One Year On (or, ‘the sort of idiots this blog aimed to thwart – and did.’)

Didn’t bother with the one year anniversary of this place back in August.

Do the blog, post it, think what to do next. Summit to do when there’s a spare moment in life. What you see is what you get. That’s how it rolls.

But as it is now a year since two unsavoury communications reached these parts, it’s time they received an airing, as a reminder of one of the reasons this blog began in the first place and what has come to pass.

Both comments were received in response to ‘A Tale For Halloween’, the tongue-in-cheek first ‘official’ piece at Jazz-Hands upon it going public.

Reckoned some were not going to be happy about it, but in the event most people thought it a giggle (consider its connection to a certain other blog!), with only two notorious morons who had been complete liabilities to the forum that had inspired the blog were pathetic enough to spit their dummies about it.

Here’s the first one:

This charmer is one Ravenamy (or Ravenemy in some places), someone who just about cried herself to sleep when Aarin was banned from the EA forum.

Not because she liked the way Aarin was helpful to people about their game. She had not been involved in the Sims community long enough to know Aarin or her mates properly. What Ravenamy liked was Aarin bullying people for being nooby and treating them like dirt.

Which kinda lets you know what kinda person this Ravenamy is.

She was one of Aarin’s false friends who joined her post-explusion forum@jazz-hands which was going to take over the Sims world, or so they all thought.

As you can see, her opinion of fellow Sims enthusiasts didn’t amount to much, even though she had hardly been on the official Sims 3 forum of EA long enough to judge – Aarin being expelled only the day after she started posting.

Her comment about ‘wearing helmets’ refers to this.

People with certain severe handicaps need to wear these as there is the risk of injury to themselves. It doesn’t mean those having to wear them are mentally handicapped – people with cerebral palsy such as Simon Stevens (above, CEO of Enable Enterprises and a university graduate) have to because of the daily risk of falling down over in the street or even a flight of stairs.

Lovely person, that Ravenamy. Not.

That alias she chose to post to Jazz-Hands under (she always used alias when trolling as she’s such a pathetic coward) was the admin account of Let Us Eat Babies – a forum she ran with a number of the other self-styled ‘bad kids’ from forum@jazz-hands.net. Like everything else they did, it failed due to their usual lack of direction and discipline.

The other post received however was beyond laughter as much it was beyond contempt, but before looking at it, just to clarify what the next correspondent was raving about, she saw Jazz-Hands as some sort of sideline of The Mare’s Nest – rather than a blog started by someone that was also involved with another blog elsewhere. Lateral thinking was never her strong point however, so you must make allowances.

The Mare’s Nest‘s relationship with forum@jazz-hands.net was kinda Hazel-rah and the Efrafans (if you’ve ever read ‘Watership Down’, which you should. Now!), trying to save them from destroying themselves. It was just about the only place that ever mentioned them, as most regarded forum@jazz-hands.net members as scum thanks to their trolling on others blogs and forums.

Off-blog, we had lots of arguments about them. Lots.

Unfortunately, this particular Efrafa had far too many Vervains and not one Captain Campion, and proved a lost cause, but that’s another tale.

Now for the missive.

For the record, a lot of people outside of the forum@jazz-hands.net orbit would refuse to have given VintageLydia (LyrianFleur on the official Sims 3 forum) their e-mail address, particularly after she and her friends bullied an old lady called Tussy there. She was daft, dangerous, and as plenty learned the hard way, destructive, causing trouble everywhere she went.

So try to get your head around this.

Upon the demise of the forum about Sims 3 they had been a member of, that is forum@jazz-hands.net, your humble narrator wanted to run a blog called Jazz-Hands about the Sims 3.

That okay so far?

They were upset at the way it had all ended and objected to the way the rest of its members wanted to throw everything about it in the bin like it was a forgotten toy they had grown bored with.

The other forum@jazz-hands.net members had already announced they were starting two other forums of their own under entirely different names, Arrogance Is Bliss and Little Tin Box – a week before forum@jazz-hands.net died. One of those was VintageLydia.

No one else took up the name and logo from the old forum@jazz-hands.net. Just the one that had made custom content t-shirts and hooded tops with the Jazz-Hands logo months earlier.

VintageLydia now admitted those involved in both these post-forum@jazz-hands.net projects by this point, two months after forum@jazz-hands.net had folded, had nothing to do with playing the Sims anymore.

So that being the case, what exactly were her and Ravenamy’s objections?

On past experience of their destructive behaviour across the Sims community, it was either the fear that someone else would succeed where their ‘awesome’ cohorts had failed over and over again, or perhaps the case that some trolls can never be cured of their self-destructive behaviour and will always wish discord when others wished the best of luck.

Let’s put the above into context.

Question: What complaint has Aarin made about the use of the old Jazz-Hands logo here?

Answer: To this day, absolutely none, either directly here or on her blog.

Its perhaps never crossed the minds of some that Aarin may just have breathed a big sigh of relief in private when she learned it was used here with hugs and TLC instead of being hijacked by some of those false friends she’d gathered over her unhappy year in the Sims 3 world.

Had any legal action been taken over a non-copyrighted logo being used for non-commercial purposes, it would have been the most expensive mistake of their whole sorry lives.

Question: How many of the forums of the former forum@jazz-hands.net members has Aarin joined, or their blogs subscribed to?

Answer: Nil – although a number of them have subscribed to her Tumblr 6s And 7s. Make up your own mind as to what that says she feels about those calling themselves her ‘friends’.

Aarin may have allowed her moods to get the better of her, and her silly pride in the way of doing the right thing and making up with people she should never have fallen out with, but at least she did do good stuff too. Which is more than can be said for many of her so-called friends, who spent all of their time looking for ‘foes’ and people to be ‘foes’ with. Eventually, that will wear anyone out.

But you are known by the company you keep, which was why Pollysim disowned her old friends in the end, as she accepted they weren’t hers or anyone’s friends, just bitter twisted people looking for strangers online to lash out at. She was the ‘good’ Jazzer who put principles of right and wrong above pride. What Aarin should have done, but didn’t.

Question: Why was the old Jazz-Hands logo adopted as well as the name?

It was a good logo and didn’t deserve such an undignified end. Having made a lot of custom content clothes using it, didn’t want to see it vanish from the Sims 3 community with the stigma of the people it had represented still on it.

Those complaining about it being used here forget that they did not even bother to have links to forum@jazz-hands in their official forum signatures when it was alive or make anything to promote the place themselves. Unless you call making trouble on the official Sims 3 forum to ruin it for everyone else ‘promotion’.

For the record, only one person ever used a Jazz-Hands avatar or signature on the Official Sims 3 forum or anywhere else – Lawertend for a time over at the now folded The Simmers Club (and he was one of the biggest trolls in the Sims 2 and Sims 3 fan worlds, hardly a good advert).

Only Buddycherd and CashingTheFame Izzy promoted forum@jazz-hands.net on the Official Sims 3 forum the way any normal Sims enthusiast would, in a calm reasonable manner (those two dropped out of forum@jazz-hands.net quite early on for other places). All the rest did in ways that saw their posts soon deleted by moderators to keep the peace. You can guess why.

So those moaners can sit down and shut up about anyone ‘stealing’ the name and logo of a forum they brought disgrace to with their constant nasty behaviour to fellow Sims players across the world. Time they visited a shrink!

Which brings this post to the other reason for keeping the name Jazz-Hands and its original logo alive together. It stopped anyone, whether a former forum@jazz-hands.net member or not, from using it ever again as some sort of swastika for those evil people that think the Sims community is their playground to go around looking for people to bully and hurt, of which there are sadly still plenty.

Last summer saw a number of nasty forums and blogs that did nothing but stir up flame wars across the Sims community for their own sick amusement. Aarin’s disappearence left open the danger someone may have attempted to use the name of her old forum and its old logo as a new troll rallying flag.

In the UK in the 1960s the Mods and in the 1970s the Punks both adopted the Union Jack and designs based around it in order to reclaim the flag from people and organisations who thought it represented only their own little ‘master race’ and not everyone.

In the same spirit, the ‘Gossip’ logo was reclaimed only after it had been discarded to be used for the purpose originally intended: for fun and fan activity concerning The Sims 3, not as a symbol for anyone else’s stupid hate agendas.

One year on, Jazz-Hands lives on, unlike almost all of its critics’ efforts. You’d better get used to it, because it’s here to stay!