I enjoyed The Sims and it’s sequels. I know I own 2 and 3, and may have a copy of the original lost in a copy paper box somewhere at my parents’ house. I never purchased any of the expansions, as I never felt I needed to personally support EA’s franchise milking. Besides, you don’t need any of the expansions to soak up the depressingly meta experience of being irritated with your sim for pissing away his time playing computer games when you should be doing essentially anything else.
However I was always somewhat bemused by the nature of sexuality in the Sims-verse. There is no sexual orientation as such; everyone is uniformly bisexual. This was most pronounced in the first game, where if you left your sim to his or her own devices and went for lunch, there’d be no telling who they might have become romantically entangled with by your return. While there may be statistical support for the idea that “(most) everyone is a little bit bi,” an entire population of absolute bisexuals no more accurately represents reality than there being none at all.
The peculiarities of sexual identity have landed the game an ‘adults only’ rating in Russia, as it runs afoul of a law that prohibits the distribution to children of media containing, among other things, “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships.” Politics aside, there’s almost no chance this will have a practical effect on who plays the game. Parents are not typically that deferential to the empowered moral guardians, and even if they were, Russia is well-known as a land where game piracy is as much the rule as the exception.
Meanwhile, Nintendo has drawn the ire of GLAAD for failing to let players be as gay as they want to be in Tomodachi Life, a game about, uh… something. I don’t actually know anything about the game other than the fact that it’s attracted controversy, and as I don’t own and have no intention of acquiring a 3DS, I also don’t particularly care. Nintendo isn’t going to change the game post-ship, and I also don’t care about that. Nintendo has probably done the math, and decided that losing sales from the committed culture warriors who also happen to own a Nintendo 3DS costs less than making the changes they want, and for everyone else they can do things differently in the sequel and all will be forgiven, or at least forgotten.
In the moderately more important world of U.S. military policy, the Defense Secretary is “open” to a review of the policy barring transgender individuals from joining up. I can think of perfectly reasonable rationales to both support and oppose this. If a man wishes to behave as a woman whilst serving the State, provided the effectuation of this desire doesn’t overly burden the organization, then all the best to them. On the other hand, one might imagine a twilight zone where a handful of servicepersons, stuck in some far-away shithole they probably needn’t be in to begin with, are unable to get the various pills they need to properly express what they feel they really are. The logistics of managing this, and/or the failure to do so, might be something of a morale problem.
Really though, I’m pretty indifferent, and this issue doesn’t seem like it should really be that high up the docket of problems with the military that need addressed (and I suspect it isn’t).
I’m not sure I really had much to say in all of above, but it seemed like an appropriate night to clear those links out as I’m at present missing an Against Me! show, because not doing things is so nice. I saw the band in ’05 or ’06, sometime around when ‘Searching for a Former Clarity’ released, and long before Tom transitioned into Laura. It was a really good show, and tonight would likely have been a really good show, too. But between my feelings about that, a mid-afternoon motorcycle ride right before I’d have had to leave for the show, and a heaping of general indifference, it just didn’t happen.
Sundry Complaints 