The Week The Skeletons Tumbled (Or Rather LiveJournaled) Out Of The Mod The Sims Cupboard…

February had far too much disturbing stuff going on than was remotely comfortable to deal with, but the worst had to be the battle between those at Mod The Sims who via Sim Secret found themselves forced into browbeating MTS‘s owner Delphy and his moderators into doing what ought to have been done months before, and in the end allowed one very old but very dangerous can of worms to be reopened in the process.

The grumbling all started – ironically enough – over at Sim Secret, a popular hideaway for Mod The Sims members to bitch incessantly at how unkewl every non-MTS/GOS/MATY affiliated website is (see MedleyMisty for details). On Thursday 6th February, the following appeared:

What the first poster was talking about was the following appearing on Mod The Sims for download:

Now unless you have been living on planet Mars (or even planets Bounty or Snickers), you will know of the less-than-subtle milk marketing campaigns getting Z-list celebrities to have pictures of themselves with milk moustaches as if hinting that perhaps rather than drinking milk they’ve got semen on their face after just giving someone a blowjob (although why the blazes anyone would be smiling after having done just that is beyond our comprehension – ugh!).

Tasteless enough having custom content for that. But when it is made aimed at teen Simmies, that’s when the alarm bells start ringing – even it seems at ‘hey we’re such broadminded liberal humanist inverted snobs’. Mod The Sims.

This however was not the only problem people had with this Sims4.me persons content, in fact it seemed to be a running sore.

Sims4.me had been posting his custom content – oh yes, it certainly was a he as we shall prove later, not a schoolgirl as claimed – over at Mod The Sims since last year as well as his own eponymous website.

The strange part was that he only seemed to do custom content for teenage girls.

… most of which were of a nature that could be more than construed as revealing or linked to popular porn industry tropes.

This included a walking style modifier…

… which was in order to – wait for it…

‘Modifies the teen walk to appear less mechanical and more natural and sensual.’

The worst of it was the disgrunted posters from Mod The Sims were not hopeful that protesting to those running the place would get them anywhere.

The HP in this instance is HystericalParoxysm, someone with a track record of permabanning people first and asking questions later, but there seemed little confidence in anything being done here.

And can you blame them? The above mod came out in December last year, yet it appeared over at Mod The Sims without a single note of concern from those running the place.

 

The micro skirts meanwhile that caused so much upset due to their extensive use for panty shots at MTS by Sims4.me had been up since August last year.

Is it just us or… micro skirts as sleepwear?

Well, it wasn’t merely a matter of them being microskirts…

… it was the matter of him drooling about them having ‘bright white panties underneath.’

 

Whilst one said what was the point of trying (since Delphy had been quick to scrub complains days before), one person decided they would register their protest by doing the Simming equivalent of Martin Luther nailing his Ninety Five Theses to the door of Wittenburg Castle church (Luther deciding he wasn’t prepared to wait the half millenia before No More Nails was invented and if it made a big hole in the church door that was their tough luck) – namely posting a screenshot of the offending article with their own protest typed over it in the traditional Sim Secret style.

Note well their statement ‘we’ll see if it gets posted’ – in other words anticipating that the so-called free-for-all that Sim Secret purports to be isn’t quite such an open mike if your target happens to be one of the non-EA forum ‘Special Ones’.

Their cynicism in this case however proved unfounded, as not only were screenshots from two days before posted up from people that had protested – only for Delphy to swiftly erase them – but also plenty letting Delphy know exactly what they thought about it.

The creators were far from kids, as you shall see later…

There were two punches however that were really below the belt – although in the first case if you see exactly what had happened you can hardly blame them (up to a point) for lashing out.

‘I shouldn’t be surprised considering your past…’

What past exactly is that you ask? For those of you that already know what’s coming up next, feel free to skip on, for the rest of you, prepare for a rather unpleasant history lesson.

Delphy’s conviction: Separating the fact from the fiction.

On 25th June 2001, the Southern Daily Echo newspaper reported that one Stuart Stanfield – that is, Delphy – had plead guilty at Southampton Crown Court to thirty charges of making indecent photographs. His wife had contacted authorities over hundreds of pornographic images on his laptop, thirty of which involved children engaging in indecent acts.

To clarify a point here, by ‘making indecent photographs’, what was meant by this was downloading, not actually making child pornography himself per se – had that been the case they’d have locked him up and lost the key. This is legal jargon from the fact when downloading from the internet you are not physically transferring an object from one place to another, the computer is receiving instructions to make an exact copy of an object from another place. It is however a very popular public misinterpretation with tabloid newspapers in order to make a horrible situation appear far worse.

The report continued:

‘He accepts he is sexually interested in older teenage girls. For his own gratification he has downloaded pornography on a number of occasions but he emphatically denies any suggestion he is a paedophile.’

Judge Paul Darlow was not so impressed however and fined Delphy £2,500 plus £585 costs. He was also placed on the England and Wales Sex Offenders’ Register for five years. What saved him from a jail sentence was a background report which concluded that he did not present a risk to children.

For the record, in the UK possessing naked pictures of an under eighteen year old is illegal, not under sixteen as the brain donors of More Awesome Than You would claim (those of a 16-17 year old would simply qualify for a lesser conviction, but a conviction nevertheless) – who have difficulty understanding the differences between the ages of consent and the laws protecting children from exploitation until they are legally adults in the eyes of the law.

With his marriage finished, Delphy moved to the Republic of Ireland to start life afresh. Contrary to the rumours again circulating around the internet from American bar room lawyers, the Republic of Ireland does have a sex offender register – set up in fact one month before Delphy’s conviction in the UK. It is also very clear that if you are convicted outside of Ireland for a sex offence which is also illegal within Ireland, you are required to sign the Irish register – go check it yourself – and so much for the story Delphy moved there to escape the sight of the law. Whilst the British and Irish may have grumbles about extraditions from one to another (not least of all Ireland’s ‘exemption for political offences’ get-out clause to avoid deporting IRA terrorists wanted for murder), anyone that thinks Eire is some soft touch sanctuary for British jackanapes needs a big slice of STFU cake.

There’s been other accusations since surrounding Delphy and girls under the age of consent, but to be blunt every last one of them has been conjecture without a single shred of evidence to back them up with, the same sort of crap thrown against the Isacssons. 

Kapeesh?

But there’s little point pretending it hasn’t been a matter of some disquiet to veteran Simmers from the earliest days, some of whom have been wary of Delphy ever since. The gaming and modding website RelicNews had one of those in charge tartly calling Delphy the runner of a ‘panty related fangirl recruitment centre‘.

The moment Delphy started Mod The Sims in March 2004 (and Sexy Sims later), he put himself right into a position where he risked breaching (not actually breached as some idiots claim) the terms of his probation forbidding him having contact with minors during that time. However, unless some child or parent actually complained about it, nothing was ever going to be done – and Delphy wasn’t exactly going to broadcast it to the world either that he was signing The Register!

However, someone must have found out, as on 3rd November 2004 without any warning, TSR issued a blanket ban on the merest mention of anything remotely to do with Mod The Sims – the excuse being its hosting of adult content (which was later hived off to Sexy Sims). This was bizarre, since TSR was hosting what could be termed ranchy items itself.

The ‘Delphy is my hero’ and anti-TSR camps have claimed ever since this was due to MTS‘s content being for free, and thus TSR didn’t like the competition. All well and good, were it not for the small fact that plenty others were doing the same proffering free content, and indeed a number of MTS members had been offered the opportunity to put pay-for content on TSR as well, an offer abruptly withdrawn to them on the night of the 3rd November if they continued to have any contact whatsoever with those at MTS. Basically if you had any involvement with MTS, you were going to be permabanned from TSR on sight.

What was probably more telling was that TSR said in its attempt at justification that it wanted to promote ‘a child-friendly environment’. Since they were all about trying to make some dough, why would they care two custard flans about kids  – they didn’t have credit cards?! It doesn’t take too many braincells (perhaps even enough for a MATY regular) to deduce Steve Bonham and co had been tipped the wink about Delphy’s less than distant past (he would have still been signing the register at this point in time until 2006 at the latest) and in panic had turfed him out on his ear, lest some British tabloid got wind of the sort of members it attracted – which would have finished TSR overnight (remember also at that time EA directly advertised TSR on the Sims 2 Bulletin Board – something worth a forture to them and they couldn’t afford to see jeapordised).

And that kiddies is what Steve Bonham, the Isacssons, Johan and Per Burström at The Sims Resource really did to upset the Delphy acolytes all those years ago. The Pay-For content handbags-at-ten-paces was a mere part of it, and is why also some of them were happy therefore to indulge the loathesome Pescado and his goons at More Awesome Than You/Paysites Must Be Destroyed/TSR Must Be Destroyed, out of the stupidest maxim of all that ‘my enemy’s enemy is ergo my friend’ – who ironically unlike those at TSR have taken great pleasure in digging up Delphy’s past whenever they’ve felt the need for entertainment.

With friends like that, who needs enemies?

So much for the ancient history lessons: let’s go back to the present.

A Man Is Known By The Company He Keeps

Amongst those who were in praise of Sims4.me’s dubious offerings was one Lungpaul. To say this guy is dodgy is putting it mildly.

Lungpaul has a blogsite of his own, which posts stuff such as this:

Yes, a guy with an erection in front of a Simmie schoolgirl masturbating. Classy dude, isn’t he?

No wonder MTS members were upset not merely with the sort of stuff getting uploaded, but the sort of people the place was attracting in the process.

Sims4.me claims to be a collective of six teenage schoolgirls in California. This is bullshit.

The person behind Sims4.me is an Queenslander called Michael Wright. He may have been smart enough to have changed his registration details since, but pity for him he registered under his own name in the first place, betraying the truth of his identity as no Californian schoolgirl – but someone based in Australia. Which explains why all his schoolgirl Simmies happened to be wearing stereotypical Australian school uniforms – as Cloverstardropper ought to be able to confirm, there are no school uniforms in California outside of the limited private circuit: attempts to impose them on state schools as elsewhere in the USA have failed (it is a somewhat contentious subject…).

End Result

Back with the ongoing war of words between those in charge of Mod The Sims and the members, those at Sim Secret were spitting feathers over how those crying ‘foul!’ were being treated.

There was also complaints over at Garden Of Shadows – which has a regular section about the posts on Sim Secret – which included the former owner of GoS, Liegen (Liegenschonheit) – now posting as Ameranthe, giving it as a reason she’d withdrawn her downloads from MTS.

Interestingly, one of the Mod The Sims moderators – Mustluvcatz – broke silence at this point, claiming in terms that would have made a Simguru blush that they were ‘dealing with it’.

Liegen (Liegenschonheit) and MustLuvCatz then indulged in a fair old bit of spindoctoring.

‘On the surface it looks like Delphy and others are supporting someone who makes highly questionable content.’

Are you bloody serious? On the surface? On the surface?!

What a load of complete and utter bullshit!

Sims4.me had been uploading questionable content to Mod The Sims since bloody AUGUST 2013! There’s no ‘on the surface’ about it – they have been giving him room to upload his custom content onto their own website and therefore they most certainly WERE supporting Sims4.me.  It’s a bit bloody late to backpedal now, and all the deleting of Lungpaul as some token gesture of cleaning up the MTS act is a bit late now.

It got worse, with those trying to justify the unjustifiable, trying to insinuate that somehow it was the complainers’ faults at not being broadminded enough to find nothing dubious in the overt sexualisation of teen Simmies over and over again in every piece of custom content produced by someone pretending to be a Californian schoolgirl.

Seriously Mustluvcatz – take a giant running f**k to yourself.

Isbrealiomcaife however nailed it nicely:

‘I think it might be a combination of panty shots, pregnant teenagers, lacy underwear, and unlocked playground and kegstand actions.’

But lo and behold, a miracle! Having backed Sims4.me up until this point, all of a sudden, Delphy and co dropped him like a red hot brick!

BANNED! After two days of Delphy and co scrubbing the posts of anyone daring to complain about Sims4.me.

Needless to say, Sims4.me was pretty upset about this – ranting about it on his website.

And it wasn’t going to bring Ameranthe-Liegen back:

As KatieBrett said, these were items made to sexualise teen Simmies – period – and all the rewriting and wordtwisting in the world is going to change that.

And the only reason why they were taken down was thanks to some Mod The Sims members kicking up a stink at Sim Secret that spilled in turn to the larger audience at Garden of Shadows, with the result that Delphy – having rode roughshod over his members objections to the point of censoring them time and time again – shit his pants when they decided to openly beg the question as to whether his leniency towards Sims4.me and Lungpaul was towards creepy little shits sharing the same pecadillos as he still has, no matter how distasteful they may be to the rest of his readers, and no matter the real life disasters they had brought upon him thirteen years earlier.

In short, someone that clearly hadn’t learned a bloody thing from past mistakes.

Yes, it was thirteen years ago, but Delphy needs to keep it in his thick bloody skull that its the sort of ‘mistake’ that he will have to live down for life, not merely for the five years of being on that register, and thereby keep his websites as well as himself a million miles away from anything that could be construed as reverting back to ‘old ways’ – for the sake of the rest of the Simming community if nothing else.

This was a six month long disaster that was waiting to happen – but not only Delphy deserved the blame for this. Those who were supposed to be his fellow staff members ought to have had the common sense and courage to have made their objections known far sooner – not retrospectively claiming to have said them after the members began publicly objecting on two other websites because they were being gagged on their own.

Thankfully there does not appear to have been any calamitous effects upon MTS as per the threatened boycott, but those in charge there need to give themselves a damn good shake – before they shake the faith of any more of their members to the extent they decide to head elsewhere. Or results in horrifying publicity for the Simming community far beyond anonymous posts in Sim Secret.