIANCE


DO I LOOK LIKE I CARE IF THERE'S TIBERIUM IN THE WATER SUPPLY

And so after several hours of horrifying, epidural-less and totally unsupervised labour, the current Scumthorpe triplets were finally born in a messy puddle on the floor, after which Kathryn immediately staggered upstairs and mercifully passed out. Sprog had also fallen asleep on the floor by this point, and Rick had broken so many bottles in a futile effort to make cocktails that his grandchildren will probably still be picking up the shards of broken glass.



Around this time, Larry finally noticed the existence of his new children:


WHAT

WHO LEFT ALL THESE BABIES LYING AROUND


GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HOUSE YOU HORRIBLE LITTLE FREELOADERS

And then the cumulative effects of several bottles of scotch all hit him at once and forced him to kneel before the porcelain throne.


Charming.

So what have we learned here today? Well, quite a few things. That QUALITY PARENTING begins at conception. That EA's use of family-friendly euphemisms can sometimes hilariously undermine their efforts to prevent controversial sim behaviour. But most of all, that no matter how badly your pregnant sim's friends and family react to her having a baby, at least you can take comfort in one thing: They're not married to a Scumthorpe.

Well, at least until I figure out how to make them into downloads for everyone who requested them. Then all bets are off.

--------------------------------------------------

MinghamSmith: 23rd Aug 2012, 09:00 AM I once had Larry Scumthorpe temporarily lose his mind and start taking pot-shots at the paparazzi with a 9mm pistol (which is probably the only genuinely laudable thing he's ever done) and then saw the assassination mod blame a 1-year-old Sprog who hadn't yet learned to walk for their deaths instead.

...Actually, wait, that's not really much of a WTF moment. For Sprog, being a suspect in multiple homicide cases as a crawling baby is perfectly in character.

---------------------------------------------------

MinghamSmith: 27th Aug 2012, 08:51 PM
And now, time for some more recent pictures of the Scumthorpe triplets.


First up, an experiment: Since everyone seemed quite interested in how Sprog's weird genetics would ultimately pan out a couple of pages back, I decided to repeat the same process with Lolita Scumthorpe, going into CAS with her and then briefly switching to Young Adult to see what would happen.

Apparently, future Lolita will look like this:


...Ok, I think we all have a serious question for Larry Scumthorpe now:

How the hell do you keep fathering pretty daughters?

You look like someone accidentally spliced Basil Fawlty and Snidely Whiplash together in a David Cronenberg-esque teleportation disaster, and yet you somehow managed to produce THAT? My god, Scumthorpe genetics make about as much sense as Scumthorpe behaviour.

And by that, of course, I mean NONE! NONE WHATSOEVER!

Unfortunately, Larry's bizarrely good genes aren't always enough to counteract the effects of severe Tiberium poisoning and hereditary insanity. Lester, of course, is still a total genetic catastrophe:


JESUS CHRIST

IT'S LIKE ONE OF THE OTTOMAS TWINS WENT ON A HUNGER STRIKE



And here I'm honestly kind of disturbed. This is Uncanny Valley levels of wrong.

But then again, maybe it's just his weird facial expressions that make him look like a failed attempt at genetically engineering a half-alien overlord to rule over mankind. Maybe if he'd just smile and giggle and coo like a regular baby he'd stop being so profoundly offputting-


-Ok, scratch that. Lester, stop smiling. Please, please stop smiling. In fact, never smile again as long as you live. It's often said that smiles make any human face look more appealing. Your very existence proves otherwise.

However, despite appearing so grossly dissimilar to one another that they barely even look like members of the same species, Lester and Lolita nonetheless seem to have the only genuinely positive relationship in the entire family. In a household where everyone else either wants to murder each other, has already done so or happens to be an omnicidal maniac, these two happily play together and chat about anything their limited vocabularies allow them to whenever Sprog isn't trying to use one of them as his personal punching bag.

It's almost sweet, in an incredibly dysfunctional kind of way.



Unfortunately, they also seem to share bad habits as well as toys:


WHY ARE ALL MY BABIES ALCOHOLICS

Of course, even Tiberium-addled crazy babies need to be cared for to some degree, and since the presence of Larry Scumthorpe is about as beneficial to the well-being of small children as the OMGWTFBBQ the job of feeding and changing them usually falls to Rick Scumthorpe. However, whether this state of affairs can continue for much longer is highly uncertain, because doing so is increasingly starting to drive him mad.


Especially when Lester is involved.

You can certainly see where Rick's coming from. Since both his brothers moved away and severed all contact with the rest of the family, he's had to spend most of his twenties as the only person bothering to clean up after a succession of increasingly deranged and creepy babies that his father openly admits are attempts to produce a better male heir to the family fortune than himself. He's now nothing but a failed heir, set aside and most likely written out of his father's will in favour of a sickly little toddler who may not even have reached the age of majority by the time Larry dies.

And he knows it.

One day, he apparently decided that he'd finally had enough.


"Oh, you're going on a stroll alright, Lester. A ONE-WAY STROLL TO THE GATES OF HELL!"


But, you think, this has to be a misleading screenshot. Surely I'm just implying the stroller is rolling towards something dangerous when it's actually in a field-


-Nope!

Of course, since you can't actually push your 1-year-old Gollum-esque mutant half-brother down a steep hill to his almost certain death in this game, Lester survived, and will therefore continue to be a constant source of discomfort and inconvenience to everyone around him for the next several decades.


"...I hate you, Lester. So very, very much."

----------------------------------------------------------------

And now, a preview of things to come in my town. Because due to the impending release of Supernatural, the next month will inevitably be a time of great upheaval for SimNation. How could it not be when within a matter of weeks the existence of magic will become public knowledge, the dead will begin to walk the earth and fairies and werewolves will be discovered in Moonlight Falls? Sure, sim society will most likely manage to adapt to all this, just as it did upon first contact with all its existing occult minorities. But the fact remains that for many sims, life will never be the same again.

And so, as magic begins to re-enter the public eye, a mysterious, mystical new member of the Scumthorpe dynasty prepares to reveal himself to the world:


Let the speculation as to his nature begin...

Spiritbw 2nd Feb 2013 11:43 PM

*Editors note: Bit of info on the Scumthorpes' messed up family gamewise from MinghamSmith. Sorry if this seems a bit slapdash in info but I am adding these in order as I progress form oldest to most recent of the posts I can find*

The Scumthorpes are currently at the beginning of generation 4, if you count me editing the family tree and retconning in Ethel and Sylvester Scumthorpe, the parents of Larry and Sid. While the triplets are technically the same generation as Larry's adult offspring due to sharing a father, the first fourth-generation Scumthorpe was actually born some time ago when Darius Victor/Scumthorpe decided he hadn't fulfilled enough supervillain cliches, cloned himself and produced a mini-me named Alexander.

Consequently, the fourth generation is actually biologically older than some members of the third generation at the moment. I should probably edit my last post; the Scumthorpe family tree makes even less sense than their genetics.

------------------------------------

MinghamSmith: 29th Aug 2012, 08:18 PM Since I'm currently waiting around for Supernatural to be released before I bring about any major new developments in my town, I think the time's right for a few posts about Sprog Scumthorpe and how he is without a doubt the creepiest sim in the world.

You've seen his baby photos, in which he pretended to slit the throats of Wugglesworth Schnuggles Bears, crawled around wielding a claw hammer and only ever laughed or smiled when watching his relatives suffer. You've seen him hanging around in the background of more recent screenshots as a child, looking like an evil Frodo Baggins and disproving the notion of childhood innocence and purity merely by existing. But the following few posts will demonstrate for the first time just how profoundly screwed-up he really is.

So, without further ado, I present...

Sprog, You Horrifying Little Shit

Part I: Autonomous Casual Rage

As previously mentioned a few pages back, Sprog has just about the worst personality you can possibly give a child sim as far as traits are concerned. His current traits are Evil, Mean-Spirited, Insane and Pyromaniac, with Kleptomaniac and Hot-Headed as planned additions during the teen and young adult stages to reflect the poor impulse control and disregard for law and order generally found in clinically-diagnosed psychopaths. Sprog, in short, is basically a long-term experiment in which I take the concept of sims born with the Evil trait to its logical conclusion and see what happens.

So far, it hasn't turned out well.

Often, people have complained that the traits system doesn't lead to enough behavioural variantion in TS3 sims, and that sims have consequently become bland and samey. But that isn't always the case. The effects of the aforementioned trait combination, for instance, become glaringly obvious almost immediately after you encounter a sim with it.


And they aren't pretty.

Let's begin with Sprog's idle animations. Put simply, they range from darkly comical to downright disturbing. Because even when left entirely to his own devices, Sprog still routinely starts loud and aggressive arguments with himself...



...either has a rebellious hand that hates him or a disturbingly precocious penchant for self-strangulation...



...and frequently starts hissing and barking like an animal in public for reasons that are probably best left unexplored.


(On an unrelated note, my god, he's got a tongue worthy of Gene Simmons)

Other sims are, to say the least, unnerved by him as a result.

One day, Sprog went to the local library, most likely hoping to stare disconcertingly at anatomy textbooks and giggle insanely at the gorier parts of Hannibal for as long as he could without being forcibly evicted from the place.

A few minutes later, at least one grown man fled the building in terror.


This is a perfectly reasonable response to the presence of Sprog.

Later on, he declared Jocasta Bachelor a nemesis. She immediately wet herself.


This is also a perfectly reasonable response to the presence of Sprog.

But it's around Lolita Scumthorpe that Sprog is at his most legitimately unsettling. Because whenever they're in the same room together, he looms over her and just... stares. Blankly and soullessly, with the red Emperor of Evil glow surrounding him and a not-so-subtle hint of YOU'RE NEXT in his cold, dead eyes.


Run away, Lolita! Run away as fast as your stubby little legs can carry you-

-Oh, god, she hasn't even learned to walk yet!

CRAWL! CRAWL FOR YOUR LIFE!

In short, I've created a monster. But surely nobody is born evil? Surely it's early enough for him to eventually become a less fundamentally broken human being with the right amount of effort and support? Surely there's some small hope of redemption here?

Nope. Not even remotely.

Sprog's wishes revolve almost entirely around seeing ghosts, declaring the entire world his nemesis and watching people die, with the occasional petty wish to make his baby sisters cry purely because he can. He has zero positive relationships and countless enemies, never autonomously uses anything from outside the Mean interactions category and quite evidently doesn't understand the concepts of love or compassion on even the most basic level. Overall, he's only ever expressed anything vaguely resembling affection or empathy once in his entire miserable excuse for a life...


...towards a wild snake he found in a bush. Presumably, this was the only point at which he ever felt something in common with another living creature.

And then the snake apparently realised it was being held by a homicidal maniac and made a break for it. Even poisonous reptiles are afraid of Sprog. He is completely, utterly, absolutely irredeemable on every concievable level, and the world would be an objectively better place if Larry Scumthorpe had grilled him on the OMGWTFBBQ at birth.

So, in conclusion: Sprog, what do you want to be when you grow up?


"Feared."

Heh.

Who says children in TS3 can't have distinctive personalities?

----------------------------------------

Editors Note: Thought these few bits from other posts would be of interest and expand a bit on things

chreai@MinghamSmith
Perhaps Sprog's name should've been Dameon. That pic of him with the snake seems awfully appropriate. Funny how that was his pet of choice....


Personally, I couldn't help but think of this fable when he found the snake. It perfectly sums up how any attempt to engage with him on a level other than running away or cowering in fear would inevitably pan out. And it fits a future plan for him too...

As for Sprog's name, you're right, Damien (or Lucifer, or Beelzebub, etc) would have worked very well as an alternative name for him. I decided to reserve those kinds of names for inhuman/supernatural sims, though, since there are a few toddlers in my town that are actually, literally half-demon. Along with an endless assortment of new occult characters to make next week once Supernatural is out, many of which will probably start making appearances in this thread once I determine the comedy potential of fairies, witches and werewolves.

As it stands, though, there is a definite reason why Sprog is called Sprog: It's based around the idea that the Scumthorpes are such mind-bogglingly terrible parents that they didn't even bother to name him properly and just scribbled a mildly pejorative term on his birth certificate out of sheer apathy. It's also similar to the thought process behind Lolita's name- the joke there is that they're also so stupid that they didn't realise they'd named their baby girl after a certain notorious Vladimir Nabokov novel. :p


http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sprog

It's a mildly dismissive slang term for a baby or child, perhaps vaguely equivalent to something like "brat." If it seems obscure, blame my nationality- when I first used it for the character I didn't realise it was a specifically British term that might be unfamiliar to people from outside the UK. My mistake.

(Although the existence of Sprog predates me posting on here by a few months, so I probably wasn't thinking about that at the time)

Spiritbw 3rd Feb 2013 12:03 AM

MinghamSmith: 3rd Sep 2012, 11:24 AM Time for more QUALITY PARENTING!

We rejoin the Scumthorpes on an average day in the life of SimNation's least psychologically healthy political family. Carrie's downstairs beating the crap out of her Imaginary Friend doll and trying to hide from Sprog, Lester's asleep on the sofa and still as much of a spindly mutant hellbaby as ever and Rick is growing increasingly concerned by the fact that he's in his late twenties and still digs graves for a living despite how influential, well-connected and powerful his father's become in recent years.


In the nursery, meanwhile, Lolita happily plays with a little xylophone. She's fairly good at it...


...Well, except for when she tries to eat the percussion mallet.

Still, this is nonetheless a cute, endearing scene of early child development that regular, sane parents might well coo over, watch with pride and photograph far more than strictly necessary. Even the Scumthorpes couldn't possibly do anything to wreck a moment like this, surely-


-Oh, you have got to be kidding me. GODAMMIT, Larry!


SHUT UP AND LEARN WHEN TO QUIT, LOLITA, YOU FAIL AT XYLOPHONES


YOU ARE THE MOST TALENTLESS BABY EVER


THE VERY FACT THAT I'M YOUR FATHER FILLS ME WITH DISGUST AND SHAME


AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA oh my god that expression

i think i may have a new avatar


----------------------------------------------------

Also, a while back some of you expressed an interest in what the other Scumthorpe triplets will look like as adults after I posted CAS screenshots of future Lolita and adult Sprog. While I'm still trying to come up with a suitably unnerving look for adult Lester and may have to wait for some of the new makeup options in Supernatural, I do have this image of future Carrie.

And once again, it's... surprising.


Just as I said a couple of pages back, how the hell does Larry keep having pretty daughters? Even with visible burns and scars covering half her face, she's still more attractive than at least 90% of the entire human race. It makes no sense at all! Her father is objectively hideous, and her mother never looked that good!

(And if you're wondering how she got those scars, blame Sprog. Of course it's Sprog's fault)

Spiritbw 3rd Feb 2013 12:10 AM

MinghamSmith: 12th Sep 2012, 07:34 PM

And now, a big Scumthorpe update. I haven't been able to play for most of the past week due to updating all my mods and sorting out an annoying glitch resulting from transferring everything over from the Steam version of the game to Origin in order to be able to play Supernatural and future expansions, but now things are up and running again I think it's time to reveal the new addition to the family I've hinted at in previous posts.

Up until now, all the Scumthorpes have been ordinary (if severely messed-up) humans, with the closest thing to an inhuman member of the family being either Sprog or a certain spindly mutant hellbaby we all love to hate or hate to love. But yesterday, the first paranormal Scumthorpe decided to reveal himself to the world after an early life spent in near-total obscurity elsewhere in SimNation. And despite having been born and raised entirely isolated from the rest of the family and its ongoing tradition of dodgy baby names, his name is probably the most questionable of the lot:


Meet Judas Brutus Cassius Scumthorpe, the previously-unknown bastard son of Sid Scumthorpe and an as-of-yet-unidentified witch from Moonlight Falls with whom he somehow managed to have his only ever one-night-stand approximately 30 years ago. In a truly disastrous turn of events that more or less entirely disproves the notion of a just and loving Sim god, Judas managed to inherit both his mother's ability to use magic and every single one of the catastrophic personality flaws that run in the Scumthorpe family, all the while managing the impressive feat of having both the least trustworthy name and the least trustworthy eyebrows in the history of the universe. And now, having recently learned of his direct (if illegitimate) links to a wealthy and influential family, he's come to claim his fair share of Larry Scumthorpe's money and power. By any means necessary.

So how does a magical megalomaniac go about attracting the attention of a multi-millionaire?

Through rampant sorcerous dickery, of course!

Within less than 24 hours of his initial arrival in Sunset Valley, Judas had given local medical professionals a perfect opportunity to conduct research into the effects of hypothermia during the run-up to the release of Seasons...



...personally run regional tourism into the ground by repeatedly setting badly-dressed pudding-faced foreigners on fire...



...and turned several people into amphibians purely to amuse himself. At least, on the few occasions when he wasn't flinging pestilence curses around at passers-by like they were going out of style or compelling people to publicly lose control of their bladders.







So yeah, Sid Scumthorpe's only sexual experience in his entire lecherous life managed to produce an evil sorcerer named after three legendary traitors who apparently views the non-magical world and everybody in it as his personal plaything, thus proving that the whole universe runs on Murphy's Law.

Can things possibly get any worse for this town?

Why, yes, of course they can: He's a necromancer too!

Above all things, Judas Scumthorpe loves to dominate and control his fellow man, and sees raising the dead as his personal minions as the easiest and most viable path to power. He has absolutely no qualms about clearing out entire cemeteries in order to do so...





...and sometimes resorts to graverobbing in the most literal sense imaginable to further swell the ranks of his future undead horde. Now, most sims who attempt to raise the dead tend to be well-meaning, sympathetic characters, or at worst curious opportunists with access to dead people and magic.

Judas, on the other hand, will actively try to steal the remains of your loved ones to further his dastardly plans, and already managed to run off with Lolita Goth's tombstone in his inventory when Gunther and Cornelia weren't looking. Put simply, he is a terrible, terrible human being.


HIDE YOUR URNS, HIDE YOUR CORPSES, HE'S RAISING ALL OF THEM OUT HERE

And wait a minute, take a look at this thought bubble:


Is zombie Lolita Goth... thinking? About being happy and human and alive rather than eating brains?

Is she still sentient and capable of feeling? Can she still remember her time among the living?


Apparently yes.

But wait, hang on, that would imply that all of Judas's undead slaves are still conscious the entire time. Even though they're zombies. Even though all they can do is shamble around and moan wordlessly, all the while looking on helplessly as their bodies slowly break down and rot away-

-My god, that's the most existentially terrifying Sims-related thing ever.

GODAMMIT, JUDAS!

So other than a glitch or two, that's what the release of Supernatural has inflicted on my town so far. A monstrous magical overlord resulting from a broken condom and 5 minutes of awkward fumbling around in the dark that will not rest until both the living and the dead kneel and grovel at his feet forever.

And the worst thing about this entire situation?

Larry still needs a viable heir. And Judas knows it.


TODAY, SUNSET VALLEY! TOMORROW, THE WORLD!

------------------------------------

MinghamSmith: 14th Sep 2012, 07:53 AM Now Supernatural's out, I also have the things I need in order to click on Edit in CAS with Lester Scumthorpe selected and get an accurate picture of what everyone's favourite ugly emaciated mutant baby will eventually grow into, like I did with his sisters and Sprog when people expressed an interest in their genetics.

It isn't pretty.


After spending the entirety of his formative years continuing to suffer from the same Tiberium poisoning he was born with, full-grown Lester is horrifyingly radioactive, built like Christian Bale in The Machinist (at best) and only a few unorthodox facial piercings away from resembling something out of Hellraiser. Geiger counters go haywire around him. Vampires stupid or desperate enough to try drinking his blood might as well be swallowing depleted uranium. There are zombies in better condition than him, and yet he's still the most viable heir the Scumthorpes currently have unless Judas steps in.

Also, compare that picture with the ones of his sisters as young adults.

They're all the same age. He's 20 there.

---------------------------------------------

MinghamSmith: 22nd Sep 2012, 09:46 AM

Before proceeding with this post, a disclaimer: Up until my regular characters intervened in the following series of events, I had nothing to do with it whatsoever. Absolutely nothing. What you are about to see is one of the most bizarre cases of autonomous behaviour by a NPC I've ever seen in the sims series, with no efforts by the player to set it up or influence it at all. Even by my standards, it's weird and deranged, to the point where it'd actually be kind of unsettling if it hadn't taken place in such a cartoony game.

You have been warned.

So without further ado:

Babysnatching and Bloodlust: I Couldn't Make This Up If I Tried

Apart from Judas Scumthorpe abruptly barging into Larry's mansion and intimidating his illegitimate semi-uncle into providing financial backing for his evil sorcerous endeavours, this Thursday was a fairly normal day for everyone's favourite family of maniacs and morons. Lester and Lolita hung around together and had oddly precocious baby conversations as usual, Carrie alternated between building toddler skills and beating the crap out of her Imaginary Friend doll, Sprog once again ignored school entirely in favour of typing up his first crazy person manifesto and Rick continued to slide further into depression and insanity from having to take care of them all while still digging graves for a living. All fairly routine stuff for them, barring the sudden addition of a necromancer to the family.

And then out of nowhere, this happened:


Who the hell is that?

Upon inspection, this mystery sim turned out to be a middle-aged service NPC (a bouncer, oddly) named Tuesday Sears that I'd never heard of before in my life, who proceeded to spend the entire afternoon hanging around outside the front door and complaining about routing errors. Initially, I figured she'd been directed onto the lot by the game's questionable AI and got stuck, so I decided to just ignore her and hope she'd eventually head back to whichever bar or club she was assigned to...


...Until night fell, and I found her hiding in a bush while repeatedly complaining that a locked door prevented her from getting into the house and behaving increasingly like an escaped mental patient.

Since when did I even suggest that you were allowed in there, you perplexingly persistent puddle of idiocy? I don't even know you!


And why the hell are Lester and Lolita thinking about her? They've never even seen her before. She's not a social worker. They have no reason to know of her existence, let alone express any awareness of her presence nearby. It's not like they're responding to an attempt to interact with them or anything.

Unless-


-Oh my god.

As time went by, her thought bubbles increasingly began to revolve solely around the Scumthorpe triplets and getting into the house to be close to them.
This isn't just a WTF moment anymore. This is getting downright sinister.

Feeling increasingly concerned, I checked on the triplets and quickly noticed something overtly creepy happening: Over and over again, "Be picked up by Tuesday Sears" appeared in their action queues, only to quickly drop out when the doors blocked this complete and total stranger from entering their home.

Yes, you read that correctly. The AI in my game has somehow generated a deranged, obsessive kidnapper hell-bent on stealing other people's babies that autonomously tries to invade your home lot and carry them away. I am not joking. I am not lying. This happened exactly as I described it, and I don't have the faintest idea how or why.


LET ME IN, LET ME IN, I JUST WANT TO SEE THE BABIES


I JUST WANT TO HOLD ONE

AND SQUEEZE ONE AND CHANGE ONE

AND HAVE IT CALL ME MUMMY AND NEVER LET YOU SEE IT AGAIN


...Oh, hell no, I am not standing for this.

Fortunately, though, crazy child-snatching middle-aged women aren't the only things that lurk around the grounds of Stately Scum Manor late at night:


CRY HAVOC, AND LET SLIP THE SPROGS OF WAR


At this point, sticking on the Jaws theme would probably be appropriate. Or the theme to Halloween. Either version. Or perhaps this suspenseful little tune. Because Ms. Sears has absolutely no idea just how utterly, utterly dead she is right now.

Sometimes, having a prepubescent Patrick Bateman in the family has its perks.


A word of advice, by the way: If you're a sim and you happen to see this approaching you in the dark, RUN.

RUN FOR YOUR LIFE, AND DON'T LOOK BACK.

Doubly so if he happens to be carrying the pistol from Desecrate's Weapons System.


Triply so if the expression on his face looks anything like this.


WHY WON'T YOU LET ME STEAL YOUR BABIES? YOU'VE ALREADY GOT THREE!


ALL I WANT IS ONE LITTLE BABY! JUST ONE! IS THAT REALLY SO MUCH TO ASK-

*BANG*


"Heh. Exploded cranium. Brain matter. Pity, though, I wanted to keep the skull..."


And so with the timely arrival of Death himself, this bizarre and disturbing chain of events mercifully came to an end.


"...Oh, god, not this horrible little bugger again. STOP GIVING ME EXTRA WORK!"


"I hate this job sometimes, I really do. It ain't easy being Grim."

Thus concluded my first and hopefully only encounter with a NPC even more insane than most of my own characters. Most of them.

Because if you find yourself having to fight crazy with crazy... well, at least you can't outdo Sprog in that regard.

Perhaps I need to balance things out a bit more. Perhaps I should make a normal, reasonable, sensible man as a counterpoint to Larry Scumthorpe, and give him a nice, peaceful, non-deranged life with a lovely wife and a pleasant career. An author, maybe-

-Oh, wait, no. Bad idea. Bad, bad idea. Based on what just happened between the game's AI and the Scumthorpes, any attempt to make a sim with a successful writing career would probably just lead to a horrifying virtual re-enactment of Stephen King's Misery sooner or later. With the AI playing Annie Wilkes by itself.

What the hell is wrong with my town?

Spiritbw 3rd Feb 2013 1:18 AM

Okay, that is it for now as I am starting to get eye strain and a stiff neck form editing. More to be added later after I've had a rest. I am trying to edit things a bit so they are download friendly with the number of pictures with my somewhat limited knowledge of how to make the best use of this site. Seems like every Forum has it's own code and tags and some times they are not very obvious.

hugbug993 8th Feb 2013 12:13 AM

Because I was bored, I went through and got links to all the pictures of the Scumthorpes (and some others from the same town) in the WTF thread.

Radiation is Always Related to Pregnancy

Mining Fetish

Baby Facepalm (Carrie)

Learning to Talk

Young Alcoholics

Toddler Lester

Baby Talk

The Claw

The Cast

Aliens of SV

Everyone Hates Lolita

Imaginary Friends

Butler Affair

Baby Sprog

Evil Engagement Party

Worst Birth Ever

Triplets Update

You Fail At Xylophones

Judas Arrives

Adult Lester

Babysnatcher

Creepiness

Necromantic Reunion

Baby's First Military Coup D'etat

Eldritch Lester

Beating Up Babies

Scumthorpes' Best Pregnancy

Sprog Mega-Post

Child Triplets

Arthur Friend

Alien Probing

Rick Scumthorpe Gives Birth

Carrie

Birth Aftermath

Baby Football

Radiation is Actually Related

Chemistry Set

Scumthorpe Dreams

Meteorite

Sprog's First Massacre

Clowns

Crosseyed Judas

Pyromaniac Sprog

Playground Lurker

Simsdestroyer 8th Feb 2013 1:45 AM

Oh my god, I'm not usually into sim stories but this was HILARIOUS...I'm in love with Scumthorpes already....Me wants more!!!! lol

gemly_teddie 8th Feb 2013 3:10 PM

Awkward question, does MinghamSmith know you're doing this?
I'm sure he has no problem with it, just thought it'd be good for him to know you've set up a thread for him.

BourgeoisBanana 8th Feb 2013 6:59 PM

This reminds me of EphemeralToast's legacies from The Sims 2, absolutely hilarious. Keep it up please!

Sojourner 8th Feb 2013 9:29 PM

Now Mingham. You just have to get your priorities straight!

But how about posting updates to the Scumthorpe Saga here from now on? Because I live in fear that someday you will post about the Scumthorpes in a thread I'm not following, and I'll miss it!

Pretty pleez?

MiniMimi 9th Feb 2013 12:33 AM

Thanks Spiritbw, I had a good laugh reading Mingham's beginnings again (And totally forgot about Spurgin!)

lewisb40 9th Feb 2013 1:19 AM

The title should have a disclaimer in it, "Please make sure you have used the bathroom or put on diapers before opening this thread". Maybe the first sentence of the post. I am crying tears of laughter and yes, now must go to the powder room.

*pumps fist at MinghamSmith & Spiritbw* Damn you for this thread!

lenglel 9th Feb 2013 8:34 AM

1 Attachment(s)
Black is such a happy color.

Spiritbw 9th Feb 2013 6:24 PM

Glad that everyone is liking it and everything is okay with folks (especially MinghamSmith, sorry, should have asked anyhow).

Had a busy week but now back to keep adding the posts I can find. For the record, all the pictures are behind the spoiler tags to keep from overloading people's computers when trying to read this. There are just too many to let it load properly otherwise.

That said, onwards!

---------------------------------------

MinghamSmith: 25th Sep 2012, 07:08 AM Indeed, sometimes you aren't. You really, really aren't.

And fittingly enough, last night I repeatedly managed to do so at the absolute worst possible times you can imagine and then took screenshots of the results anyway. Because my game apparently runs exclusively on anti-logic and pure mind-bending horror these days:

(Warning: Nightmare fuel ahoy!)


what is this

i told Larry to mock the ghost of his first wife and he was holding Lolita at the time and OH GOD WHY

IS THERE ANY EXPRESSION LESS APPROPRIATE FOR BEING AROUND SMALL CHILDREN


...Erm, wow. Even for a Lester screenshot that's horrifying. It's like a group of intrepid explorers discovered some kind of mummified hairless rat-monkey thing in the Amazon rainforest, then collectively suffered numerous traumatic brain injuries and starting treating it as their baby out of sheer mind-boggling insanity.

Except that is a baby. One that's set to inherit a billion-Simoleon mining corporation based primarily around mutagenic alien crystals, even though he's little more than a walking corpse and makes the Ottomas family look like a shining example of sim genetics by comparison.

SimNation is doomed.


FUCKING BLOCKS HOW DO THEY WORK

ALSO VENGEANCE

VENGEANCE UPON SPROG FOR THAT TIME HE STUCK ME IN THE OVEN


And even cute little Lolita gets her creepy on sometimes:


DAMMIT LOLITA YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE THE ADORABLE ONE

YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG

...Wait.

It's just occurred to me how closely she resembles one of the Little Sisters in Bioshock.

Like, almost exactly.

Even the cute Scumthorpes are nightmare material on some level. And this is only 3 generations in. What if they run for 10 generations or more? What kind of inhuman abominations will they have produced by the end of it all?

Doesn't bear thinking about, really. But you can't get much worse than Lester... right?

Right?




Well, sometimes children do have surprising or downright odd vocabularies that have nothing to do with formal education. From personal experience, I learned the words "optimistic," "pessimistic," "barbarians" and "cultural imperialism" from various places when I was in the equivalent of elementary school, and reportedly often said the word "visions" as a baby.*

I imagine Sprog as having picked up a fair few biology terms from hanging around in the library reading anatomy textbooks and thinking about innovative ways to make things die. He's perfectly literate, after all. He's by no means unintelligent, he's just far too deranged to do anything constructive with his otherwise above-average intellect.

* Blame Simon and Garfunkel. One of the first songs I ever recognised and enjoyed was The Sound of Silence, which begins with this verse:

Hello, darkness, my old friend,
I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping,
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence


Apparently I treated it like a lullaby and my parents played it all the time to get baby me to go to sleep. Whatever works, I guess. :P

------------------------------------------

MinghamSmith: 1st Oct 2012, 10:32 PM


Spiritbw@MinghamSmith: Right there? She reminds me of another little girl with black hair in braids: (There is no way to embed video here is there? ) http://www.youtube.com/watch?featur...e&v=_YFk4b6yeX4

Actually, you're right. Even the personality of the original TV Wednesday Addams fits Lolita Scumthorpe perfectly- though she's currently only a baby, she's still meant to be the cheerfully innocent one who views her family's eccentricities as the norm.

(The much more deadpan and sarcastic movie version of Wednesday Addams, on the other hand, is closer to how I envision Carrie Scumthorpe once she gets to the child stage. The triplets are more or less deliberately designed as a comedy trio- Lolita is the ditzy, upbeat one, Carrie is the snarky, grumpy one and Lester is just screwed up and weird)

Anyway, time for another Scumthorpe update: We rejoin SimNation's worst political family as a certain illegitimate sorcerer stakes his claim to some of the family fortunes... through whatever means necessary. He's dark. He's determined. He has downright devilish eyebrows.

He's Judas Scumthorpe, and one of these days the world will kneel before him.

Hey, it's good to be ambitious.

(Also, a characterisation point. Whenever these two speak, read everything Larry says in a harsh, gravelly New York or New Jersey accent and Judas as if he's voiced by Simon Templeman. It works. It's how I imagine they'd both sound if they weren't speaking Simlish. And for some reason it makes everything they say twice as funny)

So without further ado...

Whatever Judas Wants, Judas Gets


"...So in short, despite having been born somewhat outside the context of holy matrimony and having only just met you I'm nonetheless your first, and I believe only nephew. And so I felt I'd be justified in asking my dear old uncle Larry for a little monetary assistance with a few things... You know, magical equipment, elixirs, financial backing for my eight-point world domination plan-"


"-Ok, shut up right now. You honestly believe I'm going to fork out thousands of simoleons to some badly-dressed mystical stranger barging onto my property out of nowhere just because my useless shit of a brother forgot to wear a condom 30 years ago? HELL. NO. I don't care what kind of sparkly fairyland you claim to be from or what kind of delusional paranormal crap you buy into, YOU ARE AN ACCIDENT. YOU HAVE NO REASON TO EXIST. YOU WILL NEVER BE ANYTHING BUT A WALKING CONTRACEPTIVE DISASTER. Stop talking, start walking and get the fuck out of my house."


"Fine. Then I suppose we'll have to do this the hard way."


"And the hard way is?"

"Well, a key component of it is that urn on the table over there. Your first wife's, I believe? The one you shot in the face about a month before marrying a girl less than half your age? Don't bother denying it, Larry, Sid told me everything. And by the time I'm through with her remains, you'll be wishing you'd offered me double what I requested. Triple. Your entire life savings, even. One last chance, finance my magical endeavours or suffer my sorcerous wrath."


"Oh, now this is just precious. You really think there's a single thing you could do with Honoria's urn that'd make me change my mind? Let me tell you something, you illegitimate imbecile, I HATED Honoria. You could smash that thing to bits, empty it down the toilet, sit any one of my horrible little excuses for babies on top of it and teach them to use the potty... All I'd do is laugh, both at your failure and at her ashes getting the sort of sendoff they so richly deserve. And what did you say you were anyway, a magician? I'm calling it right now, the most impressive thing you could possibly do with that urn is nothing but some third-rate Criss Angel crap-


"-OH REALLY? You seriously walked right into this one, Larry..."


"Oh, christ, you're not bluffing. Ok, ok, you have magical powers and I cower before them, I really, really do-

-Wait, you're not... trying to raise the dead here, are you?

NO! You can't! You wouldn't dare-"


"-Of course I would. I'm a Scumthorpe."


"FOR GOD'S SAKE, JUDAS, I'LL GIVE YOU ANYTHING YOU WANT! JUST DON'T LET ME SEE MY WIFE AGAIN!"


"Too late, Larry. Too late. Enjoy the family reunion, I'm sure you both have so much to catch up on..."


LARRY


WE NEED TO TALK


BUT ALL I WANT TO DO IS EAT YOUR BRAINS


NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

-------------------------------------------

MinghamSmith: 6th Oct 2012, 08:24 PM Ah, watching your babies at play. Doesn't it just warm your heart to see their innocent games and their unparalleled sense of wonder at all the world has to offer?

Except sometimes those things just aren't there. Sometimes the little ones have far darker imaginations than you'd care to admit.

Sometimes you just find yourself having to bear witness to...

Baby's First Military Coup D'etat

Earlier, Lester went looking in a box and found a model tank and a toy rocket. It all ended very badly:


"Those in power, hear my voice: We do not come in peace. We have tanks. We have nuclear weapons. And we will not hesitate to use them!"


"Dissolve the government and give us eleventy billion simoleons, or face our mighty arsenal!"


"I'm not bluffing! I have an accomplice, and her finger's on the button!"


YAY BUTTONS


"What's this? They refuse to meet our demands! Fire the missiles, little sis!"


VWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH

KABOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM



YOUR NATION ROTS IN THE DUSTBIN OF HISTORY


VICTORY

NOW WE CAN BE EMPERORS AND STUFF



I LOVE MY TANK


I LOVE MY NUKE

Spiritbw 9th Feb 2013 6:39 PM

MinghamSmith: 1st Nov 2012, 06:05 AM Yesterday, I received a wonderful (read: creepy and bizarre) reminder of why Sprog Scumthorpe is without a doubt the best worst sim ever.

Having noticed that his relationships panel seemed somewhat larger and more populated than it was before the release of Supernatural, I went into Master Controller and tried to set his relationship status with every other sim in the entire town to Enemy. Helps with his AI, fits his character, etc etc etc.

In response, he immediately rolled a want to beat up an infant.


I... what... I don't even... WHAT THE HELL, SPROG?

---------------------------------------

MinghamSmith: 9th Nov 2012, 10:26 AM Back on page 48, I posted a bunch of pictures from the rather odd night when Darius, the disowned third son of Larry Scumthorpe, proposed to his girlfriend Veronica and danced the night away with his sister and his robot bodyguard. Recently, they got married. Because even professional supervillains need love.


And soon afterwards, the new couple had their first baby together.

In the days leading up to the birth of said baby, though, I came to realise that members of the Scumthorpe family simply cannot procreate without something ludicrous happening in the process. It all began when the game arbitrarily decided that one of Daisy Duke's costumes from The Dukes of Hazzard was an appropriate outfit to have a baby in, a development Veronica appeared about as satisfied with as you'd expect:


QUALITY MATERNITY WEAR

It then transpired that Larry Scumthorpe's bizarre inability to respond to the Announce Pregnancy interaction appropriately was an inheritable genetic defect rather than an unfortunate personality quirk. Because Darius clearly can't do it right either:


"Darling, I'm pregnant-"

"-I TOTALLY BOMBED A GOVERNMENT BUILDING."

And for some reason, Alice Scumthorpe autonomously decided that there was no better place to have a nap than the bed with her pregnant sister-in-law in it. First she couldn't take her eyes off Veronica's breasts upon meeting her 11 pages ago, now she wants to share a bed with her.


Somehow, I think there might be some unrequited feelings here.

Still, for all his eccentricities, at least Darius was a far more supportive and enthusiastic father-to-be than anybody in the main Scumthorpe household ever was:


DO FOETUSES DREAM OF WORLD DOMINATION


YES, YES THEY DO


And so Veronica entered the third trimester, switched back to the hilariously awkward outfit the game assigned to her as everyday maternity wear for reasons I've yet to fully comprehend and waddled around the house looking increasingly like an unfortunate prostitute who'd really let herself go. On a happier note, though, she seemed to get along brilliantly with Alexander, Darius's artificially-grown mini-me:


"Of course you can bring the world to its knees with a sufficiently large rocket!"


"Just don't nuke too many things, or you'll only have an irradiated wasteland to rule over afterwards-"


"...Oh, bugger. CAN IT WAIT, BABY? I'M TRYING TO BOND WITH MY HUSBAND'S 5-YEAR-OLD CLONE HERE!"


"Babies? Natural delivery? Jesus christ, I was grown in a test tube. This is so not my area."

But hang on, this household is usually at least somewhat more competent than Larry and co. Surely the others are on hand to help with the birth-


DAMMIT ALICE


DAMMIT KILLBOT

Luckily, unlike his father Darius actually managed to notice his wife in labour fairly quickly and took her to the hospital like a reasonably sane person, thus bringing another incredibly silly Scumthorpe pregnancy to a comparatively quick and merciful conclusion.


And so Larry Scumthorpe's first granddaughter was born. Not that he'd ever bother to acknowledge her, of course.

But hey, never mind, Darius now has a baby!


A smelly, smirking, evil genius baby. Named Daria.

All glory to SimNation's future empress?

-------------------------------------------------

MinghamSmith: 10th Nov 2012, 07:07 PM
how about another Sprog megapost?

Sprog, You Horrifying Little Shit


Part II: AwfulMod

First off, I should probably admit that a lot of these screenshots aren't recent ones. They're from during the summer, soon after I realised that children can use Desecrate's Weapons System just as well as adults and began abusing that odd little quirk of the mod like no tomorrow. I just never got round to posting them, possibly because I simply forgot, but also because of some reservations on my part due to having no idea how posting screenshots of a 5-year-old homicidal maniac killing people would go down with everyone at the time.

But since Sprog's apparently turned out to be the most popular Scumthorpe by miles, here he is going on his first murderous rampage around town:


Somehow, the first time he ever shot a 9mm pistol he took out two people with one bullet.

...Don't ask, it's Sprog. The laws of sim reality are merely guidelines to him.


Yes, that is Sprog attaining the red Emperor of Evil glow despite being in elementary school.


And yes, that is the most hilariously nonchalant response to watching two people die ever.


And no, the Dexter the Bear glitch whereby you can have toddlers and children briefly wielding claw hammers will never stop being funny.

In some ways, though, Sprog is really just a form of pest control in my town if you look at him from the player's perspective. He constantly butchers game-generated pudding townies, makes way for my own creations in the process and is generally brilliant at getting rid of annoying characters. Although sometimes the less well-designed EA premades find themselves hunted down by him as well.

Such was the fate of Ethan Bunch, gunned down in a Showtime venue toilet on a whim:


WHEN I'VE FINISHED PISSING, YOU HAVE MY PERMISSION TO DIE


On a related note, something tells me Sprog might be developing delusions of grandeur between his frequent violent rages:


KNEEL BEFORE YOUR KING OR FACE ANNIHILATION

Thanks to that picture, I'm now seeing the autonomous "Preside Over Royal Court" interaction that came with Generations in a disturbing new light. Usually, it's clearly nothing more than a harmless children's game. When Sprog does it, though, (and he does it a lot) it's very hard for me not to interpret it as him pretending to be the emperor Caligula sentencing hordes of imaginary Romans to horrifying deaths and declaring himself a living god. Hopefully minus the weird stuff with the horse almost being made a consul, but given that I have Pets installed, who knows?

So, having seen almost the entirety of Sprog's life so far documented in this thread, you may be wondering: What's the absolute worst thing he's ever done?

Oh, that's easy. He assassinated his own mother.


Ever wonder why Kathryn Scumthorpe entirely disappeared from this thread after Larry walked in on her making out with the butler and divorced her on the spot? Well, now you know. Sprog simply got bored one day, picked up the pistol from Desecrate's Weapons System once again and decided to take a few shots at his own relatives rather than his usual prey of game-generated pudding faces and miscellaneous townies for a change. As you can see, Larry didn't exactly mind.

Sprog, of course, was anything but conflicted or remorseful:


WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU, SPROG?


And then the entire Scumthorpe family suffered yet another critical empathy failure that contradicted just about everything sims are programmed to do in response to a household tragedy: Larry didn't get the Death of a Loved One moodlet. Sprog got nothing but positive moodlets from watching his mother die. Rick gave the camera a look of mild disappointment for about 3 seconds before wandering off to watch daytime TV and forget the entire thing ever happened.

And the babies?

Nothing.

Nothing at all. In a game where babies are usually considerably more able to understand the significance of deaths and divorces than they would be in reality, none of the Scumthorpe triplets got any kind of moodlet at all after Kathryn died. In fact, there is absolutely no indication that any of them even remember their mother existed.

In short, the closest thing to a normal human reaction in the entire household was from a severely depressed butler who wouldn't stop blubbering for a week.


And since then, said butler has mysteriously vanished off the face of the earth.

Gone. Without a trace.


Why, whatever could have happened to him?

--------------------------------------------

And finally, for those of you interested in this sort of thing, a preview of stuff to come. Because now Darius Scumthorpe has got married and started his own dynasty of professional supervillains, I'm moving the timeline in my town along again. The most obvious result of me doing so is that the Scumthorpe triplets have all aged up into children, which I'll demonstrate in my next post. But the time skip also brings us that much closer to a much scarier prospect on the horizon:

And what might that be?

Oh, that's perfectly simple: Teenage Sprog.


When normal teens get moody, people groan and roll their eyes.
When teenage Sprog gets moody, people scream, and someone dies...

Spiritbw 9th Feb 2013 6:50 PM

analect@MinghamSmith LMFAO. Oh, MinghamSmith, you rock nine kinds of awesome. *applause*

If you get Seasons, you realise we'll all be eagerly awaiting the first patented Scumthorpe Industries Freeze-a-Death-a-tron Chamber, or somesuch creative evil, right?


MinghamSmith: 11th Nov 2012, 05:03 PM Unfortunately, that'll have to wait a bit longer than I'd like, given that I'm British and don't get Seasons until the 16th. But don't worry, I'm sure there'll be something Seasons-related in the near future unless updating everything to patch 1.42 next week causes my game to implode. If it's not something like Darius Scumthorpe horribly misusing the new weather machine and cloud launcher to screw over his dad like a second-rate Mr Freeze, it'll be a new family that's a remake of my favourite TS2 household.

What was that household, you might ask?

Professor Assprobe's Alien Baby Breeding Facility.

No further explanation required.

Anyway, new content:


Last post, I mentioned that the triplets had recently ceased to be babies. Let's see how they all turned out!

First, Carrie.


...Huh. That's a very alternative look for a first-grader.

Currently, Carrie's traits are Evil, Insane and Grumpy, most likely due to having been stuffed in the oven by Sprog on numerous occasions during the first few years of her life. She's enemies with Sprog and most of the adults in the house apart from Judas, has a neutral relationship value with her other two siblings at best and had never actually left the grounds of Stately Scum Manor at all until earlier today, with the sole exception of being ditched in a field overnight once as a toddler so Larry wouldn't have to listen to her crying.


It's therefore somewhat fitting that she's the only one of the triplets to end up with an Imaginary Friend. She named it Throatslasher, after what she'd dearly love to do to Sprog one day. "Mr Stabby" was also strongly considered as a possible name. The default name "Cuddles," however, was rejected immediately on the grounds that she probably doesn't even know what that means.


THROATSLASHER RISES


Lolita, meanwhile, is now so profoundly, ludicrously identical to the '60s TV version of Wednesday Addams it's hilarious. I mean, look at her. Even the personality fits- much like the original Wednesday Addams, Lolita Scumthorpe tends to go through life cheerfully oblivious to how utterly bizarre her family is and has basically no idea how outrageous everything they say and do looks to normal people. Her traits are Evil, Excitable and Easily Impressed, though Evil is really only there because it's a hallmark of the family. Overall, she's pretty innocent and ultimately harmless.


...Well, mostly harmless. She's still a Scumthorpe.

But wait, where's Lester got to? He was the first of the triplets to be born, and also aged up before his sisters.

Where's everyone's favourite little Tiberium-addled mutant hiding-


AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH OH MY FUCKING GOD

JESUSCHRISTWHATTHEHELLISTHATTHINGKILLITWITHFIRE

...Yeah, THAT'S child Lester. By my calculations, he seems to become approximately 10 times more disturbing to look at and 50% less recognisably human every time he ages up. And no, that's not just a lighting effect. He always has that sickly grey tint to his skin, and he really is that frail and hunched-over. I guess that's what accidental exposure to toxic alien space rocks in the womb courtesy of your deranged industrialist father and his ethically-dubious mining corporation does to you. But still, my GOD.

After taking that screenshot, though, I remembered something: In TS3, the child stage is the first stage where sims can roll wishes or wants.

I glanced down at Lester's wish slots and the suggested actions coming up above them, and noticed this:


Apparently, his first ever wish was to watch his father die.

And frankly, I can't really blame him.

-----------------------------------

McChoclatey@MinghamSmith: I friggin' love reading about the Scumthorpes. It's so entertaining, it's like the characters are in their own little worlds! I wonder how Sprog's gonna handle puberty. I mean, what're you gonna do with the attraction system making everyone go crazy over each other?

MinghamSmith: 11th Nov 2012, 06:33 PM Well, considering that my game appears to run solely on Murphy's Law I'm predicting that the attraction system will almost certainly cause at least one person to fall in horribly one-sided love with teenage Sprog once he ages up from a child. Possibly several people. Which will obviously end very, very badly for them.

On the other hand, said system may also be the only thing that'll ever get Rick Scumthorpe laid. Well, unless alien probing counts. But why on earth would the aliens want Scumthorpe DNA anywhere near the genepool of their new hybrid race? :P

-------------------------------------

eskie227@MinghamSmith I still want to know how child Sprog got the Emperor of Evil glow. Watching the whole family reminds me of watching a car crash, you just can't look away.

MinghamSmith: 12th Nov 2012, 06:31 PM I think it was something to do with an earlier version of Twallan's Assassination mod, given that it primarily appeared when Sprog had recently shot people. Although that still doesn't account for it showing up around his own family members, especially since on Emperors of Evil it tends to appear when they're around non-evil sims and yet everyone in the main Scumthorpe household has the Evil trait.

...Ok, I admit, I really haven't a clue how he managed that.

Overall, the best thing to do here is probably to simply accept that Sprog has the power of madness on his side and just isn't bound by the laws of sim reality anymore. After all, even his traits let him do things that regular human beings shouldn't logically be capable of- he can inexplicably transform seeds into flame fruits and more or less survive indefinitely on them without access to a fridge due to having Pyromaniac as a hidden trait, for instance. Hell, when the curfew mod I used to use worked I once had him run away from home for three days straight and survive that way while culling the local population of pudding townies, with no ill effects at all.

Also, I just patched for Seasons. Something tells me my town is about to become even more of a trainwreck than usual.

Spiritbw 9th Feb 2013 7:13 PM

*Editors Note: This exchange wasn't strictly Scrumthorpe, but in the same vein. Figured people would want to read it anyhow.

------------------------------------------------

misslaheela@MinghamSmith: Mingham. You should show everybody Arthur Friend. I don't know if they've seen him yet.
*cackles, then wanders off*


BL00DIEDHELL@misslaheela ^^sdkghhgdkjsdg WHAT DO YOU KNOW D:

MinghamSmith: 14th Nov 2012, 03:40 PM Arthur Friend is the result of me attempting to create an evil Imaginary Friend turned real and his downtrodden, infallibly loyal minion/former owner after discovering there were no limits on what traits Imaginary Friends can have and finding the concept of a manipulative, villainous entity born from some poor sim child's brain so fundamentally unsettling that it more or less demanded to be made into a character.

It resulted in this:


In hindsight, it probably wasn't the most sensible simming decision I've ever made.

----------------------------------------------

MinghamSmith: 16th Nov 2012, 07:05 PM

So I just installed Seasons.

And for some reason, Rick Scumthorpe rolled a want to gain a few Logic points when I loaded for the first time after patching despite usually being a drunken, douchey, anti-intellectual moron. Well, good for him, he could probably use them and it's always nice to see somebody wanting to improve their mind-


erm

is that a wise idea Rick

you do realise what I just installed right

Somewhat surprisingly, he actually turned out to be either a natural astronomer or someone with the biggest case of beginner's luck ever, judging by the fact that he managed to discover a new star within less than an hour of using a perfectly ordinary telescope for the first time in his entire life.

Unfortunately, however, he quickly proved to be about as effective at naming astronomical objects as his family usually is at naming infants:


And so it came to pass that a once-majestic celestial body that lit the darkness of the cosmos countless millennia before the birth of our sun was forced to spend its dying days named after the most repulsive members of a race of hairless apes, forever stumbling about on a pale blue dot suspended in infinity.

Still, at least nothing seems to have gone unambiguously wrong so far-


...Ah.

I guess we all kind of saw this coming.

But still, it's only been four in-game hours since Seasons was added to this disaster of a town. What the HELL?


ATTENTION: HUMAN SUBJECT REQUIRED FOR MAJOR BIOLOGICAL EXPERIMENT


"...Dude, first contact. I knew I wasn't wasting my time with the X-Files in the '90s-"


"-Wait, what are you doing? Stop it! You don't want me!"


"I'm not probing material! I haven't even lost my virginity the usual way yet!"


NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

And just in case you're in any doubt as to the implications of this momentous event, here's Rick's moodlet panel afterwards. When it expired, this new moodlet was automatically replaced by another one of... shall we say, growing significance?


IT BEGINS

-------------------------------

MinghamSmith: 25th Nov 2012, 11:54 AM And now, a moment two sim days and years of questionable alien research in the making...

Rick Scumthorpe Gives Birth

We rejoin the Scumthorpes in the middle of a... heated debate over the long-term future of the family:


"Rick, to use one of your generation's more popular internet memes, Son, I am disappoint. Really, I am. You're approaching 30, you've been digging graves for a living for the past decade, and as far as I know you've never engaged in sexual activity with anyone whose name didn't end in .jpg! You haven't even fathered any bastards, let alone legitimate heirs! What kind of sorry excuse for a rich man's son doesn't even have a single illegitimate child he never sees? And that's not even getting into how much you've let yourself go in the last few months-"


WHAT DO YOU MEAN I'VE LET MYSELF GO


"Don't you dare try to go off on a tangent here, you cretinous puddle of inadequacy! Even the son I explicitly disowned is more successful than you! Remember Darius? Well, apparently Darius is now a multi-millionaire supervillain with three kids and a shapely blonde wife, despite his career path being one that can only end with James Bond coming up with a shitty one-liner and shooting him in the face! And he's not even your older brother!"


"So I see only one way in which you can still be useful to me, Rick: In the coming weeks, I'm going to look around the other side of the Atlantic for bankrupt aristocrats with impressive-sounding titles and questionable work ethics. I'm going to offer to solve their financial worries in the blink of an eye if their daughters will agree to marry into our family. And soon enough, you're going to be the father of lots and lots of little aristocratic Scumthorpe babies, regardless of your opinion on the matter. I'll make you say the wedding vows at gunpoint if I have to. You will successfully consumate the marriage, or you will die. It's all incredibly medieval, I know, but when you're in my position, what else can you do with an idiot son other than write him off as breeding stock?"


"...Is forcing people into an arranged marriage even legal in SimNation?"

"Technically only in Veronaville due to some obscure bylaw, but do I look like I give a damn? I am not dying without someone competent to take my place, and none of you could be trusted with even the tiniest fraction of my fortune! Spurgin? He couldn't direct traffic down a one-way street! You? I've seen squirming premature infants accomplish more impressive things than you! Sprog? My god, do you want to watch the whole world burn? And does Lester even qualify as a human being? In short, my only option left is to force a few grandchildren into existence, because every last one of my sons is a complete and total fuckup!"


"I mean, really, is there any way you could possibly be more of an embarassment to me?"

"I-"


-AUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGH


OH GOD MY ASS

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
< FOOTAGE OF ALIEN RECTAL BIRTH DELETED FOR THE SAKE OF EVERYONE'S SANITY >
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


"...Rick, explain. NOW."


"...I can't. I really, really can't."

And so Cryptosporidium Scumthorpe, Enslaver of Man came into the world.

His initial traits are Genius and Brave. Considering the people he lives with, he's going to need the latter.

-------------------------------------------------

Kathwynn quoted: I am sorry. I had too

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptosporidium
Cryptosporidium is a genus of protozoans that can cause gastrointestinal illness with diarrhea in humans.

It's from Wikipedia, it could be wrong...


MinghamSmith: 25th Nov 2012, 03:09 PM Nope, that's entirely correct.

Which is why it was also the name of the protagonist in this game:


(Yes, probing is very much involved here too

-------------------------------------------

MinghamSmith: 27th Nov 2012, 06:04 AM Carrie, wat r u doin

Carrie, STAHP

------------------------------------------

MinghamSmith: 29th Nov 2012, 12:15 PM And now, a few extra pictures before I move on to other Scumthorpe-related things:

Rick Scumthorpe Gives Birth: The Aftermath

Soon after Crypto Scumthorpe was born, news of Rick's surprise rectal pregnancy quickly reached the rest of the family and naturally became the big conversation topic of the moment. In the process, I reached two significant conclusions about this game:

A: Who says TS3 sims can't be expressive?

B: When you have a buttbaby, you seriously need to make sure you adequately explain what just occurred to any young children living with you at the time.

Because otherwise, this happens:


"Hey! Carrie! I-know-something-you-don't-know..."

"What is it now, Lolita?"

"I know where BABIES come from!"


"BABIES come from BUTTS. BOY BUTTS."


"Bull. Shit. How could you possibly know where babies really come from? We're 6! They don't even teach us that for another four years!"


"No, seriously, I was downstairs and I saw Rick screaming about his butt and looking like he was going to do butt things, but instead of doing butt things his butt had a baby! And it was green! And then dad started yelling at him for having a baby even though he wants grandkids, and then they called the butt doctor-"


WHAT IN THE EVERLOVING FUCK LOLITA

HAVE YOU BEEN BROWSING THE WEIRD BIT OF DEVIANTART AGAIN

And so two little girls came to believe that pregnancy is completely unpredictable and revolves entirely around men's buttocks.

And that green newborns are perfectly normal.

This... isn't going to help them develop healthy relationships later in life, is it?

Spiritbw 9th Feb 2013 7:29 PM

BL00DIEDHELL@MinghamSmith (Btw, I was wondering earlier, whatever happened to Judas after giving Larry a 'nice' visit from his first wife...? He seemed to just disappear. )

MinghamSmith: 29th Nov 2012, 09:49 PM
Don't worry, I'll get back to Judas soon enough- since the last post, he's been lounging around Stately Scum Manor living off Larry's fortune on account of everyone else being too afraid of him to raise any kind of objection to him being there. And zombie Honoria can still be found wandering around town and being a nuisance from time to time.

Apologies if some characters fall in and out of focus- it's an inevitable hazard of playing a large family, I guess. The Scumthorpes are spread out across four households, three branches of the family tree, and mostly hate each other, so they're unlikely to all appear at once in anything without someone winding up dead. Same applies to characters like Spurgin Scumthorpe the neckbeardy internet troll and Sid Scumthorpe- they're background characters at the moment.

(Although Sid will definitely get some time in the limelight when '70s/'80s/'90s Stuff comes out, if only so I can have him strutting around town wearing a literal leisure suit and pathetically trying to flirt with any woman who doesn't immediately cross the street and roll her eyes upon seeing him. It basically writes itself)

-----------------------------------------

anifromid2 quoted: No way! Don't burn them alive! Demolish the house, add lines to the yard, put a crib at each end and play baby football.

MinghamSmith: 6th Dec 2012, 02:15 PM FYI, "baby football" sounds far, far worse when you're British. And considerably more literal:

...I know, I'm going to hell for this one, aren't I?

-----------------------------------------

MinghamSmith: 6th Dec 2012, 07:50 PM Sometimes, Lester Scumthorpe's speech bubbles are wonderfully, hilariously fitting:


"...My god, that explains so, so much about my life."

-----------------------------------------

MinghamSmith: 7th Dec 2012, 07:23 AM

A new object appears!


"Erm... sis, are we cooking meth in here now?"


"Christ's sake, Lester, go to bed..."


"...Yep, totally cooking meth."

(Don't worry, it isn't. But still, would you trust ANY of these people with toxic chemicals and Bunsen burners?)

-------------------------------------

MinghamSmith: 21st Dec 2012, 08:36 AM It's been a while, so here's another Scumthorpe post. Apparently, some of them can't even sleep without being ridiculous and creepy:

Do Scumthorpes Dream of Eclectic Shit?

A while back, I was controlling the Scumthorpe triplets and sent them all to bed late in the evening after a long day of playing videogames, being yelled at by Larry for no reason and (in Carrie's case) chatting to an imaginary man who lives in her brain and subsequently getting beaten up by Sprog for the millionth time that week. Having never tried it before, I used the dream interaction from Generations to see what would happen.

The results were... not encouraging, and most likely something that a child psychologist would want to look into in any sane, rational setting. Hell, these three put together could probably provide enough material for an entire conference on dysfunctional children by themselves.

Let's take Carrie's dreams, for instance:


FUCK MARRIAGE


OH GOD I'M 6 WHY DID I READ 50 SHADES OF GREY


CHICKEN MAKES EVERYTHING BETTER

Carrie's mind is... a confusing, frightening place, to say the least.


And meanwhile, Lolita seems to have recurring nightmares about Sprog.

...Frankly, I can't really blame the poor girl.

But at least neither of them have remotely similar dreams to poor Lester, who rapidly seems to be becoming the most morbid and nihilistic 6-year-old in the entirety of SimNation due to the constant frustration of being a shrivelled, frail little Tiberium mutant with barely-functional limbs, radioactive blood and in all likelihood a drastically shortened lifespan.

I mean, look at this stuff:


IN THE END, WE ALL BURN


WE ARE ALL BURIED


AND THEN WE ROT AND FADE FROM MEMORY



SUCH IS THE FATE OF ALL MANKIND



SWEET DREAMS, REAL-WORLD HUMANS

Godammit, Lester, why must you be such a creepy little bastard-


-Oh, I see, because there's a Lovecraftian horror lurking under your bed.

Never mind, carry on.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

In other news, though, an update on Crypto the alien baby: He's now sitting up and crawling:


And generally being the most adorable thing ever to come out of a man's rectum.


And getting on brilliantly with his elementary-school-age half-aunt. Not the most normal family relationship one could have, but still...


...Awwww.

Spiritbw 9th Feb 2013 7:42 PM

*Editor's note: While the first part of this next post isn't Scumthorpe related, I decided to leave the post intact.

MinghamSmith 27th Dec 2012, 02:59 PM
At the moment, I'm wondering what it says about me when the very first thought to cross my mind upon gaining control of an adult alien sim for the first time was "will the game let me successfully drop a meteor on somebody and kill them?"

Because that's exactly what happened a few weeks ago.

It turns out that yes, the game will let you do that. But because this is my absurd mess of a town, nothing significant can ever happen without some kind of baffling disaster occurring along the way. And thus began one of the greatest chain reactions of ridiculous autonomous sim moments I've ever seen.

Things began somewhat logically. I selected my alien, went into town and found a worthless game-generated pudding-faced townie to test this out on. Because let's face it, puddings don't count as people. Puddings are useless subhuman blobs that exist solely to be bashed into an acceptable shape via Master Controller or eternally tormented and killed for the amusement of the sim gods looking down from on high.

Puddings are clay, and we are the hands that mould or crush them. So sayeth myself.


SUFFER NOT A PUDDING TO LIVE

So the sky soon went dark, my alien hid in a toilet, nearby inactives and NPCs began to freak out and Indiana Jackass and Pudding McFashionSense here predictably abandoned all notions of self-preservation in favour of standing around to marvel at the multi-ton flaming lump of death plummeting through the atmosphere in their direction. Though at least the latter of the two managed to give a vaguely appropriate response to it:


"My word, what a fascinating natural phenomenon! Isn't space just awe-inspiring?"
"BRO WHAT THE FUCK WE'RE TOTALLY GONNA DIE"

After this point, though, everything rapidly went to hell.


First, half the objects on the lot all exploded in unison about two seconds after the initial meteor impact, leaving the ground permanently scorched and replacing most of the deckchairs around the pool with burnt-out piles of miscellaneous garbage. Most of them are still there. So, for that matter, is the meteor itself. Catastrophic property damage is a wonderful, wonderful thing.

I then sent my meteor-dropping mistress of destruction back over to inspect her handiwork, and-


...Wait a minute, who's that coming round the corner? What on earth is going on behind my alien? That's Mortimer Goth, surely he's not actually going to-


WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING MORTIMER GOTH

Yes, your eyes do not deceive you: As far as Mortimer Goth is concerned, the most appropriate response to witnessing a nearby meteor strike is apparently to wander right up to the smouldering crater and drop a newborn baby on the floor next to it so it can take in the lovely aroma of smoke, ashes and interstellar dust for the first time. Bugger safety, forget fire hazards, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for your little one! Trauma? What trauma?

Unfortunately, I was too busy laughing at this point to keep pressing the capture button, but within the next minute the following things also happened. And no, I am not exaggerating any of them:

- Death arrived for the crushed pudding, and the baby began screaming. And screaming, And screaming.

- Torrential rain began despite the weather having been sunny less than a minute ago. Baby is soaked and still screaming.

- Mortimer Goth inexplicably became singed and ran off home for a shower. Baby is abandoned, soaked and still screaming.

- Every NPC nearby got stuck panicking outside in the middle of the road. Baby is abandoned, soaked, soiling itself and still screaming.

- A nearby SimBot suddenly short-circuited. Baby is abandoned, soaked, soiling itself, still screaming and surrounded by sizzling scrap metal.

...I don't even need to say it, do I?

QUALITY PARENTING


But wait, there's more! Because two catastrophic events occurred in my town that day. One involved a traumatised NPC floorbaby that I couldn't do anything about. The other? Well, it can best be described as an overlooked threat that's been on the horizon for a while...


...Because somebody's just had a birthday.


What? SPROG is evolving!


SPROG evolved into TEENSPROG

...Well, I guess that's it, then. We're doomed. We're utterly, utterly doomed.

Goodbye, world. It's been nice knowing you.

-----------------------------------------------

Kathwynn@MinghamSmith Sprog looks like he was badly crossed Hannibal Lector and Norman Bates.. Where he picked up only the most psychotic sides of each.


MinghamSmith: 27th Dec 2012, 05:44 PM One of my greatest simming regrets is that nobody's ever made a Hannibal Lecter mask for TS3. I always wanted to have one for all ages and stick it on baby Sprog and child Sprog as well as his older forms. I'd have demanded one months ago if there wasn't a rule against requests.

...Then again, it's probably a good thing that rule's in place, otherwise I'd most likely spend an entire thread demanding ridiculous stuff like Bane masks for toddlers, sliders that pull the lips apart and thin them until the sim has permanently bared teeth and no lips at all and some kind of vampire fangs-esque accessory where all the teeth are long and sharp like Venom's spiky abomination of a mouth in Spiderman. And god knows what else.

What can I say? I like to get experimental with CAS. In a somewhat Frankenstein-esque sense a lot of the time, admittedly, but there's nothing wrong with wanting to push the limits of what the game can do. And occasionally outright violating the laws of sim reality for the sake of making inhuman creatures and bizarre characters that nobody expects to see.

----------------------------------------

minimogut quoted: Well, once again, Mingham has reduced me to a giggling wreck with his posts. Good show, sir. Good. Show.

I fear for all of Simnation, and it's various inhabitants. Of course, should Larry decide to set up an arranged marriage between Sprog and some poor woman, I fear more for the bride than anyone else. I feel that Larry wouldn't be above something like that...


MinghamSmith: 28th Dec 2012, 01:09 PM Oh, he isn't remotely above that. Soon he'll be doing exactly that with Rick, in a gender-inverted parody of the sort of social climber marriages that took place between rich American heiresses and bankrupt British aristocrats with impressive titles near the end of the nineteenth century. Most likely while holding Rick at gunpoint throughout the entire ceremony, because A: Larry is an atrocious human being and B: does anyone really expect him to be a competent matchmaker?

...He's already completely ruled out trying that with Sprog, though. Even Larry isn't that stupid.

-------------------------------------------------

MinghamSmith: 31st Dec 2012, 05:08 PM Since Sprog Scumthorpe can finally make use of Dexter the Bear now that he's reached his teenage years, I decided to have him pay a visit to one of the crappy game-generated households that spring up like weeds from time to time thanks to EA's Story Progression for the sole purpose of murdering everyone inside in order to keep the local pudding population down. Pest control, basically. Just standard procedure for Sprog, nothing at all out of the ordinary...

...Until he reached their doorbell, at which point he autonomously stripped down to his underpants, barged into the house with a gun and made this face:



And so 2012 came to an end with every sim in that household getting shot in the face or beaten to death with a claw hammer, a deeply disturbed young man wandering home mostly naked for no apparent reason and the first great teenage Sprog moment occurring.

Happy new year, everyone! :D

chreai 9th Feb 2013 7:54 PM

Yay! A thread has finally been made! Adding to my favorites so I won't miss any updates. Your Scumthorpe stories are always good for a laugh, Mingham! Btw, out of curiosity, is this thread solely for Mingham's Scumthorpe adventures or can anyone who was gifted a Scumthorpe post their stories here??

Spiritbw 9th Feb 2013 8:02 PM

ButchSims Quoted: It's quite simple. ALL creatures on this planet have an instinctual fear of clowns. And deservedly so. They iz creepy.

MinghamSmith: 6th Jan 2013, 03:04 AM Funny you should mention that, actually: Looking back through very old Scumthorpe pictures, I just found a horrifying coincidence:


Apparently, "clowns" was Sprog's first word as a baby.


And it wasn't spoken in tones of fear. Baby Sprog liked clowns.

From that moment on, I knew he was utterly, utterly beyond help...

---------------------------------------


MinghamSmith: 6th Jan 2013, 10:24 AM Even modding out the attraction system won't completely stop the gifting weirdness- it must be handled by a different system to attraction. At least, that's the only possible explanation I have for some mystery person repeatedly mailing copies of Evil Mr Gnome to Stately Scum Manor.

Unless the Scumthorpes are just that much of a magnet for all things terrible-

-Wait, what am I saying? Of course they are.

-------------------------------------------

MinghamSmith: 10th Jan 2013, 04:18 PM

From time to time, Judas Scumthorpe will make this face.

It is the best face.


--------------------------------------------

MinghamSmith: 22nd Jan 2013, 01:53 PM
I decided to delete the Fireproof Homestead reward for everyone who previously had it... and then realised something.

Sprog can now start fires.

So I clicked on Sprog, selected "Burn Something Nearby" and watched as he...


...headed down into the wine cellar and set Judas's alchemy station on fire?

Ok, now I'm scared. He was nowhere near it when I told him to do that. He wasn't even on the same floor. And yet he still went out of his way to set fire to the one object in the house that A: would cause the most annoyance if reduced to a smouldering pile of ashes and B: would logically be the most likely to explode.

If he goes for the triplets' chemistry table next time, I'll KNOW that he's become self-aware.

---------------------------------------------

eskie227@MinghamSmith You know, you should have checked with the community first as to whether it would be advisable to delete the fireproof homestead reward first. We could have warned you it's a bad, bad idea when Sprog is around.


MinghamSmith: 22nd Jan 2013, 06:31 PM mittedly, the whole point of that was to enable Sprog's abilities resulting from the hidden Pyromaniac trait. If you have the Fireproof Homestead reward, it blocks those abilities from being used for some reason. Possibly a bug they never fixed.

It's also part of a general move on my part towards using mods to make the game harder. Like many people, I find that TS3 is often too safe, with not enough things posing a genuine threat to sims. This, I feel, is counterproductive, as you're probably going to feel much more attached to something you need to actively try to keep safe from harm. So I'm letting fires occur, modding lightning so it occurs more frequently and is more likely to strike the active lot, making mummies deadlier, increasing the prices of things so losing vast amounts of money in one go is actually possible...

...Actually, I may have accidentally modded in a serious potential disaster with that last one. There's a mod out there that renders your chances of success when using the slot machines from the Store casino set far, far lower and makes using them in the first place more expensive. Couple that with the fact that I'm pretty sure sims can autonomously use said slot machines, and I think I just enabled sims to develop crippling gambling addictions and bankrupt themselves.

Hey, it'd make for a good story...

-----------------------------------------------------

MinghamSmith: 2nd Feb 2013, 10:14 AM And now, another Scumthorpe post. Apologies if there haven't been many lately, the last month's been a busy one due to finishing university essays, sorting and categorising a collection of early nineteenth-century letters for a local archive and starting a new semester. But now I'm back with yet another case of the game's AI abruptly becoming downright unsettling for no apparent reason. Much like the infamous Tuesday Sears baby-snatching incident from a few months back, I had nothing to do with this at all. This just happened, because my game is completely insane and apparently hates me.

So without further ado...

Parental Negligence and the Playground Lurker: I Couldn't Make This Up If I Tried

Last night, things were proceeding as usual for the majority of the Scumthorpe family. Carrie played with her Imaginary Friend (and only friend) Throatslasher, Rick looked after Crypto the alien baby, Larry spent the evening unsuccessfully trying to figure out how to get rid of his embarassing extraterrestrial grandchild and Sprog continued to burn things and somehow managed to acquire a hatchet.

While watching this perfectly normal scene of domestic life, however, a recurring question kept nagging at me:

Where's Lolita?

I looked around for her. She wasn't in bed, or at a friend's house, or playing with leaf piles in the back garden. Time marched on, the full moon rose, midnight approached, and still she remained missing. I began to worry a little.

And then I found her playing in a sandpit. In a children's play area by the school. In the middle of the night. Alone. With the temperature at around zero degrees Celsius. Without outerwear. During a severe thunderstorm AND a full moon, in a world where full moons inevitably lead to temporary zombie plagues and certain sections of the population becoming incredibly hairy and flying into psychotic rages.


Lolita Scumthorpe, incidentally, is probably around 6 or 7.

QUALITY PARENTING


Yes, yes, that's a lovely sandcastle but WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING HERE


...Apparently Lolita didn't have the faintest idea either.

But hang on, I thought, there's another thought bubble coming up. Maybe this'll explain what's going on here-


-You have got to be kidding me. Game, you did NOT just go there.

You did NOT just generate a creepy old man with no eyebrows who hangs around children's playgrounds late at night and have him come out in response to the unsupervised presence of the most unfortunately-named kid in the entire town. Oh, what's that? You did? WHAT THE HELL, GAME? What next, is Story Progression going to spit out the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and stick him in a high-level teaching job at the local school? Is some poor sim child's Imaginary Friend going to unexpectedly spawn as Chucky from Child's Play and murder their entire family? For the love of god, what is wrong with my town?


OH BRILLIANT NOW WHAT


And so one of the most questionable game-generated sims of all time emerged not from behind a bush as I initially expected, but from under the ground. Because my town apparently just wasn't bizarre or disturbing enough already, so the game decided to bury an undead creeper in a children's playground when I wasn't looking and wait for the right moment to spring him on me. As you do.

But hey, at least now we can get a better look at this creature, this Playground Lurker-


HELLO CHILDREN

oh god why did I take that screenshot why did I take that screenshot


I know she usually comes across as by far the most naive and ditzy of the Scumthorpe triplets, but when faced with this hideous decomposing mishmash of every children's storybook villain, every fantasy ghoul and every stranger danger PSA ever, Lolita made the unusually wise and logical decision of running like the wind. Perhaps she's not so dumb after all. Even if she does still believe that all babies are born from men's asses...


And thus the evening ended with a little girl wandering home alone in the pouring rain and the freezing cold, slamming the back door after her and fuming about how much her family sucks. For none of the adult members of the family had noticed her absence, or cared even one iota about her encounter with the deathless horror that sleeps beneath the earth within the grounds of a local elementary school. Such are the heartless ways of the Scumthorpe dynasty.

And the Playground Lurker?

He's still out there...

------------------------------------------------

Editor's Note: And that brings us up to date. Most recent post is in fact farther up in this thread by MinghamSmith them self. All that is left is tracking down links, some editing and adding any new stories that come into being.

If I have any missing stories or links please feel free to let me know.

Spiritbw 9th Feb 2013 8:05 PM

Quote: Originally posted by chreai
Yay! A thread has finally been made! Adding to my favorites so I won't miss any updates. Your Scumthorpe stories are always good for a laugh, Mingham! Btw, out of curiosity, is this thread solely for Mingham's Scumthorpe adventures or can anyone who was gifted a Scumthorpe post their stories here??


While it is mainly ment to be a depository of all of MinghamSmith's stories, I think we can happily expand this to any Scumthorpe story people have to share. Heck, I'd love to hear about stories people made with families inspired by the Scumthorpe's....their distant relations perhaps?

eskie227 9th Feb 2013 10:04 PM

Quote: Originally posted by Spiritbw
While it is mainly ment to be a depository of all of MinghamSmith's stories, I think we can happily expand this to any Scumthorpe story people have to share. Heck, I'd love to hear about stories people made with families inspired by the Scumthorpe's....their distant relations perhaps?


Please God, let there be no other relations to the Scumthorpe's. Having them infest one sim town is difficult enough. If they spread........................no one will ever be safe.

BL00DIEDHELL 9th Feb 2013 10:58 PM

Quote: Originally posted by MinghamSmith
Too late. I've emailed copies of Larry's .sim file from my sim bin to other people on here at least twice already. It's already begun.

(Feel free to PM me if you're interested in copies of them, by the way. Mercifully, Sprog can't appear in other games since his distinctive eyes are something I acquired via a sim in a .sims3pack that I've never been able to properly identify, but Larry, Rick, Honoria and Spurgin are composed of nothing but base-game content. Judas, Darius, Alice, Sid, Carrie and Lolita are made using a few key bits of CC, EP and Store content, but are otherwise also possible to add in this way. Lester relies on quite a few custom sliders, though)


Aahahaha.

Aaahahhahahahaha.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA FUCK YES SEND PLEASE.

As for Sprog, maybe you could package a version of him with base game eyes? Okay so it'd suck that he wouldn't be exactly like in your game, but if someone's really desperate to have him in theirs, it'd be better than nothing?

Spiritbw 9th Feb 2013 11:12 PM

Well, I am in the process of making my own Scumthorpe relatives but the game keeps developing bugs and crashing the system. Starting to think I either have a hardware problem somewhere or it's trying to contain the spread!


Would love though to hear about the other ideas you have MinghamSmith.

lewisb40 10th Feb 2013 12:14 AM

Normally I don't read sim stories because they bore me to tears and I would rather play my game, which is fun and not so politically correct. Now I am stuck on this saga, it's so entertaining. Time to catch up on my reading. Oh yeah, Bloodiedhell, damn you too for suggesting this, subtle but you directed me here. (Just joking about the damn you )

Ive 10th Feb 2013 12:58 AM

I'm not a fan of sim stories at all, but I love this!

I would love Larry in my game too.

BL00DIEDHELL 10th Feb 2013 2:52 AM

Quote: Originally posted by lewisb40
Oh yeah, Bloodiedhell, damn you too for suggesting this, subtle but you directed me here. (Just joking about the damn you )


BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

You're welcome! :P

Sojourner 10th Feb 2013 9:35 PM

1 Attachment(s)
Only one observation, Mingham ....

When you say "red-hair" and "Conan", it's not exactly manly brawn that I envision.

It's this:

Sojourner 10th Feb 2013 9:50 PM

OK, now I'm the one missing the reference ... Matilda Scumthorpe was a bad idea becaaaause .... ?

BL00DIEDHELL 11th Feb 2013 2:14 AM

I dunno, I kinda want to see a more brawny manly Conan O'Brien now.

lakme 11th Feb 2013 3:40 AM

This saga is amazing, and kind of making me miss my TS2 days when I would devise crazy, twisted stories for my Sims to act out. Now I just make them get rich and have babies. Man, what happened to me?

Sojourner 11th Feb 2013 10:57 AM

Quote: Originally posted by BL00DIEDHELL
I dunno, I kinda want to see a more brawny manly Conan O'Brien now.


A universe that has a brawny Conan O'Brien in it ... Now that WOULD be perverse!

gemly_teddie 11th Feb 2013 3:38 PM

(I just had to google 'Conan O'Brien' to find out who he is. Apparently, he's no relation to the Irish comic Dara O'Brien...)
When I read 'Conan' I immediately thought 'the barbarian', which is what I assume you were going for?
I got the Matilda reference, I love Roald Dahl my favorite used to be 'the BFG', but then as I got older I liked 'The Twits' the best.
Unfortunately, I'm not a big reader, and so didn't get Carrie.
I now feel like watching all the Roald Dahl books films, unfortunately I only have 'Charlie and the chocolate factory' (The original, obviously, the new one was awful compared.) but I really feel like watching 'James and the giant peach'...

Sojourner 11th Feb 2013 4:14 PM

I don't know, I read Charlie and the Chocolate factory long before they made a movie, and there was an air of faint menace about the whole thing that was lacking in the first movie - it was enough to give you a toothache just watching it, honestly. I haven't seen the new one all the way through, but in the snippets I've seen, Johnny Depp did a MUCH better job (probably because he had a much better script and better directing) of portraying that aspect from the book.

BTW - Veruca - one letter short of Verruca = plantar wart. Veruca WAS a little wart. I'm thinking that was not coincidence.

chreai 11th Feb 2013 5:46 PM

Quote: Originally posted by Sojourner
Only one observation, Mingham ....

When you say "red-hair" and "Conan", it's not exactly manly brawn that I envision.

It's this:


Omg, Sojourner, that made me laugh so hard! Conan is my all-time favorite late-night host. I bet he would have even gotten a kick out of your statement! I can just picture him reacting by giving one of his fake-offended looks to the camera.

Sojourner 11th Feb 2013 5:53 PM

I KNOW, I can just see it, LOL!

I love Conan. Don't get cable so I try to watch online whenever I can. I will never watch the Tonight Show again, and I never liked Jay Leno anyway. He's such a creepy jerk!

gemly_teddie 11th Feb 2013 6:31 PM

I think i prefer the old one because it's the one I grew up with. Watching it while my parents made christmas dinner was a tradition. I like the new one too, but it doesn't have the same nostalgia to me, so isn't as good.

(Oops, I de-railed the thread... :s)

TrillianRikku 11th Feb 2013 10:03 PM

I just spent the morning reading and I have to say they are very disturbing but in a good way this thread really made my day I hope to see more

Sojourner 11th Feb 2013 10:16 PM

4 Attachment(s)
No worries. We will just re-rail it ...

So, I've been building a Buddhist monastery based on Senemm's Zen Monastery Lot. I want my lot to be livable and to be a working monastery so I've been tweaking the lot A LOT. And I was thinking about how someone had posted on the "I wish real-life were more like the Sims when..." - they had posted about wishing people were as tolerant and unbigoted as the Sims are.

Just as I'm placing the big Buddha statue out front, the camera picks up on the neighbors next door standing on their front lawn, watching the goings-on on the new buildings going up next door (even though I'm in build mode and the game is not advancing time, I can just TELL they are watching my ever move. I CAN TELL, really!)

So, just out of curiosity, I put the building on hold and select the Keaton household just to see what, if anything, is going on. Because I swear to you, when I built the house across the street, the Keatons were nowhere to be seen, and it is 8:01 on Sunday morning on day one. Not a sim-second has advanced since I started de-fuglifying the existing houses and building new ones. I have no idea why they suddenly popped up out of nowhere. But my curiosity is aroused sooo...

The first thing that happens is He-Keaton (I can't remember their names) shakes his fist in the direction of the monastery and howls. I wasn't quick enough to get a screenshot, I was so surprised! Then immediately afterwards, She-Keaton growls and throws a hissy fit. I just barely caught the tail end of that in a screenshot. Immediately after that, for no apparent reason, He-Keaton breaks down and weeps into his open palms. Then - and this caught me totally off-guard again because I figured the drama was all over by now - He-Keaton does this weird fist-pumping, muscle-flexing dance and stares belligerently down the street towards the growing monastery again.

I imagine the whole thing went something like this:

He-Keaton (shouting and shaking fist) - "DANG FOREIGNERS AND THEIR CREEPY WEIRD VEGETARIAN DEVIL-WORSHIPPING WAYS! YOU'RE NOT WELCOME HERE!"

She-Keaton (doing the angry-dance) - "You can't stay here, endangering my soon-to-be-born first child! And the second one, because He-Keaton now has a dream to have a boy, AND a dream to have a girl, so we'll be getting pregnant again right away!"

He-Keaton (weeping) - "Noooooo, my poor unborn children!"

He-Keaton (fist-pumping and throwing out his chest) - "We will have revenge! WE WILL DRIVE YOU OUT!"

Then they both stood there doing nothing, just staring down the street, for several sim-minutes. I was so intrigued that I quit the game and reloaded, in the hope that they would do it again so I could get better screen shots.

Uh-uh, nothin' doing. Now they just stand there and stare down the street with zombie expressions on their faces, as if to say "We will not dance at your bidding! We are not your playthings, we are not your puppets! Do your worst, Sim-Goddess!".

Never before have I seen Sims behave this way for no reason at all. There were no signs of any pre-existing fight (presumably pre-dating the creation of their world at 8 AM Sim-Time on a Sunday morning, or one Sim-minute before I entered their household). Their relationship with each other was very high. All their needs were at the normal game-start levels. They just went off the deep end, apparently venting a heretofore unsuspected propensity for bigotry never before seen in the Simiverse. At least not by me.

What could possibly have caused this sudden foray into the darker recesses of the Sim-mind? Why, they're acting as if there was a Scumthorpe among them!

But I haven't downloaded any Scumthorpes. There are no Scumthorpes in my Sim-world. I'm sure my little Simiverse is totally Scumthorpe free!

Wait a minute! Where's that picture of Sprog I downloaded a few days ago?

NOOOOOO! It's still on my desktop!


AAAAAAAARGH! I submit to you, ladies and gentlemen, that merely having a jpg of Sprog on your hard drive is enough of a doorway for the evil that is Scumthorpe to pervade and infect your Sim-worlds.

The evil that is Sprog casts a loooong shadow, and I'm not sure that even shredding that file is enough to save my Simmies now ...

gemly_teddie 15th Feb 2013 4:01 PM

Haha, you wait until that premium content comes out and toddlers can teach themselves to walk and talk. Parents will no longer be needed, just need to teach them to change their own nappies and get a bottle out of nowhere too.

BL00DIEDHELL 15th Feb 2013 7:27 PM

^ Destroyed playroom.

Sojourner 16th Feb 2013 1:27 AM

With Sprog aging up and coming in to his powers (teens can use Dexter the Bear, right? *SHUDDER*) perhaps it's time to consider downloading MoDoors so you can create a Sprog-proof safe room in the Scumthorpe mansion ....

And as far as the Space-baby and "jellyfish" - you DO know where Cthulu comes from, right?

Sojourner 16th Feb 2013 2:12 AM

Ah well, remember Lester is a Mutant who has been, errr, mutated as it were, by a horribly toxic ore of doubtful (perhaps extraterrestrial) origin.

Of course, not forgetting that the "safe room" will need an exit-only secret tunnel to the outside in case Sprog decides to burn down the entire mansion...

Lady_Chaos 16th Feb 2013 2:23 AM

I'm really late, but... OP? I love you for this XD

vhanster 16th Feb 2013 2:56 AM

Quote: Originally posted by MinghamSmith
Of course I do. Except Lester talked about jellyfish as a toddler too.


Weren't Lester and the other triplets contaminated with alien space-rocks their father is mining anyway? It still fits.

Sojourner 16th Feb 2013 12:08 PM

Quote: Originally posted by MinghamSmith
Good point. What the hell, it's not like tying them vaguely into the Cthulhu Mythos is going to make them any worse.


No, but it should scare the holy bejeezus out of Cthulhu and his lot!

Quote: Originally posted by MinghamSmith
Also, I must download another of Twallan's mods soon so I can exceed the maximum number of sims in the household. Someone new will probably be joining the family in the near future. Not a new baby, although one or two might directly follow their arrival...


OMG, talk about foreshadowing! Now I won't sleep for days!

Lady_Chaos 16th Feb 2013 5:26 PM

Good lord Mingham... there are no words, but just know that I am grinning quite idiotically at my computer screen, waiting for new Scumthorpe stuff XD

(Spaaaaaaaaaaaccccccceee? I hope I'm not reading too far into that, because to my twisted mind, that is a reference.)

Fentonparkninja 16th Feb 2013 10:08 PM

Yeah, the pet bowl in the background there is super-foreshadowing.

Let me guess, they've gone and adopted Black Shuck ...

Spiritbw 16th Feb 2013 10:17 PM

The Killjoys
 
Well, MinghamSmith asked I post something about my Scumthorpe inspired Legacy, The Killjoys. While I am still pretty early in it I have been making a large number of screenshots to use in building stories. I did have to start over after a glitch nixed the first attempt so it has been slow going but the second round seems to be going much better.

First off is our founding father in this legacy: August Killjoy



Uh, August, stop smiling. PLEASE stop smiling.

August is a bit of an old fashioned soul. Evil(of course), proper, observant, charismatic and a schmoozer. This is the man who is to win the Killjoy fortune. So just how does he go about making his daily living?



As a Sham Swami. Our faker of phantoms is in the medium business. With no actual magical powers he of course just puts on a show and is very good at cold reading folks.

He was also quite a ladies man as a bachelor* got the eyes of more than a few folks. There were a few ladies that expressed an interest in him. Though one day at the library.....



Umm....er.....I'm afraid sir that we cannot return your attentions. Please....



Oh..*phew*...oh, that poor girl......

It's an understandable mistake you must understand, when you've had this happen:



OH JEEZ CREEPS RUNAWAY!



Burrragh Weeegggl Luuubbbzzz Gooooo



Stand back! I have a waterballoon and am not afraid to use it!


So yeah. Somehow that man seems to have a magnetic personality.



On the other hand, the animal life seems to have the measure of him.

*Even using Twallan's mods to tweak the attraction system.

I think I need to work on editing the size of the pics and next up, the woman who became his bride and the nature of married life.

Sojourner 16th Feb 2013 10:18 PM

BTW, you do have that toddler mod that allows genius babies to feed themselves, and all others to eat out of the pet bowl, right? Because without it I don't see how any of the Scumthorpe offspring manage not to starve to death, given the general inattention and neglect (if not downright abuse) in the Scumthorpe household.

BL00DIEDHELL 16th Feb 2013 10:24 PM



OH FUCK ME THAT GUY NEEDS A WAX STAT

Sojourner 16th Feb 2013 10:33 PM

Quote: Originally posted by MinghamSmith
I do. And that's why they have a pet bowl. It's not because they've bought a hellhound, they haven't. It's how they feed their toddlers.


That figures. I should have known, LOL!

As for Rick, I often suspect that were it not for his horrible horrible family, he might have turned out to be a halfway decent human being. As it is, he's really not as bad as one might have expected, all things considered.

Spiritbw 16th Feb 2013 10:37 PM

Well, I said I'd bring you into the second member so far of the Killjoy family. Here she is:



Carmella Scumthorpe-Killjoy.

Wait, Scumthorpe?!

Yup, this was my little tribute and tip of the hat to what started this legacy. I leave it up to you folks to figure out her relations to the other Scumthorpes MeghamSmith came up with.

She's just about as bad as they are, Evil(duh), Proper, artistic a sculptor and a snob. Actually she suprised me as a sculptor. Usually the first thing carved is a chair, a table or a toilet. When she carved her first item we got this:



She's also in the time she's been with August written three books(only the first was a flop) painted six pictures and turned out two sculptures. It's only been a week and a half since she came here! Something tells me there is a competition going on here as to who is the true bread-winner in this old fashioned home.

Actually since they came through the door to their first joint home there has been an odd relationship between the two. They were made for each other, literially true but they also seem to be quite happy with each other.






OR ARE THEY?



Next up, life in the Killjoy honeymoon house.

BL00DIEDHELL 16th Feb 2013 10:48 PM

Quote: Originally posted by Spiritbw
Carmella Scumthorpe-Killjoy.

Wait, Scumthorpe?!

Yup, this was my little tribute and tip of the hat to what started this legacy. I leave it up to you folks to figure out her relations to the other Scumthorpes MeghamSmith came up with.


This reminds me of something. The Ptolemy family (who I posted about in the OMG WTF ARE YOU DOING THREAD with the worst fucking full moon ever) were originally Scumthorpes. Or at least, the father was, the others didn't exist. (I renamed them because I'm stupidly neurotic and got worried about stepping on other peoples' toes :P)



...Yup, he's a Scumthorpe alright.

Spiritbw 16th Feb 2013 10:49 PM

Quote: Originally posted by BL00DIEDHELL


OH FUCK ME THAT GUY NEEDS A WAX STAT


Yeah, I saw that guy and just had to get him in to the story somehow. As he left he did change into a suit(No pic sorry). Not that he looked much better mind. Still like a bear trying to be human.

Then of course there was this guy sitting in the back behind the bookshelves:



Moonlight Falls research denies any rumours of an accident in their experimental DNA splicing faucility

Spiritbw 16th Feb 2013 11:08 PM

Well, I did say that life in the Killjoy household was...unique. For starters, they are so attracted to each other they will spend any time they are in the house together flirting, holding hands and kissing...pretty much like you'd expect newly-weds to do. So much so that I have to make sure they actually eat, wash and go to sleep at something like a normal time. I want to see what this legacy does but I don't want it dying in the first generation from mooning over each other!

Then they do stuff like this:



YOUR SOUL WILL POWER THIS DEMON BOX




EEEEYAGGGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!

Oh, and don't think it's one way either.



Mind, obviously the upbringing has tempered Carmella a bit, she looks like she's resigned about the whole thing as she is scared.

They are always scaring each other constantly. What does the adrenaline rush make life together all that more exciting? Or are you two so maladjusted you confuse the flutter of fear with the flutter of love?

......

Don't answer that......

Dinner conversation is also interesting.





So they're discussing the best way to deal with toxic material and she suggests using it in missiles which he apparently approves of. Riiiight.

Oh, and you know how MighamSmith was going on about his kids keep talking aobut jellyfish? Guess what August was discussing with one of the kids at the beech during summer break?



Ya Ya Cthulhu Fhtagn!

Spiritbw 16th Feb 2013 11:59 PM

Quote: Originally posted by MinghamSmith
I do. And that's why they have a pet bowl. It's not because they've bought a hellhound, they haven't. It's how they feed their toddlers.

(Crypto has the Genius trait and can find bottles himself, though. And Rick, for all his idiocy, is actually reasonably good at caring for his little green rectal son)


I should ask, where can one find that mod?

BL00DIEDHELL 17th Feb 2013 12:16 AM

Quote: Originally posted by MinghamSmith
I can't argue there. He looks like one, plus he's got the recurring "can't respond appropriately to Announce Pregnancy" problem that's plagued every single member of the dynasty that's been informed of a pregnancy so far.

An idea for how to work new Scumthorpes like this into the (near-incomprehensible) official family tree, by the way: Though I haven't made any myself, Larry and Sid probably have cousins. Most people do, after all. So feel free to make Scumthorpes related to them that way and then run with it- given that Larry's fathered eight children in total and three of them were born at the same time, it's probably safe to say that the family has a genetic tendency to breed like rats and wind up with many, many distant relatives.


Okay fuck it, I'll make him a Scumthorpe again :P. Ptolemy can be the wife's maiden name and I just hope that's not too confusing.

I was planning on keeping this branch of the family all werewolves and was thinking of who to pair the twin girls up with when they're older, and thought Gator.

...I think Gator's had enough of my game autonomously fucking him about without him dating a Scumthorpe too.

Spiritbw 17th Feb 2013 3:12 AM

Quote: Originally posted by MinghamSmith
http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=479364

Here. Personally, I can't play toddlers without it. It makes their autonomy infinitely better.


Thanks. The Killjoys just both rolled to have thier first child. This will probably be much useful.

BL00DIEDHELL 17th Feb 2013 6:56 PM

Loving the new avatar, Spiritbw!

Also I think I hate myself. I didn't do any actual playing last night, just building. I am not a good builder. I am probably average at best. My houses turn into blocky boring looking horrors, because I either a) lack imagination and a know-how on making houses look realistic and/or b) get fucking bored.

"I know!" I think to myself, "I'll make a Scumthorpe mansion myself! From scratch! No editing bullshit. On a 64x64 lot!"



So far I have the garage, the layout of the house, kitchen, dining area, indoor swimming pool, small lake, tiny garden (I'm not a fan of huge gardens that take literally all day to tend to) and an outdoor play area for the twins.

Just the garage with cars and the fence around the lot alone cost over 500k.
Fuck.

Sojourner 17th Feb 2013 8:17 PM

If it's not too late, do not use a foundation! Or at least leave a large area where you can build so you can put stairs to the basement (EA in their infinite stupidity made it incredibly difficult-to-impossible to add stairs to the basement through a foundation). Build the basement ALL FOUR LEVELS using the basement tool, whether you're going to use it right now or not. 62x62! These are Scumthorpes! They need room for secret lairs, secret labs, secret ... stuff! They will need to expand! You can always wall off sections later, or delete parts of the basement to create hallways and areas that are separated on that level but can only be accessed via stairs from above and/or below.

Besides basements are free in edit town. They cost mucho simoleans later. Plus, there's the whole planning-for-stairs thing.

BL00DIEDHELL 17th Feb 2013 8:21 PM

Oh don't worry, I rarely use foundations because I fucking hate how difficult it is to get down into a basement in a house with foundations. The only time I've ever managed it was when I shoved in a lift (I made Sims of the kids from The Binding of Isaac, so it was pretty much essential that they sleep in the basement, but wanted them to have a crappy house too and foundations everywhere D:!). EA seem to manage it fine but have made it incredibly hard on the rest of us.



I'm planning on adding a wine cellar with a wine making machine, although I've no idea who will be using it yet. God knows what else will be shoved in XD.

Sojourner 17th Feb 2013 8:28 PM

Eeeeeexcellent *steepling fingers*.

Your plan, she is coming together.



gemly_teddie 17th Feb 2013 8:51 PM

I never build basements. Probably because I've never had one irl. But then, I've never had foundations irl, but I use them all the time...
My next mission, add a basement to my legacy house! When I can afford to decorate the rest, that is...

BL00DIEDHELL 17th Feb 2013 9:39 PM

I've never had a basement irl either, but I like to build them for wine cellars, secret dungeons and torture rooms...and baby rooms for my asshole Sims. Thanks to a few tips from Mingham I can be a true asshole parent and leave them entirely to their own devices now!

Spiritbw 17th Feb 2013 10:08 PM

Quote: Originally posted by BL00DIEDHELL
Loving the new avatar, Spiritbw!


Thanks. Figured I needed a good Sim one for a Sim forum and now i have all these pictures....

Quote:
Also I think I hate myself. I didn't do any actual playing last night, just building. I am not a good builder. I am probably average at best. My houses turn into blocky boring looking horrors, because I either a) lack imagination and a know-how on making houses look realistic and/or b) get fucking bored.

"I know!" I think to myself, "I'll make a Scumthorpe mansion myself! From scratch! No editing bullshit. On a 64x64 lot!"



So far I have the garage, the layout of the house, kitchen, dining area, indoor swimming pool, small lake, tiny garden (I'm not a fan of huge gardens that take literally all day to tend to) and an outdoor play area for the twins.

Just the garage with cars and the fence around the lot alone cost over 500k.
Fuck.


What a coincidence. I haven't gotten to the car part but I have been working on a Scumthorpe mansion myself in perperation for the family expanding. Pictures of stately Killjoy Manor to come....when it's finished.

I got to agree with folks about the frustration of getting stairs through a foundation. Specially spiral stairs which I used for access to what will be the labs and crypts. Build foundation, build walls, remove foundation dig basement, put in stairs, relay the foundation around the stairs. Without the walls I found that the foundation when put around spiral stairs will stay a square away from the stairs themselves. After much experimentation and cursing of EA/Maxis programing I managed to get hidden door, staircase and fireplace into a 2'x6' area.

|CC|
|CC|
|LM|M
|SM|M
|FB|B
|FB|B

C=Circular stair
| =Wall
L=Landing
S=Straight stair
F=Foundation
M=Mantle, Fireplace
B=Bookcase secret door

BL00DIEDHELL 17th Feb 2013 10:11 PM

Uuggghhh spiral staircases piss me the fuck off. I only really use them for basements because if it's going to another storey of the house, say a bunch of Sims going to bed at the same time, mutiple Sims on a spiral staircase just gets on my tits. Tantrums abound. Thanks for the basement foundation tip though!

Sojourner 17th Feb 2013 11:10 PM

There's an instant multi-level transporter pad on this site somewhere. I can't find it just now and I have to go cook dinner for the boychild, but I'll try to find it when I get done with that.

It takes up way less room than stairs, I think 4 squares. And they just transport instanteously. You could put a couple in high traffic areas but since it takes 0 time to ascend/descend, there really probably isn't any need to do so.

BL00DIEDHELL 17th Feb 2013 11:27 PM

Ooooh yes, that would be kick ass. Certainly would be useful for my mad scientist.

ButchSims 17th Feb 2013 11:38 PM

is it this? :http://www.modthesims.info/d/371655

This unlocks the Teleporter Pad Lifetime Award for buy mode. I suppose that could work.

Sojourner 18th Feb 2013 12:51 AM

No, this is an object - and it turns out its not on THIS site, it's on another one.

CyberBob's Beam-Me-Up:

http://www.den.simlogical.com/denfo...hp?topic=1011.0

You'd think with a name like that I'd be able to remember it, but NOOOooOOOoOOoooOOOoo!

The thing about these is that NPC's WILL use them. They're 'spensive though, like S-1100 in-game price.

Of course in the course of hunting for them I've come across about 20 pieces of CC that I MUST HAVE! MUST MUST MUST! LOL!

BL00DIEDHELL 18th Feb 2013 1:43 AM

Kick ass, thank you!

EDIT: I just had a rather peculiar realisation, which I've already shared with (read: inflicted on) Mingham.

Quote: Originally posted by MinghamSmith


I've seen many, many strange scenarios play out in this game. Ghost drivers, men threatening babies with claw gauntlets, aliens probing each other rather than humans, the list goes on. But I still never expected to witness an evil clanking doombot doing a guido fistpump dance while staring longingly at his creator's sister.

Well, at least Alice didn't seem to mind-


-Wait, is she giving flirty looks to a robot?


...I guess that answers that question.


So Alice was giving flirty looks to a Simbot. Who is considered the "son/daughter" of their creator. Which would technically mean the Killbots are Alice's "nephews".

...Welp, that scene just got even weirder.

EDIT EDIT: Oh fuck you quotes for taking out the spoilered pictures. D:<

Sojourner 18th Feb 2013 2:22 AM

NP. And I restrained myself and only downloaded 6 or 8 new pieces of CC. So you're forgiven for setting me on that particular quest, thus exposing me to new CC, LOL!

BL00DIEDHELL 18th Feb 2013 2:58 AM

Well thank you! :P

Spiritbw 18th Feb 2013 3:50 AM

Quote: Originally posted by BL00DIEDHELL

EDIT EDIT: Oh fuck you quotes for taking out the spoilered pictures. D:<


Quotes take out the pictures, spoilered or not.

....and my game has developed a glitch again. Can't save as doing so crashes the game. >

Gone through every bloody thing to fix it, it'll work for a while but then I have to basiclly do a new game to get it to continue saving. Gaaaah!!!!!!

lil bag2 18th Feb 2013 4:09 AM

Quote: Originally posted by MinghamSmith
So feel free to make Scumthorpes related to them that way and then run with it


Please, please do not tempt me LOL

BL00DIEDHELL 18th Feb 2013 1:39 PM

Quote: Originally posted by Spiritbw
Quotes take out the pictures, spoilered or not.

....and my game has developed a glitch again. Can't save as doing so crashes the game. >

Gone through every bloody thing to fix it, it'll work for a while but then I have to basiclly do a new game to get it to continue saving. Gaaaah!!!!!!


So I see D: I thought spoilers might be a good way to get around it.

Also holy shit, fuck your game. What exactly happens when it glitches out?

Spiritbw 18th Feb 2013 8:25 PM

It's just the same save problem that has been around since The Sims 3 was released. Go to save and the game crashes to desktop. I've tried everything to fix it but it seems after a certain time of play it just goes, "nope, not letting you save anymore!" That's even if I am doing regular saves too. Crash/error logs all suggest it's the issue which should be fixed by using the DEP solution, but I already did that. Running windows 7 64 bit so shouldn't be the trying to use 2GB memory when there is actually 4 issue. Tried taking out CC but still no go. Last week did a complete reinstall (twice). Video drivers just updated....

I'm at a loss.

BL00DIEDHELL 18th Feb 2013 9:04 PM

Aw fuck man, that's shitty. I don't know any suggestions on how to fix it unfortunately (I'm rather computer illiterate). There's a help board somewhere on here, isn't there? (I say somewhere because I tend to forget about it if my game gets a problem so I can't remember whereabouts it is. Hurrr) Hopefully there'd be some people there who'd have a useful idea. >.<

EDIT: Does it happen just when you use the save option, or does it affect the save as option too? If you don't know, maybe it's worth a try? That's about the most help I can be right now I'm afraid.

gemly_teddie 18th Feb 2013 9:30 PM

Are you getting error codes with your CTDs? I'm fairly useless too, but I keep getting 'error code 12' and 'error code 16' when saving, but it doesn't crash. Until my 'graphics driver igfx' stops responding, and then 'successfully' restarts...
And isn't there some kind of crash log in your game files? There is in mine, but it will only open in IE, which doesn't work at all on my laptop for some reason, so I can't view it to see what it says.

Maybe my problems come from my laptop...

Sojourner 18th Feb 2013 11:26 PM

I have it but haven't tried it yet.

You can report back to us.


Spiritbw 19th Feb 2013 7:05 AM

Thanks for the help guys.

As to diffrent saves, yes all of them have the same problem. Sadly no there is no error codes, that would make my life so much easier. Not sure about the save sizes myself, I'll have to see if I can find that out. Also, I'll give the save cleaner a try.

EDIT: Game folder for most recent save is 33 Mb.

BL00DIEDHELL 19th Feb 2013 1:47 PM

Balls. The only other thing I'd do in that situation is instead of saving my game, save the *family* to the library and then reload them when needed. But I can totally understand that being a huge Goddamn pain in the ass for you.

No word on save cleaner yet, needed to download the .NET4.0 Framework and couldn't get the site to load so...Yeah.

Kathwynn 19th Feb 2013 1:57 PM

I actually recall having had a similar problem in the past. I never really did figure out what was wrong. I uninstalled and deleted everything that was remotely sims related. Rebooted the comp.

Then installed the game, ect as though it was a new game.

It worked for a while and then replaced the laptop a year after that with a new one. I never knew for certain if it was a bug not connected to the game, laptop age (4yrs old when I replaced it), or simply Ea usual inability to code anything with out screwing something up in the process.

eskie227 19th Feb 2013 5:24 PM

Quote: Originally posted by Spiritbw
Thanks for the help guys.

As to diffrent saves, yes all of them have the same problem. Sadly no there is no error codes, that would make my life so much easier. Not sure about the save sizes myself, I'll have to see if I can find that out. Also, I'll give the save cleaner a try.

EDIT: Game folder for most recent save is 33 Mb.


Just a note, 30 MB saves are pretty small, at least in my experience (I've played saves of 200 MB and up with legacies, and pretty full up towns). I doubt your problem relates to the save folder size, so it's unlikely using a "save cleaner" to further reduce the size will make any difference.

gemly_teddie 19th Feb 2013 8:21 PM

*ahem* 161.7MB...
I'm only on generation 2 in this town as well!!

Spiritbw 20th Feb 2013 12:26 AM

I feel bat that the last little bit this has turned into a "Fix spiritbw's issue" thread. Specially since nothing seems to be working.

All Custom content and mods are gone, saved the Killjoys to the bin and the new house that was in the works.

Tried with all mods but Errortrap removed: Crashes to Desktop
All mods and CC gone: Crashes to Desktop
Tried a new game with them and the house in it: Crashes to desktop.
Tried new game with just the Killjoys: Crashes to Desktop
Tried a new game with generic sims that come with the game: Crashes to Desktop
Tried every suggest modification to how it runs, DEP settings: Crashes to Desktop

At this point it's looking like some error develops higher in the game. Going to try one last thing, because it would just figure with Digital editions of the game, then I might need to try reinstalling again as that seems to be the only thing that fizes the issue. Though why it does so only for a time before developing agian is beyond me. Thank god my ISP doesn't nail us for going over the limit unless we do so three months running.

Sojourner 20th Feb 2013 12:29 AM

Well if you end up having to reinstall the digital editions again, don't reinstall any mods or scripted objects as you will be getting the latest patches and nobody has had time to update their mods yet.

Spiritbw 20th Feb 2013 1:08 AM

Quote: Originally posted by Sojourner
Well if you end up having to reinstall the digital editions again, don't reinstall any mods or scripted objects as you will be getting the latest patches and nobody has had time to update their mods yet.


Yeah, just saw the thing about the update that came out today. Reading throught hat now. I did pull my saved games and backed them up so here is hoping. Meanwhile, the deletion for reinstall has begun. Hopefully I'll be able to continue the epic of the Killjoy-Scumthorpe's soon.


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