Sims 2 University | Tab-mode Gameplay and Storytelling in an ACTIVE Univ..
I’m quite proud of this one. Since I can’t work on TDOB right now (should be able to pick it back up in a couple of weeks), I was finally able to get some time to edit this video. It took so long, like dear lord, what a ridiculously time consuming hobby I have assigned myself :D - but this one made me very happy. It’s good to see Gretchen Vandersen’s grandson off to college, and I’m so happy with how playable the University has become.
I don't want to go into too many details, but I'm putting this out here for safety. My entire life has been upended in ways that I would never have been able to imagine, and I've come to realize that I live in a space that's physically, emotionally, and mentally unsafe. I had my suspicious about the latter two categories of danger, but that first one - I genuinely didn't see it coming.
I'm taking active steps to remove myself from the situation, but there are elements of this that are out of my control. One of those things is that I may lose my access to this laptop. And as much as I love my laptop, blogging, gaming, etc., that's one of the least of my current concerns. If giving the laptop back to the person who gave it to me gets them away from me faster, then that's what I'll have to do. So if posting becomes more sporatic, or if it gets weird (I wouldn't put it past them to try to burn down spaces that give me joy and comfort), I just want to say how much I appreciate the kindness of everyone I've met here.
Just a quick housekeeping post relating to my Sims 2 gameplay/storytelling and how I'm organizing my blog @yarndiggity. If you follow that blog, you'll notice I'm not using a lot of diagesis lately. I think the last found-media post was Bellamie Wood's DITL post. And that's largely because I have an epic crapton of images to sort/organize, process, edit, reorganize, and post related to multiple individual story threads, and there are some types of stories that diagesis just doesn't serve well.
So I've made a few specific distinctions using tags. "#new traddery" is for world building, including character building, "#new traddery without context" are just captures that amuse me for whatever reason, regardless of whether they do or don't serve a story, and "#tales from new traddery" is for contained story arcs. Right now, I'm in Act 2 of what I intend to be a trilogy. First was The Hours of Her Garden, now we're early on in The Direction of Birds, but the third act, which is loosely plotted as of right now (December 24, 2025) is still untitled. I"ll also be using Radio New Traddery very strategically going forward - you'll know it when you'll see it (and if all goes as intended, you'll hate it... wink wink).
Readers may notice we're still missing the last two episodes of Beyond The Culvert. I wish I could say that that was ready to go but I ran into a couple of issues. I'm going to have to dig through a lot of files to piece together what I need for those and I'm still going to be missing a few bits because I turned Story Progression back on too soon after Vince's arrest and thought I'd turned it off at the individual level for everyone I needed but I missed a few - long story short, (Mayor) Derrick Thibadeaux died off screen. Thankfully, I do have a handful of interview shots, but so much time has passed by now in game that all of those images are pretty far back in my files. And now it's just kind of like "this old thing?" So what I'm thinking at this point is that, and what would make sense from the point of the story, is that the episodes got pulled because they expose some pretty serious church corruption, but what's lost can be found, and I have a place in the third act of the current Tales trilogy where it can be revealed at a point where it will matter in-universe.
Finally, readers may also notice that New Traddery is slowly starting to spread out a little further, with stories reaching into Bluewater Village. There's a really awesome reason for that. All of this has been worldbuilding off of the back of a bastardized legacy challenge and right now, Gen 9 are still children. I've installed a mod that slows aging down drastically, but it's only a matter of time before the heir apparent, Brittney McGaw is old enough to take off to university, and when that happens, we'll be a blink away from G10. My plan has always been to do remake every subhood and fill them with people who moved away from the main hood for new opportunities. So right now, I'm laying the groundwork for a Bluewater Village revamp, which I'll simply call Bluewater for now. I don't know how many gens I'll do there, but the foundational generation is in place already.
ETA: totally forgot the Holidays part. Have happy ones. Or, if it's more appropriate, have honest ones - I'm not here to invalidate feelings and I personally don't vibe with the whole "HAVE HAPPY HOLIDAYS OR ELSE!!!" energy that we tend to see a lot of in life and online. Sometimes the Holidays aren't fun, sometimes they're hurtful. Just be kind to yourself and honor your truth. Although I will insist that you eat the damned cookie.
Ok, I absolutely understand why the gun shop and the bake-and-wake posts would get flagged, but one of my posts got flagged and the images were just... sims talking? It was about friendship and love after loss, and I can't stress this enough, they're sims. They're not real. But I'm noticing it everywhere - these mod bots are so confused and it's annoying, but it's a little funny because-
Imagine if you're on here ACTUALLY looking for "mature" content and your dash is suddenly just... Sims talking.
But that's got me sort of thinking... maybe New Traddery's gotten a little too clean, a little too wholesome. If they're going to flag posts as mature, might as well lean into it. Hmmm.
If you've been following @yarndiggity, you'll know we've officially pushed forward into the next story arc. For the murder mystery, you've got the perp, the weapon, the place, and if you read carefully, you'd have the motive, too. But the details were never revealed, so we have one last Under Oath, Over Coffee being drafted for the queue, after which the Devareaux ladies will probably retire. They've been at it for almost 20 years, they'd like to start a family while they still can. So yes, there's still that last wrap-up that I owe, but my game itself has already moved on by many years.
But outside of that, I want to prepare readers for the next story arc without spoiling any of the events, and the best way to do that is to remind readers of something I've shared before: my gameplay and the storytelling it produces is my way of reviewing and unpacking my perceptions of life and how the world worked as a child and teen growing up in the 70s and 80s in the rural American south, particularly having been raised in a music minister's family with generational expectations of service. It is impossible to unpack this without exploring how deeply religion was (and is) intertwined in those communities, and what that looks like both when you do question it and when you don't.
But we don't stay kids forever, and we can't go home again. So the next arc starts exploring what I observed from the outside as things started changing. A real life example - by the time I finished my formal education in the early 00's, my mom and step-dad had moved states and become "city folk," and I myself had become a little more well-traveled, so ALL of our perceptions started shifting. When we visited "home," we noticed things were changing and the magic was leaving. Our little country church was replaced by this monstrosity of a building, hymns and singing schools were replaced by "praise choruses" and overhead projectors and "worship teams," but community and family started to feel more like strangers. We didn't know it at the time, but social contract was being rewritten. We just thought our little town was becoming more modern - we had no idea that things were actually going backwards but with a shiny modern facade.
Those changes are what this next arc is here to help me unpack. Again, it's impossible to tell these stories without including the religious aspect, as its central to the culture, and I know that it can be triggering for some people (including myself). If that's not something you want to unpack with me or even observe from afar, block the tag #aspire now. I'll use that for the heavy-handed or directly related posts. I'm also using a tw: religion tag for those posts now as well. Also, posts tagged "#new traddery without context" will always be safe on their own. There's also a whole other storyline that's evolving where I asked myself "what would happen if Gemma Teller and Cercei Lannister got in a fight?" I think I'm in for a good time with that one, but I haven't gotten very far - I'm just laying the groundwork. I'll come up with a tag for that when it's time and let you know here.
And if you made it this far, here's a sweet image of a bunch of kids in elementary school.
Hi, I noticed that a few lovely simmers have found my main, and I feel like a jerk for never updating this space, but the truth is that all the story action actually happens on my story blog, @yarndiggity. If you haven't visited it yet, it's a gameplay-based story told via Diegesis. The current story arc is a murder mystery, which wraps up the events of a 7th generation of Legacy-esque gameplay. I say "esque" because I like to turn on Story Progression while simultaneously playing rotationally, and I cheat because I'm playing pretend with digital dollies and can do what I want.
With that said, I do have some guidelines that I play by that keep some semblance of order, so I thought this might be the place to share a few of those. So here are a few of them interspersed with town lore, in no particular order:
New Traddery is just Riverblossom Hills taken over by my attempted Legacy families. There were originally three families - Traddery, Wholesome, and Best, but the first one to have a baby under Story Progression became the primary family, and the "heir" is the child that looked most like the dad. Why? because-
New Traddery is based on the cultural norms I experience growing up as a church musician's kid in several states in the southern US in the 1980s. My game is how I process, and the stories are based on events I witnessed from a child's/teen's perspective. Obviously, there are some differences because it's a video game and also... aliens. But it started out as very patriarchal. It's not as much, now, because 160 years have passed and I'd like to think there's been some progress. But the rule is close to the same - whoever looks the most like the previous heir gets the house/property.
The legal system used in the story, particularly the documents, is loosely based on Johnston County, North Carolina. In my head, North Carolina makes a lot of sense for New Traddery because of the mountains, although from a climate perspective, I play it further south. New Traddery has two autumns and no Winter. And that's just because I absolutely loathe playing the snow scenes. The little "putting on outerwear" thing drives me nuts as it is.
The newspaper writing style is very loosely based on two real newspapers from small Mississippi towns, the Columbian Progress and the Picayune Item, (because they're both towns about an hour's car ride from one of the Universities I used to inspire TU). The gossip column itself isn't actually inspired by any real gossip column, but more from the practice of those small-town newspapers of having rural reporters submit weekly columns about events that were truly out in the sticks. Those columns were always more about individual people's personal business than they were about local events. Brandyn Wood's line "I think Goodie even put it in the paper" comes straight from someone I knew in real life being embarrassed about a mundane but private life event being not only publicized but headlined in such a column.
The Simnational Aspirational Convention is heavily inspired by the Southern Baptist Convention, at least in name, but I have a whole religious system built out called Aspirationalism. There are five sacred texts, The Book of Wants, The Book of Fears, The Book of Needs, The Book of Skills, and The Book of Aspirations. It's based on what I will and won't do as The Watcher. Like, I don't actively play Romance Sims, I don't play with pets if I can avoid it (I love animals in real life, but they're annoying in the game). Don't get me started on idle animations - breaking out the puzzle sphere when I'm just trying to get you married before the party timer runs out is just sinful.
If you're a book nerd, you may notice a lot of ASOIF names in New Traddery - Asha, Theon, Brandyn, Brendan, Rivers. At one point, there was also a Jon and a Sam. There are also a lot of English/European royalty names - my original plan with the legacy was going to be to use that as a naming convention to help me track it, but Story Progression had other ideas and the population grew so large that it became too much work to isolate those names to the core family, but the Traddery family had a William, Edward, Phillip, Beatrice, Eugenie, Elizabeth, Jane, Phillipa, Katherine, Victoria, Mary, Isabella, Margaret- it goes on and on.
Other notable namesakes - Gretch Jalowitz was named after singer Gretchen Wilson. She owns a gun store because Gretchen Wilson has a great story about managing a dive bar when she was young and keeping a shotgun behind the bar, and Gretch is pretty much always pregnant, so even the "barefooted in my own front yard with a baby on my hip" seems like something she would do. Snappy's is inspired by a dive bar I visited in a small Louisiana town when I was in college. TBH, Snappy's is probably more wholesome than that place. I think "Boolprop County" is self-explanatory. Carl Green's last name is Green because I literally just created for the purpose of testing the MJ mod I found on the Booty. He was never supposed to be part of the story, but ACR had other plans.
I didn't really understand how SP worked and couldn't figure out why my bin kept filling up with new adults I didn't create, so I dropped them in empty apartment lots to fill up the town. Because I never played those lots but never turned SP off for them, they ended up having babies/getting alien pregnant, and then dying off randomly, so I sometimes would click into a lot to discover it was full of orphans, so I'd have to quickly move them out or drop another random adult in there to keep the social worker from showing up. That's why I built an orphanage with a designated caretaker, and he's why there are so many Thornes in town - his name is Craig Thorne - he raised 9 kids and outlived a lot of them. He's got great-grandchildren about to graduate college.
Similarly, there are several sims in town that have Watcher-granted immortality, and that's because I prefer playing functional careers and schools rather than rabbitholes. I loathe rabbitholes. And I find functional jobs easier to play in residential lots using meeting/school tokens rather than community lots. Not in every case - the police station is part of a full civic services building that functions as a community lot owned by Brandyn Wood, but others, like the town hall and the elementary school, are residential lots and are owned by caretaker sims whose needs I just cheat, and I hide them in janitorial/utility rooms to do their own work while I operate the building.
The Mayor lives in the Viejo house (since it's all just Riverblossom HIlls). Each mayor gets a budget to make some upgrades, but not everything can be upgraded - it's a historical site. The premades that came with the neighborhood are considered prominent historical figures and their relics are preserved to some degree. The Greenmans' house is an event venue - the original address was 110 Old Farm Road, so it's now "The 110." I never play pre-mades, but due to Story Progression, one of the BIN families ended up in the Traddery family tree (Ottomas, yep. Sigh.) and another bin family still has living decendants - Marielle Kim and Oliver Kim are both students at Traddery University.
And that's all of this book I'm writing for today. If you made it this far, all I can say is wow, and thank you for indulging my special interest infodump. Your reward is a little spoiler for the next story arc: megachurches, inheritance disputes, and the resistance of the creatives.
And a completely unrelated image - a forest lot that I rarely use, called Thornewood Forest, because we need just one more cozy campfire:
When I first set up this blog, I didn't ever intend on using it. I'd just moved states after a major life event, the kind of thing that makes you move back in with family as a full adult in order to survive, and I just wanted a place to escape to when the real world became too real. That place, at that stage of my life, was silly television shows that I intentionally took too seriously, and this blog was just a way I could track tags for ships and spoilers (since I wouldn't be able to keep up with all of my personal interests during that time of life upheaval).
But life has a way of life-ing, and I legitimately forgot that this blog was here. I got a new job, and then a promotion at that job, and then I got remarried, and then I got a new job again, then there was a whole worldwide health event... and the things I used to be interested in were forgotten in the digital dust.
Fast forward to now - I've fallen back in love with the only game series I've ever played for myself - The Sims (nothing wrong with regular gaming, I just never could get those little shooter guys to move). And I'm literally just playing the Sims 2, for the first time since 2017. And there are so many new things - it's like my old favorite but entirely new with "mods I always wanted" and a living, breathing, thriving community. It's a lot of fun.
But look, tl;dr aside, I just wanted to say that I had no real idea how to tumblr and when I created my blog @yarndiggity, I genuinely thought I was creating a new blog entirely. So all of that to say - if you see a "like" from me at this blog, it's because I don't know how to make it give you the well-earned heart attached to the correct name. But if you're following my shenanigans, be sure to go where they're posted. I am actually thinking of using this space as behind the scenes or outtakes or gameplay notes - not sure yet, but I'll let you know if I do. In the meantime, please enjoy a random photo of a modest starter home subdivision I made.
