The Life Of Riley: The Return Of Dolphinz2121

It’s strange. On Thursday night one of us had a touch of nostalgia and randomly clicked through some of the now long moribund links we still have up to those bloggers whom have vanished, our little lights in the window in the hope one day they’ll reappear.

One of them was Dolphinz2121 aka Peaceluvdolphinz on DeviantArt, one of the geeky good eggs of the early days of the EA forum Sims 3 community. Like Ruby The ConFuzzled, schoolwork took its toll and apart from a brief comeback at Simpletons (R.I.P), by 2013 she had vanished, her blog abandoned.

By chance today, the other of us was doing a check on the Dumblr for the first time in what seems forever (we’ve each had a nightmarish last two months for reasons we’ll go into when time allows…), and they found this message:

Time to do some rapid catching up!

Unfortunately, to begin with, each of our hearts sank in turn.

Great to see she was in further education.

But this was going to be another Tumblr with an inexhaustive list concerning the person’s sexuality, what pronouns you could and could not use, what tags must be put on posts to stop followers being ‘triggered’… in short everything that has made us despise Dumblr with a passion as the place where the human race takes itself seriously to an extent beyond all parody.

And we’re sorry, but we’re tired of it.

Maybe it has been the last year where you view these things online and realise this is what has brought us to a world messed up seemingly beyond all redemption: where we micromanage personal trivia with the entire planet which once upon a time was only shared with close friends at most, where the unimportant is inflated to crises level as a means of ignoring real, tangible, pressing socio-economic problems which threaten the continued existence of that fragile society reliant on the social contract that the majority of citizens have a stake in its maintenance rather than some Hobbesian state of nature little better than the jungle; and ultimately where an adult baby can be put in charge of the most powerful nation on earth because one nation’s sense of values and priorities has become f**ked up to the nth degree.

(If that sounds snide, look no further than Trump threatening to turn North Korea into wasteland – actually they’re doing a grand enough job doing that themselves without anyone else’s intervention – whilst ignoring his Caribbean neighbours and a certain part of the U.S. called Puerto Rico being turned into wasteland by back to back hurricanes. Meanwhile, Black Lives Matter showed solidarity with their ‘brethren’ by making up stories about Florida police barring blacks from shelters whilst doing as much as Trump – ie. f**k all – to help relief efforts on the U.S. mainland, let alone the majority black Caribbean islands now flattened to matchwood. Like we said, a country that’s completely lost the plot).

But the initial instinct, from both of us, was to turn our backs.

Whatever Dolphinz2121 had become, we wanted to keep our memory of the girl we’d once liked.

Then one of us decided it was silly, and ploughed on, almost regretting doing so from the outset, until they spotted something interesting…

After the tortuous list of ‘privileges’ and ‘disadvantages’ (anyone who came out with this in the British Isles would be lucky to last five minutes in the real world. Except amongst Guardian readers ***), we see nestled at the bottom…

… ‘sex worker (not full service).’

 

This is all your fault Sims 3!

Those Christian fundamentalists were right to warn us of the corrupting effect this game was having on the nation’s youth. The moment you put those Spas in the game offering a variety of packages and careers part-time and full-time… – AND NOW THIS!

 

Granted, she’s just about confessed everything else to the entire internet, although there was some mild merriment over one of us having to explain to the other (the younger to the older for once…) that ‘full service’ didn’t mean they got sausage, egg, tomatos, hash browns and beans with a cup of tea afterwards – although when you think about it you’re bound to be a bit peckish after a bout of bedroom gymnastics.

[Which reminds us: one of us a few weeks ago found themselves trapped in the bar/restaurant of a London hotel locked down during a fake ‘terrorist bomb scare’ incident at the train station across the road. Somehow, they found themselves in conversation with three women – ie. they decided to pull the unwitting ebookworm sitting next to them into their yakyak group via persistence and banking on basic human politeness that they wouldn’t be told to piss off. They turned out to be ‘escorts’ on a night off catching up with one another. Cut a long story short, they were all self-employed but used to be with the same ‘agency’. Cut an even longer story short, it was pretty obvious they were looking for a shock horror reaction from the ebookworm when they told them – very matter of fact – about their career choice. Not an eyelid was batted. That’s what eight years at The Mare’s Nest, several years entrapping nonces online whilst still at school and the Trumpanzees taking over the White House does to your levels of shockability. Still, they turned out to be nice enough, and the next hour of conversation before making a polite exit was informative, if somewhat strange – the overriding impression was that contrary to Diary Of A Call Girl, the lives of those ‘on the game’ appears to be swapping the mundanity of a ‘normal’ job for mundanity of another…].

In any case, the conquest by the internet over human communications has meant the term has somewhat blurred and spread like an inkblot in the wash over the last decade. No longer the preserve of those singing ‘the minute you walked in the joint,’ everyone is a ‘sex worker’ these days from lap dancers and camgirls/boys to your local masseur deciding they need to up the ante and offer ‘happy endings’ from necessity when every other bugger in the block (and masseurs tend to multiply like tribbles…) is offering deep tissue Guatamalan Lunar Stone gluten-free massages with Cranial Sacral Therapy ***  at a rate slightly less hideously overpriced than you.

Anyway, we digress.

Whether the above was posted on the same day Dolphinz2121 contacted us, we cannot say as it is impossible to tell what day anything was posted other than the time, so we can only guess there was some correlation between it and the message we received.

We also now know that she does work in the university library to help pay for her fees (which explains her other jobs entirely – if any of you knew the half of what your average librarian was like, most of them appear to be worse than rabbits. We think it’s something to do with the glue they use in the book bindings…) and that she’s saving up for amongst other things a Grand Tour of the art galleries of Europe.

$10k in six months? Hmmm, we make that as £7400 in real money.

So that’s going to require seventy four handjobs; or thirty five deep tissue Guatamalan Lunar Stone gluten-free massages with Cranial Sacral Therapy and a Happy Ending; or thirty deep tissue Guatamalan Lunar Stone gluten-free massages with Cranial Sacral Therapy, a Happy Ending and a Happy Meal; or easiest of all rent a flat in London for a month, get yourself a ridiculous plastic leather dominatrix outfit from Harmony that will make you look like a cross between Catwoman and Foofa, and it will only require servicing eight Tory MPs (with plenty of ‘yoooou pathetic snivelling little man!’ – or woman, if the stories one of us heard about a certain MP are anything to go by…) to hit your target.

Here to help!

 

Anyway, nice to see you back. At least we hope it is…

*** Guardianistas – those who treat that paper like it is the word of Almighty God himself/herself/itself/oh shit, now we’re doing the pronoun crap! – are the biggest hypocrites on the planet who pat themselves on the back for reading a newspaper not funded by adverts from the big corporations… but instead massively subsidised by ‘grants’ from charitable foundations set up by the Rockafellars, the Gates and other members of the ‘Good Club’ (look it up!), not to mention ‘legal’ tax evasion schemes they routinely crucify everyone else for. Ho hum…)

*** Cranial Sacral Therapy: a fancy term for scratching someone head like they’re a bloody cat, except you aren’t calling them your little kitty witty woo at the same time (unless they pay extra…) and hoping they’re an ASMRtic so they’re tripping out of their mind and will give them a massive tip whilst they still have the tinglies.