Jessamine Diane’s Bed Of Roses (No.9)

Back on the topic of Jessamine Diane (as we appear to be taking a lot of curious hits from a Deviant Art direction of late, ah our unwitting role as the Burkes Peerage of Simmers and Bumnuggetry alike past and present comes back to haunt us!), she had some further comment to make on her past, which for the sake of completeness and the news about Mollymoo15 (another from the 2010 era) we’ll post.

‘Regrets, she’s had a few…’

As we mentioned recently, 2010 wasn’t quite the good old days some recently would have us believe, and there was a fair amount of self-destructiveness, and there are plenty that may look back on that time as a period when a number of good people were lost through people taking themselves and the online world too seriously.

But the bottom line was some of those like Jessamine Diane were kids, and had far more excuse than grown women like Jarsie9 taking out their bitterness on online strangers or the mental psychosis clusterf**k that was Aarin’s Jazz-Hands.

(Or perhaps the worst of the lot in the long term, the ‘suicide bombing’ of The Simmers Club from which it never recovered and the knock on effect it had in losing a fair number of Simmers to the community who simply dropped out).

We’d a feeling that FuryRed would come up in the post, and sure enough it did – now this was a point where we stuck our necks out against the majority – and in the end we’d say we were still proven right.

Now hereby hangs a tale of inaction that was later to backfire on us in the days when we were a trio, and for Jessamine Diane’s benefit an example of how we equally made bad mistakes during that time.

During the summer of 2010, FuryRed Says suddenly put up a ‘donation’ widget on her blog, ‘just to see’ she claimed – and one of the Mare’s Nest team went spare, demanding we take down our links to her blog or at the least publicly criticise her for it. At this time she was simply taking advantage of the free Blogger space, and had no reason whatsoever to require any donations to pay for bandwidth.

Now, at that time her blog had become somewhat infested with a lot of young girls that somewhat hero-worshipped her to a ludicrous extent (it was pretty clear they were having what would be termed an ‘online crush’) and we had to confess that this did look suspiciously like she was attempting to see if she could exploit it for financial gain. Our Laura was holding down a very menial part-time job in the gift shop of what was then Kidderminster Zoo (now the West Midlands Safari and Leisure Park), and wasn’t quite the fresh-out-of-school teenager hoping to be a journalist she was making herself out to be (she was in fact twenty two by this stage). The temptation to eke out some extra pennies from those fools willing to be parted in the hope she would acknowledge their presence more might have been a little too tempting…

But – and to our shame – we outvoted our colleague two to one to do nothing, not least of all because by that stage we were a little punch drunk. We were tired of battling it seemed on all sides (Aarinites, Comrades, endless EA forum trolls, the ‘Swansea Jack’ affair, etc), and it was also the case that FuryRed was something of the ‘golden girl’ as far as many Simmers were concerned at that stage. We didn’t want to go continually falling out unnecessarily with people, we were weary of it.

What we forgot of course is that some people are very good at acting sugar sweet one minute only to stick the knife in the next because they’re feeling bored and ‘drama’ livens up the day – and unfortunately the Emo generation reared on too much TV soap excel at this sort of ‘fair is foul and foul is fair’ mindflip.

So it was that FuryRed abruptly tried to become the rehabilitator of WindsorErick at the very juncture he’d gone completely beyond the pale – much of it to be blunt little more than her own little powertrip that she could ‘get’ the Sims community to accept Windbag’s rehabilitation (despite what he’d been doing for months on end and had played no small part in busting up Jessamine Diane and Blazaxx’s tempestuous friendship) because of who she was, and that best beloved was the major reason we told her there and then to f**k off and die.

We’d just saw Aarin and her gang staked in their coffins, we weren’t about to see another wannabe online egomaniac taking over with Windbag in tow as her pet ASBO dog (he was in fact finished off shortly after by the revelation of his home address c/o one of the ex-Aarinites, but that’s another tale entirely).

Sure enough, shortly after this, FuryRed announced her retiral from the EA forum and all activities were being relocated to her new forum where the faithful were to gather in worship. Sounds a familiar tale?

Now of course that all lasted the sum total of one year – as her teeny sycophants dropped out of their tenuous hold to Simming and thus her forum – before FuryRed abruptly vanished, and in fact the last communication those at her forum were ever to receive from her was her trying to get them involved in one of those pyramid style ‘work from home’ get-rich-quick schemes. Not very edifying.

In a sad echo of the Aarinites fiasco, the Reddites finally attempted to regroup in a new forum, Reviving The Red, all too late.

It took seven months for these remanents of what had been a forum of over 300 people to get together a rescue plan, by which time the momentum and enthusiasm had all gone – and many of the Simmers with it.

Just to give their side of the story on FuryRed’s disappearence, here’s what FrozenFearless had to say.

Time enough to lock her old forum, but no time to bother letting any of her old friends know what was going on – ‘you’re no longer of use to me, so long’. Charming!

So in the light of that…

…it puts your own little bumnuggetries into sharp perspective, doesn’t it?

The truth is we all screw up in our own ways, sometimes what we think of is a bed of roses either turns out to be a bed of nails or we just can’t help ourselves making it into one. It’s what sadly makes us human – and when you’re young, you go through a lot of them.

Or to quote from Cloverstardropper:

Which could almost sum up how we’ve felt with almost every contentious or attempting to be funny post we’ve ever made here (and boy did this one recently nosedive on us!).

What counts is how we all deal with it.

As we’ve said before, it’s better to be odd than a sod, and sod anyone that says otherwise. But pity those who see others as disposable and that they can simply ‘move on’ from those no longer of use to them – they’ll discover the world’s in reality a far smaller place than they may think.

As for Spychip, oh we’re keeping her busy…

‘I’ve done a lot of things I wished I hadn’t, there’s other things I never hope to do. But sliding off the map in both directions, is the sorry mess I’ve made of knowing you.’