Llamashlie Del Rey

Ashlie. 34. She/her. TS2&TS4. Absent-minded. Over emotional. Shy. Easily Impressed. Night Owl. My blogging is sporadic and inconsistent but I do try to follow back most simblrs!

[tau1tvec]

Funny how originally The Sims was considered to be a satire on consumerism and late stage capitalism, and 26 years, 3 games, and thousands of dollars in DLC later, it might be getting in-game ads.

Full circle moment if the circle was on fire, and also the portal to hell.

[brandinotbroke]

Spockthewok (aka Will Nixon) wrote a master's thesis on pink flashing, figured out the cause and potentially found the first genuine fix.

The fix itself (along with the thesis for those interested) can be found here:

A patch to fix the 'pink soup' bug in The Sims 2. Contribute to spockthewok/TS2MemCapRemover development by creating an account on GitHub.

[pforestsims]

Author of the mod discovered that memory-usage-related pink soup is a result of an intentional safety check in the game's code, rather than a mistake in calculating texture memory.

So his experimental mod for TS2 RPC launcher basically tells the game to stop freaking out and turning stuff pink when shaders' memory usage goes over certain threshold. NOTE: it may get rid of the pink, but the game will still crash if you exceed 4GB limit.

There are two mod options to choose from:

Version 1 is more radical, it completely removes the safety check. You'll (probably) find out the shader's memory limit has been exceeded when your game crashes.

Version 2 is supposed to allow some pink soup at around 3.5 GB memory usage, near the danger zone, so you have time to act - so obviously, this one sounds more sensible.

And while I remain convinced that pink soup can occur because of other shader-related issues or f*cked-up memory settings, not just this "failsafe", if your game suffers from pink soup it's definitely worth a try!

[julessims]

GOS is back for good!

Hello! I was the one who fixed it.

Well it wasn’t just me, to be fair. I would have never been able to without @fireflowersims help and HugeLunatics trust in both of us. Thank you to both of them for their work and thank you @teaaddictyt for reaching out and doing the more public communication.

I’m super happy I got the chance to work to fix it. It wasn’t an easy undertaking. It seemed like every little thing would cause more errors, I fixed one and another thing broke. But now it seems stable, finally.

A lot of technical stuff below the cut, beware.

Fixing such an old forum is not easy. Documentation is rather sparse because the framework it runs on is old. There is however a more modern version, but updating is difficult. Here was the issue for the forum - upgrading failed. 

A website (usually) consists of two different parts: 1 - The files. They contain the code, scripts, designs, images, attachment, profile pictures etc. 2 - The database. The database connects all the different parts and tells the website where to find something. Everything gets stored in tables, assigned IDs and given values. Everything written, each post and topic is also stored in the database. So without the database the whole page would be useless.

It was clear from the beginning that the database was the culprit for the failed upgrades. I got an earlier backup from HL and started working.

I set up a local environment with two versions of XAMPP. One running on php 7.4 (the last version having compatibility for the forum framework version and the upgrade script to the recent version) and the other on a modern 8.3, which was the same as the version the server @fireflowersims set up for GOS.

I ran the upgrade script (which consists of 4 separate parts) on the old backup and ran into errors right away. The script would just outright crash on me, most often without a log or message. The (local) server would just stop responding. My original plan had been to upgrade to version 2.0 first, then 2.1, since it was the recommended order. However the database backup had already been partly upgraded to 2.1. That was the reason my upgrade script failed. Reversing those changes could have been a possibility but extremely time intensive.

(This is the frontpage of the upgrader. I stared at it so much. Like you can see it has a ton of steps)

Instead I asked for the current database and HL provided it to me. This one was already further along on the upgrade and I could see the error HL had run into before handing over. I had to look at the upgrade scripts and source php files to diagnose what the framework was expecting - and failing - to find in the database.

That’s where I found the main culprit for *most* of the errors: Time tables. The framework saves every action that a user does in a log, a long table with the action, an id and a date. This was where everything had gotten wrong. The upgrader expected to see one column for the date, named *day*, while the current table had a different column for day, month and year. I tried fixing the table at first but that didn’t seem to work, so I completely deleted the table and created a new empty one myself. (By now I think the issue stems from forgetting to uninstall certain packages before upgrading, more on that later)

That was possible because the log actually doesn’t hold relevant information for the forum to work. It just records each step, probably for moderation purposes. Once I had done that step the upgrade script was finally able to proceed.

There were a few more errors where I had to look at what the script was doing, find the corresponding code in the sources and edit the database myself. Thankfully the code is relatively well commented and named, so I was able to find what I needed.

Finally I got the upgrade script to run to the end and I was actually able to open the forums (local) page. I hadn’t been able to for now so it was a first. But a lot of stuff was still missing, like all the topics. I could see that the posts were back, but not sorted correctly.

The fix was simple but annoying. The forum framework comes with a repair_setting.php file which I had run several times to fix all the paths, but apparently it didn’t fix *all* of them. So back to the database I went, ran some queries and fixed them myself.

Then the forum finally worked again!

(This is what the forum looked like when I first opened it. It ONLY had recent posts)

(The working local forum, no files yet with the default theme. Seems wrong to look at GOS without the dark theme, right?)

There were still a few things I needed to fix but the database seemed to work fine now. I had never done so many queries in my life. I know SQL, and had to fix databases before but not this intensely. So I guessed I learned something new haha.

Next was the exciting step to upload my clean install to the server. @fireflowersims and I had some directory issues, but I was able to fix them manually once again.

Then I had to take a look at the files which mostly consist of avatars and attachments. They didn’t work at all once moved to the clean install. Once again I took a look at the code and realized that the upgrade script would have changed those files as well, but because I ran it on a clean install it didn’t actually do this step.

I didn’t want to run the upgrade script again, worried that it would mess up a now working database. Instead I wrote a script myself that sorted through all the attachments, looked for the IDs of the avatars from the database so it could move and rename them.

Last were the attachments. This was an easier fix. They just had to be given the ending .dat. @fireflowersims ran a command through the console and then the attachments worked too!

We were getting closer!

Next was the theme. The old theme didn’t work on the modern framework anymore so @fireflowersims looked for a new one which I customized with CSS, trying to get it closer to the way the forum looked before. I think it turned out quite alright, hope you guys think so too!

(Trying to find out what CSS class addresses what? Make everything red and green!)

(All the spider webs)

Next was packages, or mods, to the framework. Fire and I encountered some hiccups here too, since there were some leftovers in the database. The packages hadn’t been properly deinstalled before running the upgrade script, which was another source of the errors. I tried fixing them manually but one of the packages would continue to just break the site no matter what I tried, so we settled for an alternative.

Some more work was put into SSL and making the forum secure. Once again some settings seemed to just break the page and each time I had to go back in the database and manually fix what had gone wrong. It was tedious but by now I knew my way around quite well.

@fireflowersims handled a lot of the server administrative work and DNS settings. I know very little about that part so having @fireflowersims there was great and they made sure the page is reachable at the correct address.

So yeah, I hope the site stays online for a long time now. It’s such a big part of our community and communities history. I used to download so much from there when I was younger. I wanted to give back to the community I love so much. That was the reason I spent many many hours digging through code and old forum threads.

[simnostalgia]

Simscave 01 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

SimCave

The news of what happened to GOS makes this a good time to mention, probably, something that I didn't mention earlier because of the hate I received when I scraped GOS.

But I also scraped SimCave.

[papermoonproductions]

Mixed Messaging.

Back in 2023, @hugelunatic-deactivated20260510 gave @simnostalgia shit for archiving/scraping GoS “just in case,” citing concerns over scraping, bandwidth, and preservation itself.

Now GoS and Sims2Artists are suddenly gone, and people are left scrambling through remnants, mirrors, and whatever archives survived.

That is exactly why preservation matters.

You cannot discourage archival efforts and then act surprised when people are upset that massive parts of Sims 2 history vanished with little warning. You also cannot get angry over backlash when there was never any clear, direct communication to the wider community.

People were explicitly told that if GoS was truly at risk of going down, there would be an announcement.

No real community-wide warning was ever given.

And honestly, this is where the messaging becomes incredibly frustrating.

We were told:

hosting costs were manageable,

the site was not going anywhere as long as ads/donations covered most costs,

out-of-pocket expenses were still within budget,

scraping was mainly an issue because it increased bandwidth/server load,

“if I were not willing/able to continue, then there would be an announcement,”

and later posts even made it sound like things were functioning again after the PHP fixes.

Most people interpreted that as stability returning.

So yes, people are understandably confused and frustrated now, because the messaging for years was essentially: “Things are annoying, but manageable.”

Not: “Hey. This is serious. Archive what you can now. I may be done.”

And no, buried technical posts about PHP upgrades and drive failures are not the same thing as directly communicating that to the wider community.

I literally had to use archived Tumblr pages just to reconstruct the timeline before speaking on this.

And honestly, we are lucky @simnostalgia even had the foresight to preserve as much as they did back in 2023, because otherwise even more would likely be gone forever or nearly impossible to piece back together. But that archive is still missing huge amounts of resources, attachments, images, updates, and years of content added afterward.

What makes this even more frustrating is that @simnostalgia received backlash for trying to preserve the site in the first place. At this point, I honestly hope they feel vindicated, because this situation is exactly why archival efforts matter.

People absolutely would have helped preserve, mirror, archive, financially support, or even transition these sites if the situation had been communicated clearly, especially if HugeLunatic had simply said: “I am done. Someone else needs to preserve or host this now.”

[twentyfourfirst-sims]

Garden of Shadows: a preservation effort

Like many of us, I grew up with Garden of Shadows. To me, it was more than just a forum. It was a place I could ask for help, learn new skills and, best of all, find amazing content in any style I could possibly want. I loved the board names, the people, the themes; everything, really.

And I admit I was more than a little heartbroken to find it gone.

After mulling it over, I decided that I wanted to preserve what I possibly could. I spent a few hours yesterday running through strategies and ideas about how to best go about it, and the best I could come up with was, well, exactly the same.

So, here it is: the Garden of Shadows mirror forum.

I've only just started, but I hope to add a little bit to it every day. The primary focus will be on preserving all the knowledge and custom content. I'm tackling it myself, but if you feel so inclined, you're more than welcome to join in.

--

PS. I am not here to offend, break Terms of Use, or to step on any toes. This is simply an effort to preserve content and knowledge for a game I have played and loved for over twenty years. Thank you ♥

[heathensimmer]

Further Documentation of Sims 2 being an endless and vast chasm of depth

Toddlers literally get a "sugar high" and it's coded to increase their motives and make them perform random animations.

They can get this feature by licking up chocolate puddles made by the Cuisine career reward. Has to be used by a Sim with low Cooking skill to leave the puddles!

[ofgodsandllamas]

I've been working on the farmstead lot some more, getting more crops grown to fill their grocery store, and I finally built a little pond on their lot (Buddy is an angler, and it'd be great to stock some fresh fish!) and I had a lot of fun decorating this area a little more! This little corner is so pretty, now! I'm going to keep slowly adding more plants to the lot over time - I've never been much of a landscaper but I'm TRYING.

My favorite part of ponds is just adding duckies, ngl

I've actually got all my houses built, now! Tomorrow I plan to work on some final community lots - I definitely want a bowling alley/arcade and some kind of restaurant to begin with, but tbh I may just find a nice restaurant to download huhu so I can start pLAYING! Playing the Starrs (who I'm not sure will be playables in the hood) isn't very satisfying because I'm literally just playing them to farm, cheating their aspiration to stay out of the red and taking care of mood enough to make sure they can harvest number of different produce to sell in store lol

[earlypleasantview]

Reblog if you're an active TS2 Simblr.

My dash is kind of empty

[melsie-hyperfixates]

My Sims 2 blog @melsie-sims2 is about to pop off again. After a bit of a dry spell, my queue is the fullest it's been in over six months!

I would also LOVE for you to like this or comment if you're a Sims 2 storyteller, whether that's BACC, Pleasantview, an Uberhood or your own custom hood.

My dash has gotten a bit empty since my hiatus so I want to follow way more Sims 2 players!

[clouseplayssims]

In addition to this blog, I've got a sims story going: https://andthenthenothingcame.tumblr.com/

[curious-subject]

[ofgodsandllamas]

People I want to get to know better

I got tagged by @gummilutt - I hope you don't mind, but I'm posting this from my main account rather than my sims finds side account hehe!

Last song: lol it was Chuu's Heart Attack, which was much needed because today has been SOOO stressful and just LONG and I just needed something cute and fun to distract me for a few moments ;~;

Favorite colour: It's so hard to pick a favorite color, but if I had to pick anything, I'd say some kind of shade of cyan-y blues and dandelion type yellows! But also mint green-blues? These are the colors people most associate with me, too, so I think they're good ones to name!

Currently watching: I've really gotten into Dropout stuff lately so I've been watching a lot of Make Some Noise.

Last movie: Uhhhhhh. Good question! I don't really watch movies much, tbh. I'm more likely to watch a series than a movie and idk why! ADHD quirk?

Currently reading: A Darker Shade of Magic, but I haven't been reading in the last month or so. My attention has diverted once again which.... tbh not a surprise. I'll get back to it, though.

Sweet, spicy, or savoury: All of them! And honestly I think it just depends on the mood. Sometimes you just need something sweet - like right now I am, inexplicably, craving maple glazed donuts. Why? I just am! But I never turn down spicy queso birria tacos! And savory is just always good, it's comforting. And when you balance them all in a week, well, you're eating well aren't you? I know some people have strong feelings about certain flavor profiles but I like them all!

Relationship: I have been married for 12 years (13 soon!) which still sounds mind blowing when I put numbers to it - but we've been together over 15 years! Not to be sappy but idk where I'd be without him; he's a wonderful support system and has been a really big help over the last decade, especially as I sorted out a lot of mental struggles and I don't think a lot of people would have the kind of patience with me that he does.

Current obsession: I am very much back in my TS2 fixation mode. I think for a lot of us, our game and hobby fixations cycle - for me, my art phase will return, my reading phase will return, I'll be back to obsessing over Fields of Mistria in time (March my beloved), but TS2 has its grips in me again - so much so that I've finally been working on cleaning up my god forsaken cc folder and getting rid of my duplicate files and merging things so that it can load and run faster. It's incredible lol.

Last googled: the sims 2 userstartup lmaooooooooooo something was wrong with mine, a typo or something SOMEWHERE and my aliases were not working so I said HECK IT and yoinked someone else's that they graciously shared LMAOOOOO

Currently working on: Aside from work burnout (;~;) and trying to deepclean my house post winter depression funk and finally getting tired of the state of things, I've created a new sims hood that I'm really fond of so far! I didn't want to go QUITE BACC style this time - I wanted to have pre-existing lots that the families can visit and once I've finished overhauling my defaults (a project I keep putting off....) I'll generate some townies (unless I decide I actually want to create a bunch of sims to townify....?) so that there's more than JUST my playable sims but I'm just really excited about a new hood to play with new, fully randomized sims and seeing what they get up to! I've got some community lots yet to build and one more house to build (and one more yet to decorate) so it's still plodding along but it's just really fun taking my time and getting things set up, even if I'm itching to PLAY. I've never really gotten into the weeds of decorating a neighborhood with the hood deco but treating it like a miniature or toy house is so fun!

Idk who to tag because I'm so inactive here anymore and feel very out of touch with ANYONE and also a lot of people have already been tagged, so sorry if you've already been tagged of you're like "wait who the heck is this?!" lol no pressure! @bunsim @romysims @shadysentinel @enelea @emperorofthedark

[2fingerswhiskey]

i am a serious sims 4 player.

[2fingerswhiskey]

his bazoongas are too big for the fuckin menu

[gloomiegalaxie-deactivated20250]

this is beautiful

[ofgodsandllamas]

I'm slowly, slowly plodding away at a new neighborhood that I'm really excited about. I've never done the whole randomise absolutely every aspect of your starting hood, but I'm trying that out and having a lot of fun! All of the sims going into the hood are made via the pooklet method, with siblings/relatives made of their relatives as a base that I go through and tweak, or children born of the parents, etc. And then their personalities, aspirations, and traits are all randomized. The only exceptions right now are the sims pictured in these pics - Buddy and Bianca Starr. I wanted to have an established farm and grocery by the time I start properly playing, so they have MOSTLY randomized personality and traits, but I ensured they have the green thumb traits.

I'm just having a lot of fun taking my time and building things up. Trying to play a "from scratch" hood as I've been, where all sims have to earn money and create community lots (usually via a loan because let's be real lol) has been a fun challenge, but I just want to play something right now where I can send sims to established community lots!

I haven't decided if I'll just randomize townies and NPCs or if I'll go download some premade ones or not - I guess it really depends on if I get bored and burnt out on making sims lol. There's 5 families I'm starting with, not including the Starrs (though I guess I'll want to play them to keep the farm and grocery going come to think of it!) and I've completely randomized how many members of the family, what ages and sex they are, etc. The first three families are created and placed, but only one of them has a home. I've got two yet to go! Ack! I will probably just go find some nice premade lots and put them all up in some because I'm just eager to get going!!!!!

Now I do still want player-owned community lots and businesses, but I do want to have certain already established venues that we can go visit! Also as you can see, I've only really put down trees in one area yet loooool that will be finished here in a while yet, too.

At first I was too uncertain about this sky because it feels a little too TS4 but the more I've been using it, the more fond of I've grown - maybe it's just because of the colors? I still put down Maxis clouds on the lots, to try to "blend" it a little better, we'll see how I feel about it in a month! I'm also really excited to try out the gardening overhaul! That's part of why I wanted the grocery store pre-established as I start out, so that sims can go buy seeds right away, and the Starrs can make and sell seeds from their own excess produce!

And if you notice any trees on roads, shhhh I updated the roads in simPE and they haven't caught up with the deforestation yet hahahaha!

[brandinotbroke]

@ people who still play sims 2 on windows

Those of you who use DXVK but still experience pink flashing, could you try this for me? I am too lazy to reinstall Sims on my Windows partition

Open your dxvk.conf (or create one in the installation path of the game) and write:

dxvk.enableMemoryDefrag = True

Test this setting in-game for a while, then change it to:

dxvk.enableMemoryDefrag = False

And test this as well.

By "test it", I do not mean to test it for a mere 10-20 minutes. Test it thoroughly! Different hoods, different lots, take your time and play the actual game like you normally would! If normal gameplay works, try to stress test it (cheats, CC, high quality lot imposters, etc). If it takes a few days to test, so be it, but we really need to stop reporting too fast and make sure that our observations aren't coincidence.

I do not think this is going to be the big fantastic fix people are hoping for, but it's still intriguing. DXVK is set to "auto" out-of-the-box and my suspicion is that this is what makes the game run better on Linux: The GPU drivers on Linux are different, so perhaps the "auto" setting actually works properly in Linux, but not in Windows.

[farfromdaylight]

How To Dreamwidth: A Primer

the more friends ask me about dreamwidth, the more i realize i know a lot about this site that isn’t super obvious at first glance. so here is a primer for those of you thinking about making a dreamwidth account. this post ranges from your really basic starter tips to the completely esoteric things that come from using it for a decade.

2023 note: This post was written in 2018. While most of this post is still true, various features may have been changed or updated in the years since.

a what now? dreamwho?

Dreamwidth is a code fork of LiveJournal. A code fork means that they took LJ’s code (which used to be open source) and went their own direction with it. They still use the basic ideas behind LJ’s codebase, but have changed and improved upon it in various ways.

The core difference between DW and other websites is privacy isn’t an afterthought, but the central feature. You can lock posts, filter them to a select group, or make them visible to only you. I recommend reading through this section of DW’s FAQ for more on this.

When you make an account, you can subscribe (ie follow) and grant access to other users. Both of these are one-way – if A subscribes to B, that doesn’t automatically grant B access to all of A’s locked posts. Here’s more on this.

DW in general can be kind of confusing for people who have only used tumblr, but their FAQs are pretty good on the whole, and they’re searchable. If a website feature is confusing, start there.

okay, i have a journal. now what?

Customize it! DW doesn’t have all the latest and greatest features, but you can still make it your own. Here are some useful tips.

You can change your layout from Organize > Select Style. Mobile support is hit or miss, unfortunately, but there are some nice default layouts that work with it. You can also use this style for Practicality which makes DW fully mobile-friendly. If you’d rather design it yourself, Tabula Rasa is completely stripped down.

You can get premade DW layouts at the dreamwidthlayouts community. If you have trouble with your code, ask over at style_system.

Edit your profile! This is where you put your usernames for other social media sites, tell people a bit about yourself, and mention your interests. Your interests will be part of the interest search; it’s one way to find people.

Upload icons! Free accounts get 15 icons; paid accounts get 100 icons, premium accounts get 250 icons. You can use one icon in each entry and commment you make. It’s good form to put the maker of the icon in the comment section if you didn’t make it. If you got it from someone on tumblr, you can even link their blog using the code <user name=username site=tumblr>. (This works all across DW!)

While you can’t make pages, you can set a post to stick at the top of your journal, much like Twitter’s pinned tweets. Here’s how to do it.

You can also change how Dreamwidth itself looks, if you don’t like the red. Go to Account Settings > Display. Most other site display preferences are on that page.

While you’re here, look through the Account Settings > Privacy page. By default, your public entries will be included in site searches. You can turn it off at the bottom of the page if you want. You can also set it so your entries are automatically access-locked or private as well.

This got very long so the rest is behind the cut. (Now you really know I’m legit.)

Keep reading

[pooklet]

[whyeverr]

hey so this isn't how you beat the allegation that kits are scraped from EPs to sell separately 👍🏻

[freezerbunny-sims2]

Old video.