Diary of a Newbie #5: wallswallswallswalls…
by Alphaville Herald on 20/03/04 at 7:53 pm
By Montserrat Tovar
one day i said to uri: i want to make a house. i want to do that. so uri took me to a lot in another city and said: here. build a house. i said: uri, help me. he said no and then sat down to watch action movies in front of a giant screen tv. this is how it happened that i came to begin building walls.
increasingly i have this feeling about tso that there is nothing about tso that was not created by and for people in the 9th circle of dante’s hell. in the 9th circle people are paralyzed. the closer they get to the center of hell, the more paralyzed they get. where you get paralyzed building walls is that it is very easy to make mistakes and somewhat difficult to fix the mistakes. my walls went diagonal by accident. diagonal walls are a problem because when you go to put doors up, you can’t put doors on a diagonal wall. you can’t put windows or anything else on a diagonal wall. you’re just stuck with a giant wall and if your bed is on the other side of a group of diagonal walls, well you just have to hike through the garden. if your bathroom is on the other side of a diagonal wall, well, you’re stuck there, too. there is a little pop-up that comes up when you build walls and it tells you lots of dumb stuff except it doesn’t say that a diagonal wall is useless.
after about an hour of struggling with walls, i tried to build doors. it was at that moment that i understood the horror of diagonal walls. but i had to leave even though the house i was building looked terrible. it was disorderly and had walls going in 40 different directions because sometimes when i tried to delete a wall, a new one would get built instead. later on i came back to work on the house again. i began to worry because it looked like i was pissing money away and everything was just getting uglier and worse. around 3am the first night i sent a note to uri and i wished at that moment that i could have buzzed him awake with a cattle prod. the note said:
“dear uri:
i’m sorry to bother you about this but the walls are making me insane.
the help thingie says: to delete a structural object click on icon hold down control key move cursor until object has pink glow and then delete.
ok well i did that. and –
#1 there is no pink glow and
#2 it deletes the wrong walls or
#3 it makes new walls.
so there is some secret sims handshake going on that is not in the help crap?
i am a grownup. i know how to read. this is driving me nuts — it is 3am and i am trying to figure out how to fix walls.
it is not working.
i admit that i am getting weird about the walls. if there is a trick to the walls i must know it and i entreat you to tell me what it is.
in the mean time i am getting crazy because i am turning the building project into something that looks like a building after a bombing and i hate ugly even if it is wretched stupid it-is-beneath-me-even-to-spend-one-drop-of-adrenaline-on-it-tso. i implore you to fix these walls so that i can rest: it is like living with a song in your head where one note is wrong all the time.
i don’t want to think about this anymore i don’t want to fuck around with the not-pink-no-glow anymore.
i abhore the tso help documentation which was obviously written by a pack of earthworms. i rail against the mere idea of pink and all its works, i vomit on the glow, i renounce the glamour of sims, and i am annoyed with myself for having given two hours to the stupid walls today.
know that i am very frustrated.
yrs truly,
–montserrat”
this is how the first day of building ended.
the second day was not much better.
at some point while i was out, uri kindly came and fixed many of the diagonal walls. i still had free-standing walls out in the middle of rooms and they looked something like monoliths from the 2001 movie. it was ugly. i got a stove and in the process of trying to locate it in what was about to become the kitchen, i managed to move it out of the house entirely and into the yard. in the yard i moved it to the left, and to the right, and forwards, and backwards. yes. i taught the stove to dance. eventually i was able to move the stove back into the kitchen but not before it spent a little while in a room with a grand piano. i could not find a refrigerator that was not turquoise.
at this point i needed to green and found out that i had to pay to eat in a house where i was a roomie. i was surprised by this because when i go visiting out in alphaville i see that everyone eats and apparently no one pays for anything. i also deleted a bed that cost several thousand simoleans while trying to get rid of a wall, and had to buy a new one. i felt awful about that. it was my dark moment when i thought i was just going to try to stop learning to build: i threw away so much money learning and making mistakes. i got an easel and somehow managed to move that into the yard, too. i planted a garden in the living room by mistake. i accidentally also painted the walls black. i noticed also that sometimes you will choose a certain floor pattern and the next day you go back to use it again and it is simply not there in the choices list. the building application was designed by people with an assumption of knowledge problem about the size of mount everest.
i did find that i could do one thing splendidly and that was that i could plant trees. so i planted trees everywhere. it was a small consolation for the horror of the walls.
tomorrow will be the third day. right now i am going to sleep.
i deserve it.
Jessica McPherson
Mar 22nd, 2004
This was the most pointless story I have ever read. Who really cares about walls? It makes the story boring. No one is going to scream in horror if they see a diagnol wall after reading this story. And I’ve been playing offline version of the sims for a long time and when you delete a wall it doesn’t freaking build a new one, or delete the wrong one. You just are terrible at building. Don’t blame Maxis for your lame mistakes.
Jessica McPherson
Mar 22nd, 2004
“at this point i needed to green and found out that i had to pay to eat in a house where i was a roomie. i was surprised by this because when i go visiting out in alphaville i see that everyone eats and apparently no one pays for anything.”
Holy crap! Did you not read anything in the damn manual for TSO?! You are the most pathetic newbie ever!
urizenus
Mar 22nd, 2004
lol, yes poor Montserrat is a bit clue impaired, but the most pathetic newbie ever? I hardly think so. People who come to tso from offline sims probably don’t recognize how frustrating the interface is. You have to remember that while there are 80K or so people who find tso a snap to use, there are the 920,000 projected subscribers who aren’t here and the question is, why aren’t they here? Well some of them came, saw, and ran away. Those of us who came and stayed forget what being a newbie was like.
m. tovar
Mar 22nd, 2004
ok. i’m done.
listen to me, you marvelous group of gelatin brained insects, the information that maxis
is handing out in its so-called help information is wrong. can you say wrong, boys and girls?
the maxis help information does not mention that the control button and left mouse button should be lifted sequentially. lifting the buttons sequentially is important to actually being able to delete a wall. lift the buttons in the wrong sequence and you may add another wall instead of deleting the one you were trying to get rid of.
i am really tired of the whole paternalistic
voice-of-the-universe tone of most of the comments i read here. you guys write like you see yourselves as fonts of received wisdom and i say unto you that the burning bush appeared to somebody else. not you. at the sound of the trumpets the heavens awoke, but the heavens did not awake for you.
and as for you, urizenus, cold horrible dear urizenus, if i am clueless, these guys are in deep shit. i was tossed into this crayon colored low res allegedly streaming world, a world without beauty or vision, a world of cute little creatures where cute includes the idea of repulsion apparently created primarily by the shrieks, despair, and frustrated sexual fantasies of what must be a bunch of down-sized 20 year programmer wannabes who demonstrate no higher knowledge of interface design principles than my labrador retriever and you tell me i am a little clueless. urizenus i have not been three years old for a very long time.
i did not get fleeced.
i did not end up working for evangeline auditioning for triple xxx live action show me your p or get banned movies.
i did good.
thank you very much.
oh and jessica honey you cretin you have to learn to spell “diagnol”, ok? when we write in english we spell “diagnol” d-i-a-g-o-n-a-l. i’m sure they taught this in school when you were there but maybe you were just spending too much time having catfights in the girls’ bathrooms to notice? that’s ok honey. they have books called “dictionaries”. you can use those to look up words whenever you want to know what they mean or how to spell them. it’s ok.
oos-onagocag-naaji
Mar 25th, 2004
I’ve never really gotten into the Sims offline, beyond sporadic periods of playing up to the point of having to get X amount of friends–where I then give up in frustration. It’d always been a temporary amusement, and that’s all I’ve asked from it. If others enjoyed the thing, then more power to ‘em. When I first heard about TSO, I figured there would be a massive number of people involved, but decided (after reading a few reviews) that it wasn’t the game for me. Months later–last month, actually–I found The Alphaville Herald during some random searching for things. It gave me an idea of what TSO was probably like, and re-enforced the idea that I would probably never play it. I skim the election stuff, read a little more of the technical news, despair of noob scamming… and read Montserrat’s posts whenever I find them. A lot of the philosophical view goes over my head but I grasp enough of it to get a feel for TSO, and after playing a handful of other online games I don’t feel she’s far from the truth.
I’m glad she’s chosen to run this series of articles, and I hope she chooses to continue after this wall debacle. (Hang in there!)
And since I’ll probably never post again, a quick thanks to Urizenus for TAH.
Mr-President
Mar 25th, 2004
Montserrat Tovar,
That was my favorite comment I’ve ever read.
Mista Mann
Apr 6th, 2004
I don’t know, maybe it’s just me but when you never use capitalization should you really rail someone else on bad spelling?