Hi! I'm Simgaroop and welcome to my Simblr! I mostly play The Sims 2, but I occasionally post pictures from The Sims 3 and The Sims 4. Maxis Match and Pre-Made fan.
When the sale of EA was announced, the community railed and put immense amounts of moral and ethical pressure on many creators and members of the Sims 4 creator network to withdraw from the network, to stop supporting and promoting EA, and to take a stand against the company and enabling it's profits.
Now, EA have brought it quite a number of fairly big name Sims 4 CC creators and plan to profit 70% of a US dollar from their content.
In my mind, this is even more directly "supporting" EA and enabling their profits than making Sims 4 video content on YouTube. Will there be any pressure, moral and or ethical, put upon these creators?
(FWIW, I hate this entire thing 🤣 am I surprised? No. Am I horrified? Yes.)
(This is another post that should be written in Spanish, but it is alright)
A while ago I posted here about my possible neurodivergence. Well, I was recently diagnosed with autism. It was kind of a shock, and kind of a relief, because so many things started to make sense about me.
The next step was to tell my loved ones about this Dx. I first told my youngest sibling, with whom I had already shared my suspicions AND my nerdy interests (she was the one who introduced me to Custom Content over 20 years ago LOL), and she was very kind to me. But then there was the middle sibling (I am the oldest of three), with who I have had issues in the past and was worried she would reject or think I am being too oversensitive. I was shocked by her reaction: She was incredibly kind and later told me she felt bad for being mean to me when I was being "weird" (in her words), such as my stimming (which was way more obvious as a child) and my tendency to be alone when I am tired. She said she now understands me so much more and has been very very sweet to me. I was even able to share with her some of my interests and I discovered she likes some of them too, such as some animated shows and even video games.
This has been a ray of light in an otherwise very, very dark time in our lives. Our mother is in palliative care at home, and that has changed our dynamic completely. I am ofter too tired to be creative or productive after work, hence my absence from this blog. I still reblog stuff in my sideblog, but otherwise I am lurking 100% of the time.
I really want to come back here to share fandom thoughts and the kind of things that distract me. I am pissed at The Sims (more exactly EA) mainly for the Buyout and now I just heard they are now offering micro transactions through custom content (WTF, they have become The Sims Resource?!), so I am not really in the mood to play and post Sims content. But maybe I can share other stuff?
All my love to you. I just read the comments you left on my last personal stuff and I am deeply touched. Warm hugs and I wish you the brightest of days.
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.
Nicely said and you made me realize what I miss the most from the days when I used to make custom content back in the early 2000s: The sense of community and sharing between the members with no reason but to spread the enthusiasm for our hobby/fandom.
I have looked for new hobbies in recent years and it seems that everything is for profit thanks to influencer culture. Endless sponsored posts, patreon, memberships, advertising, it is overwhelming and feels like you can't truly enjoy the fandom/hobby unless you are willing to spend a ton of money.
With the sims 2, I only needed the game, a simple photo editing software and the free tools from the community (SimPe, CatofEvilGenius Hair Binning tool, etc.) to spend hours and hours making hair retextures. Also, as you said, I am forever grateful to Neena Needles for her original textures and colors and to Azaya and Bosie at Garden of Shadows for their tutorials. If I got stuck doing something or needed a mesh, I knew that someone would help me sooner or later.
Despite all the drama between Sims 2 players, that sense of community and sharing was awesome. I am so happy that it still exists today!
I will always support free sites not because I do not value the time or effort I spent doing CC, but because at the end of the day I never intended to make it for profit. And behind every piece of CC there is a whole community effort.
I spent a long time this afternoon just browsing and downloading stuff for my game, and the amount of amazing content available nowadays is overwhelming (in a good way!).
I found a lot of 4t2 replacements, plant conversions, some amazing mods that add new gameplay functions like candle making, color preferences and I think I am barely scratching the surface of the options available. I had to stop before I got confused while trying to update some object defaults because that can be tricky if I don't pay close attention to my folders. I'd rather do that when I am less tired.
I am very, very impressed!!
And I downloaded a LOT more CC today! My Downloads folders is barely hanging on before turning into madness :D.
Just kidding, but I think I'll leave it like it is right now or I will never play. I wanna give a makeover to my old sims with the new hairs and clothing and take nice pictures. I guess I can't stop playing dressup with my digital dolls.
I spent a long time this afternoon just browsing and downloading stuff for my game, and the amount of amazing content available nowadays is overwhelming (in a good way!).
I found a lot of 4t2 replacements, plant conversions, some amazing mods that add new gameplay functions like candle making, color preferences and I think I am barely scratching the surface of the options available. I had to stop before I got confused while trying to update some object defaults because that can be tricky if I don't pay close attention to my folders. I'd rather do that when I am less tired.
I am very, very impressed!!
I spent the whole evening downloading hair for my Sims 2 game, just like the old times! Well... almost like the old times, because using the hair database is making my job so much easier!!
I found so many cool meshes that I would love to recolor or retexture, but I'll need to find an alternative to Photoshop for Mac (or Linux) because I definitely do NOT want to pay Adobe their ridiculous subscription prices.
I also want to tweak my Downloads folder and update it with a few 4t2 conversions and garden defaults to make my game look a bit more 2025-ish I guess. Not too much, though, I love the early 2000s vibe of The Sims 2!
I am posting this from my Steam Deck, aka my little Linux computer. I was able to hook it to a monitor and it works like a charm! Once I have finished modding my game, I will have a portable Sims 2 machine. I am going to play my Broke Legacy from the beginning (It's been 18 years, I think I am allowed to re-start it :D) and maaaybe post a few pictures. I can't promise a story because I no longer feel confident enough to write fanfiction, but if something funny or interesting happens, I will share it here.
Sometimes, I wonder if re-installing The Sims games can be considered a hobby on its own?
I have just installed The Sims 2 on my Steam Deck because the software I was using to run WIndows on my Macbook ran out of its subscription and I can't afford to renew it at the moment.
I am actually posting this from the Steam Deck as well, because you can use it as a linux computer too. So far I have managed to reinstall many mods and I was smart enough to make a backup of my most recent CC folder on Google Drive, so I just had to download it here and I am almost ready. For some reason, the hair folder was not saved, so I'll need to take a look at DeeDee and my own archives for some of my favorite meshes.
You have no idea the joy I felt taking these screenshots!
The game is finally working properly, with ALL my custom content backup (which features a comically large amount of hair and clothing, I've realized I love taking pictures and giving makeovers to my sims the most). I am going to play a genetically correct version of Pleasantview by @thedudewiththedragontattoos, so that's why the Sims look slightly different.
It's been... quite an ordeal, getting this game to run properly with mods and CC.
I caved in a bought the Legacy Edition on Steam because of the promise of it "just working" on my Mac (through Parallel Desktop) and my Steam Deck without going through hoops and patches and graphic rules and all that jazz. It's been a long, long, long, month (but that is a story for another time) and I desperatedly needed the distraction.
I am going to be fair to EA this time. The game worked properly out of the box. I am still impressed, and I am aware that lots of players have had troubles. The issues, obviously, began when I started to mod it. It's taken me two days (but once again, I appreciate the distraction), but I have finally managed to figure out the reason why the game wouldn't show any hoods when I added my ancient backup of Maxis Recolors and why Brandi Broke wouldn't stop reseting: My Parallel Desktop setup was synched with Icloud so the files were not stable and one of my mods was not compatible with Legacy edition.
Now I'm in the process of adding back my hair and clothing default backup and praying that it works because I do not want to build it again.
But if it goes all right, I am playing my Legacy again for fun. Maybe I will share some pictures of the funniest stuff that happens (I tend to let my Sims' free will run wild). I will be starting over, and I am excited about it!
There is no official diganosis and at this stage in my life I probably won't look for one. But in recent years I've started to think I probably am one. I even thought about asking my therapist about this, just before she released me a couple years ago. But it just felt like I was making things up at the moment. Besides, it is pretty stupid for a mental health specialist to self-diagnose, so that's why I am not saying this with complete certainty.
Huh, this is one of those posts I should be writing in Spanish.
Anyway, why am I randomly posting this in my Sim blog? Well, because I am exhausted. I've spent the last two months carrying a huge figurative boulder on my shoulders and just pretending (or masking) non stop. If you met me in person, the most likely impression you would have of me is that I am a very calm, warm and sweet person, who has her shit together, is the voice of reason, a great listener, someone who is eager to come up with solutions to any problem. Someone who has control over her emotions, who likes "normal" everyday stuff. People look up to me and I am constantly been asked for support, both in my professional and personal life. I am so nice and adaptable, that I was able to practically live in a hospital for over 5 weeks, just leaving it to go to work.
However, deep inside I am a very anxious woman, who is triggered by thoughts of death, disease (of loved ones), doctors and hospitals. I need to have my time to be alone. I prefer (almost need) to sleep in a very dark room and listening to movie or videogame podcasts. I've always been into videogames and animated shows, and I tend to obsess about those topics. I used to write a lot of fanfiction and loved it, but have never told a soul because I am so embarrased by it. I prefer to be alone, I hate to make and answer phone calls and when I get a notification on Whatsapp I really need to take a moment to even read the message (and it is even worse if it's a voice message). I am socially awkward in situations that are not related to work. I used to stimm a lot when I was a child, and I still do it when I am stressed. I was a picky eater. I used to be the lonely child who preferred to be by herself and only made friends because my parents were worried. I do not watch series on Netflix, but I can browse Youtube for hours and watch Lets Plays and documentaries about shows. I've always wanted to share my nerd tendencies, but I can't, because I am a woman in her forties, and my family and social circle look down on that stuff. So I constantly pretend and only when I am alone at night I can browse and look at the stuff I like, which is honestly very innocent, but I feel like I have to hide it.
And these last weeks I have had to constantly hide myself in my "social" and "professional" self. And I am exhausted. I feel like my heart is heavy. And it is even affecting my work performance.
So I come to my nerdy spot on the Internet to vent. To the one place in which I can sort of be myself and hope like someone might read this and understand.
*Reads Post* Wow, this is why I mostly lurk. I sound like a 15 year old and my urge to pretend that everything is fine with me is screaming that I do not post this. 😥
The surgery was succesful. It took 8 hours. She`s back in the room with me. Thank you so much for your well wishes. We really appreciate them!
I am emotionally exhausted. I feel like I need to take a 24 hour nap, but this is still not over yet. I will come back once my brain is a little less scattered. ❤️
Sometimes, I miss being part of a fandom. Despite being “chronically online”, I do not have a public social media presence.
I am a very introverted person and prefer to share my thoughts and pictures with my close family and friends. I dunno, I just don’t see the point and end up deleting any draft before posting.
However, there are times when I miss being part of a community and just talk about movies or games online. Especially in times like these, where I badly need the distraction.
Someone really, really close to me is going through a lengthy and difficult medical crisis. I am the only one who can take care of them at night, so I have been living in a hospital for 2 weeks, and I will probably stay here a few weeks longer. I am emotionally exhausted and despite having the support of my family (we are a team on this, and my role is the night caretaker), I feel lonely and stressed.
Wanna know what has been keeping me distracted? Fanfiction. I looked for my favorite tropes on AO3 and started reading fics that looked interesting, even if I was not familiar with the fandom.
So, considering this is my only public space, would it be wrong if I reblogged or shared non-sims stuff here? I understand if you’d rather keep your feed strictly Sim focused, though.
I will keep my Sims stuff too. I cant promise if I will create content, but maybe I will want to play Sims 2 or 3 (not 4, I am too lazy to keep track of mods)
Well, that’s it for now. My loved one will be arriving from heart surgery soon (successful) and I need to be ready for them.
I return to this simblr exactly a year later. I just noticed that my last entry was written on September 19th, 2022, a few hours after the third S-19 earthquake in my city. I swear this is not on purpose.
Macbook owners (M1 onwards), this video has finally allowed me to install (and play) The Ultimate Collection in my M1 Air:
I am so grateful for Natalie (and her graphics settings) and the folks who have been developing the Sims 2 Installer! It now includes a few tweaks, clean templates and even the store content!
I think I am going to have a very light game this time. I need to start over from scratch, after all. I will go back to my hair colors and textures though, I've missed them!
