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Credit due to all the amazing modders who took time to create these amazing mods. None of these are mine. Also, shoutout to pleasantsims who made an amazing list filled with so many essential mods for a better game. Most of the ones i use are from that list.

Anti-Corruption Mods; mods that will help you prevent neighborhood corruption. these are a must have!!

No Corrupt Death : suppresses the corrupt death memory.

No unlink on delete : when moving tombstones, the game no longer deletes the sim in question.

Anti-Redundancy : elimnates spawning of unnecessary redundant NPCs.

Sim Blender : ultimate sims 2 management item ; acts like a “god” / IS A MUST HAVE.

Toddlers:

Baby bottle replacement : replaces the ugly green bottle with a clear one filled with milk.

Accessible toddler high chair : global mod that allows sims to access any high chair from left & right sides. custom chairs work as well.

Build & Buy Mode:

OMSPs : allows you to place more decorative objects in more places.

Rug Texture Fix : fixes the wonky ugly textures that happen to rugs when places off-grid in game.

Television Placement Mod : allows you to adjust the placement of tvs, can be moved up and down on walls like paintings.

Walk-Through Blocks : allows sims to walk around and through objects; useful for small lots.

Business Mods:

Business Mod : fixes a ton of issues with Open for Business. Get this only if you’re interested in starting a business with your sim.

Townie Budget Mod : townies no longer are able to pay for things they cannot afford. adds to realism.

Computer Mod:

Monique’s Hacked Computer : allows online shopping, sims to have bank accounts, and much more.

Education Mods:

Semester Changes : makes University 8 days instead of 24; if you’re interested in making semesters smaller for faster playthrough

Faster Homework : finish homework in 15 minutes instead of an hour.

Fix Mods:

Extended Family treated as Family : allows the game to recognize second cousins, first cousins once removed, great grandparents, great grandchildren, and great aunts and uncles as family members. No more dating distant relatives!

No Sim Loaded : removes useless “sim loaded” tokens and other garbage that slows down your game and causes lag.

Pescado’s Apartment Hack : fixes a lot of issues with apartments.

Smart Beds : forces the bed ownership system in the game to actually work. Sims will autonomously use the bed they have the most ownership of.

Hobby Mod:

Professional Blogger : sims who have maxed out enthusiasm in a hobby will earn money during the time they blog.

Job Mod:

Level Numbers Added to Job Titles : adds the job level next to the job title in menu screens. Very handy for quickly seeing what level your Sim is at in their career.

Memory Mods:

Memory Manipulator : the Memory Manipulator allows you to edit the memories of the currently selected sim. Now you can edit memories directly through an in-game menu

Met New Great Grandchild Memory : this mod gives the memory of meeting a new great grandchild.

Misc Mods:

Watch TV from All Chairs : allows your Sims to watch TV from chairs facing any direction at least 10 squares back from the TV – even if they’re facing sideways or at 45-degree angles.

Marriage Last Name Chooser : allows you to choose the last name of two Sims getting married.

Camera Mod:

Gunmod’s Camera Mod : necessary to view your skies and skylines. Allows you to view the far edges of your hood and have a top-down view, plus many more camera angles.

Pregnancy Mods:

Pregnancy Relationship Change : for when a sim’s pregnancy first shows and those around her realize she’s pregnant. Allows a Sim to figure out a baby is not “his” if he has high enough logic skill points.

Quiet Pregnancy : no longer get the pregnancy chimes after try for baby. Pregnancies will be a surprise!

Young Adults Can Enjoy Maternity : this is a suite of mods that allows your Young Adults to get pregnant and have babies in University, plus a host of other functions.

Relationship Mods:

Autonomous Casual Romance (ACR) – allows your Sims to autonomously woohoo, try for baby, make booty calls, and perform a whole host of romantic interactions. gives your Sims more freedom to make their own romantic decisions and creates a lot of drama and fun in your neighborhood. Highly recommended! It’s one of my favorite mods.

Just Be Friends Social : teens and up can ask romantic interests to “just be friends,” and then all crush/love flags between them get cleared.

Skill Mod:

Comm Skilling : controlled sims, NPCs, and townies may gain skills while visiting community lots. Enthusiasm may now be gained on community lots and while visiting.

Townie Mods:

Townie Body Diversity : any spawned townies have a chance of being either fat or fit. Every Sim is no longer thin.

Townie Move-In No Memory Loss : townies will keep all their memories when moving into a playable household.

Must Have Tools:

Sims2Pack Clean Installer : Sims2Pack Clean Installer is a tool, mainly for lots. It categorizes, catalog, and removes content, as well as preview files before installing.

Bulk Rename Utility : Software that lets you rename files ; a lot of package files come with ( ) , [ ] , +, - and even _, files with different symbols can make the game take longer to read and therefore taking more time to load.(if help is needed, leave something on my ask, i’ll help you)

The European Union already forced Apple to abandon its proprietary charging port and adopt USB-C across its entire iPhone lineup. It just did something bigger. A new EU mandate requires every smartphone sold in Europe including Apple devices to feature a battery that can be replaced by the user without specialist tools, without voiding a warranty, and without sending the device to a manufacturer approved service center. Batteries must maintain a minimum capacity threshold after a set number of charge cycles and replacement parts must remain available for up to ten years after a model goes on sale.

The consumer electronics industry built its current business model around batteries that degrade, cannot be replaced at home, and create a natural upgrade cycle every two to three years. The EU just legislated that model out of existence in the world's largest regulatory market.

Apple, Samsung, and every other manufacturer now faces a choice between redesigning their devices for the European market or accepting that their current hardware architecture is no longer legally sellable there.

She mentions multiple times in the books that she despises expensive gifts, and the ones that actually leave an impact on are her Chevy and the wooden wolf bracelet Jacob gives her. The Chevy is second-hand from Billy, and the bracelet was carved by Jacob. They hold value to her because they have personality; they speak to her tastes and were given to her with those tastes in mind.

She loves her Chevy, but it is eventually replaced with a sleek, expensive designer car gifted to her by the Cullens. She adores the bracelet but Edward puts an designer charm on it to remind her of him.

Even her clothes, which she insists are fine and suit her, are replaced with branded sweaters, dresses and heels.

She hates the idea of any kind of marriage but Edward holds vampirism over her head to get what he wants. Even when she agrees to marry him (against her will) she wants to keep it simple, wanting to simply drive to Texas and get married via a drive thru- Alice begs Bella to allow her to plan the wedding and it's easily more ostentacious and expensive than her birthday party in New Moon, which she describes as "a hundred times worse than I'd imagined"

They get rid of her preferred aesthetics in hopes that their consumerist one will stick, and one of the last things they do to her is literally strip her of her humanity.

There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered Chinese characters by age 3.

At 21 years old, heartbroken by her husband who left her for another woman, she decided to encode her feelings in a structure so intricate, so beautiful, so intellectually staggering that it still baffles scholars to this day.

Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the "Star Gauge" or "Map of the Armillary Sphere" - it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems.

Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love.

The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method.

At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) - "heart." Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui's original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.

Take for instance the outer red grid of the Star Gauge. Starting from the top right corner and reading down, you get this seven-character quatrain:

仁智懷德聖虞唐，

貞志篤終誓穹蒼，

欽所感想妄淫荒，

心憂增慕懷慘傷。

In pinyin, it is:

Rén zhì huái dé shèng yú táng,

zhēnzhì dǔ zhōng shì qióng cāng,

qīn suǒ gǎnxiǎng wàng yín huāng,

xīn yōu zēng mù huái cǎn shāng.

Notice how it rhymes? táng / cāng / huāng / shāng

The rough translation in English is: "The benevolent and wise cherish virtue, like the sage-kings Yao and Shun, With steadfast will I swear to the heavens above, What I revere and feel - how could it be wanton or dissolute? My heart's sorrow grows, longing brings only grief."

Now read it from the bottom to the top and you get this entirely different seven-character quatrain:

傷慘懷慕增憂心，

荒淫妄想感所欽，

蒼穹誓終篤志貞，

唐虞聖德懷智仁。

The pinyin:

Shāng cǎn huái mù zēng yōu xīn,

huāngyín wàngxiǎng gǎn suǒ qīn,

cāngqióng shì zhōng dǔzhì zhēn,

táng yúshèngdé huái zhì rén.

It rhymes too: xīn and qīn, zhēn and rén

And the meaning is just as beautiful and coherent: "Grief and sorrow, longing fills my worried heart, Wanton and dissolute fantasies - is that what you revere? I swear to the heavens my constancy is true, May we embody the sage-kings' virtue, wisdom, and benevolence."

That's just 2 poems out of the over 4,000 you can construct from the Xuanji Tu!

At the very center of the grid, the 8 red characters wrapped around the central heart, she "signed" her poem with a hidden message:

詩圖璇玑，始平蘇氏。 "The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping."

Or reversed:

蘇氏詩圖，璇玑始平。 "Su's poem-picture - the Armillary Sphere begins in peace."

Many scholars, and even emperors, throughout Chinese history have been completely obsessed by Su Hui's puzzle.

For instance, in the Ming dynasty, a scholar named Kang Wanmin (康萬民) devoted his entire life to the poems (kangshiw.com/contents/461/2…), ending up documenting twelve different reading methods - forward, backward, diagonal, radiating, corner-to-corner, spiraling - and extracting 4,206 poems. His book on the subject ("Reading Methods for the Xuanji Tu Poems", 璇璣圖詩讀法) runs to hundreds of pages.

Empress Wu Zetian herself, the legendary woman emperor of the Tang dynasty, wrote a preface to the Xuanji Tu around 692 CE (baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BB%87…).

Incredibly, there's even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems:

- The name 璇玑 (Xuanji) - Armillary Sphere - is astronomical in meaning and the way the poems can be read mirrors the way celestial bodies orbit around a fixed center. It's a model of the heavens.

- Her original work, with the characters woven on silk brocade, was in five colors (red, black, blue/green, purple, and yellow) which correspond to the Five Elements (五行) - the foundational Chinese philosophical system that explains how the universe operates. So it's also a model of the entire cosmic order according to ancient Chinese philosophy.

- It's also of course deeply mathematical with this 29 x 29 perfect square grid, with sub-squares, lines and rectangles, and a structure which allows for symmetrical reading patterns in all directions

- Last but not least, the content of the poems themselves contain multiple registers. On top of expressing her personal grief and longing for her husband, it's also filled with accusations against the concubine (Zhao Yangtai) he left her for, reflections on politics (with many references to sage-kings) and philosophical reflections.

So the Star Gauge is simultaneously:

- A love letter (expressing personal longing)

- A legal brief (arguing her case against her rival)

- A cosmological model (structured like the heavens)

- A Five Element diagram (encoding the fundamental structure of the world according to ancient Chinese philosophy)

- A mathematical construction with perfect symmetry and precision

And yet, for all this complexity, we should not forget this was all ultimately in service of the simplest human message imaginable: a 21-year-old woman asking the love of her life "come back to me".

Her husband did, eventually. According to what empress Wu Zetian herself wrote in her preface to the Xuanji Tu, when he received Su's brocade he was so "moved by its supreme beauty" that he sent away his concubine and returned to his wife. As the story goes, they lived together until old age.

The heart at the center was filled after all.

Turned out that someone in the family had brought lilies into the house and put them up high, thinking that the cat wouldn't get to them. Alas, even a lick of pollen from lilies causes fatal kidney damage in cats.

Said cat was not epileptic. Her kidneys were fried, so she lost her life at one year of age.

The Margaret of Ashbury trilogy by Judith Merkle Riley: A Vision of Light, In Pursuit of the Green Lion, and The Water Devil

These books don’t get enough recognition and I aim to change that.  Enough of you followers of mine are into medieval stuff that you should all check out this trilogy.

God talks to Margaret of Ashbury, which, in 14th century England, can be a tad problematic.  Margaret survives the difficulties that accompany her gift (and those that accompany medieval life in general) with good humor and strength and the help of her friends, who include a midwife and an alchemist.  Though there is a good dose of the supernatural in her story, with its ghosts and demons, it’s all grounded in a very real world.  

The 2021 LTSC is available in the plain vanilla version, Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021, with end of mainstream support scheduled January 12, 2027, and Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021, with an extended end date of January 13, 2032. They are not quite the same as the ordinary consumer editions of Windows 10. They don't include the Windows Store or any "modern" apps. Apart from the Edge browser, they have almost nothing else: no OneDrive, no Weather or Contacts apps, and no Windows Mail or whatever it's called this week.

...no OneDrive, Copilot AI, or all of the other useless crapware cluttering up the Start menu? AND patches/support through 2032??

Shirt stays: these go around your thighs to hold your shirt down, so that it stays smooth and tucked in. They're usually elastic, with 1-3 clips, and if you wear skirts frequently this is a GREAT way to make sure your top doesn't ride up. The clips will be visible if you're wearing something tight, so loose pants or skirts are where these do best. There's also an insane version that clips to your socks, but that is for lunatics. If you wanted, you could also use one of these clips to hold up thigh-highs.

These do a great job of smoothing and narrowing the waist area by keeping your shirt from bunching there.

Sleeve garters: usually metal, leather, elastic, or silk. These are usually worn with button-down shirts to adjust where your cuff falls on the wrist or hand. They're properly worn on the upper arm, and you pull the fabric of the sleeve above the garter until you cuff is where you want it. Because this creates a puff of sleeve at the bicep, it also broadens the appearance of the shoulders. It's great if you're working with your hands or if your sleeves are often too long for your preference.

Waistband clip or belt adjustment clip/buttons

Three different ways of tightening the waistband of a pair of pants or a skirt. You're not going to get more than an inch or so tighter without weird bunching, and for most of these you'd want them to be hidden under a shirt or jacket, but they do the job if that's something you're having issues with.

Collar pins: There are so many fun ones out there, both with and without chains. They're not terribly practical, though the slight weight may help keep your collar where you want it. Also consider collar tips, which pin (surprise) to the very tips of your collar points.

Sweater clips/guards: meant to hold your sweater or cardigan mostly closed. Great if your cardigan doesn't button, or if you don't like it to be buttoned all the way.

But menswear doesn’t get to have all the fun! Here are a few traditionally womenswear accessories:

Hem weights keep your skirt from flying up. You can get sew in and temporary ones.

Lingerie pins keep the straps of your dress and your bra together! They can be hidden or very cute. You can go for vintage ones if you’re obsessed like me or just find either fancy safety pins or small bar pins.

Some also come in groups of three with chains that keep the straps from sliding off your shoulder.

(Often these will get mistaken for baby or doll pins because they are very small, 2-3 cm in length.)

Glove clips hold your gloves to your belt or purse whole you aren’t wearing them, but keep them close at hand (ha).