#I'D TOTALLY BUY THIS!

[episims]

What We Need Is... More Books

After long last I realized that instead of battling with the constant urge to swap my book defaults, I could just give my sims more books to read.

This mod combines both of mine + iSimChi's book defaults and makes the game randomize between those for each genre. So instead of 7 books, there are 21 ✨

I made my older covers use the pages of my newer ones since they have more details.

The mod also fixes the following book behavior:

Books placed outside of bookshelves will no longer turn upwards when a lot is loaded

The 'read to sleep' interaction (that was added in Apartment Life and appears on minors who are in bed but haven't yet fallen asleep) will use children's books instead of the skilling one

This mod consists of two files. In addition to the mod file, there's a texture file that includes the needed book defaults.

If you want to use the mod with some other defaults, simply replace the textures from the texture file. You can also use that file as a base for making your own default set of 21 books.

📚 Download (SFS) (alternate)

Free Time is required. Conflicts with other book cover default replacements, remove those before using these. Also conflicts with ftminifixes by Pescado, if you want to use both make my mod load last (you'll lose the golden book that ftminifixes brings back to the reward bookcase since this mod randomizes textures for that bookcase too).

⚠️ A replacement for novel icons isn't included. You'll probably want to get the one from my newer defaults, as those covers will be used for the novels with the included texture file.

Many thanks to @isimchi for the permission to use their awesome textures 💜 for full credits, please see the original posts.

All the books have 512x512 textures and use a 64x64 specular map. The mod file includes improved material definitions that also fix some lighting issues for the drama and the scifi books.

[ms-demeanor]

Since some people might want a Mac, I'll offer a Mac equivalent of your laptop guide from the perspective of a Mac/Linux person.

Even the cheapest Macs cost more than Windows laptops, but part of that is Apple not making anything for the low end of the tech spectrum. There is no equivalent Mac to an Intel i3 with 4 gigabytes of RAM. This makes it a lot easier to find the laptop you need.

That said, it is possible to buy the wrong Mac for you, and the wrong Mac for you is the 13-inch MacBook Pro with the Touch Bar. Get literally anything else. If it has an M2 chip in it, it's the most recent model and will serve you well for several years. Any new MacBook Air is a good pick.

(You could wait for new Macs with M3, but I wouldn't bother. If you are reading these guides the M3 isn't going to do anything you need done that a M2 couldn't.)

Macs now have integrated storage and memory, so you should be aware that whatever internal storage and RAM you get, you'll be stuck with. But if you would be willing to get a 256 gig SSD in a Windows laptop, the Mac laptop with 256 gigs of storage will be just as good, and if you'd be willing to get 8 gigs of RAM in a Windows laptop the Mac will perform slightly better with the same amount of memory.

Buy a small external hard drive and hook it up so Time Machine can make daily backups of your laptop. Turn on iCloud Drive so your documents are available anywhere you can use a web browser. And get AppleCare because it will almost certainly be a waste of money but wooooooow will you be glad it's there if you need it.

I get that you are trying to help and I am not trying to be mean to you specifically, but people shouldn't buy apple computers. That's why I didn't provide specs for them. Apple is a company that is absolutely terrible to its customers and its customers deserve better than what apple is willing to offer.

Apple charges $800 to upgrade the onboard storage from a 256GB SSD to a 2TB SSD.

A 2TB SSD costs between $75-100.

I maintain that any company that would charge you more than half the cost of a new device to install a $100 part on day one is a company making the wrong computer for you.

The point of being willing to tolerate a 256GB SSD or 8GB RAM in a Windows laptop is that you're deferring some of the cost to save money at the time of purchase so that you can spend a little bit in three years instead of having to replace the entire computer. Because, you see, many people cannot afford to pay $1000 for a computer and need to buy a computer that costs $650 and will add $200 worth of hardware at a later date.

My minimum specs recommendations for a mac would be to configure one with the max possible RAM and SSD, look at the cost, and choose to go buy three i7 windows laptops with the same storage and RAM for less than the sticker price of the macs.

So let's say you want to get a 14" Macbook pro with the lowest-level processor. That's $2000. Now let's bump that from 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD to 32GB and 2TB. That gets you to $3000. (The SSD is $200 less than on the lower model, and they'll let you put in an 8TB SSD for $1800 on this model; that's not available on the 13" because apple's product development team is entirely staffed by assholes who think you deserve a shitty computer if you can't afford to pay the cost of two 1991 Jeep Cherokee Laredos for a single laptop).

For $3000 you can get 3 Lenovo Workstation laptops with i7 processors, 32GB RAM, and a 2TB SSD.

And look, for just $200 more I could go up to 48GB RAM and get a 4TB SSD - it costs $600 to upgrade the 14" mac from a 2TB SSD to a 4TB SSD so you could still get three laptops with more ram and the same amount of storage for the cost of one macbook.

I get that some people need to use Final Cut and Logic Pro, but hoo boy they sure are charging you through the nose to use products that have become industry standard. The words "capture" and "monopoly" come to mind even though they don't quite apply here.

"Hostile" does, though, especially since Mac users end up locked into the ecosystem through software and cloud services and become uncertain how to leave it behind if they ever decide that a computer should cost less than a month's rent on a shitty studio apartment in LA.

There's a very good reason I didn't give mac advice and that's because my mac advice is "DON'T."

[exoshroommie]

THEY'RE OUT!

socks the dillypillar and a hopeye are now available as plushies :)

here they are

they're both already about 10% funded and are the same price as previous ones

you can buy them until 22 days from now!! they ship december 14th this year

[jq37]

Descendants: The Rise of Red is kind of a bizarre movie to talk about critically because, imo, it almost doesn't make sense to talk about it in the usual terms of good vs bad or enjoyable vs not enjoyable when the way more obvious tension is finished vs unfinished.

Because, more than any other movie I've ever seen, it does *not* read as a full movie. And I don't mean in a "this movie has a cliffhanger" kind of way. The Empire Strikes Back and Across the Spiderverse fit that description. They end on big dramatic cliffhangers that point to a resolution in the third installment.

But Rise of Red just sets all this stuff up and then...ends without concluding anything. It doesn't feel like the first movie in a trilogy (or duology). It feels like the first act of a two-act musical. It very specifically reminds me of the end of the first act of Into the Woods where all the main characters sing the song Ever After about how they all fixed their problems with magic and nothing bad will ever happen to them again and then the narrator ominously says "To be continued" before the curtain drops. But in Into the Woods you know there's a second act and this movie wasn't sold as the first act of a bigger story. Like sure, it has the, "You didn't think this was the end" tag at the end like all the other movies, but those movies were complete, self-contained stories even though they had sequels. This was NOT a full story. It's half of one story.

Like, if we're supposed to take this as a full story, there are so many bizarre choices:

Why did they make sure to mention that Cinderella and Charming fell in love at the ball at the top if it wasn't meant to set up Back to the Future style, "Oh no, I accidentally got my mom banned from the ball so she's not gonna fall in love with Dad and I won't be born" shenanigans?

Why did Maddox very pointedly have that bit about "you could lose your mom completely" if that was never going to come into play? Red never did anything to endanger Bridget or endanger her own birth so it doesn't make sense as a warning in that way.

Why was there all this focus on this Carrie on prom night moment for Bridget if we LITERALLY NEVER SAW CASTLECOMING? Why dance around this moment and talk about it all cloak and dagger with no specificity if they weren't building up to some big reveal that it wasn't as straightforward as it seemed? And like, they leaned in HARD with making Bridget the nicest, sweetest, cotton candy princess as a teen so I need WAY more than, "She got pranked by known bullies she's been enduring with a smile very handily up to this point" to buy that she went from that to "murderous dictator". And even if she did become murderous, I find it insanely hard to believe that she'd include her best and only friend on the list of people she wants to suffer unless there was a betrayal. I find it INSANE that there wasn't a falling out scene at any point in this movie with how thickly they were laying on the admiration and camaraderie.

(Note: And adult Cinderella def has guilty vibes re: the Queen at orientation. Which I know I'm not imagining because it's literally spelled out in the Jr Novelization!)

Before the time travel element of the movie started, I thought they were going for something like they go to the past and realize that Bridget was bullied not by the VKs but by the spoiled royals, and Ella ends up joining in the bullying once she gets with Charming, betraying Bridget and justifying her whole "Love Ain't It" philosophy. Or Ella ditching her at the last minute to be with Charming meaning she has to deal with the monster prank alone and it was the being alone rather than the prank itself that hurt her (though that is NOT a good enough reason to go all off with their heads on your subjects). The fact that, as far as we know right now, it literally was just a relatively mild and reversible prank that caused all of this is just, such flat storytelling, you know?

But! All of this makes way more sense if this is meant to be the first act of a single contained story. And I don't wanna be all "Pepe Silvia, secret good 4th episode of Sherlock" about this but I did see this picture:

Which seems to indicate that this was written as a Part One. Which, if so, idk why they wouldn't advertise it that way but whatever. The point is, if that's the case then it means that we're potentially in bad pacing territory rather than straight up bad storytelling territory. Because this isn't a bad place to be halfway through your story:

The heroes, warned that time travel is dangerous, have gone back in time to change the heart of a brutal tyrant before she can stage a coup. They seemingly succeed in their mission and when they come home, everything is great! But then, the side effects of time travel start to catch up with them. Chloe realizes that, in breaking the vase, she prevented her mother from going to the ball and falling in love with her dad (who was conspicuously absent from the final scene btw) which means she's starting to be forgotten and erased from the timeline. And Red realizes that though this new version of her mom is as sweet and kind as the teen she once met, she's a complete stranger to her (fulfilling the Hatter's warning that she could lose her mom completely). So they have to go back in time once more to make sure the Ella and Charming fall in love again, perhaps at the cost of whatever bad thing that happened to Bridget happening again and bringing back the original version of her future self. But, now with more context of how her mom became that way, Red can now talk to her mother and persuade her to give people another chance.

Boom, that gives us time to go back and hit everything we haven't yet hit. We can pay off the time travel tropes that were set up but not explored. We can go to Castlecoming which feels so obviously set up to be the centerpiece of this story (like, come on, Back to the Future literally does the school dance thing. This is Time Travel Storytelling 101). We can actually get info about what the prank was and why it affected Bridget so completely.

(Note: This is a side thing but it really strikes me as so crazy that Bridget would so SUCH a big 180 here. Like, I know the Queen of Hearts is a silly, goofy, campy villain, but she straight up murders people and there's no way to get around that if we're taking her out of the surreal story she comes from and putting her in a (comparatively) grounded story. If I wasn't doing a betrayal plot, I would make the twist that the spell that turned Bridget into a "monster" didn't just have a physical effect, it had a mental effect and it magically twisted her personality to be the way it is now. So they broke the physical half of the curse, but neglected the other half and it's been festering the whole time, turning her as evil as she was sweet. Because like, a simple physical transformation isn't that big of a deal to have such heavy security--Bridget made cupcakes with a transformative effect and that was totally fine. I'm not saying that that's what's gonna be the case. I just think it would be an explanation that makes sense for why she changed so crazy much that makes more sense than a simple prank or even a betrayal. Her mom wasn't even evil! How did she go from zero to murder without even an evil mom to push her onto the path? But I'm super digressing right now.)

(Note #2: OK, one last thing. The trap on the book presumably would have hit the VK's and trapped them in Merlin's office regardless of what Chloe and Red did, right? That's like, net zero influence on the timeline. I genuinely can't tell if that's a straight up plot hole or set up to be like, "Oh no. Actually when she said that she was turned into a monster in front of everyone it was meant in a less literal way." Like she was just made to look bad and that was the real thing that pushed her over the edge. Like idk. It really feels like the only thing they really did that would change the timeline was get Ella banned from the dance and presumably out of the way where she couldn't hurt Bridget. OK NOW I'm done.)

Anyway, my point is that this is not how I would have structured my movie and I think this was a super weird way to go into the second era of Descendants movies, but they can still tell a complete story if that's their plan. I'm genuinely really curious to see if this pans out to be a fairly competently told story that just happens to be split over two movies or a complete fumbling of the narrative bag because it could really be either at this point and it's fascinating to me.

[kakusu-shipping]

HELLO THERE

My name is Emile, I'm a Proship selfshipper who loves drawing other people's Self Inserts above anything else and for this week and this week only I am opening $10 RUSH ORDER SKETCH COMMISSIONS!

Do you want a drawing of you and your F/O for cheap and don't mind it being a little rough? Consider DMing me and you could get something like This!

For the low low price of $10 a sketch!!!

And as a bonus!! If you end up liking your sketch and would like it lined, colored, or even fully rendered, you can DM me next week and I will happily slash the price of a full piece just for you!!!

From right this very second through Thursday night my DMs will be open to anyone interested! I only have Paypal to accept payment so please be aware of that!

Thankyou for your time!

[icewindandboringhorror]

finally finished all of one character's entire quests/optional dialogue/questions/etc.... 100,000 words... .... aughhh

[quackle]

GUYS LOOK-

[weneedatdcharacterwho]

We need a Total Drama character who assigns other campers fursonas. Chris argues that he should be a wolf, not a porcupine, but no one agrees with him

[oh-meow-swirls]

it's kind of weird to me that they didn't bother releasing sushi and tempura internationally at all but at the same time i'm kinda glad they didn't cuz like. yo-kai watch was financially failing in the west by the time 3 released. i feel like if they had released sushi and tempura the franchise would've completely tanked before we got sukiyaki which would've sucked. honestly if anything i feel like it's more surprising that we got all three versions of 2 instead of them just releasing psychic specters but tbf i think yo-kai watch was doing well in the west when 2 released. 2 is just inexplicably what killed the franchise despite being a masterpiece-

[sexiestpodcastcharacter]

Thank you for running this complicated bracket!

I'm so sad though that I realized almost every character left in the AP bracket except one is from a DnD podcast/arc so there's almost no indie ttrpg rep in this round

You're welcome! And yeah, shout-out to Nicky Skyjacks for representing games that aren't D&D.

I was going to offer a teaser of an upcoming bracket because somebody submitted a character from We Will NOT Play D&D, but apparently it's named that because it's a scripted audio drama, and not because they'll play any game except for D&D. :(

Anyways shout out to Interstitial, The Unexplored Places, Campaign, NeoScum, TAZ Amnesty, Chapter and Multiverse, Pest Control, and of course Friends at the Table as well as any other podcasts in this bracket that played non-D&D games that I don't know about.

For those who might want to try listening to actual plays that aren't D&D but want something shorter/less of a commitment than the above, the GM for Campaign also has the podcast One Shot, and there's also Party of One Podcast.

For those wanting to try playing some indie TTRPGs, there's a bunch of cool ones for $10 in this itch.io bundle that's raising money for Medical Aid For Palestinians.

Feel free to reply or reblog with more actual play podcasts that use systems other than Dungeons and Dragons!

[leafy-m]

I got Witch Hat Atelier Kitchen volume 3 a little early and guys.... GUYS!! THIS is what Kitchen in English should be like! 💥💝💖

If you like Orufrey, you have got to get volume 3!

[sl33py-g4m3r]

I've had the SMT IV neutral theme going through my head for a majority of the day.

Listening to it before bed probably won't help in getting it unstuck from my head, lol

SMT IV's soundtrack is amazing~~~

As is other MegaTen games. Fantastic soundtracks~~

I'm now imagining a rom hack or something of pokemon scarlet and violet where you'd need to negotiate with the pokemon like the demons in MegaTen; or the samurai or hunters from SMT IV being isekai'd into the Scarlet and Violet world.

How would they get on in each others worlds, do you think?

Samurai from the Eaastern Kingdom of Mikado trying to stop the big bad of Pokemon scarlet and violet, while the pokemon trainers from the game try to combat SMT IV's plot

or something idk...

I've been up over 24 hours, lol. and have probably made a very similar post in the past tbh...

reminds me of a previous post where I queried whether aside from white/black kyurem, what it would be like if you could fuse pokemon like the demons in MegaTen and what the results would be. or whether it would be looked down upon cause we see pokemon moreso pets and creatures to care for rather than outright demons.

all these thoughts simply from a tired "i have a song stuck in my head" post, lol.

Have SMT IV on 3DS but text too small for my legally blind butt to play. Someone brought it up in a similar post I complained about this.

Sucks that nintendo killed Citra I'd guess.... Why nintendo???

*uses magnifying glass to tediously play a megaten game*

hope too that maybe some day we might end up seeing a port of SMT IV for the switch and I think if they do it right that it'd be pretty neat~~~

Just give me a bigger interface to read T_T

wish I'd discovered it before nintendo killed it. I was into the emulation scene for gba games and a bunch of other games in high school but then slowly fell out of doing it cause theft is bad. and now the paranoia if I even torrent something isn't worth it anymore.

anxiety go brrr

but I haven't got in trouble yet.

I'm tired and I pray to YHWH that this is coherent...

[twig---verginix]

why'd they make the neighbor rival personalities so different in rse. it's literally like

neighbor may: sweet, polite, a little awkward and shy

neighbor brendan: how did birch raise this misogynistic dweeb

[i-can-even-burn-salad]

It's easy, they said 😶

Changed the deck's ssd, and every step along the way was stressful enough I now have 5% more grey hair.

Stripped one of the screws. Guess my screwdriver sucked, but god is it hard to find clear instructions which size to use. (With the ifixit set, for me it was a PH1 for the backplate and a PH0 for the internal ones.)

Ordered a new set of bits, a screw remover set (which didn't end up working, but got it out with a tiny flathead instead), and a new set of screws. Together with the SSD, could have just bought the more expensive tier of the deck in the first place 😅

Prying the backplate off was stressful, omg. All the cracky noises. (Thanks to the ifixit video reminding me to remove the microSD, would have snapped it in half.)

"Just unplug the battery!" There was nothing "just" about it, googled, and wriggled, and pried, and wriggled some more, and scraped off some fingernail trying to get that damn connector out.

Meanwhile actually changing the ssd took like 1 minute.

Still haven't put the screws back in (wanted to see if everything works first). Might give it a few days and keep an eye on the thermals just in case.

I ended up buying an usb case for nvme ssds and cloned my drive. Didn't even need to install software, Linux does that with a single command. It worked perfectly fine, except that somehow, Steam has forgotten most of its settings, which really, small issue, but mildly hilarious. Yes, everything is still there, but here, have some beep sounds on menu navigation and all your emulated games forgot that they used to be in a collection.

Was it worth it? I think so.

I've owned the thing for 2 years now, so I am absolutely certain of two things: 1) it's worth the money and more b) 256 GB is too little space for me and sd cards won't be saving me.

The main reason why I wanted an upgrade is that one of my games performs terribly off the micro sd. It took several minutes to load into a map; quickly hopping in to kill a boss? Sorry, boss is dead now.

Unfortunately, that game is also 72+ GB and can't just be finished and uninstalled, so that's like 1/3 of the space permanently taken.

Also honestly, navigating two of each common and compatdata-folders for savegame hunting, mod installing or snoop-around-in-files-purposes is just a huge pain in the ass. I'm sure it works for those people who think changing a wallpaper is witchcraft, but I like mods/reshade and not every game I like supports cloud saves.

[dandyshucks]

ouhhhh the neighbour doesn't have any supplies of her own for crochet and I'm teaching her and my mother today starting in just over an hour

and i am ... not selfish with my supplies but i am unemployed and living off a very tight budget (cannot purchase any more yarn for projects unless i manage to do some pretty spectacular savings on my groceries for the month which is... not very doable) so I'm a tad worried she's going to be good at crocheting and want to Make Something with the yarn that i do have fjdskl and I would normally be totally fine with that but considering there's basically nowhere in town to buy yarn (i've had to buy online) and shipping is $20+ lately, that's not exactly a great thing for me right now 🧍‍♂️

[fordofthefalls]

While going through my old journals, a photo fell out. I don't remember getting this photo taken, but I look surprisingly content for how stressed out I was at the time!