I had better address some confusion about the comic that is named “Ronnie’s Blog,” versus this thing you are reading now, which really is a Blog.

A good way to keep it straight is to think of me as an actor in a reality show. Ronnie the actual Sim plays the part of the Ronnie that you see in the Comic. The Comic is about my life as a Sim in Sunset Valley; but it is not a live-action view. It is staged and re-enacted and dramatized and condensed to fit the medium of a comic, aimed to be enjoyable to humans in the Outer World. The events depicted are somewhat in my past by the time we get them illustrated and published.

By contrast, I write these blog entries in the present time, in English, and they are not edited or TiVo-delayed or Photoshopped or dubbed for one target audience or another. I suppose the “typical” reader would be a human who’s spent some time playing The Sims, but I intend that other readers should also be able to relate. Literature has many examples of characters like me, e.g. Pinocchio, Lt. Cmdr. Data, … um… Frankenstein’s monster… well, and any number of stories about computers that become self-aware. I’m not saying they’re exactly like me.

Here’s an example of the kind of editing that goes into the Comic. Consider the scene in Issue #5, where Janet and I are talking as she fixes our exploded sink. That scene was edited to make sense to a human. As shown, it wouldn’t make any sense to a Sim. You see, Janet would never talk to me at the same time as doing the repair, because when she stands at the sink she’s looking away from me. It’s just rude and we don’t do it. No – when my sister speaks to you she faces you, pays attention to you and looks you straight in the eye. This is a cultural value, and I know that humans are sometimes frustrated by our doing it. But on the other hand, Sims don’t tell lies. I ask you, is that not worth something?

So anyway, yes, the Comic is a dramatization – a reality show, not reality as it’s happening. We live our lives normally and then, when things happen that would help to get the story across to a Comic reader, we work with humans to film those parts. Whilst we are filming, we may be told to think of something specific, perhaps not the original situation, but a different one that will lead to the type of action that the director wants. Janet is a method actor. We all are, really. We do the scenes ad-lib with our Free Will at the maximum setting (which is just the way we live when we’re not on the set.) So, for Issue #5, we really did detonate the sink (with some difficulty, I might add) early on a school day – otherwise Janet would be all “what’s my motivation for this scene?” instead of projecting the grim determination that you see. But the conversation was dubbed in. That is, the word balloons are from a conversation that didn’t really look like that, because Janet just won’t talk out the side of her mouth. Some may call that a software limitation. To me, it indicates character.

I hope this helps clarify things.