Bubba hanging out in a location that no longer exists--I took this photo in May 2023, but this nice little clearing in the woods off the trail was bulldozed in February 2024.
I went for a walk during one of those unseasonably warm days and saw some Bobcats out there destroying the trees, and for no good reason either, as now this whole area has been left as a ruined muddy mess with the destroyed remnants of the trees left piled up haphazardly and no further construction having occurred. The whole mess is clearly visible from the official trail, and there are ugly barricades blocking off the little offshoots that used to go to this area and cheap "no trespassing" posters carelessly stapled to trees, leaving the entire area feeling ugly and violated and making my inner Captain Planet seethe with rage and hatred.
Reality finds a way to take everything that brings me even a moment's joy or peace from me, one way or another.
----- Granted, that area did have a decent amount of garbage strewn about, mostly in the form of bumpers and seats from 1990s cars, and random construction debris and old shipping pallets, but the whole area had a certain surreal beauty with the wildflowers and small trees growing in defiance of the garbage.
As for the name "Brantley Haywood", back when I was playing Sims 4 in September 2023, I decided to try making Bubba, just because. I let the game randomly generate a name and wound up with "Brantley Haywood", which I actually think suits him pretty well. My time playing with him was unremarkable, as Bubba as a character has always been a fairly generic "fat and possibly gay forty-something redneck dog", so as expected he lived in a small house (my go-to Sims home is the exact sort of "single-wide trailer with expansion built on" you'd expect 50% of my characters to live in, for simplicity's sake) on a small lot, did a little bit of gardening and fishing, and spent most of his time on his porch in his underwear (THAT was Sims being Sims, but 100% in character for the canon Bubba anyways) using his grill or his woodworking table.
Also, surprisingly in-character for him, he wound up adopting Herschel as a roommate, although I didn't bother exploring any sort of romantic chemistry between them since I got bored playing him and moved on to other, more interesting characters, like continuing the adventures of the Sims Reynards, Sim Domec's robotics career, and Ivaylo Boscov's reign of chaos as a psychotic evil genius with a robosexual life partner. However, in canon, I have considered Bubba and Herschel being a couple, despite the 20ish year age difference, as the idea of this fat gay redneck trying to flirt with an entirely oblivious ditz of a deer half his age is utterly hilarious and I think they work quite well in an "opposites attract" and "dad boyfriend/son boyfriend" sort of way, a dynamic I also see working between Big Jack Hawthorne and Nico Reynard, oddly enough.
