4

Van Gelder & Mason

Who is influencing whom?

Panoctagon
Former prison architect, Strate Tenerrow, graduated from penitentiaries to residential homes. While his earlier works tended to resemble large prison cells or small prisons, his entire body of work changed upon discovering the post-postmodernist designer and artist, Mans Bjornvald. While still somewhat rooted in the prison idea, Tenerrow's newest work suggests the theory of the panopticon, while maintaining a pleasant octagonal shape, with terraced lawns from landscape architect to the stars, Nast Yershim.

Bedrooms: 3 (theoretical), 2 (practical)
Bathrooms: 3
House type: Celebrity mansion
Max. occupancy: 6 (theoretical), 4 (practical)
I'd had absolutely enough of boxy Nebraska-style single-family houses and I was getting fed up with the whole idea of realism. Why did my next house need to be realistic? Impracticality is a foundational underpinning of The Sims school of architecture, from the very first floating houses in The Sims 1 to that weird car shaped building on TS4's main menu screen, no one should expect this game to be all realism, all the time. The tree in the middle courtyard was a throwback to an apartment building I uploaded to The Sims 2 Exchange one time, where I did something similar. The overall shape of the place was informed by the Mashuga house from The Sims: Livin' It Up.

After meeting each other on "Ain't No Joke", Gretchen and Tyreesha started seeing each other after being voted out and got married a year or so later. Tyreesha has carried on doing stand-up comedy while Gretchen shifted gears to becoming a game streamer and influencer. Tyreesha's just finished her 3rd Viddox special and Gretchen is enjoying all the money that 1,000,000 subscribers brings. Tyreesha's little brother, Jamal, just finished a video production degree and is looking for practical experience, which was a handy coincidence, seeing as how Gretchen's last producer left at a critical time and she was desperately seeking a new one.

Gretchen van Gelder
Stand-up comic turned social media influencer, Gretchen got her hooks into pop culture with her Pixelcrate livestreams, injecting her brand of comedy into showcases of cornball mods with less than 100 downloads. Now, she's the head of the most popular brand on MeeVee.
Astrological sign: Gemini
Lifestage: Adult (aged 36)
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Tyreesha van Gelder
Though she got voted out pretty early on in Ain't No Joke, Tyreesha's career took off faster than that season's winner did. Her last 2 stand-up specials on Viddox were so wildly acclaimed that a 3rd one was a given, but she feels like she might be coming to a turning point.
Astrological sign: Scorpio
Lifestage: Adult (aged 34)
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Jamal Mason
Instead of jumping right into video production work after graduating, Jamal ended up having to move in with his big sister and her wife. While he's been able to produce Gretchen's MeeVee videos, he wants more. Actually, he wants Gretchen, but he's afraid of Tyreesha finding that out.
Astrological sign: Gemini
Lifestage: Young adult (aged 27)
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Gretchen van Gelder and Tyreesha Mason met each other as contestants on series 5 of SimTV's stand-up comedy based reality show, Ain't No Joke. Incidentally, the same series where fan favourite, Pedro Gonzales, was caught with an unauthorised smartphone and was ejected from the show for breaking the rules. Gretchen got voted out after bombing out of that week's challenge, a roast of series 1's winner, Bro Spider. Tyreesha was voted off 2 weeks later.

While they hadn't really said anything about it during their time on the show, they both thought the other was cute and they decided to go out for dinner one night. Gretchen was analysing her mistakes during the roast and asked Tyreesha's opinion on what she could have done differently. Tyreesha said that, while it was a good idea to have a running gag (Gretchen had been consistently making fun of Bro's new goatee), she could have read the room a bit better. Most of the men in attendance had goatees or full beards and most people don't like to laugh at attributes that they have themselves. The goatee jokes could have been easily ported to Bro's duck-butt pompadour. They spent the rest of the evening privately roasting their other competitors and cracking each other up, repeating this procedure for the next several nights. The thing that finally made Tyreesha realise she was in love with Gretchen was when she looked out into the audience at her next show and saw her watching the set from the bar. Gretchen had been talking for a while about having a parallel engagement on that night, but she still made the effort to come to Tyreesha's show.

Tyreesha had been doing quite well for herself, having a 2-night per week gig at Halley's Comic, as well as a weekly show on XTFM Satellite Radio, called The News with Tyreesha Mason, where she roasted people in the headlines. Gretchen, however, decided comedy writing was too much work and decided to try out a new feature of her favourite videogame, Pixelcrate, and take a video of herself commenting on mods she'd downloaded recently. This turned out to be more popular than she had imagined it would (considering the sheer number of Pixelcrate streamers on MeeVee at the time), so she changed the format slightly to showcase new mods and unpopular mods. Essentially, mods she found in the game's category on Litebox with 100 downloads or fewer.

Even though comedy writing was too hard, comedy came naturally during Gretchen's livestreams, which caused her to become more and more popular. Of course, a lot of her followers within SimTV's broadcast area recognised her from ANJ, but this didn't seem to be a driving force behind her popularity. Before she knew it, she reached 150.000 followers and earned a MeeVee Silver Subscriber Medal. The ad revenue was nothing to sneeze at either. Being a Silver Medal holder meant that MeeVee put her stream onto the list of Premium-tier earners which meant that larger and wealthier companies would advertise on her sidebar. Deciding that she was making more than enough at livestreaming Pixelcrate to offset having no other job, she set up an account for the stream on Quid so her subscribers could support her directly.

All throughout this, Tyreesha and Gretchen continued seeing each other, which turned into sleeping together. A year and 3 months after Halley's Comic, Funnell/Loud Productions offered her a §5 million contract to write and present a special episode of The News with Tyreesha Mason for Viddox, which ended up being one of the highest-rated shows on the streaming service for the better part of a month. With their careers now both quite underway, Tyreesha felt comfortable at long last with proposing to Gretchen, and they were married the following April.

In order to keep their private lives... well... private, they both agreed not to divulge to anyone that they were married to each other. While they weren't ashamed of each other in the least amount, there had been a stalking incident involving another popular Pixelcrate streamer recently. LouisLouieLooney had let everyone on his stream know that he had gotten married to unboxing influencer, JailaSellers, and a stalker was able to trace down where they lived based on images that they had both shown of outside their houses. The man found their house in East Jerome and burned it to the ground. It turned out that the man had parasocial feelings for Jaila and burned the house down in an attempt to kill Louis. For this and other reasons, mostly related to prestige, Gretchen and Tyreesha bought an ultramodern mansion in Newcrest and had all the windows replaced by 1-way glass. While, officially, Tyreesha took Gretchen's name (mostly because "Dagger of the Mind" is her favourite Star Trek episode), she continues going by her maiden name in public. Both of them have mentioned that they're married, though they have never mentioned who their spouses are. It wasn't until last year that the public even knew that Tyreesha was lesbian.

As Gretchen's production became more elaborate, she found she wasn't able to operate all the software anymore, so she hired a video producer to oversee everything. Kenni was a fair-to-middling video producer, definitely knowledgeable in the craft. But she would probably have been better off editing commercial spots. She knew next to nothing about social media, requiring Gretchen to be her own manager.

Content warning: Pregnancy mentions. Click here to expand section.

One day a couple years ago, Kenni informed Gretchen that she was pregnant with twins and so she would require 3 months' worth of time off in about 25 more weeks. At first, Gretchen was amenable to the idea, even bringing in little gifts and extra food for her, suggesting names, talking about baby stuff, all sorts of things, and Kenni considered Gretchen a friend, as well as an employer. Well, Kenni started getting Braxton-Hicks contractions and told Gretchen that her doctor wanted her to keep off her feet for the rest of her pregnancy; however, Gretchen's follower count broke the 500.000 mark the previous week and MeeVee was going to add her stream to the list of Elite earners, whereupon the largest firms engaged with AddVid were going to begin advertising on her sidebar. She also was planning to hold a special stream for the half-million celebration where she would play the most popular mods and open live voice chat with Quid subscribers. Gretchen allowed Kenni to return home, but laid her off at that point. She reverted to her old style of streaming, using OpenStream, and trash-talked her "bitchy old producer" on stream, blaming her for ruining the moment, leaving certain key details out entirely.

As luck would have it, a new video producer was about to fall into her lap, however...

Tyreesha's younger brother, Jamal, had been attending La Fiesta Tech for mass media and video production. It was no co-incidence that he chose LFT's course, since the last half-dozen directors of photography working for Gala Productions (the country's foremost producer of music videos) were graduates of LFT's media department. It had been his intent when he graduated to move out to the coast and work for one of the big studios, but the week after graduation, the Associated Guild of Directors and Producers went on strike. Not wanting to cross the picket line and get blacklisted by AGDAP, thus ruining all his hopes of directing music videos, he sat around for a while, trying to come up with an alternative. As his parents were heading to their retirement home in Sunset Valley, Tyreesha invited him to take the spare bedroom in Gretchen's and her house. When he arrived, he tried to pay his sister his first-month's rent, but she refused, saying that she was making a thousand times that much in residuals and appearance fees. However, there was another problem that he could address instead.

Jamal had been aware that his sister was married to a woman, but he, like everyone else in the world, had no idea that woman was his favourite Pixelcrate streamer, GingerVG. After introductions, Gretchen took him to the studio in the converted ground-floor bedroom and gave him his first task: set up the live voice chat for tonight's stream and prepare to make a recording of it. She had recorded her other milestone streams as well, starting at 100k subscribers, so she also told him to start thinking about a DVD release.

On balance, Tyreesha has been making more money than Gretchen. In the past 2 years alone, she's made 2 more Viddox specials, was called back to make a guest appearance on series 7 and host series 8 of ANJ, made an appearance on series 11 of Fellows, and has done all the late-night talk shows at least twice. Gretchen is actually just a bit jealous of her wife's fame. The only people who seem to know that she exists are grody gamer dudes and kids. She's recently branched out into unboxing videos and developer interviews.

Jamal, on the other hand, has it relatively easy. All he has to do is about 2 hours of work every night, leaving the rest of his time open for partying and playing multiplayer games with his friends in the spacious sitting room. Over the past few months, he's been having really sexy dreams about Gretchen. She's a completely different person in his dreams. For a start, she's straight; for another, she's demure and alluring, as opposed to real life where she's cranky and kind of a bitch. Nonetheless, a recurring daydream of his is conspiring to be alone with her. Some days, he imagines getting her blackout drunk, then having sex with her while she's passed out. However, he's unlikely to ever genuinely pursue this, since it is very much not in his nature. Also, it would raise questions that he would prefer not to answer if his sister's wife were to suddenly show up pregnant. Still, if he could find a skinny red-haired girl at a rave sometime who thought he was hot enough to take to bed with her, he wouldn't resist.

Ain't No Joke is a rather obvious reference to Last Comic Standing, a reality show about stand-up comedians. Pedro Gonzales is similarly a rather obvious reference to Gabriel Iglésias and the BlackBerry debacle. I named Bro Spider before remembering there was a contestant named Ant on the real show. I just figured "Bro Spider" sounds like the kind of faux-edgy name that an annoying David Spade type of comic would give himself.

So far, all of my Sunshine Acres-adjacent characters have been kind, caring, and considerate (with notable exceptions in the Kottrell's and Bowen's), so I decided I needed someone who was cute, but a total bitch. By that, I don't mean "assertively opinionated woman". I mean, assertively opinionated while simultaneously self-centred and unpleasant to be around in a disagreement. She and Tyreesha only matched because they both have rapier wits and they enjoy using each other to sharpen them. Understand, Gretchen isn't bad, she's just very particular about who is allowed to speak to her. It's not a defence mechanism, it's just her personality. However, the life of a social media influencer has definitely played a part in her rising irritability. She's realised that she has no marketable job skills and, if anything happens to her subscriber count, her corporate partnerships are all going to end. She feels like she's too old to learn a new skill, and she can't understand what people see in unboxing videos and game streams. Going for several years with a hollow sense of fulfillment would make anyone bitter.

Tyreesha, on the other hand, is doing what she always wanted to do: make people laugh. Personality-wise, she's equal parts Wanda Sykes and Linda Belcher. When she got voted off ANJ, she was feeling pretty low about herself, until that cute girl who sat next to her in the writing room every day for most of 3 months came back into her life and asked her out to a sit-down burger place.

This whole household only happened at all because I decided to build a streaming studio into my octagonal mansion. My mum has been watching Youtube influencers lately, and with a couple exceptions, most of them are all conventionally-attractive gen-Z women, most of whom aren't particularly shapey. Were it not for the makeup they wear, clothes would sort of just hang off of them and they'd blend right into the carpeting. So, I made someone who fit that bill. Someone who would be really plain-looking were it not for her hair and makeup. So, that's how Gretchen happened. Tyreesha happened because I wanted Gretchen to have a spouse, but I didn't want them to be a cisgender man. I must admit, I'm not good at making non-white people in The Sims, but when I clicked on "Add a sim", the game gave me a black man with an almost insectile face. Not realistic in the slightest and only human-looking in the vaguest possible sense. Well, I didn't want to have it randomise another sim for me, so I changed his gender, then I worked on her face for longer than I'd like to admit. Fortunately, I was able to make her look more human. Really, I made her look super cute. That's sort of important with me: if you saw this person walking toward you on the street, would they fall into your uncanny valley? If the answer is "yes", it's back to the drawing board. Jamal happened because I wanted a live-in video producer for Gretchen. Fortunately, unlike past iterations of The Sims, 4 has the ability to make inferences and extrapolate how a sibling or parent would look, so I didn't really have to do much to Jamal except fix his chin and widen his nose a bit. I dressed him in an outfit I've seen the guy across the carpark wear. Men are easy. You don't have to put too much thought into making them.

Character design wise, Gretchen is dressed in the same juxtapositive style I dress myself in: something baggy has to be offset by something tight. In this case, tight jeans and a baggy sweater. Her Party outfit is the other way around: a tight tanktop and baggy trousers. Tyreesha, I wanted to dress her in something resembling the lolita style. Unfortunately, The Sims 4 is pretty mean about frilly outfits like that, so I settled for the "early 1990s teenager" aesthetic instead. As I said, Jamal is dressed the way I saw my neighbour dress. In fact, he looks very much like him, just in general. Jamal's skin is a little darker, but they've got the same hairstyle, the same beard, even the same outfit. It kinda made me come to grips with the fact I've got a little crush on my neighbour, but that's a discussion for another time.

This household is only the first foray into corporate feudalism. There will be others.