#all my settings had reverted to default :(

[ontarom]

A moment of discrete tenderness between the spymaster and the King of Orzammar, aka the Hero of Ferelden, during a visit to Skyhold.

A couple months ago I played DAO with a noble dwarf and I really fell in love with him. He ended up being a great fit to romance Leliana, I think: very honorable and gentlemanly, but not without his sins (he has fathered two kids, which Leliana knows about and is okay with, but he's mortified by it)

But now I'm mad that Leliana gets introduced as "mistress to the King/Queen of Ferelden" in the Winter Palace, if she romanced a human Grey Warden, but not as "mistress to the King/Queen of Orzammar". Maybe it depends whether on you put Behlen or Harrowmont on the throne... Bleh, anyway, my headcanon is that Duran Aeducan came back and took the throne after Harrowmont.

Also yeah I REALLY simplified the crown of Orzammar because the real thing looks cumbersome as hell.

[anachronisims]

How to EFFECTIVELY Use Empty Standby List to Reduce Flashing and Crashing

This tutorial is for TS2. Obviously. This is virtually the last "chapter" of advice for the Pink Flashing Survey Report (still forthcoming as a single readable thing but posted in bits and pieces over the last six months). PS it's a lonnnnnnng post. Ctrl+F "tldr" for the very short version once you open the cut.

"Part 1" of the Empty Standby List ("ESL") tutorial was already written comprehensively with screenshots by Digi at her wordpress. Following Digi's tutorial will get you set up with ESL as a routine automated background task your computer runs, typically every five minutes.

@gayars set up two instances of the routine, each running every five minutes, staggered two/three minutes apart. In other words, task 1 runs at 12:00, task 2 runs at 12:03, task 1 runs at 12:05, task 2 runs at 12:08, etc. However, I found that this negatively impacted the graphical performance of my game, notably by having the ESL task window flash over the game window, which I had never seen before, nor since reverting back to a single 5-minute task routine.

Anyway. Go do Digi's tutorial if you haven't already; I'll wait.

Background on Why this Matters

So, now your computer will be wiping the standby memory every five minutes. The thing is, this won't be able to have much impact on your game unless you wait to let it wipe before you do a major loading action.

Major loading actions are, in general order of strain (most to least strenuous):

Loading a full neighborhood.

Loading a large (3x4 or bigger) populated lot.

Loading a large unpopulated lot.

Loading actual CAS, if you have a lot of non-defaulted CC.

Loading a medium (3x3) populated lot.

Loading a medium unpopulated lot.

Loading a small (2x3 or smaller) populated lot.

Loading a small unpopulated lot.

Loading CAS catalogs from within a lot (e.g. using FFS clothing tool, "Change Appearance" on the mirror, shopping for clothes/trying on clothes on a community lot).

Turning up your lot view settings (generating other lots' lot imposters within your current lot)/panning the camera around.

You should already be doing at least all medium- and large-lot loading with the Lot View Settings Juggling Method, and “uint LotSkirtIncrease” removed from your userstartup.cheat - otherwise whenever you load a lot you are compounding the strain by also having the neighborhood load at the same time.

Using Resource Monitor Effectively

If you watched the Jessa Channel tutorial on flashing, she recommended downloading a third-party RAM usage monitoring software. This is unnecessary. For purposes of reducing your crashing, all you need is the native Windows program "Resource Monitor" that she also recommends.

To open it:

Click the Windows symbol/start menu.

Begin typing "Resource Monitor."

Click Resource Monitor when it shows up.

Once it is open, get to the useful information:

Click the "Memory" tab.

Make sure the "Processes" and "Physical Memory" subs are fully open, as above.

Sort by "Commit (KB)."

Each time you reopen Resource Monitor, it should restore your last view settings, so you won't have to repeat these steps.

While Resource Monitor is still open, "Pin" it to the taskbar so it will always be readily accessible.

Right-click the icon on the taskbar.

Click "Pin to taskbar."

If it says "Unpin from taskbar" you have already done this step :)

Now comes the monitoring part. You will focus on the dark-blue "Standby" block of the bar graph on Physical Memory.

Every fifth minute, when the ESL task runs, this will flash down to 0 and then pop up to about 30-75, depending on what you are doing. It will go higher faster if you are doing stuff, obviously, and hover pretty low if your computer is just sitting still. TLDR the remainder of this tutorial: only take stress actions when Standby is below 100.

As we all know too well, TS2 has a 4gb RAM limit. The problem is, TS2 seems to count the memory that is in standby, too, not just the committed/working set. Thus, before you take a major loading action (that is going to push up to 1.5gb into Standby), you need to wait for Standby to wipe so the game doesn't accidentally think it's using more memory than it is. Got it?

This is how much RAM my game is using when my neighborhood opens, pretty closely zoomed in on any particular lot. If it is zoomed out further - like a whole city block - both committed and working set are easily over 2.2gb. When I pan around the neighborhood, it continues going up. Portions of the hood that go back out of view seem to get relegated to standby, but yes, my game has crashed just from looking too much at my neighborhood from too wide an angle. Unless I slow down and let ESL run before moving on to the next section.

Six months of diligent Resource Manager monitoring has resulted in substantial reductions of crashing and flashing on my first hood view load and first lot view load. It is not 100% guaranteed, but it cuts it back to Very Playable Levels. And when I have tested the theory by purposefully not letting ESL run before a stress point, it always flashes and/or crashes within the next couple minutes.

SO! Here's what I do when I'm launching my game.

Because of overheating concerns, I always fully shut down my computer when I'm not using it for more than an hour. If I have been playing and experience a flash or crash, I will restart before trying again. @infinitesimblr, a survey Respondent who reported virtually no flashing or crashing despite a vast CC catalog, also recommends restarting between using Bodyshop or SimPE and the full game. I have found it may make a difference with Bodyshop (which I use too rarely to make a pseudoscientific claim) but that I have found basically no impact going from SimPE to the game. YMMV.

Immediately after Windows is done loading, I open Resource Monitor and wait a few minutes. Often background updates begin running and the Standby bar goes crazy - sometimes filling up the entire available RAM - and I just let it sit and do its thing. (Usually I start the computer right before my kid's bedtime so I am not actively waiting on it or anything. Go take a shower or make a sandwich or drink some water, like you did in the old days when the game itself took 20 minutes to load.)

Once the standby bar levels out and is consistently peaking no higher than about 250mb between ESL wipes, after the next ESL wipe, I will launch the game. (Usually between logging into Windowsat the beginning of storytime and checking Resource Monitor before we go do tuck-in, it is reliably hanging out below 100 unless a big TS4 or Windows update was downloading.)

Reminder: do not delete thumbnails anymore prior to launching the game. I also have turned off RPC's clear caches option and have observed faster loading times with minimal increases in crashing.

After the neighborhood selection screen comes up, wait for ESL to run again before opening your neighborhood.

If you have continue to have more than VERY sporadic hood load flashing after taking these steps, you should try launching into a subhood if you have one, then pivoting to the main hood if that's where you're playing that session after yet another ESL wipe. If that doesn't help you simply need to thin out your hood or accept the flashing. (I ended up deleting about 25% of my deco trees and 10-15 outer-lying lots that will be re-placed in a subhood.)

After the hood is loaded, navigate to the lot you want, but DO NOT actually load that lot until ESL runs yet again. Ditto for CAS - Do not select "Create New Family" until ESL has run again.

Play should be proceed as normal at this point. You probably don't need to alt-tab back to Resource Monitor again unless your sims are going traveling or you are changing play lots.

BONUS TIP #1: You can put a shortcut to the ESL routine on your desktop and push it manually (just double click the icon) if you don't feel like waiting once the game is loaded. I have had imperfect results with this vs. just waiting the five minutes, though, because the game wants to run through some stuff and flush it. But it's an option for you to experiment with.

BONUS TIP #2: If you have a really deep clothing/hair CC catalog, try to avoid using the FFS clothing tool option where you select every outfit for the sim, and their hair and makeup, at the same time. Instead, choose individual outfits by type and use the regular mirror option to change appearance (or SimBlender has it, I think, so they can do it where they already are).

[y-rhywbeth2]

D&D Vampire Lore Dump #1

Feeding and Diet It's actually more complicated than just "they bite you and eat your blood." Plus what they're able to eat; how often they need to eat; what happens to you if they bite you and what happens to them if they don't feed- spoiler: it's unpleasant. Incidentally, you should reload and kill Cazador again.

(I was comparing stuff across editions and compiling it into something more coherent and then figured I'd info dump about it in case my fixations are useful to somebody out there.)

DISCLAIMER: There are two things to note about the lore presented here: First, while the standard stat block in the monster manual is the default, in terms of lore vampires have this annoying tendency to be incredibly, stupidly varied. They are magical monstrosities ruled by the power of symbolism and superstition above anything else.

The next is that D&D is decades old, spans five editions, several settings and hundreds of writers. One guy establishes a piece of lore, and then the next picks it up goes "nah" and writes something else. I collected info from four different source books, all from different editions, which naturally don't entirely agree on how vampires work. Lore never stays consistent and may contradict itself. You may see information somewhere else from a source I don't have that contradicts what I wrote here. If you read this and like some of this stuff but not other bits, take the good and ditch the rest.

Basically, in D&D, canon is what you decide it is.

Feeding | "Biology" | Hierarchy | Weaknesses and Cures | Psychology

They only need to feed once in a 24 hour period. Vampires can survive between 3-9 months of starvation, but it's a terrible idea. -

There are three different categories of "Undead Hunger." Vampires have two of them and actually need to consume more than one thing to stay "healthy": Blood and life force. -

The blood is obvious. This is categorised as a "diet dependency." It's required to preserve their bodies and powers, and without it their powers* are suppressed as their bodies begin to shut down. *This refers to the powers a vampire gains with age; they cannot lose power they had as a newborn (the base stat blocks given for vampires and spawn given in the monster manual) A vampire requires the equivalent of 12 hit points of blood a day, or it begins to revert into a corpse-like state. Mentally they slowly regress into a desperate, mindless animal frenzy where they'll kill and drain anything containing blood they can get their hands on. Ultimately, if they don't get any blood then they revert into a corpse and they're trapped in their own body as it begins to wither and mummify. They're trapped in a coma, vaguely aware of the passing of time in flashes of awareness until somehow they are fed blood. If they ever wake up again, they will probably wake up feral and absolutely ravenous. -

Vampires rely on the victim's blood pressure to expel blood from the wound they create, lapping and mouthing at the wound rather than actually sucking on it. Being bitten is a highly pleasurable experience that victims can't help but desire, even when they know they shouldn't. -

While the damage done remains, the wounds from a Vampire bite closes itself quickly after the feeding (assuming you're still alive). It does however leave a mark. The bite mark itself is often "less than half an inch in length", and leaves behind a significant bruise that causes no pain or sensitivity to touch. Other side effects include fatigue and a weakened immune system. -

Vampires typically target sleeping victims (less likely to fight back) and favour the blood of their own race above others. So theoretically, Astarion finds elf blood tastes best. -

Drinking animal blood tastes bland and is health-wise akin to drinking tainted water: yes it might keep you alive in desperate times, but it's ultimately bad for you and will probably make you ill. That said, it has no mechanical detriments and a vampire that's forced to live on animal blood will be just as strong as its kin, but considerably bad tempered about it. -

A vampire's secondary feeding requirement is called an "inescapable craving", which means that if a vampire doesn't get that fix then their hunger begins to devour them instead. The pain is described as a spike boring into the vampire's brain, obscuring their awareness. They begin to obsess over feeding to the exclusion of everything else, they become willing to take ridiculous levels of risk to stop the hunger as they become more and more desperate. As they are consumed they become progressively more feral until they're just a rampaging mindless horror driven only by horrific hunger. For vampires, their inescapable craving is life force, which a vampire leeches from their prey through touch leaving the victim weak. Direct skin contact isn't required, if you're wearing full plate and/or the vampire is wearing gloves and they lay a hand on you they can still drain you. Mechanically these were combat abilities, energy/level draining occurred when a vampire struck a target with their own body (usually their hands). Before 5e hit them with a nerf bat, vampires could permanently weaken you this way (you could lose character levels from this). 5e also seems to have rolled life drain into the biting, so a vampire can consume your blood and energy at the same time. -

Post feeding, a vampire starts to look alive. Their skin is flushed and warm and they feel elated and energetic. In contrast, a vampire that hasn't been feeding properly becomes more corpse like and feels "sluggish" (I'm interpreting that as flu-like symptoms). It's purely emotional however, the vampire is no less capable and dangerous and suffers no mechanical penalties. -

Vampires can feed on other vampires, which is actually more filling than living humanoid blood and gives them the ability to communicate telepathically for a few hours. They don't like it though. If a vampire drinks from another vampire then they can be controlled by that vampire and the link forces them to feel affection for each other against their will until it wears off. The results of both vampires in question feeding on each other is described as "debilitating" since they both paradoxically become enslaved to the other's will and forced to "love" each other creating an absolute dysfunctional mess of control, obsession and resentment. The good news is that it only lasts a few hours. -

Some vampires can eat regular food (no nutritional value in it for them) while others would regurgitate it if they tried. As they retain their tongues, vampires can also taste food. That said, it's a bad idea for them to eat garlic, even if they can eat solid food. -

Some kinds of vampires don't drink blood. There's all kinds of weird and wonderful stuff a vampire might be required to consume instead. Spinal fluid stands out. Or the bit about ones who drain the ocular fluid from your eyes. Gale might find interesting things to talk about with the magic eating ones who prey on mages. They're much less common, probably something to do with most people not finding that very sexy. I don't think any of them exist on Toril.

[bhaalsbabe]

It's interesting to consider that the name "The Dark Urge" wasn't actually Durge's name. It was just another way for Bhaal to dehumanise Durge and have them be the killing machine he wanted; a description of the only part them that mattered rather than the sentimental crap society used; a code-name if you'd like.

Since it wasn't until Durge reached adulthood that they've been taken into the temple of Bhaal and that the Urge finally showed itself, it's very plausible Durge used to have a pretty normal childhood and that included having a pretty normal name.

That name might as well be what you name your Durge at the beginning of the game. And yet, when you "say your name out loud", you hear "The Dark Urge", probably to set you back on the path of destruction. Even while you hear this, however, Durge continues using the actual name (and not this edge-lord silly name their brain supplied): "I think my name is -insert your choice of the name-"

With the loss of memories came the loss of all the indoctrination as well, reverting Durge back to what they used to be as a growing up child, including the skills (hence why, on default, you're running around as a sorcerer blasting everything that moves with fireballs instead of hiding in the shadows and taking out enemies sneakily), and more importantly, the name.

Durge had a way to connect with people again, and not with just their daggers.

(Also imagine this, everyone being forced to call Durge that, and then Gortash comes and calls Durge by their original name, wouldn't it be so much easier for them to form a more personal connection with the Banite)

[mookymilksims]

🌟 ULTIMATE REALISTIC 🍼 Inactive Daycare Roleplay Guide 🧸✨

Wash good, MooMoo crew! 🐄💖 Welcome back to my channel, and if you're new here, thanks so much for stopping by!

In today's video, just as promised, I'll be showing you how to set up your very own inactive Daycare in The Sims 3! 🎮👶

An inactive Daycare is basically an NPC-run daycare center in your save file, where your babies, toddlers, and children can be sent instead of calling a babysitter. It's a super handy way to add realism to your gameplay!

Now, I know for a fact that many of you probably had no idea this was even possible. A bunch of my simmer friends—who’ve been playing this game way longer than I have—were shocked when I told them about it. So trust me, you’re in for a treat!

I’m really excited to walk you through everything: how to get it set up, the mods you’ll need, and a few extras to enhance the experience even more.

This guide is part of a new Education Roleplay Guide Series that I’m adding to my guides playlist! 📚✨ We’re starting with Daycare, then moving on to Elementary, High School, Boarding School, and finally University roleplay. So if that sounds fun to you, stay tuned for the whole series!

Alright, grab your water and get comfy—let's jump right in! 🚀

Mods You Need 🛠️

The only mod you’ll need to set up your inactive Daycare is the NRAAS Go Here mod. This mod includes specific settings that automatically assign a babysitter service call to your inactive Daycare, making the whole system work seamlessly. 🏡👶

Here’s an important tip: When the Daycare isn’t open, the game will revert to its regular “Call Babysitter” feature, so you don’t need to worry about your gameplay being interrupted when the Daycare isn’t available.

Now, a quick note about compatibility: Avoid using mods that modify babysitters or the Daycare career, as they’ll conflict with these settings and may cause the Daycare career to disappear entirely from your game. Trust me, I’ve learned this the hard way—let my playtesting mistakes save you some headaches! 😅

For those who want a bit more detail, I’ve created a manual guide for these settings and mod enhancements on my Tumblr. I’ll link it in this guide, and you can always find all my guides through my Tumblr link in the description. I make sure to upload every new guide the same day my video goes live! 💻✨

If you already have your own Go Here settings, the manual guide will help you tweak them specifically for inactive Daycares. But if you’d rather save time, you can download my pre-configured Go Here settings, where I’ve already enabled the mod to register inactive Daycares for you.

All the links and resources you’ll need can be found at the end of my Tumblr guide. 🌟

For the Nerds: Understanding the Settings 🤓✨

Here’s a quick breakdown of the settings you’ll be tweaking:

Allow Active Day Care The mod allows Day Care career Sims from active households to care for local inactive children. Set to: True

Allow Babies/Toddlers to Be Home Alone The mod stops the “hibernation” of children left alone at home but doesn’t call a babysitter. Set to: False

Hire Babysitters for Inactives The mod either finds a Day Care to place inactive children or hires a babysitter to watch them while their guardian is away. Set to: True

Use Day Care Instead of Babysitters The mod uses Day Care career Sims to watch inactive children instead of hiring babysitters. Set to: True

At first glance, these settings might feel a little overwhelming, but here’s the gist:

You’re ensuring children aren’t left home alone.

You’re allowing the game to automatically call for babysitters when necessary.

Most importantly, you’re enabling the mod to use an active Day Care career in your world instead of the default babysitting service.

Here’s the fun part: Although the settings refer to an "active" Day Care career from an active household, we can tweak them to let an inactive household run the Day Care instead! This is how we get around making your own household responsible for the service. 🏡👶

Now that we’ve covered the settings, you have two options:

Manually adjust the settings yourself using this guide.

Download my pre-configured settings for convenience.

If you choose the second option, simply place my settings file into your Library folder and import it through the NRAAS settings menu in-game. 🗂️

Next, I’ll show you how to set it up in your world step by step! Let’s go! 🚀

Setting Up Your Daycare Lots 🏡🎨

First, let me say I really wanted to finish my Preschool Conversion Megapack before this video so I could send you off with hundreds of new items to decorate your Preschools. But I fell behind on my conversion schedule—don’t worry, though! I’ll make it up to you by finishing the project and uploading a handful of CC Preschool lots for you to download. Stay tuned for that! 💾✨

For now, I’ll be using a CC-free Daycare lot I found on the Sims 3 Exchange. I’ll upload a few more options I come across, so you can revamp them and place them in your worlds. Full credit goes to the original creators, but since the Sims 3 website has been glitching lately, many of you might struggle to download from the Exchange. That’s the only reason I’m uploading these files myself—they’ll go into your Library folder, of course!

Daycare Lot Design Tips 🏢👶

Your Daycare lot doesn’t have to look like a house—it never did! You can design it as a fully commercial Preschool and assign it as a residential lot. While home daycares can be cozy, they might not always match the theme of your world.

For Daycare staff housing, here’s a quick tip:

Build a basement and add bunk beds with a dresser for the staff to sleep. That’s all they need—sleeping quarters.

The lot’s main areas, like the bathroom and kitchen, should already exist on the commercial level, so no need to replicate them in the basement.

You’ll want to encourage staff to only use this basement for sleeping. The less functional the basement is, the less likely the staff will linger there instead of interacting with the Daycare space.

Building for Smooth Gameplay 🎭🔄

Since these lots will be used by inactive Sims, design them to complement the game’s AI. Like in Part 2 of my Slice of Life Roleplay Guide, aim for an 80% decorative, 20% functional building style.

Here’s what I’ve learned from my playtesting:

Highchairs: Optional for aesthetics. Inactive Sims usually feed toddlers on the floor, so highchairs don’t get much use.

Walkers: Add two max—inactives will occasionally place toddlers in them, but too many decreases usage.

Rocking Chairs: Great addition! Inactives love to rock with babies and toddlers.

Playpens: Limit to one—you can fit up to four toddlers in a single playpen. Adding more lowers their usage rate.

Cribs: Useful for babies, but avoid adding too many, as inactives might not use them.

For toddlers, I highly recommend CC toddler beds that allow them to autonomously climb in and out. These are ideal since they let toddlers nap independently and won’t trap them like traditional cribs.

Skill-Building & Play Areas 🧩🎶

Designate a playroom for skill-building toys, but don’t overdo it:

Toddlers love music and block toys, so place two of each to ensure availability.

Add one functional toy box to prevent clutter. Too many toys lying around can distract Daycare staff from teaching toddlers how to walk or talk.

Other Tips & Tricks 🌟

Baby Changing Stations: Nice for aesthetics, but inactives typically change diapers on the spot.

Keep the lot’s design spacious and realistic to align with my 80% deco, 20% functional system. So when you do add cc and deco you'll have a lot of room to work with!

By following these tips, your Daycare lots should run like a dream for inactives. I can’t wait to see what you all create with this system! Happy building! 🎉🛠️

Setting Up Your Daycare Staff (Optional: Toddler NPC Household) 👩‍🏫👶

When setting up your Daycare staff, you technically only need one adult Sim to run the Daycare. However, adding more adults to the household can make things more dynamic and fun! Here's how I like to organize it:

Creating the Staff 🧑‍🎓👩‍🔧

For my Daycare, I created a Preschool teacher modeled after the teacher from Cocomelon—a fun little nod for anyone familiar! I also added:

A "Nanny" Sim registered as a nanny or homemaker using NRAAS Careers or PhoebeJay's Register Mod.

A Handy Sim, registered as self-employed through NRAAS or using PhoebeJay's Register.

Feel free to get creative with your staff roles—each one can bring unique dynamics to the Daycare environment!

Adding NPC Toddlers 👶👶

For a more immersive Daycare experience, you can optionally add up to 5 toddlers to this household. Here's why I recommend it:

These toddlers will populate your Daycare lot and also appear out and about in your world when the Daycare isn’t open. The adults in the household will naturally take them to community lots like parks, beaches, or arcades.

By creating these toddlers, you avoid relying entirely on townie households, which may not always have younger Sims.

Balancing Toddler Populations 🏫

With my population settings, new babies and toddlers might take a while to appear in your world. Here’s the breakdown:

If you only add 2-3 toddlers across townie households, the GoHere mod will teleport just those 2-3 toddlers along with your active toddler to the Daycare lot. That makes for a total of 4 toddlers at the Preschool.

If you add 5 NPC toddlers to your Daycare staff, those 4 townie toddlers combined with the NPC toddlers will total 9 toddlers on the lot.

Pair this with deco Preschool Sims, and your Daycare will feel lively and realistic—with minimal performance impact!

Why Add NPC Toddlers? 🤔

While optional, I highly recommend adding NPC toddlers if you want your Preschool to feel full and bustling. It’s not as fun when your toddler or baby is the only child on the lot, or there are only one or two others. With 9 toddlers (and some clever decor), your lot will truly feel like a thriving Preschool.

By following this setup, you can make your Daycare come to life with both active and NPC toddlers, creating a vibrant and immersive experience! 🎉

Setting Up Your Daycare Staff Household 🏫👶

Toddler NPCs and Their Beds 🛏️

No need to worry about building a basement or special sleeping arrangements for your toddler NPCs—they’ll autonomously use the modded toddler beds I showed you earlier!

Playing as the Daycare Staff Household 🎮

Once you’ve created your Daycare staff, switch to this household to set things up:

Assigning the Preschool Teacher 👩‍🏫

Use a newspaper or head to the library to apply for a job via computer. If you’ve watched my ULTIMATE REALISTIC Money Overhaul Guide, you know that if there isn’t a PC on the Daycare lot, you’ll need to use the library anyway.

I don’t recommend placing PCs on inactive Daycare lots, as adult staff will be distracted playing games instead of watching the toddlers.

Using Job Overhaul Settings 🛠️

Access Job Overhaul Mod settings, and enable “Show All Available Jobs.”

You can import your preset settings later, but for now, assign the Daycare career to your Preschool Teacher.

Once assigned, the mod will prompt the teacher to visit City Hall to complete paperwork and designate their residential lot as the new Daycare.

Setting Up Additional Staff 🧹🔧

Assign the other two adult Sims to their roles:

Nanny/Director: Register using PhoebeJay’s Register Mod or assign a self-employed career.

Handy Sim: Same process as the Nanny.

While NRAAS self-employed careers can work, I recommend PhoebeJay’s Register Mod for a better task automation experience. In my tests, staff assigned via the Register were more effective at helping around the Preschool.

Optional Aesthetic Touches 🎨

Use Transmogrify to turn the Register into lockers for a cohesive Preschool look.

You can even download scrubs or matching uniforms for the staff—get creative!

Assigning Career Levels and Duties 🏆

Once your Preschool Teacher returns from City Hall:

Open NRaas > MC > Intermediate > Career Level and set their Daycare Career Level to 5.

This is critical, as the inactive Daycare setup doesn’t work properly if the career level is below 4 or 5.

If using the Transmogrified lockers:

Assign the other two staff members to their lockers.

Setting Staff Duties:

Nanny/Director: Clean up and care for children.

Handy Sim: Repair broken items, with the optional duty of also tending to children.

Expanding the Daycare Team (Optional) 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦

You can assign additional Daycare staff from other NPC households. For example, if you have 6 toddlers in total, consider adding 1–2 more staff members.

Aim for a good balance—toddlers should outnumber adults. This allows room for toddlers to explore, play independently, or nap while still receiving plenty of attention.

Switching Back to Your Active Household 🏠

Once everything is set up, head to Edit Town and switch to your active household.

Import your NRaas settings if you haven’t already, especially GoHere. These settings will take effect the following Sim day.

By the next morning, your Daycare will be ready to operate, and your toddlers can enjoy a lively, engaging environment! 🎉

Cons to This Setup

While I love this setup, I want to be transparent about some of the drawbacks and share a few workarounds:

1. Hygiene Needs Inactives won’t change your active toddler’s diaper, even though they handle all the other toddlers and babies on the lot. To work around this, make sure your toddler’s hygiene bar is full before sending your sims to work or school.

2. Potty Training Inactives will help your toddler learn to use the potty, but they do so gradually. You’ll need to do the bulk of potty training at home. Once your toddler has learned, they can autonomously use the potty at the daycare, reducing frustration. Before they’ve mastered it, you might consider using cheats to keep their hygiene up—this can cut down on fussiness during the day.

3. Skill Building Inactives will occasionally teach your toddler to talk and walk, or supervise them while they play with skill-building toys. This doesn’t happen every day, but it’s a nice bonus when it does. Any progress they make at daycare gives you more time to enjoy other activities when they’re home.

Once your toddler learns to talk and walk, it unlocks even more daycare activities (with the help of mods). This can make the daycare feel like a fun mini-game for your toddler’s development.

4. Eating Needs Feeding works similarly to hygiene: inactives feed all the other toddlers but won’t reliably feed your active toddler. They may attempt to use the Sweet Simmers Mod to feed your toddler on their lap, but this often cancels out.

For this, I recommend Zoe24’s Toddler Food Bowl Mod. This mod adds an object that works like a pet food bowl, letting you auto-fill it with various food options that toddlers can eat on their own. It’s adorable, functional, and gives your toddler some autonomy while keeping them happy and well-fed.

5. Babies’ Needs If you have active babies, the same challenges apply. Inactives will cuddle, play with, and occasionally put babies in cribs, but you’ll likely need to use cheats to keep their needs met. This isn’t a dealbreaker for me since mods make babies more interactive overall, and the daycare system is still fun despite these quirks.

It’s worth noting that the inactive staff will take excellent care of all other babies and toddlers on the lot, so your focus can stay on your own children.

Dynamic Gameplay

One of my favorite things about this setup is that no two days are the same. Inactive daycare staff vary their interactions with your child, creating a dynamic and exciting environment. For example:

Monday: They might focus on playing with your toddler.

Tuesday: Someone might teach them to use the music box.

Wednesday: A staff member might spend an hour teaching them to walk.

Thursday: Another sim might cuddle them in a rocking chair.

Friday: They could take turns placing your toddler in a playpen or engaging with them in other ways.

This variety keeps things fresh and gives your toddler new experiences to explore every day.

Recommendation for Enhanced Gameplay

I highly recommend combining this setup with the Ultimate Careers Mod (UC). This mod makes it easy to switch between all your sims, ensuring they’re always actively doing something. With this combination, The Sims 3 begins to feel like a more complete game with structured tasks and open-ended roleplay options.

Whether you prefer a day packed with activities or a cozy, low-key session, this setup offers creative freedom and flexibility for every kind of player.

Now, let’s jump into the game 🎮, and I’ll show you how it all comes together ✨ when you apply the techniques from this guide! 😄👶🏽🏡

🌟 Conclusion 🌟

As you saw, just as I promised, every day in this setup feels unique and dynamic. 🎠 Your babies 👶🏽 and toddlers 🍼 can enjoy a genuine inactive daycare experience that adds so much realism 🌈 to your family gameplay and roleplay mechanics. This setup has been a staple in my family plays, and I can’t imagine playing without it! 💕

Let’s clear up a few questions I know will come up:

❓ Can I have more than one inactive daycare lot in my world? You can, but GoHere will only assign one lot as the daycare hub (likely the first one you set up). So, setting up multiple daycare lots wouldn’t make sense since only one will function as intended.

❓ Can I have both an inactive daycare and an active daycare in the same save file? Unfortunately, no. As I explained earlier in the video 📺, the GoHere mod will treat the inactive daycare as if it’s already an active one. This means trying to juggle both setups in one save file will lead to conflicts.

➡️ My recommendation: If you know you’re going to run an active daycare in the future, skip this setup. But if you’re sure you’ll keep your daycare inactive, go ahead and follow this guide!

🎥 If you want to enhance your gameplay even more, check out my ULTIMATE REALISTIC Family Gameplay Guide for mods that complement this setup. Both guides (this one and the family gameplay guide) will be available on my Tumblr, and you’ll find the link in the description below!

I hope this guide made everything clear and inspired you to try this setup in your own games! 🌟 Thank you so much for joining me today—I appreciate and love you all! 💖

See you next time, MooMoo's! 🐄💕 Byeee! 👋

🌟 Resources 🌟

📖 Tutorials:

📂 [Manual Guide]: Set up functional inactive daycares step-by-step!

🏡 [ULTIMATE REALISTIC Family Gameplay Guide]: Enhance your baby-to-teen experience.

🛠️ Mods You’ll Need:

🔧 NRAAS Go Here

🛏️ Arsil Toddler Bed (Napping Mat)

🛏️ Olomaya Toddler Bed

🍽️ Zoe24 Toddler Food Bowl

🛍️ Phoebe Jay Register

🛠️ Extra Settings & Lots:

⚙️ GoHere Settings (Place in your Library folder)

🏡 CC-Free Daycare Lots (Credits to the amazing creators!)

[basiltonpitch]

Devi vs. David: aka a comprehensive list of every single time ben gross has referred to devi as one or the other (season four edition)

HERE IT IS!!! the final edition of devi vs. david!!! if you're new here and haven't checked out any of my other devi vs. david deep dives, please feel free to check them out here: season 1, season 2, season 3. you can also find all of my devi vs. david ramblings here. and as i've said again and again and again, this is a list of every single time ben refers to her as either devi or david, this time in season 4, with context + insight + my own lil insane thoughts, because i'm 100% totally normal when it comes to this topic (they said, like a liar).

heads up, not all of the netflix captions are accurate, or the whole quote wasn't all in one frame, so if the font looks different in any of the following screencaps, it's because i captioned them myself.

i already noted in previous analyses, as well as in this post, that ben tends to go for “david” during their rivalry and their friensdhip, as opposed to when they’re estranged/fighting etc and when they're in more...well, romantic situations, he defaults to “devi.” i’ll go a little more into this towards the end, but it’s just something i’d like to bring to your attention before i get started.

anyways, here we go!

hmm remember when i predicted we would get a “devi” first this season because of the months of distance and miscommunication? and when i thought it would happen immediately after devi sees margot kiss ben? i may not have had all the details right, but i saw this coming from a mile away. and this also fits into the pattern i thought was going to be established: season 1 we get “david” first, season 2 we get “devi,” season 3 “david” and now in season 4 they’re finishing the pattern with another “devi.” they’re in wildly different places in their relationship in each of these instances, which i go more in detail about in this post where i predicted that we would get a “devi” first this season.

anyways. this use of “devi” has me hurting for both of them. they’ve got this - this chasm of months of distance, of zero contact, of miscommunication and misread feelings and misrepresented actions (“he was clearly embarrassed for me.” vs “it was so clear she that thought it sucked. she got up and sprinted out.” i love my two unreliable narrators devi vishwakumar and ben gross!!). i’m having a lot of thoughts about devi’s intentions here that i…probably won’t go into further detail about, lol, because this post is about ben. so. of course he reverts to “devi” here - they aren’t friends, right now. they aren’t really rivals right now, either - i mean, they always will be, of course, but that’s not the focal point of their relationship here. they’re talking for the first time after three months of radio silence, of ben creating this rift between them because of some bullshit advice after misrepresenting what happened (okay like. i’m not here to hate on ben - i just. it’s his fault. it’s literally his fault). he can’t call her “david” because, as i’ve said before, “david” has turned fond. they aren’t friends, they aren’t rivals, they aren’t lovers. so, “devi.”

(didn't include the first "devi" he says to get her attention in this scene, sorry.)

okay this is. basically bouncing off the last one - he can’t call her “david.” they aren’t close enough for that, not right now - they won’t be for some time this season. but he’s also trying to set the tone of the conversation, a more mature version of the one they had in the beginning of the episode. and i do applaud him for this, for owning up to all of this being his fault, too (which. i don’t think all of it was, honestly - there is blame to be placed on devi and on margot over what happened this episode, but the 3 months of no contact? ben’s fault, 100%). big props to him for apologizing. however still a little salty about him internalizing those words from mr. basketball player all those months ago, because dude did not have all the info when he gave ben that advice. but to be fair - ben is a seventeen year old with low social skills (not faulting him for that because like. same) so i sympathize with him a bit there. overall, based on where they are in their relationship in 4x01, i was really pleased with how this convo turned out especially since the spoilers we were given from the premiere made it look so much worse than it really is.

hm. remember how that last convo of theirs was pretty mature and low-conflict. yeah then they give us this. ben’s…exasperated. within reason, i think - and to be clear i don’t think devi’s really in the wrong here, it’s just…he chose to be with margot because he thought it was the easier route. he distanced himself from devi because he thought it would be easier. but it’s not. of course it’s not - he and devi both still have all these messy feelings for each other that they’ve been pushing down and suppressing and denying. and it’s tiring. being around devi while he’s “““moving on””” is tiring. being sucked into drama over and over is tiring. he wants - or thinks he wants- something calm, and easy. -and like. it would be fuckign easy if y’all just got your shit together and admitted your feelings but that comes later so we’re moving on for now-

okay so. as i’ve said in my previous posts, it doesn’t make sense for him to refer to her as “david” to other people when she’s not around, so we’re not going to explain why he said “devi” here - that’s a given. but this whole scene…he kinda let devi get into his head before talking to margot. like, from the characters’ point of view, not ours, it definitely seems like margot had the most motive to deface her car. i mean ben straight up says, “you did have a good reason, so i could understand why you might.” and this isn’t me digging at devi for thinking margot did it, or ben for second-guessing margot, or anything like that - it’s just like. objectively. it does seem like margot could have done it. so i get where ben’s coming from.

okay so…we know that that is. false. a lie. an untruth. et cetera. bouncing back to the first instance of “devi” in 4x02, this, once again, makes me think that ben is just…trying to make things easier, calmer. he doesn’t want to deal with devi’s drama right now (again, not dissing devi, just explaining his pov). interrupting her with, “listen, devi,'' to get her attention, to shut her up because he just…can’t do this right now. he’s conflicted - he cares about devi so deeply that it’s detrimental to him at times, and after the events of 4x01 and 4x02, he thinks the best thing to help him keep “““moving on””” (bc like. i’ve touched on this before but there is no moving on for him when it comes to devi) is to go back to silence and estrangement. back to how they were over the summer. back to how they were in those few episodes of season 2, even, just with less vitriol. so, “devi” to further that distance - earlier in the episode, he says, “we are friends,” but here, he’s all but saying, we can’t be friends, not anymore. not now. maybe not ever again.

following this up with:

the thing is…he does look sorry. he doesn’t want to lose her again. it hurts her, yes, but it also hurts him. but like i said - this is easier for him, for right now at least.

oooh this brings me back to 2x08, “devi, you’re daisy.” ben, currently dating a girl that’s not devi, while still having all these complicated feelings for her, relating her to the material they’re currently studying, after she almost became the reason said girlfriend had to leave sherman oaks (temporarily for margot, of course, but still) - it’s not an exact copy/paste, obv, but i’m loving the parallel. also brings me back to 1x02, “it’s okay, devi. i know how hard it is to memorize seven facts,” the same tone being used then as it is now - although with different intentions, of course. ben is - bitter, i would say. of course he is. this whole situation is just…really reminiscent of that 2x05 to 2x07 arc, although with a bit less anger - they’ve got not just their rivalry and (currently, failed) romance behind them, but also those months of real friendship they had during season 3. there’s even more history between them to contend with now, which makes it harder for him to be angry with her. he still is - just not to the same extent as the s2 aneesa situation. 

remember when i said ben stopped talking to her to make it easier? yeah. i honestly totally forgot he says exactly that until i got to this scene while writing this out. “it’s just easier this way. she just always complicates things.” just - ouch, ouch, ouch. this is just me reiterating everything i’ve already said, i guess. does he want to push devi away right now? no, i don’t think so. but it makes things less complicated for him. devi is messy, yes, they’ve established that well over all four seasons - but this isn’t really about how messy devi is, is it? he tells margot that it’s because of devi, and it is, partially, but it’s also because of him. because he and devi clash. because he and devi mesh. because, at least right now, it is so hard for him to separate all these things he feels - angry and disappointed, yes, but there’s this - wistful, i want to say, feeling there under all of that, this pull he’s always going to feel with her. and he’s not in a place where he can let that go unless he cuts her off.

god i do feel for ben here. i wish they had brought back some of the stuff from last season with him…chilling out more when it comes to academics and all that, but like, this is ben gross we’re talking about here - one intestinal blockage and heartfelt convo with his dad isn’t going to erase over a decade of self-set high expectations. dude is stressed, literally sweating through his clothes and now he looks like someone squirted a bottle of french’s on him.

and amongst all this, comes the last person he wants to talk to right now - he smells like sweat and acrylic paint and he just had his girlfriend judge the spiel he’s probably recited in the mirror a hundred times (which like, in all fairness to margot, it did feel like a bowflex commercial). and now here’s devi, all calm and collected with her power blazer and bouncy high pony - looking like the opposite of what ben’s feeling. he’s already frustrated, and her showing up makes it that much worse - until approximately two seconds later when she saves his women’s medium sized ass.

episode 5’s you never disappoint do you. i love, love, love this conversation between ben and devi - this vulnerability here, the way they tell each other that they’ll be okay, that yes, this is scary. our lives are about to change forever - but you’ll make it through. you’ll survive. you’ll thrive. 

and this line…this so much. ben knows who devi is, has been in proximity to her for twelve years at this point, as a rival, as a friend, even as a lover for a short stint - and he knows her, and he knows that she knows herself. maybe - no, definitely - she didn’t know who she was before, drowning in fresh grief, but she’s grown, she’s healed (not completely, but she has healed nonetheless), and ben has had a front row seat to that. he has watched from up close as she became the person she is now. he believes in her, and he knows she can believe in herself, too.

i promise i’m feeling so totally normal about this…remember when i said i thought the first “david” would be at the end of 4x05 during reconciliation? i do, and, surprise surprise - i was right, because ben gross is nothing if not consistent (most of the time, at least). this “david” is driving me insane. they just had this heartfelt discussion about their fears with going to college, reassuring each other that they’ll be okay, fucking…pep talking each other, because they know each other better than they know anyone else, and ben drops a “david” like it’s nothing. like it’s easy. like he means it!!! i’ve said so many times that “david” has turned into this term of endearment almost exclusively used during their friendship, with ben avoiding using it when they’re not friends, and after last episode, where it had been verbally established (by devi, at least), that they still aren’t friends…now he slips a “david” in. this is the closest, the most vulnerable, they’ve been with each other in months. this is ben taking that step to pull them even closer - ben feeling safe enough to do so. this is ben saying, “i can be your friend,” thirty seconds before he actually utters those words.

okay full disclosure, “david” isn’t in the official captions on this one, so like, idk if jaren decided to add this day of filming or what - but whatever. that doesn’t matter here. what does matter is this absolute effortless slide back into their friendship. ben going out of his way to approach her, to tell her the good news (well. it’s not really good news for devi but like. he doesn’t know that, so). he’s excited for her!!! he gives her this boost of confidence (and yes i know it doesn’t last long, what with the deferral email coming in that day but. still.)

ooooh the way i love this scene!!! the fact that we get to see this interaction through paxton’s eyes is just delightful to me. like, okay, i’m not a “he’s mean to you so he likes you!!” kind of person, but banter like this coming about while they’re actively friends and post-bargot (bengot? ragross? ykwim) breakup…it’s thinly veiled flirting, and idk if we would have been given that perspective if this scene had been shot from devi’s pov, or ben’s. while this isn’t the first taste of mutual banter we’ve got all season (looking at you, 4x04 bathroom scene), this is the first friendly mutual banter, and god we were starving for it - at least i know i was. there’s bite behind their words, but it’s playful for both of them!! but like - then there’s the shot of them both immediately fixing their appearance after they’re no longer in each other’s line of sight (ben tucking in his necklace, devi taking off her cardigan) and i just. ooooh my god i love it. i’ve said it before, and i’ll say it again - peak crush behavior. and ben isn’t even posturing for paxton here like he would have before, thanks to the literal shitstorm of 3x06 - ben’s only…well, acting up, i guess i would say, for devi. not anyone else. 

(and like this is totally unrelated but god do i wish we got more bexton interactions this season, but oh well.)

hi yeah no i’m still not over this scene. it’s. so unapologetically horny and it’s a side of ben i’m honestly so glad we got to see. like, okay, we already know he messed around a little with shira, had (bad) sex with devi, and is canonically a boob guy, but this more in-depth peek at his desires (cough cough degradation kink cough cough) is just…chef’s kiss. yes this is devi’s show first and foremost but god do i love the looks into ben’s brain we get. and this - this desire for devi, this want for her, something he can’t run from in his subconscious no matter how hard he runs from it in his waking hours - yes, it’s a wet dream, but it’s more than that. trent says it: “...you really love her.”  ben loves her. he can’t get her out of his head. he wants her - physically and emotionally.

let’s, for now, ignore that this is moments before disaster. god, the look on his face, this eager, hopeful smile, the fucking bouquet he brought for her. he’s riding the high (ha, get it) of trent’s earnest pep talk, ready, for the first out of multiple times this season, to tell her he wants her. he’s done denying it, to himself and now to her, too (which. the latter obviously doesn’t really happen for another few months - but that’s beside the point).

this instance is pretty self-explanatory from ben’s pov (i mean, that’s what y’all are here for). checking in that she’s okay after seeing her throw up, congratulating her, etc. not spending too much time on this one - just noting the, once again, effortless slip back into “david” after the events of last episode. not saying there’s not some inner turmoil going on for him regarding his feelings for her; even though we can’t see it, it’s still there - but birthdaygate (as nalini called it) was…a disaster, to put it lightly, so. back to “david” it is…for now, at least.

god this followed immediately by the “is she okay?” and then ben rushing off to go check in on her…i’ll touch on this more in the next instance, but like. he’s truly the only one who gets how much this would hurt. not saying that no one else understands how devi feels, but he’s the only one who would really, truly get it if the same happened to him. just - the wondering how she didn’t get in anywhere, because she’s just as smart as (and, technically as 4x10 proves with that valedictorian sash, smarter than) him.  the immediate concern for her, the need to check in...god, he cares for her so much.

“But you’re not a quitter.” bringing back the “no one knows them better than they know each other” thing - because it’s true. no one knows devi better than ben knows her. he knows what she’s capable of - has been on the opposing side of it for over a decade. he has won against her, lost against her, won with her, lost with her…he’s seen her rise and fall and pick herself back up to rise again. he understands her, and he understands why this is so painful for her - if it were him, it would feel like twelve years of hard work, of early mornings following sleepless nights, of flash cards and meticulous notes and extra credit projects, all being flushed down the drain. he gets it, gets her. this being the first use of “devi” (to her, and not in a dream sequence) since 4x05 - he uses it to set the tone, to get her attention, to get her to listen to him. because he knows she doesn’t really want to give up. and he as much as says that: “but if you don’t try everything that you can, you’re gonna regret it.” she already knows this - there’s no doubt in my mind about that, and there’s no doubt that ben knows that she knows this. she just needed to hear it from the one person who understands - and it worked. she does try - and, as we see in 4x10, she succeeds.

this…this is the biggest break in his pattern when it comes to “devi” vs “david.” he never refers to her as “david” with a - romantic isn’t the exact word i’m looking for, but it’s the one we’re gonna use - romantic intention. i think he’s using “david” here to sort of…ease the tension, so to say? to lighten the mood a bit. he wants to tell her - has wanted to since trent told him to speak his truth, likely longer than that. but after birthdaygate - he doesn’t want to show too much of his hand. “maybe i was wrong, david.” not “i was wrong, devi.” 

feeling especially attached to this use of “david” tbh. the excitement he feels for her, immediately rushing to pull her into a hug, how proud he is of her, especially after the events of the last episode. again, he knows how hard she’s worked for this, and he knows what it’s like to feel all of that hard work pay off. she’s not alone in feeling this satisfaction - he’s feeling it with her.

 i loved, loved all the callbacks to the previous seasons, and this is no exception. the addition of “david” here brings me back to this post by @catty-words that i’m still thinking about almost two years later (and have referenced in 2 out of 3 of these analyses): “it’s a relic from their rivalry.” obviously cori goes into it a bit differently in that post because it’s about their season 2 arc, but to re-work that line here: the equatorial guinea nametag (i would say plaque but like. it’s a piece of paper) is a memento of their first time teaming up, but it is also a relic of their rivalry in a way - the initial anger of devi infiltrating his club, the temporary alliance that was struck down just hours later, the nuclear attack. and so, yes, “david” here is used as that mark of friendship, as i’ve referred to it before, and so is the nametag, but they’re also both a representation of their enmity - albeit in a much more playful way than the "david" from 2x05.

i’m going to refer you to the genius of rae @ice-sculptures real quick, who had this to say in regards to ben’s patterns when it comes to what he calls her: “it could be that he “hides” behind david when the lines of their relationship are blurred and uses it as a way to convey the affection that he doesn’t think he can openly express. but when they actually get together he doesn’t need to hide anymore bc he knows that she’s aware of how much he loves her…so devi is enough.”

y’all. devi is enough. he doesn’t need to use a term of endearment, a pet name, with her here. he doesn’t need to hide behind “david.” and like. just in case you aren’t aware - “david” means “beloved” in hebrew. i’m sure ben’s aware of that - he’s a giant nerd, and he’s jewish - it never gets established in canon, so it may just be something we’re all collectively reading into, but like. i’m obviously going to continue reading into it - he doesn’t have to hide behind “beloved” anymore, he doesn’t have to use this roundabout way to tell her how he feels - he can just say it. and he says it without even knowing if she feels the same way. he’s following trent’s advice from 4x08: “you must go to her. [...] you must tell her how you feel. there's no time to waste. [...] you must speak your truth. she needs to know." he flies to her on a whim to tell her he likes her. actually, he thinks he loves her, “devi.” he loves her. this is the bravest thing he’s done - he doesn’t know how she feels, doesn’t know if she loves him back - but he tells her anyways. he can’t wait. it doesn’t matter that she’s flying to the east coast the next day, where she’ll be a two hour and six minute train ride away. he has to tell her now. there’s no time to waste. she needs to know.

god. i just - i love that they already had this - this whole soft, sweet love confession, full of shy, gentle smiles and giggles, followed by The Big Damn Kiss of All Time (and like. the big damn bang of all time) and he still feels the need to tell her that he wants to be with her. that he wants to start this next chapter of life with her. and there’s just…something so important to me about them not being high school sweethearts. about them not really giving this an actual shot until they’re headed to college. he doesn’t want “let’s kiss at our lockers in between periods and sit next to each other in the cafeteria while we eat gloopy square-shaped pizza.” he wants “let’s fall asleep on facetime during exam season. let’s spend one weekend in new york and the next in new jersey. let’s meet in the middle. let’s cram ourselves onto a twin-sized dorm room bed that’s definitely not made for two people. let’s learn how to be adults together. let’s give this a real try. let’s give us a real try.”

and so they do.

and with that...we're done. if you've reached the end, thank you for reading! i'm so sad that this series of posts has come to an end, but i've had an absolute delight doing these, and i'm so pleased with the ending of this show - because it didn't feel like an ending. it felt like a new beginning. i'm going to miss never have i ever (i already do), but i'm so happy to have spent the past few years yelling about it with all of you - and i'll likely continue yelling about it in the near future.

[dullgecko]

>>my bad kids overstimulation hcs<<

gorgug and adaine both get extremely scared when there's a loud noise. they will scream if they're caught off guard.

Fig needs COMPLETE QUIET in order to focus on her work (which is why she's failing since she refuses to stop listening to music for anything)

Fabian almost never gets overstimulated, so when he does the floodgates open and it's ALL THE EMOTIONS

all of the bad kids HATE talking to strangers. They've gotten better at it through their quests but when they're tired they still revert back to their default settings. (fabian, gorgug and kristen don't HATE it, but still don't like it) but they all deal with it in different ways

Adaine just freezes and goes semiverbal. Mostly nods and headshakes, Kristen covers for her by excessively talking and saying things she... maybe doesn't mean.

Fig gets REALLY aggressive and just starts thinking of MURDER. If she's silent, she's thinking about murder

Kristen wasn't really allowed to stim in their house because their parents would accuse her of faking mental illness (or insinuate Helio could heal them) so now (especially when they're overwhelmed) Kristen cannot stop stimming.

Every. Single. One of them has PTSD to some degree or another. Comes with the territory of being an adventurer and having to deal with some really fucked up stuff on the regular.

Adaines dad used to slam his hands on tables or slam doors shut when he was mad. It always triggered a panic attack instantly and he would berate Adaine and make it worse before storming off and leaving her to suffer alone.

Loud noises in Gorgugs house always meant that something had gone wrong in his parents workshop. He was in the room once when something exploded and his dad got pretty badly burned. Digby was healed up almost instantly but it's a pretty formative memory for Gorgug and he still doesnt like loud noises all that much.

Fig needs quiet to zone in but feels anxious without background noise so listens to music anyway. If she didnt have music playing in her room when her horns first started showing she could hear her parents arguing downstairs so the music was mostly to drown them out. She finds it easier to focus if she's listening to something quiet without lyrics so her 'do work now' playlist is all instrumental.

Fabian can get overstimulated by tight clothing or being restrained. Reminds him too much of falling in Leviathan and getting tangled up in all the washing lines. Especially doesnt like things tight around his throat because of how close a couple of them were to choking him. Tried to wear a turtleneck when it was cold once, lasted about two hours before he took a pair of scissors to the neckline of the sweater in a panic to get it away from his throat.

They try to keep their interactions with strangers to a minimum if possible. If they're specifically there to ask questions and get answers it's Rizs job (with a couple bardics thrown in to cover for his terrible charisma score) because he can do an interogation better than anyone else. Plus he's good at telling when people are lying to him. Otherwise it's Fabian and Fig who are the ones in charge of talking (though they tend to get very off topic if not given a specific goal).

They gave Kristen one of those spinny rings to wear when they noticed she would pick at her skin when overwhelmed. It gives her hands something to do so she doesnt hurt herself.

[eri-pl]

You are a great believer of the only Eru can create true life theory it seems from your posts- what origins of dragons do you subscribe to then in how they were made from something else? How much personhood do you ascribe to individuals among them with variation/free will?

Thank you for the ask! I love asks!

First, maybe I am pedantic on words, but I like to be on the same page, so:

I don't fully agree with the word "believer" in context of a fictional setting, especially given that they are people (I've seen one on YT) who genuinely seem to believe in the Legendarium as mythology/religion/I'm not sure what word to use. I don't.

I respect (or sometimes hype about maybe too much) some of Tolkien's ideas on hot his legendarium ties to the real world, can't internalize some others, but at the end of the day, it is fiction, so the question is less "what is true" and more "what makes sense with the story and world", "what Tolkien intended".

And I do believe (based on things I read and watched on YT) that Tolkien did intend to "evil cannot create true life" and "only Eru can create souls". Does "true life" mean "sentient", or "alive in general"? If "sentient", how is that different from "having a soul"? I have no idea. But anyway yea, "Morgoth can't make things that have free will" is a very safe bet about what tolkien thought of it. And does make sense with the story.

(Still, I will take this wording as a compliment. thank you.)

I don't have a single strong HC about how dragons were made. Made from lizards? From big snakes? From dinosaurs which he somehow stole from Valinor (unlikely because siege)? Probably mutated some big lizards.

Personhood? Hmm. the text is tricky there (even a bit contradictory), but I would go with the "they have bits of Morgoth's will in them, a bit like the Ring had Sauron's". No personhood.

My default assumption about various types of more-or-less monsters is:

deeply corrupted Elves/Men: full personhood, but extreme mental issues due to trauma / generational trauma and probably their free will is, how to say it, imprisoned deep inside their minds, so very unlikely to behave in a good way (think: very strong addiction, some extreme mental ilnesses): all variants of Orcs. (Yes, it makes killing them complicated, I can live with that) (Also I did a post on Orcs and how would I try to make them more metaphysically coherent. TLDR they revert after some generations of not being moderated)

fallen spirits: full personhood, self-inflicted (+ some help from evil superiors) trauma, more effective free will, could get over their bs, yes it is hard but also they aren't willing: Morgoth, Sauron, the Balrogs, some various "demons", I'm not sure about some beings. I like to see Thuringwethil here, even though it's probably not canon.

Elven ghosts who agreed to be bound by Sauron (with coercion!) or Morgoth (if he bothers to do necromancy at all), put into various (animal or engineered from parts) bodies: free will fully bound inside, because of the magic. they can regret but they can't escape: werewolves, vampires, stuff like that, also Thuringwethil

bits of Morgoth's will/mind/whatever put into modies of mutated animals: dragons, I'm not sure what else. As they are various bits, they do have some indyvidual character, something like personality, but they aren't persons. Think: OCs. The dragons are Morgoth's OCs. ;D

They (dragons) could be type 3, but from what I remember the text more suggests 4. Or was it just the musical?

And yes, dragons being active after Morgoth was thrown out doesn't contradict this. Ending of the Quenta Silmarillion says that bits of his will still circulate in the world.

I hope this answers your question.

[aropride]

how to install dashboard unfucker (for desktop)

hi i use desktop and i use the dashboard unfucker extension by dragongirlsnout and you should too because it's awesome. i don't know much about computers so it was intimidating to set up but ended up being really easy.

but first:

what is dashboard unfucker?

dashboard unfucker is an extention that makes being on tumblr bearable again.

(ID: 2 screenshots of tumblr with urls/posts etc censored. the first is with the new layout, with labels on the left, the ad-free button, "check out these blogs," "explore all of tumblr," the radar, and no easy way to access your own blog. the second is with the extension enabled, the left hand side of the screen is empty, posts are wider, navigation icons are back at the top right, and the only thing on the right-hand side of the dash is the dashbaord unfucker and limit checker and tag replacer from xkit. end ID)

i got it for layout changes like these- the first is cramped and ugly and i feel like i'm on twitter. the second is warm and comfy and i can make my posts wider (i dont like all the empty space). (limit checker, tag replacer, and post color were done on xkit and palettes respectively, not unfucker, btw)

with the dashboard unfucker you can:

hide the following/blog subs/for you etc tabs

get rid of the changes/staff picks/etc carousel

hide recommended blogs and tags

add profile pics back to posts

hide the radar

hide the explore page

hide tumblr shop

hide user badges

highlight bots in ur activity feed

show who follows u in the activity feed

make posts wider/slimmer and move the dash posts position to the left/right

revert messages design (and make the messages box bigger)

revert activity feed to the old design

display vote counts on polls

show poll results without clicking (no more skewing polls or "see results"!!)

disable tumblr domains

add polls to reblogs

disable "post without tags?"

show ns.fw posts

and other things that i probably missed copying this from the settings!!

so how do you do it? it seems scary but it's easy actually. take my hand

(note: i did this on firefox and tested it on chrome, i'm not familiar with other browsers, also use firefox if at all possible fuck chrome)

how to install dashboard unfucker

step 1: install either tampermonkey, tampermonkey beta, greasemonkey, or violentmonkey (if you don't already have it)

note: im using tampermonkey as an example because it's what i use

step 2a: go to firefox extensions/chrome web store/your browser's equivalent

step 2b: look up "tampermonkey" and click "add to firefox/chrome/whatever" and confirm

step 2c: you're done! yayyy

step 2: click this link. look under "installation" where it says "Click on unfucker.user.js to install or update". and click that

(ID: a screenshot of the tampermonkey install page, showing dashboard unfucker v5.7.8 installation information, the source code, and the install/cancel button. end ID)

(it should open in a new tab and look like this)

step 3: click install! (when i did this it didn't look like much happened and i got scared. dont get scared take my hand)

step 4: go to www.tumblr.com and to the right of the dash it'll have the dashboard unfucker label to the right!

(ID: the default dash again, but with the dashboard unfucker title at the top right of the right-hand side of the dash. end ID)

step 5: click the little gear icon and all the options will pop up! u can fuck around with em to ur heart's content. i recommend exporting after ur done and saving it somewhere in case u have to uninstall/reinstall to troubleshoot or smth

you're done! now u can see the results of polls without clicking them and other such things

(ID: a poll i have not voted on. it has 17 votes and 23h 56m remaining. the title is "poll :)" and the answers are "answer 1" "answer 2" and "see results". there are no percentage labels, but the amount each answer has is indicated by light blue bars in each result, as they would be if i had voted. end ID) note: i'm not sure how/if this aspect of the extension is indicated for screenreaders

THIS POST IS TRANSGENDER BTW!

[misarem]

yapping about Kill the Past under the cut cuz im now free from the 25th ward finally

THE SILVER CASE

-it feels cliche to say the first game was my favorite but uhhh haha. knowing suda, The Silver Case probably didn't fully accomplish what it set out to do but to me, it's so self-contained and demonstrates such ownership of a style that mostly came out of necessity that i can't not admire it, and i'm also so fond of my playthrough of it which was so fresh and curious, compared to the other two games which were fun but I was thinking too much abt how it connects to TSC

--also just the way i played this game is so special, i was very committed to the darker aesthetic to the point where I only played past like 10pm for a while, which is funny cuz the opening of the game is straight up paranormal but by the 2nd chapter transmitter loses that edge until debatably lifecut. tokio is also haunted and paranormally but by that point i just started playing normally. it sorta reminds me of paranormasight which starts out so spooky and the curses are very present but a few hours in it sorta reverts to being a pretty normal feeling but still very good detective mystery. at one point a character does an escape room ala zero escape and its funny. but TSC doesn't stray from its initial vibe as much as paranormasight at all.

-i also played the parallel stories of TSC separate from each other rather than alternating, which made placebo such a slog but i almost feel like I appreciated both stories more that way, even though i would have loved to experience how placebo compliments transmitter

--despite not clicking with placebo at first, tokio is like one of my favorite characters this year hes such a fucking Guy. and you experience him so intimately in placebo in a way i can't even describe but is effective by the end.

---theres a bizarre and esoteric mental link in my brain between tokio, ange from umineko and fucking flynn moore from the furry visual novel Echo because of them being like surprise deurotagonists (sp?) that get fucked up from having to search for the truth about the past and how theyre all chained by it. do you think they would put happy colors in my padded cell or would it just be all white.

-I also feel like I came out of TSC a lot clearer than I did FSR or 25W, I'm sure I missed several details at first but the shelter kids stuff and kamui as more of a role and a criminal influence than as a person wasn't that hard to wrap my head around even though I thought the silver eye stuff was so whatever. i kind of wonder if part of the reason i clicked with it faster was because I'm such an mgs2head, and the whole kamui thing is sorta like what the solid snake simulation appears to be at first

-also the mackerel phones video about Kusabi is so good and feels like a must watch for how well researched it is and how accurately it nails the feeling and message of transmitter.

-TSC also uses film window a lot better than 25W and it might be worth researching how the latter being a phone game affects things but i just got off that game

-also would kinda love a translated version of the PSX version someday just to feel how different it is. idk if certain ppl hate the official translation so much maybe they should do it themselves ooooh

-i havent read 4.5 and i meant to do so before 25W to have that context about sumio and sakura and i kindaaa didnt so lol i have to do that eventually.

FLOWER, SUN AND RAIN

-"flower, sun and rain" is like a speech tick to me in the way of like, rupaul on the weakest link immediately defaulting to chaka khan when he doesnt know the answer to a question

-i wish i felt flower, sun and rain the way I felt TSC. i had a decent time with it and even had a good sense of humor about the more obviously tedious parts and the OST, and I get how mundane it's supposed to be, what it's saying about living in peace and the lie of paradise, but it didn't click with me as much. maybe a pitfall was being so attached to TSC when i played, i was probably looking for something i shouldn't have instead of just enjoying the game for what it was altho i didn't hate it or anything.

--ideally this also gets a translation on its original console cuz I like some parts of the PS2 soundtrack and id love to experience all the art assets and music in PS2 quality.

---sorta tangent. i love the opening tracks for all of these games but Anata no Tameni might be my favorite, beyond just being amazing its so dramatic and unlike the rest of the series and it really stands out. the ds opening in comparison might actually be my least favorite because of that lol

-i think that the mondo/kodai revelation is so funny just because it's an idea you'd either keep in the back of your mind or just wave off because of how dumb it seemed but regardless it's constantly staring you in the face. assuming you even played TSC before this

--sumio was never super proper or anything, i don't think, but his personality here compared to TSC is so funny, he can spend 20 years with bottled up rage and fake his way into an incompetent police force without slipping thaaat much but here he has enough small inconveniences to hit a kid over it. kind of an interesting play on like the salient thing about personality and the self being buried and it feels like an early version of like a shiroyabu situation. not the last time i will compare sumio and shiro.

--i also think its funny that the model of sumio mondo looks pretty similar to kodai compared to the key art of mondo and we should explore that one day

-i wanted more out of toriko kusabi, she was a fun diversion and i didn't expect her to be a tokioesque second protag or anything but idk. she was fun when she went against sundance and at the end and her being like a subliminal kinda suggestion to sumio's buried memories of her father i think is cool. in a less meta sense it's also cute that shes working for her dad i wonder if tetsu has to like try not to step on christine everytime he comes home from the bathhouse at like 2am. actually i dont remember what their family situation even is

-speaking of kusabi i think him like being the guardian/ferryman for sumio's journey is so so beautiful and true and i like that he gets to pull him back from the depths the way sumio sorta inadvertently did in parade/kamuidrome.

--its also really funny to me kusabi just disguises as a chubby white guy. it was probably a fatsuit but i feel like kusabi could be like 50lb away from being a bear anyways. its like the grocery store deli scene in bobs burgers.

---i also appreciated parade from transmitter way more playing this and thinking about sumio. when i played parade the first time i loved connecting the dots on everything but then it kinda got buried by kamuidrome and lifecut. and now im such a shooter for sumio kodai. look at me talking about the previous game wooo.

-i think the character designs in this are funny for how little of them you can actually see. everyone loves yayoi and yayoi is such a serve but my other fav is ken. all the punk details are completely lost in the actual game. the models also super undersell stephen carbione's look, cuz in-game he sorta looks like tokio but then you see his key art and its like yea he would look like that.

-tokio was in this game

-i think edo macallister should be a bellhop in every video game with a hotel ever. im going to the other side of the country soon and if the guy behind the desk at the hotel isn't edo i will be severely disappointed.

-i love that its hyenas. i think there should be like tokio morishima as an anthro hyena and he still has his domesticated turtle or at least like hyena sundance or yotaro or something. i think ppl would be quick to anthropomorphize tokio as a literal turtle guy.

-the eleven children stuff is whatever, i do like that theres a bunch of sumios running around but idc for all the other implications and like step and remy and koshimizu and whoever else. is sumio mondo still deaf and mostly relying on lip reading? cuz i dont think that gets brought up again. i mean he wakes up to a phone ringing every morning but i guess those are the clones. if the hearing is referenced early in fsr and i just missed it then that would be very cool. maybe thats why the voices for the characters are abstract and illegible. maybe flower sun and rain is the best game ever.

THE 25TH WARD

-what if we were all protagonists.

-i dont think this game uses film window as well as TSC but i do like the art and how much of it there is in correctness and matchmaker, also the different styles.

-i love yotaro osato sadly hes so funny and fluffy. hes osato in my notes and in normal convo but i want to call him yotaro affectionately. i do love tsuki too hes such a sufferer.

--i think theyre a teeeeny bit like like p4 adachi and dojima if they were both murderous.

-i feel bad for the lady that gets murked immediately in correctness i had a funny voice for her in my head

-shiro and kuro god bless them are funny and parallel sumio and tetsu to me. both sumio and shiro grapple with their criminal power, although sumio goes against the hc unit while shiro attempts to but finds himself back with them at the end, and while kusabi over time softens quite a bit and learns from sumio in a more overt way than kuro being literally the "japanese dirty harry" and not having as much of an arc, they both are compelled enough by their partner to rein them back in. just the surface level so i dont have to write a whole essay in a stream of consciousness type of post

--what even happens to them bc as far as i can tell, shiro just continues to be a tool of the state and kuro maybe? shoots her superior and then the 25th ward blows up.. with them on it? like okay at least tsuki got outta there.

--on the shiroverse timeline. theres conflicting sources on if his immortality is a kamui thing or a sumio mondo thing or something else and thats funny. the sources all being fan wikis and tvtropes because fuck this game that zero people played and negative people have documented.

-i need to like hold myself back from analysing meru as trans because its so clearly done for shock value but it somehow aged really hilariously now with how prevalent trans egirls are. liek theres a strange almost unearned truth to how meru exists online versus irl.

--kind of all of the gay/trans mentions in these games are like this although kusabi you can at least take in sorta good faith?

-i need to think abt what i thought abt tokio here. its increasingly funny how online he is for being a normal dude in the late 90's early 2000s.

--his portrait in yumi is kind of a hear me out but all the cgs of older tokio look crazy. tokio in general looks a mess in this game and its funny. look at him try to be masc

-i mentioned mgs2 above and the 05 chapters of these games are so reminiscent of the s3 plan and the patriots with the frontier etc using the city to collect data and the protags having to figure out where they fit into it. during TSC, i was paying a lot of attention to the story as it related to the advent of technology. it felt really relevant to kamuidrome and all of placebo but mostly ended up as background/context to the story. it was used a lot more here and i really liked it. chat logs are a great framing device in all the routes since they add so much flavor and emphasize the loneliness of life in the 25th ward (semi-related: in both TSC and 25W, the environments are devoid of people in film window, and i think this works way better for 25W than it did for TSC). placebo is yet again a good example of this with tokio only really interfacing with the world through his computer most of the time

--in terms of twists, i might actually like "the city is just a means of data collection ready to be wiped at any moment/it resembles a computer more than an actual city and life there is so impermanent that its hard to tell how real it all is" better than the end point of tsc which was "they were trying to mass process children to find a means of immortality" which i was so whatever on even though the game is trying to be crazy and also say something about like life and aging in society, but in tsc i like "they were mass grooming perfect civilians and inadvertently making them susceptible to crime" as a conclusion a bit more. but i mean 25W also poses so many more questions than it does give answers so.

---despite everything i think it was an interesting idea for suda and masahiro yuki and masahi ooka to create the 25th ward almost as a sandbox to explore more of the ideas of the first game like how the internet affects human connection, communication, sharing of information, and how people are affected by criminal power/kamui. it was a cool idea in the original but i love actually getting to see shiroyabu steadily become more unhinged (death filing), kurumizawas pervasiveness, tsuki and osato coming to grips with their own (esp osato's immense) criminal power, etc. in spite of all of the loose ends and craziness, sometimes you really need a space to work out your ideas and express yourself and i commend grasshopper for doing that so i could have played this on a nokia in 2005. in japan

overall these were video games. very excited to forget everything about them when i fixate on something else. tsc might actually be one of my fav things i played this year. would love more analysis of the 25th ward, theres some essays/interpretations floating around and ghenryperez will get to his video on it eventually. maybe i need to be the change i wish to see but also boo putting effort into writing and analysis sux.

i started sudas works with nmh, then 2 before stopping until i played killer7 a year ago and really liked its style and sense of humor. i think this happens to a lot of people, and then a year after that i started tsc. i wasnt originally that interested in nmh tsa but now that i know theres hello 25th ward characters in it i might have to try. and then nmh3 after that. and then i also wanna play twilight syndrome/moonlight syndrome when that gets a translation because of lunatics. and i also got killer is dead when it was on sale for like 2 bucks. we can enter the greater sudaverse.. together

[townofcrosshollow]

Using Git for Twine Games

A while back, I somehow managed to copy the contents of one file and overwrite a different file, meaning the entire section of the map was lost for good. I had to reconstruct it from snippets of prose written in separate documents. It sucked. And that motivated me to try something that would stop that problem from ever happening- hosting my project on GitHub!

Git sounds really fancy and hard to understand, but it's really not! So I'm going to walk you through how to use it to back up your files and do much, much more.

This tutorial expects you to have an already set up Tweego folder and VSCode. If you don't know how to get that started, @manonamora-if has an excellent ready-to-use folder with an explanation of how to use it.

What is Git?

In short, git is a kind of version control. Say you're working on a coding project with somebody else, and you need to work on the same file they were working on. But how do you know you're working on the right version of that file? Maybe they forgot to send you the newest version. Or maybe you both have to make changes at the same time. It would take a lot of effort to manually splice together everybody's changes, let alone identify what each of you had changed. That's what git's job is. Git identifies what has changed about a file, notes those changes, and updates the "main" files to match. That way, everything stays consistent, and big files can be updated easily.

Okay, but what benefit does git provide to you, somebody who's just working on a solo project with very little code? Well for one, it would have completely fixed my problem. Instead of overwriting all of my work, git would have shown me that the file had been changed. Then, I could simply click a button to revert the change. Neat! It also means you can keep working on the same project from multiple locations without losing progress. Say you're working on your game on your home computer, but then you want to keep working on your school laptop. All you'd have to do is "push" your changes to save them to your master file, and then "pull" the changes when you get to school. Neat

The Basics of Git

Okay, but what does "push" and "pull" mean? Git's confusing, but the basic terms you'll be encountering don't have to be! Here's some terminology:

Git - This is the program that goes on your computer to manage your files. It does all of the version control.

GitHub/GitLab/BitBucket - These provide servers you can host your git repositories on.

Repositories - This is a fancy word for a folder that's being maintained by git. Every file in a repository is getting analyzed by git for changes.

Local vs Remote - Your local repository is the one hosted on your computer, and it's the one you're editing. The remote one is the one hosted on a site like GitHub.

Stage - When you stage a file, you're getting it ready to commit it.

Commit - A commit is like saving your progress as a new update. You can go back to a commit later if you messed something up.

Push - When you "push" your commits, git will look at your changes, go into the remote repository, and individually change all of those things in the "main" branch.

Pull - Just like pushing, when you pull, you're taking changes from the remote repository and updating your local one to match it.

Under the cut, I'll show you full step-by-step (with photos!) of how to set up your game with GitHub using VSCode!

Setting Up Git With VSCode

Lucky for you, VSCode has built in integration with GitHub, which means you don't have to download any new programs other than git itself. You'll just have to set it up. A note- I'm not sure at what point exactly in this process VSCode prompts you to install git, because I'm not going to install it on another computer just for this tutorial haha. VSCode will provide the installation, just go along with the default settings and you'll be fine.

So first, make a Github account. It's free!

Now, open VSCode. Here's our project! You're going to want to click on that third button down in the side menu, the Source Control tab.

Under source control, you'll see this option. Click it.

Aaaaand it's done! That was easy, right? Now your folder is a git repository. Crazy!

Before you can put all of this up in GitHub, you'll need to push all of your files. Type a brief message (try "Initializing" to feel like a real cool coder), press commit, and VSCode will ask if you want to skip staging and just commit everything. Yes! Yes you do!

Now that all of your "changes" have been committed, let's publish your new repository to GitHub. Click on the new button that says "publish branch." When the popup appears, click "Allow" to give VSCode access to your GitHub account and sign in. Back in VSCode, you'll see this:

You're probably going to want it to be private, otherwise anyone on the internet could see all of your writing! Which is cool if it's a public coding project that people might want to download and use for their own projects, but if you're not a fan of code diving, leave it private.

Using Git To Help You Write

Now that you've got your folder set up as a git repository, it'll change the way VSCode looks. VSCode is using git's info to know where you've made changes, and it'll represent those changes in the UI. Here's what those look like:

If you click on those lines, you'll get to see this fancy new panel that highlights all of your changes:

So let's say we have a scene, and we aren't happy with how it's looking, but we aren't sure if we want to make one change or a different change. Instead of backing up all of your stuff or copy and pasting it to test it, you can just make whatever change you want and click that backwards facing arrow to revert it back if you aren't happy with it. You can do the same for things like CSS- when you've made some good progress and want to save your changes, commit them. Then any more changes you make will be easy to revert back if they don't look right. Groovy!

Now that everything's set up, it's as easy as committing your changes when you're satisfied with them and pushing those commits to back up your work.

Pat yourself on the back! You just learned (the very basics of) how to use git! You absolute genius!

If you have any questions while following this tutorial, feel free to ask! My askbox is always open!

[lover-of-whatever]

Fandom AUs do tend to lean towards not engaging with the material so much as treating it as a mere prompt to slap any aesthetic on. Swap AUs have become infamous for changing characters into something completely unrecognizable, but I don't think the Au is an inherently bad idea. I think Swap Au's are at their best when the two characters in question are already narrative foils and come from similar backgrounds/can easily be put in the same situation as the other.

My favorite example is kinda cheating because there is kinda basis in canon for it, but it's from one of Don't Starve Together's skin sets, called The Triumphant. The context for it is that upon being placed on the throne that controls the world of DS, you become a pawn for "Them" and they warp you into a worse version of yourself. But it's okay, you get a cool goth outfit and magic powers. Every character gets a super evil version of themselves, all but Maxwell. Maxwell as a playable character had already spent years as an evil pawn, before that he was the timid and dweebish William Carter. His time hanging out with/being used by some weird shadow shit straight up had him take on a new identity. Default Maxwell is already "Triumphant", so in order to have a skin in the set he is instead reverted back to William and literally dubbed "The Untriumphant". This is literally a Swap AU but instead of two people it's Maxwell swapping with everyone else out to kill him lmao. That in of itself is hilarious and more Swap Aus should do that actually, but that's not the example I'm going for.

Wilson is the kinda protagonist of the series, poster boy is more accurate, but he has the most involvement in the narrative for a playable character. As a result the official narrative of the game is that it was Wilson at the end of the first game that freed Maxwell from his throne and took his place. While their roles as protag and antag are loose, esp since Max is no longer the main antagonist but another guy just a part of the ensemble, they were written to have reasons to hate each outside of circumstance. While neither would admit it, they are very alike. Both are stubborn and insist on being gentlemanly, but are ultimately just massive dorks. Maxwell more the former and Wilson the latter, but Max is still subject to the butt of jokes by the rest of the cast and Wilson is literally called "The Gentleman Scientist". Both had ambitions in their respective fields but sucked at them, and when in a moment of desperation They took advantage of their desire's and offered them a trade. Max/William practices magic and Wilson science, and each insist that their. Methods let's call them is superior to the other. Their fighting is ultimately pointless, the world they live in is capable of both. They may be able to come to an agreement if they were to admit they both really wanted the same thing, knowledge. Knowledge is what drives the game; you may die and no longer have the tools of the previous sessions, but you have your memory. You can learn from your mistakes and get progress. Wilson isn't GREAT at science, but the mc/posterboy/protag is a scientist for a reason, he's as curious as the player is.

The main difference between the two is that William didn't get full understanding, his magic in the real world was all just a performance using something he didn't fully understand. He literally faked it so hard he became his persona. The extent that Wilson understands his knowledge isn't clear, but in his circumstance he has to use that to survive an environment out to kill him. When Maxwell is freed and has to live in that same environment, he does the same.

How much of Maxwell is William and how much is the result of Them? The extent of Them's influence isn't clear, but what is clear is that Maxwell would not have come into existence without Them. Every cast member has the potential to become Triumphant, not just from the potential to do evil in everyone but because They would enable that evil. Wilson's Triumphant skin is even a bloody three piece suit like Max's for Pete's sake. Wilson literally would of looked like Maxwell after taking his place. To swap the two would be to explore the worst aspects of Wilson, and William as his own character with less Them influence. What about their dynamic changes now Wilson is the one with more power? How then would they view each other? Would they still have that iconic slap fight gif or is William nicer/weaker than that?

I think it's neat :)

[bamgeut]

i miss yeonjun so much i can't believe all they had to do was take soobin away from me for four weeks to make me revert back to my default moawajjunie settings

[vampire-sugar]

This is such a loser moment but last night I came home from work tired and feeling sick and my brother had people over for like a small party so like the siblings of people I knew from high school were seeing me in such a gremlin like state and they had all traveled home from college and were going “you moved back? oh…” anyway they were all over the house and blasting music right by my window and I had to be asleep by 10pm bc I had to wake up early for work the next day and it was like 8ish so I said alright why not watch Queen of the Damned to pass the time so I opened my laptop and looked up the movie and right as I was about to press play the colors of my screen got inverted…like my taskbar was inverted and so was my chrome page but not other things anyway I spent so long rebooting my computer reverting back to default settings digging for anything that could be the cause disliking any forum comment that said “just turn the color filter off” bc it was fucking off already that was the problem and I started crying bc all I wanted was to watch QOTD while drinking my ginger tea and pretending there was no party at the house. It took my 2 hours to figure out the cause was some high contrast chrome extension I got years ago that suddenly activated for some reason and I deleted it and went to bed. So that was my experience trying to watch QOTD.

[messenger-of-stupidity]

I'm literally so fucking mad dude

So I moved recently. And I lost the little ball thing that screws onto the end of my septum piercings. So I ordered a few new sets, right? Which I was already planning to do since I want to be able to switch out the jewelry. I spent twelve dollars total.

And I change the address for my amazon. I triple check to make sure that my new address is set as the default.

And apparently while im inputting my card info (cause I also had to switch banks) amazon decides to revert back to my previous address.

so i paid the money for the piercings. And they were delivered to my old address. which has had a huge package stealing issue for like the two years I was living there.

So I drive there once I find out to get my package. And it's gone/

So now I had to order it all over again. I missed the sale i bought the jewelry previously on, so now it's fifteen dollars.

When all I really want is a ball to screw onto my septum so the bitch doesnt fall out.

twelve dollars wasted for some jackass to have four sets of septum rings. suck my fucking dick.

[flightfoot]

I’d argue that season 5 crossed over into class betrayal with how they acted in the Lila becomes class president vote scene and how Alya and Nino accused Adrien of lying for Marinette, but season 5 is chock full of inexplicable character choices for me including the CN attempted murders, the extreme Chloe without a shred of nuance, Adrien and Marinette both abandoning hero post without much of a thought after specifically promising each other that they’d stay by the others side against Monarch and never abandon the other, all of the core four but alya being on board to get someone akumatized purposefully for the greater good (I know it’s Gabriel and he sucks bigtine but they don’t know what we know and it’s adriens dad for gods sakes! Cold behavior on their part and his), no one but Zoe speaking up for Marinette when Chloe accuses her despite everyone knowing Chloe’s deal by now, gabriel getting the wish and deciding I’m not gonna bring my wife back actually and Ladybug telling alya and suhan but inexplicably not telling CN Monarchs identity for no logical reason after a season of why that is a bad thing. It seems like the plot the writers want is running the characters, characters be damned. Season 5 has me wanting to just default to earlier season characterization because I have a feeling this is just going to get worse and it’s more exhausting to try to use watsonian thinking to make all of this fit when it just doesn’t

Season 5 had a lot of weird characterization, and Revelation especially made Alya and Nino act in ways I disagreed with, with how dismissive they were of Marinette, and Adrien when he backed her up. Still wouldn't categorize it as a "betrayal" though. The argument there was that Marinette was pretty busy, Lila thought she had a shot at reforming Chloe, and Lila HAD missed the student election, due to joining the class after it occurred, so she never got a chance to run for class representative, and there were only a couple of weeks left in the school year anyway, so it wouldn't matter that much. It wasn't about "punishing" Marinette or trying to hurt her or not appreciating her, it was just giving Lila a shot.

Chat being more trigger-happy with his cataclysm in seasons 4 and 5 does seem to have been intentional, and made some sense when looking at it. Adrien's patience slowly gets worn down in later seasons as his closest relationships become more and more strained - him and Ladybug in season 4, and him and his father in both of those seasons. So he becomes more trigger-happy, more prone to lashing out because of that, especially at anything or anyone who stomps on his triggers or who hurts the people closest to him. Considering how Representation and Conformation had Chat get trapped in a nightmare of the aftermath of an accidental, overblown Cataclysm, becoming scared of his power to the point he didn't dare transform because he feared his powers going out of control in his anger, the earlier incidents where he lashed out and attempted to use Cataclysm recklessly seem to have been set up for that.

Now, going so extreme with Chloe, reverting her back to her season 1 characterization (and then some) while ignoring the bits of nuance we saw in seasons 2 and 3... I didn't like that, and it made it seem like there was a fight in the writer's room about her portrayal. Adrien and Marinette giving up the Miraculous without considering how their partner would react to them also didn't really seem to work.

Everyone but Alya being on board with akumatizing Gabriel did actually work for me, Adrien had conflicting feelings about his dad, Marinette was desperate to do SOMETHING to advance the fight against Monarch, and Nino's always hated Gabriel.

Zoe being the only one to speak up for Marinette with everyone else just standing there... yeah I think that came down to wanting to keep from cluttering the scene with too many people talking at once, and giving Zoe a chance to shine. Very obvious hand of the author in that one, but I do see why it went like that, writing-wise.

Gabriel getting the wish and deciding against using it to revive his wife did have some set-up, with Nathalie specifically bringing up him sacrificing someone else's life to bring Emilie back and him denying it, and all those videos of Emilie saying NOT to revive her. With how far off the deep end he went in season 5 I still don't completely buy him healing Nathalie instead of reviving Emilie, but it did get some decent lead-in.

I'm not completely sure that Marinette DID tell Alya and Su-Han Monarch's identity. It was a little unclear. I could see Marinette keeping that close to her chest to try to minimize the chances that Adrien find out the truth.