Plus-Sized Scribe

In a move that left hundreds of longtime residents scrambling to find alternative housing, municipal construction crews reportedly demolished a local Black neighborhood Thursday, part of an ongoing city project to make room for nothing in particular. “For decades, this part of Fort Worth has languished as nothing more than a loving community for African American families and a bustling hub for Black-owned businesses,” said Mayor Mattie Parker, adding that the destruction of dozens of beloved restaurants, theaters, barbershops, and newspapers was an essential step toward creating more vacant lots that could sit empty behind fences for an indefinite length of time.

This is a modification to the game's Traits XML that I made a long time ago for my own use for my own evil purposes, but I figured I'd toss it out into the universe in case anyone would want it. It does the following:

1) Removes all trait conflicts. Meaning, you can have a sim that's both Good and Evil, if that's something you'd want for whatever reason. Basically, I always assign traits randomly, and I disagreed with some of the conflicts that made certain traits unavailable when a sim already had a conflicting one, so I just went through and nuked all the conflicts.

2) Makes all traits available at all ages. So, you can have a baby born with any EA trait in your game. Of course, if that trait was not originally intended for babies/toddlers/children to have, those traits won't affect the kid's behavior until they are of proper age to express the trait in question. But, that was what I wanted.

3) EDIT: I forgot that it also makes all of the lifetime happiness rewards available for all ages. I forgot that that's part of the same Traits XML.

There are many mods out there that alter the Traits XML, including ones that do one or more of the above things separately but not, to my knowledge, all of them. This mod will conflict with all such mods, so you either must choose between them OR open the conflicting mods in s3pe and go through them, find the differences between them, and then edit one (by copypasting) such that it incorporates the changes of the other(s).

You can download the mod here.

I'm a gardener and so are the majority of people I spend time around. If you are mowing 3+ times a week and regularly spending money on fertilizer, soil tests, herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides, you have chosen the most expensive, time consuming thing you could possibly do with your yard. Unless you are a farmer as your livelihood, NOTHING else you could grow is that high maintenance. Nothing.

Most turfgrasses are invasive species. I said it.

The practice of "nuking" your lawn (killing everything in it and "starting over")...If you have a so-called "weed problem" this is probably the worst thing you can do.

Listen to me very carefully: "Weed" seeds are everywhere. There is, at all times, a supply of seeds lying dormant in the soil, waiting for the right conditions to sprout. (It's called the "soil seed bank" and you can look it up.) They are capable of "waiting" for years, even decades. Furthermore, most "weed" species spread by wind, meaning you can't physically eliminate them from an outdoor area unless you...surround your entire yard with an incredibly fine mesh netting and never leave, I guess.

Heavy management will make your "weed" problem progressively worse and worse because those plants are specifically adapted to colonize barren areas that recently underwent disastrous events that killed off most life.

Basically all plants are adapted to live in the company of other organisms, and suffer when there are no other plants around. "Weeds" with deep taproots penetrate into and aerate the soil. Clover puts nitrogen in the ground that other plants need. Low ground covers keep the soil moist and stop the sun from baking your grass to a crisp.

The plant "taking over" your lawn is probably not killing your grass. Your grass is dying and it's being replaced by something more suited to the environment. This is supposed to happen.

Monocultures are notoriously susceptible to disease and mass die-offs. "Oh no a big patch of my lawn is dying!" Yeah, that happens when you plant monocultures. You set yourself up for this.

"Why is there a bare patch in my yard/why won't grass grow well here?" Because in nature, each plant has a relatively narrow range of conditions it likes to grow in, so other plants it might otherwise compete with can stick to their preferred conditions and nobody has to compete directly. Win-win. Not all parts of your yard have the exact same amount of sun, moisture, etc. Expecting the plant life to look the same is unrealistic.

…and the vet was like, “You know the thing with geriatric cats is—” and I was like, “What do you mean, geriatric?! It’s a little baby, look at her!" Kumail Nanjiani: Night Thoughts (2025)

Tempted to actually put this on spotify so I can secretly stream it at work...