Looking at the Sims wiki again after learning the full lore and timeline of the game. The order goes 3,1,2, as that is the case, 2 is the final iteration of the map development so to speak. While considering my map creation and lore this looks like Veronaville Strange Town and/or River Blossom Hills.
I am still trying to figure out how strangetown is like a wormhole space that spans life and death. Death brought his son and wife there after all. 😂 I am working on an idea that death possesses Ichabod specter to marry and have a baby. I even went as far as forming a love triangle with the headless horseman. That went something like how Persephone is gone six months out the year. I mean the headless horseman was bound to an area while death had to traverse the entire world and is in charge of all the reapers. Smh I have been playing this game and watching too much scifi not to do this at this point. I was watching sandman, 😭 and this became a very possible scifi scenario. Icabod was the only one to die of natural causes, there has been to be a reason why. Female serial killers are very rare and motivation is key. If we are going for life there is no way she loved icabod more than death at this point there has to be something special. If you watched sleepy hollow you know how this is possible in my mind 😏🤣😜. Albeit it is momentary hence the worm hole bending time. And explains why Bella goth couldn't get out not that she didn't want to after she recovered some memories. The military has to have a device to bend the wormhole back and forth. Magictown seems a great place considering electromagnetic theory. Ok I'm about to geek out on technical stuff.
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I'm building a game and online school community that integrates the game and the school you can use your avatar in both the school/community and the game.
I can only build so fast. Things are moving faster than I can trade mark I have been putting my progress in GitHub. To maintain timeline of my IP. I went from building a mega bacc to writing a book to fine-tuning my homeschool curriculum and lesson plans and planner pages to sell all while raising a family alone. So just adding this here. As further online documentation.
This is by far my favorite short for a splash screen. I'm creating the frameworks necessary but I should be done by summer. I've been working on it as a personal project to teach my children for the past ten years.
Posts that explain or develop the internal logic, politics, history, or rules of the Belladonna Gulf world. Kind of a wiki.
Tags: #lore #worldbuilding #reference
Posts where I bring in-world texts such as news articles, Public Notices, in-game blogs, social media posts, etc.
Tags: #inuniverse #worldbuilding #simmedia
The Belladonna Gulf Project is the name of my UberHood in The Sims 2. I’ll be writing down the story as I play. This is both a way to document my gameplay and to create a long-running story world.
My main hood is Belladonna Cove. The project’s name comes from the idea that this world is bigger than a cove — even bigger than a bay — so I call it a gulf. All other neighborhoods are connected to it as subhoods.
Important warnings
The Sims 2 is technically a SFW game, but my gameplay is not. My gameplay and much of this blog are NSFW.
Technical & mod-related
I use a no-censor blur mod, maxis-match, realistic skintones with anatomical details (nipples, pubic hair), male parts, and other NSFW content.
My Sims do a lot of woohoo. Romance Sims will usually woohoo around a lot.
Family Sims trying for a baby will actually try and enjoy the process.
I use Inteenimater: teen Sims can woohoo (with teens, young adults, or adults) and get pregnant.
I use ACR: every time Sims get together, someone will at least end up making out.
Narrative & story-related
Other sensitive topics may appear: miscarriage, abortion, cheating, polyamory, and more. Some characters will be portrayed in unpleasant ways — for example:
Consort Capp will remain the conservative jerk EAxis intended.
The Beakers will still torment Nervous Subject.
Brandi Broke may come across as a somewhat neglectful parent.
Even if I “rescue” characters and give them happy lives, bad things will still happen — whether suggested by EAxis or added by me — whenever it makes the story more interesting.
You’re welcome to follow along, but be warned: a lot of my gameplay would likely get flagged on Instagram or most mainstream platforms. (This is probably the only place where I’ll try to avoid swearing and use euphemisms like “male parts.”)
The wholesome side
That said, I’m not aiming for gore. I also love the wholesome parts of the game — like toddlers hugging dogs, or old couples cuddling on a bench by the beach at night.
But I’ll also play with assholes — because the ugly parts of life exist too, and they make narratives more interesting.
Extra notes
If you know The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley, I will eventually recreate its “old religion” in my UberHood, just because I love that book. Expect non-Christian elements, deliberate historical inaccuracies, and a mix of Wicca and The Sims 2 witchcraft — plus a bit more of woohoo.
Featuring
Belladonna Cove as the main neighborhood;
Downtown as Downtown;
Pleasantview, Strangetown, Veronaville, Riverblossom Hills, and Desiderata Valley as shopping districts;
Bluewater Village as a shopping district;
La Fiesta Tech, Académie Le Tour, and Sim State University as university campuses;
Avalon (the only custom hood) as a shopping district.
All premade hoods were downloaded from meetme2theriver. I chose the Downtown with Tricou teens version and the Strangetown without Bella Goth version (so I had just one Bella Goth).
As for Avalon, I could not, for the life of me, create the SC4 terrain I wanted. I couldn’t find anything I truly loved. So, I downloaded this beautiful hood (it doesn’t have a Glastonbury Tor as I wished, but it is beautiful) and made that my Avalon: Wanmami Island.
About the posts
All posts fall into one of four categories: narrative, commentary, lore, or in-universe media. Some have subtypes, but everything can be found through one of the four hubs linked in the Masterpost.
About the education system
Education is what holds society together — the good, the bad, and the ugly. Smarter people than me have said that, like Émile Durkheim, for example. Paulo Freire also: if you were treated like shit, you will treat others like shit. It’s no coincidence that powerful families and institutions tend to control educational systems.
So, by the lore EAxis built for the premade Sims, and by my own desire to stir shit in my gameplay, I created a whole section dedicated to higher education in the Belladonna Gulf Project. Shitty people control a shitty education system, which creates more shitty people. Rinse and repeat.
To reinforce this, I’ll also be using a mod that limits career progression for Sims without a major (Doctors need degrees - ModTheSims). Yeah, status quo sucks — but as I warned before, ugly real-life dynamics will be present in my game.
My playstyle
My gameplay is more narrative-driven than wants or free will driven. I say it’s inspired by wants, fears, and free will — but in the end, I always put narrative intentions or my last-minute whims first.
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A quick-ish guide to the culture of The Sims 2 modding community.
Are you new to The Sims 2 community? Are you coming from more modern games, either in The Sims franchise itself or other contemporary games? Are you excited to start your #brand and become a #simfluencer and post your #earlyaccesscontent to support your #sidehustle?
Have a seat, then! Let's chat.
Hello, friend! My name's Pooklet. I've been playing since 2004 and creating since 2007. I'm by no means an expert in most forms of content creation itself, but I've been around since the heyday of The Sims 2, I've watched how community opinions have shifted (or not) since practically the beginning, and I'm hoping to give you a basic outline of the community culture that you can expect to encounter as a newcomer.
A very brief history of Sims 2 content monetization:
People have been trying to monetize content since there has been content to monetize, all the way back in the days of The Sims 1. We tend to call them "pay creators" and their websites "paysites." Some big names in this arena include The Sims Resource (their free-with-ads model is a relatively recent development, which is why you will find people to this day calling them T$R), PeggySims, Newsea, and many others that you can find on this handy website:
Paysites Must Be Destroyed
Now, if you have a glance at that website, you might be saying to yourself:
"But, that's illegal! I own the copyright to my custom content!"
Alas, no! Due to the wording of the End User License Agreement for The Sims 2, no custom content creator owns their creations for this game (or The Sims 1, or 3, or 4, for that matter, but we're talking about 2 right now). It all belongs to EA at the end of the day, and by installing and playing the game, you have agreed to these terms. Which means you have no individual, protected copyright, and it is perfectly legal for someone to download your paywalled content and then reupload it for free for others to enjoy. And they will!
Furthermore,
You are not making anything alone.
Everything from modding resources, to tutorials, to the mods required to fix disastrous glitches in the game code and make it playable at all, to the third party programs used to make any and all custom content, such as SimPE—all of these have been provided to you for free by other creators, many of whom have a usage policy that asks that people not use their freely-provided tools to make a profit. Although no one can be forced to follow a creator's policy, it is generally considered good manners to not try to make a profit off of someone else's free work. And if you are using these tools to make paywalled content, that's exactly what you're doing.
Pay creators have been ignoring these policies since the beginning of time, and so free creators likewise ignore their policies against sharing their paywalled content. Pay creators have also tried lots of different ways to keep their content exclusive, everything from trying to track leaks with slightly altered files to actively filling their content with malicious code. It has never worked.
Free creators have always found a way around these barriers. In fact, it's taken as something of a challenge to undermine monetization efforts. As you can see from Paysites Must Be Destroyed, there are entire teams of players devoted to reuploading paywalled content for free.
A culture of sharing.
The Sims 2 is something of a time capsule. At 20 years old, it predates a lot of the hyper-capitalist hustle culture that has infested every creative hobby. It is from a time when monetization was an outlier rather than the norm, and a much maligned outlier at that. This attitude has persisted for 20 years. Believe me when I say, you won't be the combo breaker. Especially now, given that The Sims 2 is not the most contemporary in the series and the community has shrunk considerably, down to the people who have either been here for a very long time, or newcomers that understand the community culture.
Also, it's just kind of not a great idea in general to try to make money off of a 20-year-old game with a pretty small community?
Like, I get that The Sims 4 is really saturated with pay creators and it's hard to get a foot in the door. I get that you might look at The Sims 2 and think that the small pond will give you room to be a big fish. It won't. You might get a handful of people willing to pay for your content, but at least one of those people will be resharing it for free.
Paywalls vs. optional donations.
Okay, so hopefully you now understand why people don't like it when you put content behind a paywall. But what about those Ko-fi and Paypal donation links you sometimes see at the bottom of people's downloads? Why is that okay, but a locked Patreon tier isn't? Well, because they're voluntary. No one is obligated to pay for that content to be able to download and use it. It's just a way for someone who does have a little extra cash to basically "tip" a creator whose content they like. You have no way of knowing whether the person who posts those links is actually receiving any donations. And that's kind of the point. Whether or not they receive any donations, they are still sharing their content, because they enjoy the hobby of making and sharing content.
"I can't make a living off of that!"
No, you can't. Because that's not what we do here. That is not part of our community culture for all the above reasons. If you want to make a reliable income off of your hobby, you're going to need to get a different hobby. Try Second Life! That is a community that actively encourages monetization. The Sims 4 allows for "early access" monetization. There's options out there for you, if what you want is to make a profit off of your creations for a game.
"Fine, what about monetized link forwarding services?"
Link forwarding services historically have malicious trackers or viruses embedded. People will also strip those and provide direct links to each other. Or they just won't download your content.
"What if I want to make YouTube videos of someone else's written tutorials and I enable ad revenue on them?"
Personally, I still think that's a dick move. I love video tutorials, I'm a very visual learner myself, and although you might feel entitled to compensation for reciting the steps of someone else's tutorial into a microphone and then editing and uploading the video, you're still monetizing someone else's freely-provided content. I would consider this an 'ask permission' scenario, one in which you tell the person, explicitly, that you will be making ad revenue off their work. If they're fine with that, then you're good! (For the record, I'm not fine with that.)
edit: more of of my thoughts on monetized youtube videos over here.
"What if—"
Look, no one can stop you from trying to monetize your content, or worse, someone else's content. But you will have the exact same arc as every pay creator who came before you: your efforts will be undermined at every turn, your reception in the greater community will be chilly at best, and it will become a battle between you and the folks resharing free reuploads of your content until any fun you initially had making content is gone.
"The steady erosion of every known social safety net beneath the crippling weight of end-stage, line-goes-up capitalism and the yawning abyss of poverty over which I am dangling has imbued me with such anxiety that I cannot engage with a hobby that precludes monetization. I am exhausted. I know no other way."
I get it, friend! I have lived in poverty all my life. I do not begrudge the impulse to find a way to make passive income off of your every waking moment. Increasingly, it seems like that is the only way to survive! Unfortunately, you will not be able to do that with this specific community. We know that we have something special here, having resisted monetization's encroach for so long, which makes us fight all the more viciously to maintain it. You are entitled to try to find ways to supplement your income, just not here. Personally, I consider that a feature, not a bug.
Bonus Round: Remember, That's Not Just Yours!
I said it earlier, but I want to reiterate: you are not making any TS2 CC alone. You are making it with tools, resources, knowledge and code that people have provided on the condition that they not be used for pay content.
To use myself as an example, "my" hair textures are a blend of resources provided by other creators. Namely, Nouk's original hair texture was edited by Vintage D, which I then further edited over the years, using parts by the creators Ephemera and Helga. It would be extremely shit of me to say "well, I think that the time that I put into my edit is worth money, so I'm charging for it" when the edits that I made would not exist without the work of those people. And it continues on down the line with edits that other people have made of my texture blends and color actions, and the content they make with them.
(If you see someone charging for these, btw, lemme know. I'd love to have a talk with them.)
In closing,
The knowledge base, the resources, the coding required to make any and all working content for The Sims 2 has been compiled for 20 years. Please understand, I'm not trying to denigrate anyone's creativity when I say: you cannot bring anything wholly "new" to TS2 CC-making, something that uses no one else's resources or programs, something you can point to and say "no one helped me with that. I did it all on my own. It is my property." Nor should you aspire to! The fun of The Sims 2 community is to share and share alike, to credit each other for our contributions, to hype each other up and iterate on shared works and resources. We've been doing it for 20 years, and hopefully we'll be doing it for many more! Wanting to be a #simfluencer is utterly antithetical to the community culture. No one is influencing anyone else. You need to leave that shit at the door if you want to be invited in.
TL;DR:
Don't show up to the commie circle-jerk trying to charge for handjobs. We're already giving them to each other for free, and nothing about your wrist technique is special enough to justify the cost.
edit: a follow-up for those who are feeling personally attacked by this post.
A quick-ish guide to the culture of The Sims 2 modding community.
Are you new to The Sims 2 community? Are you coming from more modern games, either in The Sims franchise itself or other contemporary games? Are you excited to start your #brand and become a #simfluencer and post your #earlyaccesscontent to support your #sidehustle?
Have a seat, then! Let's chat.
Hello, friend! My name's Pooklet. I've been playing since 2004 and creating since 2007. I'm by no means an expert in most forms of content creation itself, but I've been around since the heyday of The Sims 2, I've watched how community opinions have shifted (or not) since practically the beginning, and I'm hoping to give you a basic outline of the community culture that you can expect to encounter as a newcomer.
A very brief history of Sims 2 content monetization:
People have been trying to monetize content since there has been content to monetize, all the way back in the days of The Sims 1. We tend to call them "pay creators" and their websites "paysites." Some big names in this arena include The Sims Resource (their free-with-ads model is a relatively recent development, which is why you will find people to this day calling them T$R), PeggySims, Newsea, and many others that you can find on this handy website:
Paysites Must Be Destroyed
Now, if you have a glance at that website, you might be saying to yourself:
"But, that's illegal! I own the copyright to my custom content!"
Alas, no! Due to the wording of the End User License Agreement for The Sims 2, no custom content creator owns their creations for this game (or The Sims 1, or 3, or 4, for that matter, but we're talking about 2 right now). It all belongs to EA at the end of the day, and by installing and playing the game, you have agreed to these terms. Which means you have no individual, protected copyright, and it is perfectly legal for someone to download your paywalled content and then reupload it for free for others to enjoy. And they will!
Furthermore,
You are not making anything alone.
Everything from modding resources, to tutorials, to the mods required to fix disastrous glitches in the game code and make it playable at all, to the third party programs used to make any and all custom content, such as SimPE—all of these have been provided to you for free by other creators, many of whom have a usage policy that asks that people not use their freely-provided tools to make a profit. Although no one can be forced to follow a creator's policy, it is generally considered good manners to not try to make a profit off of someone else's free work. And if you are using these tools to make paywalled content, that's exactly what you're doing.
Pay creators have been ignoring these policies since the beginning of time, and so free creators likewise ignore their policies against sharing their paywalled content. Pay creators have also tried lots of different ways to keep their content exclusive, everything from trying to track leaks with slightly altered files to actively filling their content with malicious code. It has never worked.
Free creators have always found a way around these barriers. In fact, it's taken as something of a challenge to undermine monetization efforts. As you can see from Paysites Must Be Destroyed, there are entire teams of players devoted to reuploading paywalled content for free.
A culture of sharing.
The Sims 2 is something of a time capsule. At 20 years old, it predates a lot of the hyper-capitalist hustle culture that has infested every creative hobby. It is from a time when monetization was an outlier rather than the norm, and a much maligned outlier at that. This attitude has persisted for 20 years. Believe me when I say, you won't be the combo breaker. Especially now, given that The Sims 2 is not the most contemporary in the series and the community has shrunk considerably, down to the people who have either been here for a very long time, or newcomers that understand the community culture.
Also, it's just kind of not a great idea in general to try to make money off of a 20-year-old game with a pretty small community?
Like, I get that The Sims 4 is really saturated with pay creators and it's hard to get a foot in the door. I get that you might look at The Sims 2 and think that the small pond will give you room to be a big fish. It won't. You might get a handful of people willing to pay for your content, but at least one of those people will be resharing it for free.
Paywalls vs. optional donations.
Okay, so hopefully you now understand why people don't like it when you put content behind a paywall. But what about those Ko-fi and Paypal donation links you sometimes see at the bottom of people's downloads? Why is that okay, but a locked Patreon tier isn't? Well, because they're voluntary. No one is obligated to pay for that content to be able to download and use it. It's just a way for someone who does have a little extra cash to basically "tip" a creator whose content they like. You have no way of knowing whether the person who posts those links is actually receiving any donations. And that's kind of the point. Whether or not they receive any donations, they are still sharing their content, because they enjoy the hobby of making and sharing content.
"I can't make a living off of that!"
No, you can't. Because that's not what we do here. That is not part of our community culture for all the above reasons. If you want to make a reliable income off of your hobby, you're going to need to get a different hobby. Try Second Life! That is a community that actively encourages monetization. The Sims 4 allows for "early access" monetization. There's options out there for you, if what you want is to make a profit off of your creations for a game.
"Fine, what about monetized link forwarding services?"
Link forwarding services historically have malicious trackers or viruses embedded. People will also strip those and provide direct links to each other. Or they just won't download your content.
"What if I want to make YouTube videos of someone else's written tutorials and I enable ad revenue on them?"
Personally, I still think that's a dick move. I love video tutorials, I'm a very visual learner myself, and although you might feel entitled to compensation for reciting the steps of someone else's tutorial into a microphone and then editing and uploading the video, you're still monetizing someone else's freely-provided content. I would consider this an 'ask permission' scenario, one in which you tell the person, explicitly, that you will be making ad revenue off their work. If they're fine with that, then you're good! (For the record, I'm not fine with that.)
edit: more of of my thoughts on monetized youtube videos over here.
"What if—"
Look, no one can stop you from trying to monetize your content, or worse, someone else's content. But you will have the exact same arc as every pay creator who came before you: your efforts will be undermined at every turn, your reception in the greater community will be chilly at best, and it will become a battle between you and the folks resharing free reuploads of your content until any fun you initially had making content is gone.
"The steady erosion of every known social safety net beneath the crippling weight of end-stage, line-goes-up capitalism and the yawning abyss of poverty over which I am dangling has imbued me with such anxiety that I cannot engage with a hobby that precludes monetization. I am exhausted. I know no other way."
I get it, friend! I have lived in poverty all my life. I do not begrudge the impulse to find a way to make passive income off of your every waking moment. Increasingly, it seems like that is the only way to survive! Unfortunately, you will not be able to do that with this specific community. We know that we have something special here, having resisted monetization's encroach for so long, which makes us fight all the more viciously to maintain it. You are entitled to try to find ways to supplement your income, just not here. Personally, I consider that a feature, not a bug.
Bonus Round: Remember, That's Not Just Yours!
I said it earlier, but I want to reiterate: you are not making any TS2 CC alone. You are making it with tools, resources, knowledge and code that people have provided on the condition that they not be used for pay content.
To use myself as an example, "my" hair textures are a blend of resources provided by other creators. Namely, Nouk's original hair texture was edited by Vintage D, which I then further edited over the years, using parts by the creators Ephemera and Helga. It would be extremely shit of me to say "well, I think that the time that I put into my edit is worth money, so I'm charging for it" when the edits that I made would not exist without the work of those people. And it continues on down the line with edits that other people have made of my texture blends and color actions, and the content they make with them.
(If you see someone charging for these, btw, lemme know. I'd love to have a talk with them.)
In closing,
The knowledge base, the resources, the coding required to make any and all working content for The Sims 2 has been compiled for 20 years. Please understand, I'm not trying to denigrate anyone's creativity when I say: you cannot bring anything wholly "new" to TS2 CC-making, something that uses no one else's resources or programs, something you can point to and say "no one helped me with that. I did it all on my own. It is my property." Nor should you aspire to! The fun of The Sims 2 community is to share and share alike, to credit each other for our contributions, to hype each other up and iterate on shared works and resources. We've been doing it for 20 years, and hopefully we'll be doing it for many more! Wanting to be a #simfluencer is utterly antithetical to the community culture. No one is influencing anyone else. You need to leave that shit at the door if you want to be invited in.
TL;DR:
Don't show up to the commie circle-jerk trying to charge for handjobs. We're already giving them to each other for free, and nothing about your wrist technique is special enough to justify the cost.
If you're already set on the idea that you should be able to charge for content, this post is not for you, and I do not owe you a space on my blog to make your case lol.
This post came about as a result of seeing new community members who approach TS2 with a TS4 mindset and then end up absolutely floundering when the reception that they get is not at all what they were expecting. This post is not intended to convince anyone of anything, just to provide context for our unique community culture surrounding monetization.
But since you (people who are convinced of your right to sell CC, and think I am an appropriate soundboard for those opinions) will not stop being weirdos in my inbox:
As I said in the first post, no one can stop you from charging for CC. However, I can guarantee you that at least one of the tools you are using to make it has been provided to you on the condition that it not be used to make paid content. So if you go ahead and do that anyway, you have already broken the social contract, and whatever moral high ground you had has been ceded.
If you felt personally attacked by words like "simfluencer" and thought that was a cruel mischaracterization of people who charge for CC: I was referring to an actual person who actually stole someone else's CC to pass off as their own and actually has a merch store with #simfluencer stickers and hats for sale. Like, I didn't make this up lol. This is exactly the type of person I was talking about in this post, who is trying to achieve TikTok-esque influencer status in a community full of commie trilobites who couldn't give less of a fuck.
"I'm disabled, I can't work a regular job!" Same, and I'm so sorry we live in a world that devalues our contributions, that refuses us parity and kindness, that bleeds us dry of what little money we have just to try to maintain even a fraction of the quality of life that able-bodied people take for granted. I want a kinder world for you. I want you to thrive and succeed. I also know that, my own personal opinions on CC monetization aside, your battle to charge for your content in this specific community is so uphill as to be basically a 90° angle. Even if I was totally pro paid CC, it would not change the fact that the vast majority of people in the community aren't. I'm not saying "you should've picked a different hobby, you idiot, you fucking rube," I'm telling you that you have chosen one of the few remaining communities with a very strict socially-enforced contract against monetization in which to try to monetize and that is, objectively, not a good use of your time. Your skills are valuable, they are transferable, and if you want to make money doing something similar in a community that is more receptive to monetization, you absolutely can, and that would be a better use of your time.
"Artists should be allowed to charge for their work." Yep, for their work. But the work you do here isn't just yours. Here's a metaphor I've used before: if you're a fiber artist and you want to make and sell scarves, that's great! What's not great is finding a free pattern that very clearly states "do not use this for items you intend to sell" and saying to yourself "okay but it's my yarn and my time and I deserve to be paid for these scarves that I'm making, and I should be allowed to do it with this specific pattern." No one can stop you, but it does signal that yours is the only work that is of value to you, and you do not respect the wishes of the person without whom you could never have made those scarves. "They provided it for free, so I can do what I want with it" is exactly the selfish mindset that y'all are sobbing is a cruel mischaracterization.
"So you're telling me my contributions are worthless." No, I'm telling you to value the work of the people whose resources you are using! I'm telling you that the free-sharing ecosystem of The Sims 2 was established over 20 years ago, and that means that some of our most foundational tools were created by people with no-paid-content policies and if you do it anyway, you have broken the social contract. Whether you agree with that contract or feel it is outdated or unfair is completely besides point. If you do not respect the people whose work you're using, why should your work be respected? If you refuse to abide the policies of those of us who have asked you not to monetize our resources, why on earth should you be entitled to compensation?
Yep old school original ts2 players are old enough to remember what it felt like to see the first mod. Create the first mod and tools. We were envious and thankful. I remember the pay site war. I used to sit in the middle and happy tipping won. I remember I didn't have extra money in college and couldn't afford tsr. 😭 I respected the hustle. But that was their stuff not others at first. Then there was a time tsr and mts were at odds for hosting others creations. i always pitched revenue sharing. We shall see if people stop being selfish with the money.
A quick-ish guide to the culture of The Sims 2 modding community.
Are you new to The Sims 2 community? Are you coming from more modern games, either in The Sims franchise itself or other contemporary games? Are you excited to start your #brand and become a #simfluencer and post your #earlyaccesscontent to support your #sidehustle?
Have a seat, then! Let's chat.
Hello, friend! My name's Pooklet. I've been playing since 2004 and creating since 2007. I'm by no means an expert in most forms of content creation itself, but I've been around since the heyday of The Sims 2, I've watched how community opinions have shifted (or not) since practically the beginning, and I'm hoping to give you a basic outline of the community culture that you can expect to encounter as a newcomer.
A very brief history of Sims 2 content monetization:
People have been trying to monetize content since there has been content to monetize, all the way back in the days of The Sims 1. We tend to call them "pay creators" and their websites "paysites." Some big names in this arena include The Sims Resource (their free-with-ads model is a relatively recent development, which is why you will find people to this day calling them T$R), PeggySims, Newsea, and many others that you can find on this handy website:
Paysites Must Be Destroyed
Now, if you have a glance at that website, you might be saying to yourself:
"But, that's illegal! I own the copyright to my custom content!"
Alas, no! Due to the wording of the End User License Agreement for The Sims 2, no custom content creator owns their creations for this game (or The Sims 1, or 3, or 4, for that matter, but we're talking about 2 right now). It all belongs to EA at the end of the day, and by installing and playing the game, you have agreed to these terms. Which means you have no individual, protected copyright, and it is perfectly legal for someone to download your paywalled content and then reupload it for free for others to enjoy. And they will!
Furthermore,
You are not making anything alone.
Everything from modding resources, to tutorials, to the mods required to fix disastrous glitches in the game code and make it playable at all, to the third party programs used to make any and all custom content, such as SimPE—all of these have been provided to you for free by other creators, many of whom have a usage policy that asks that people not use their freely-provided tools to make a profit. Although no one can be forced to follow a creator's policy, it is generally considered good manners to not try to make a profit off of someone else's free work. And if you are using these tools to make paywalled content, that's exactly what you're doing.
Pay creators have been ignoring these policies since the beginning of time, and so free creators likewise ignore their policies against sharing their paywalled content. Pay creators have also tried lots of different ways to keep their content exclusive, everything from trying to track leaks with slightly altered files to actively filling their content with malicious code. It has never worked.
Free creators have always found a way around these barriers. In fact, it's taken as something of a challenge to undermine monetization efforts. As you can see from Paysites Must Be Destroyed, there are entire teams of players devoted to reuploading paywalled content for free.
A culture of sharing.
The Sims 2 is something of a time capsule. At 20 years old, it predates a lot of the hyper-capitalist hustle culture that has infested every creative hobby. It is from a time when monetization was an outlier rather than the norm, and a much maligned outlier at that. This attitude has persisted for 20 years. Believe me when I say, you won't be the combo breaker. Especially now, given that The Sims 2 is not the most contemporary in the series and the community has shrunk considerably, down to the people who have either been here for a very long time, or newcomers that understand the community culture.
Also, it's just kind of not a great idea in general to try to make money off of a 20-year-old game with a pretty small community?
Like, I get that The Sims 4 is really saturated with pay creators and it's hard to get a foot in the door. I get that you might look at The Sims 2 and think that the small pond will give you room to be a big fish. It won't. You might get a handful of people willing to pay for your content, but at least one of those people will be resharing it for free.
Paywalls vs. optional donations.
Okay, so hopefully you now understand why people don't like it when you put content behind a paywall. But what about those Ko-fi and Paypal donation links you sometimes see at the bottom of people's downloads? Why is that okay, but a locked Patreon tier isn't? Well, because they're voluntary. No one is obligated to pay for that content to be able to download and use it. It's just a way for someone who does have a little extra cash to basically "tip" a creator whose content they like. You have no way of knowing whether the person who posts those links is actually receiving any donations. And that's kind of the point. Whether or not they receive any donations, they are still sharing their content, because they enjoy the hobby of making and sharing content.
"I can't make a living off of that!"
No, you can't. Because that's not what we do here. That is not part of our community culture for all the above reasons. If you want to make a reliable income off of your hobby, you're going to need to get a different hobby. Try Second Life! That is a community that actively encourages monetization. The Sims 4 allows for "early access" monetization. There's options out there for you, if what you want is to make a profit off of your creations for a game.
"Fine, what about monetized link forwarding services?"
Link forwarding services historically have malicious trackers or viruses embedded. People will also strip those and provide direct links to each other. Or they just won't download your content.
"What if I want to make YouTube videos of someone else's written tutorials and I enable ad revenue on them?"
Personally, I still think that's a dick move. I love video tutorials, I'm a very visual learner myself, and although you might feel entitled to compensation for reciting the steps of someone else's tutorial into a microphone and then editing and uploading the video, you're still monetizing someone else's freely-provided content. I would consider this an 'ask permission' scenario, one in which you tell the person, explicitly, that you will be making ad revenue off their work. If they're fine with that, then you're good! (For the record, I'm not fine with that.)
edit: more of of my thoughts on monetized youtube videos over here.
"What if—"
Look, no one can stop you from trying to monetize your content, or worse, someone else's content. But you will have the exact same arc as every pay creator who came before you: your efforts will be undermined at every turn, your reception in the greater community will be chilly at best, and it will become a battle between you and the folks resharing free reuploads of your content until any fun you initially had making content is gone.
"The steady erosion of every known social safety net beneath the crippling weight of end-stage, line-goes-up capitalism and the yawning abyss of poverty over which I am dangling has imbued me with such anxiety that I cannot engage with a hobby that precludes monetization. I am exhausted. I know no other way."
I get it, friend! I have lived in poverty all my life. I do not begrudge the impulse to find a way to make passive income off of your every waking moment. Increasingly, it seems like that is the only way to survive! Unfortunately, you will not be able to do that with this specific community. We know that we have something special here, having resisted monetization's encroach for so long, which makes us fight all the more viciously to maintain it. You are entitled to try to find ways to supplement your income, just not here. Personally, I consider that a feature, not a bug.
Bonus Round: Remember, That's Not Just Yours!
I said it earlier, but I want to reiterate: you are not making any TS2 CC alone. You are making it with tools, resources, knowledge and code that people have provided on the condition that they not be used for pay content.
To use myself as an example, "my" hair textures are a blend of resources provided by other creators. Namely, Nouk's original hair texture was edited by Vintage D, which I then further edited over the years, using parts by the creators Ephemera and Helga. It would be extremely shit of me to say "well, I think that the time that I put into my edit is worth money, so I'm charging for it" when the edits that I made would not exist without the work of those people. And it continues on down the line with edits that other people have made of my texture blends and color actions, and the content they make with them.
(If you see someone charging for these, btw, lemme know. I'd love to have a talk with them.)
In closing,
The knowledge base, the resources, the coding required to make any and all working content for The Sims 2 has been compiled for 20 years. Please understand, I'm not trying to denigrate anyone's creativity when I say: you cannot bring anything wholly "new" to TS2 CC-making, something that uses no one else's resources or programs, something you can point to and say "no one helped me with that. I did it all on my own. It is my property." Nor should you aspire to! The fun of The Sims 2 community is to share and share alike, to credit each other for our contributions, to hype each other up and iterate on shared works and resources. We've been doing it for 20 years, and hopefully we'll be doing it for many more! Wanting to be a #simfluencer is utterly antithetical to the community culture. No one is influencing anyone else. You need to leave that shit at the door if you want to be invited in.
TL;DR:
Don't show up to the commie circle-jerk trying to charge for handjobs. We're already giving them to each other for free, and nothing about your wrist technique is special enough to justify the cost.
If you're already set on the idea that you should be able to charge for content, this post is not for you, and I do not owe you a space on my blog to make your case lol.
This post came about as a result of seeing new community members who approach TS2 with a TS4 mindset and then end up absolutely floundering when the reception that they get is not at all what they were expecting. This post is not intended to convince anyone of anything, just to provide context for our unique community culture surrounding monetization.
But since you (people who are convinced of your right to sell CC, and think I am an appropriate soundboard for those opinions) will not stop being weirdos in my inbox:
As I said in the first post, no one can stop you from charging for CC. However, I can guarantee you that at least one of the tools you are using to make it has been provided to you on the condition that it not be used to make paid content. So if you go ahead and do that anyway, you have already broken the social contract, and whatever moral high ground you had has been ceded.
If you felt personally attacked by words like "simfluencer" and thought that was a cruel mischaracterization of people who charge for CC: I was referring to an actual person who actually stole someone else's CC to pass off as their own and actually has a merch store with #simfluencer stickers and hats for sale. Like, I didn't make this up lol. This is exactly the type of person I was talking about in this post, who is trying to achieve TikTok-esque influencer status in a community full of commie trilobites who couldn't give less of a fuck.
"I'm disabled, I can't work a regular job!" Same, and I'm so sorry we live in a world that devalues our contributions, that refuses us parity and kindness, that bleeds us dry of what little money we have just to try to maintain even a fraction of the quality of life that able-bodied people take for granted. I want a kinder world for you. I want you to thrive and succeed. I also know that, my own personal opinions on CC monetization aside, your battle to charge for your content in this specific community is so uphill as to be basically a 90° angle. Even if I was totally pro paid CC, it would not change the fact that the vast majority of people in the community aren't. I'm not saying "you should've picked a different hobby, you idiot, you fucking rube," I'm telling you that you have chosen one of the few remaining communities with a very strict socially-enforced contract against monetization in which to try to monetize and that is, objectively, not a good use of your time. Your skills are valuable, they are transferable, and if you want to make money doing something similar in a community that is more receptive to monetization, you absolutely can, and that would be a better use of your time.
"Artists should be allowed to charge for their work." Yep, for their work. But the work you do here isn't just yours. Here's a metaphor I've used before: if you're a fiber artist and you want to make and sell scarves, that's great! What's not great is finding a free pattern that very clearly states "do not use this for items you intend to sell" and saying to yourself "okay but it's my yarn and my time and I deserve to be paid for these scarves that I'm making, and I should be allowed to do it with this specific pattern." No one can stop you, but it does signal that yours is the only work that is of value to you, and you do not respect the wishes of the person without whom you could never have made those scarves. "They provided it for free, so I can do what I want with it" is exactly the selfish mindset that y'all are sobbing is a cruel mischaracterization.
"So you're telling me my contributions are worthless." No, I'm telling you to value the work of the people whose resources you are using! I'm telling you that the free-sharing ecosystem of The Sims 2 was established over 20 years ago, and that means that some of our most foundational tools were created by people with no-paid-content policies and if you do it anyway, you have broken the social contract. Whether you agree with that contract or feel it is outdated or unfair is completely besides point. If you do not respect the people whose work you're using, why should your work be respected? If you refuse to abide the policies of those of us who have asked you not to monetize our resources, why on earth should you be entitled to compensation?
"I'm disabled, I can't work a regular job!"
"Artists should be allowed to charge for their work."
If youre skilled enough to make 3d meshes and good textures you have a chance on Sketchfab or Artstation. There are so many websites to make money off non sims based work.
And if you really want to stay in the sims niche, I have a suggestion. Offer commissions. Not of in game assets but like art pieces.
Offer to make, with every asset from scratch, a blender scene for someone of their favourite sim/sims.
If you wanna be paid as an artist in the sims niche, then do what other artists do in other fandoms. I promise you, you will be respected more than by paywalling game assets. And it will actually be something new and refreshing in this community! Because god knows the only commissions Ive seen offered in the sims community is for in game assets!
people IMMEDIATELY start whining that they give up and won't play the game anymore bc figuring out piracy is "too hard"
some guy comes out and says he might pick up anadius' work but his first course of action is to tell people to not harrass him and that the sims community is "technically challenged", meaning it wasn't just anadius who was being a meanie (I saw you guys playing offended over the years) but that this is what outsiders genuinely see in us so perhaps it is time for some introspection
When will the community finally get off their asses and start to learn the bare fucking minimum of tech-savviness 101? Some of you act like you believe people are born with an innate understanding of computers and you just missed the memo when god was handing out tech-savviness vouchers. NO. People are tech-savvy because they took the time to research and learn and MADE MISTAKES in the past, which some of you are flat out refusing to do. This is embarrassing. This is the reputation we have built for ourselves. I don't care how hard or scary you think it is, challenging your brain every now and then is good and healthy and needs to be done lest all you guys get dementia at 50 for being too comfortable with being served by others all the time. You are caging yourselves with your low self-efficacy, how are you not feeling suffocated by that?
It's okay to ask people for help so you can learn how to do things, but this service-mentality and the "ooh i'm not tech-savvy" excuses have got to stop.
through my brother i learned that there is a whole parallel community of techy simmers who just do not associate at all with the rest of us because they can't deal with our bs and i can't even blame them
we're literally worse off because of our behaviour
👆 YEP, i recently learned this too through another community, to say i was embarrassed, is a great understatement, fuck sake 🙈
sailing the seas is NOT scary nor difficult, take this time to:
correct your mindset
challenge yourself and learn something new
most of us are willing to help but you HAVE TO apply yourself first and foremost
not bully or harass those helping, be it whoever takes over for anadius, if at all (i saw the garbage yall were saying too, lmao yikes!)
NO body wants to listen to or help a whiner
the information IS out there, go find it, try it out and then ask for help.
BE. PATIENT. mistakes will be made so make your backups and try, try again. it is absolutely *not* that serious, remember the sims is a GAME.
i say this from someone who is working on settling into Fedora from PopOS with some (albeit inconsistent & shitty) linux experience here'n'there prior with techy friends and family. you think i just know how to *do* shit? NO! absolutely the hell not! i scour the internet, i bookmark everything, i read up about on any kind of down time i have. i try it once im home, if i get stuck, i go look AGAIN AND AGAIN, i will try somemthing 6-12x before i up and ask someone for help and i am PATIENT and kind about it. i use my manners, like PLEASE AND THANK YOU. c'mon folks, whats the old saying?
Yeah. I feel like too many just wait for the solution instead of finding it themselves. I spent my spare time trying to create mods but before I figured it out one was made. But I tried first and there have been times I tweaked the ones I found. I was going to publish my mega bacc but decided to just make a game.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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Natia Curtain, Palm, Coffee Table and Magazine Rack - for The Sims 2
These are 4to2 conversions from Soloriya, low poly. The magazine rack is a functional bookshelf/magazine rack.
DOWNLOAD HERE
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If you want to support my creations, you can send me a donation with Paypal or Ko-fi ☕ If you want to ask for a Paid Commission, HERE you can find more details. Thank you ❤️
This is another small update but a necessary one due to Bug Fixes.
Bug Fixes - Changing the oil/tire resulted in an object error, this has been fixed.
Bug Fixes - Slashing a tire resulted in an object error, this has been fixed.
Visit Other Sims - My edit of Meduza edit of Visit Other Sims conflicts version 2009 of Inges Institution Sign. Use version 201C instead! If you are keen on sticking to version 2009, @teaaddictyt has made an edit to Visit Other Sims to be compatible! (Thank you, Tea!)
CAPS - The dialog for choosing a parking spot no longer shows for business owners, they will automatically park in a parking spot.
Spare Tire - Adds the option to store tires in a car (Closest I could get to a trunk inventory for now) This is done through attributes, so some compPatches needed to be updated as well!
Everything is included in the download link. There are 2 versions, one for CJH Visit Other Sims and the other for Story Progression. Choose Only One!
For those who are just updating, the only files affected by this update are:
These are *all* the Simple Life brows in Afterglow naturals, you get one family in one package per brow. I've popped Volatile bases in the individual zips, too, or you can download everything in one package!
Download Simple Life Brow Bundle
Download individually:
Heavy 1 • Heavy 2 • Heavy 3 • Heavy 4 • Heavy 5 • Heavy 6
Short 1 • Short 2 • Short 3 • Short 4
Straight 1 • Straight 2 • Straight 3 • Straight 4
Curved 1 • Curved 2 • Curved 3
Arched 1 • Unique 1
Alt - Download on Simblr
Additional credits: Antoninko for the afterglow actions! check @the-afterglow-archive for more Afterglow ₊˚⊹♡
Modern Edits (Packages) of various foods and ingredients from Sun&Moons Mods
Etc stockable foods/ingredients not related to Sun&Moons Mods
Vice & Vengeance (A Mod that I have been working on for the past year, adds functional drugs and substances with addiction systems, custom animations, and trait support)
A more in-depth STD mod, using ACR
Let me know what you what to see the most and that will probably what I work on the most! XD
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Here's a cute and fun mod I worked on, with help as usual from @lamare-sims and @morepopcorn (thank you both!! ❤️❤️) that enables turdlers to take a nap in these strollers by @crispsandkerosene 🥱💤 Recolours not included, download from the original post!
This is replacement of the mesh file of original strollers and uses the same GUIDs so replace the mesh file with mine if you'd like this feature! All credit to Crisps for the original conversion, I love these things.
Pics and details below the cut!
Now, your sims can take their mini humans to the park (with mods, lol) and have them snooze in a comfy stroller! yay!
Toddlers will fall asleep autonomously if their energy is less than -25 (3/8s lol, you're welcome) and snooze until their energy is at 75.
(Random modder note for anyone confused: needs work on a -100 to 100 scale with 0 being 50% or half the bar!)
You can cancel their interaction to wake them up, but you cannot click on them to say "wake up".
If a toddler is asleep, an adult / caregiver will not be able to interact with them or with the stroller.
The "cushy" expensive stroller has them gain energy faster than the cheaper one.
If a toddler's energy is literally empty (-100), they will tantrum incessantly instead of falling asleep. I couldn't figure out why sorry - so if this is the case, use cheats to bump the toddler's energy up a little so they stop screaming and fall asleep. Poor baby just really wants to go to bed I guess 🤷♀️😂
The animation I've used is from toddlers going into energy failure while on the floor, and not having enough room to fall onto their back to pass out. Thus it doesn't QUITE look right for stroller napping... but it was an existing "toddler asleep sitting up" animation so thought I'd use it anyway! (I have also definitely seen my kids fall asleep like this lol so there you go.)
There is a small snapping "jump" when they fall asleep because they have to move to a different slot to account for the way the animation works. Tech speak aside, it's fine and not a bug, and I was okay with it 😂
Another random "fix" was with Poppy's help the stroller position has been adjusted on the tile so it no longer clips into a wall if placed right next to one👍
As always, let me know of bugs, conflicts, issues, etc 😊
