captaingalaxia

[captaingalaxia]

its poppeted hair time once again \o/

meshes included. everything’s in the usual colors: binned and familied poppet v2 naturals and unbinned unnaturals in these nyren’s kosmik colors.

Nightcrawler Pose: requested by anon. converted by entropy-sims. child to elder. Download (Alternate)

Peggy Fh110817: requested by anon. all ages. Download (Alternate)

Peggy Fh101113: all ages. Download (Alternate)

Peggy Fh101211: all ages. Download (Alternate)

credits: Nightcrawler, entropy-sims, Peggy, poppet-sims, Nyren

[captaingalaxia]

Hi, I love your hair uploads! Would it be possible to retexture Peggy's Fh110817 and Nightcrawler Pose? I don't know if you are willing to take multiple requests at once so if you don't just ignore one of these. Thank you :)

id be happy to!

[captaingalaxia]

im not actually sure if this opinion is unpopular or not so im just gonna say its An Opinion. i think when someone is like 'premade/townie makeover!' but then start changing their face... thats not a makeover anymore, thats a new sim. you made a new sim is what you did

[captaingalaxia]

A quick-ish guide to the culture of The Sims 2 modding community.

Are you new to The Sims 2 community? Are you coming from more modern games, either in The Sims franchise itself or other contemporary games? Are you excited to start your #brand and become a #simfluencer and post your #earlyaccesscontent to support your #sidehustle?

Have a seat, then! Let's chat.

Hello, friend! My name's Pooklet. I've been playing since 2004 and creating since 2007. I'm by no means an expert in most forms of content creation itself, but I've been around since the heyday of The Sims 2, I've watched how community opinions have shifted (or not) since practically the beginning, and I'm hoping to give you a basic outline of the community culture that you can expect to encounter as a newcomer.

A very brief history of Sims 2 content monetization:

People have been trying to monetize content since there has been content to monetize, all the way back in the days of The Sims 1. We tend to call them "pay creators" and their websites "paysites." Some big names in this arena include The Sims Resource (their free-with-ads model is a relatively recent development, which is why you will find people to this day calling them T$R), PeggySims, Newsea, and many others that you can find on this handy website:

Paysites Must Be Destroyed

Now, if you have a glance at that website, you might be saying to yourself:

"But, that's illegal! I own the copyright to my custom content!"

Alas, no! Due to the wording of the End User License Agreement for The Sims 2, no custom content creator owns their creations for this game (or The Sims 1, or 3, or 4, for that matter, but we're talking about 2 right now). It all belongs to EA at the end of the day, and by installing and playing the game, you have agreed to these terms. Which means you have no individual, protected copyright, and it is perfectly legal for someone to download your paywalled content and then reupload it for free for others to enjoy. And they will!

Furthermore,

You are not making anything alone.

Everything from modding resources, to tutorials, to the mods required to fix disastrous glitches in the game code and make it playable at all, to the third party programs used to make any and all custom content, such as SimPE—all of these have been provided to you for free by other creators, many of whom have a usage policy that asks that people not use their freely-provided tools to make a profit. Although no one can be forced to follow a creator's policy, it is generally considered good manners to not try to make a profit off of someone else's free work. And if you are using these tools to make paywalled content, that's exactly what you're doing.

Pay creators have been ignoring these policies since the beginning of time, and so free creators likewise ignore their policies against sharing their paywalled content. Pay creators have also tried lots of different ways to keep their content exclusive, everything from trying to track leaks with slightly altered files to actively filling their content with malicious code. It has never worked.

Free creators have always found a way around these barriers. In fact, it's taken as something of a challenge to undermine monetization efforts. As you can see from Paysites Must Be Destroyed, there are entire teams of players devoted to reuploading paywalled content for free.

A culture of sharing.

The Sims 2 is something of a time capsule. At 20 years old, it predates a lot of the hyper-capitalist hustle culture that has infested every creative hobby. It is from a time when monetization was an outlier rather than the norm, and a much maligned outlier at that. This attitude has persisted for 20 years. Believe me when I say, you won't be the combo breaker. Especially now, given that The Sims 2 is not the most contemporary in the series and the community has shrunk considerably, down to the people who have either been here for a very long time, or newcomers that understand the community culture.

Also, it's just kind of not a great idea in general to try to make money off of a 20-year-old game with a pretty small community?

Like, I get that The Sims 4 is really saturated with pay creators and it's hard to get a foot in the door. I get that you might look at The Sims 2 and think that the small pond will give you room to be a big fish. It won't. You might get a handful of people willing to pay for your content, but at least one of those people will be resharing it for free.

Paywalls vs. optional donations.

Okay, so hopefully you now understand why people don't like it when you put content behind a paywall. But what about those Ko-fi and Paypal donation links you sometimes see at the bottom of people's downloads? Why is that okay, but a locked Patreon tier isn't? Well, because they're voluntary. No one is obligated to pay for that content to be able to download and use it. It's just a way for someone who does have a little extra cash to basically "tip" a creator whose content they like. You have no way of knowing whether the person who posts those links is actually receiving any donations. And that's kind of the point. Whether or not they receive any donations, they are still sharing their content, because they enjoy the hobby of making and sharing content.

"I can't make a living off of that!"

No, you can't. Because that's not what we do here. That is not part of our community culture for all the above reasons. If you want to make a reliable income off of your hobby, you're going to need to get a different hobby. Try Second Life! That is a community that actively encourages monetization. The Sims 4 allows for "early access" monetization. There's options out there for you, if what you want is to make a profit off of your creations for a game.

"Fine, what about monetized link forwarding services?"

Link forwarding services historically have malicious trackers or viruses embedded. People will also strip those and provide direct links to each other. Or they just won't download your content.

"What if I want to make YouTube videos of someone else's written tutorials and I enable ad revenue on them?"

Personally, I still think that's a dick move. I love video tutorials, I'm a very visual learner myself, and although you might feel entitled to compensation for reciting the steps of someone else's tutorial into a microphone and then editing and uploading the video, you're still monetizing someone else's freely-provided content. I would consider this an 'ask permission' scenario, one in which you tell the person, explicitly, that you will be making ad revenue off their work. If they're fine with that, then you're good! (For the record, I'm not fine with that.)

edit: more of of my thoughts on monetized youtube videos over here.

"What if—"

Look, no one can stop you from trying to monetize your content, or worse, someone else's content. But you will have the exact same arc as every pay creator who came before you: your efforts will be undermined at every turn, your reception in the greater community will be chilly at best, and it will become a battle between you and the folks resharing free reuploads of your content until any fun you initially had making content is gone.

"The steady erosion of every known social safety net beneath the crippling weight of end-stage, line-goes-up capitalism and the yawning abyss of poverty over which I am dangling has imbued me with such anxiety that I cannot engage with a hobby that precludes monetization. I am exhausted. I know no other way."

I get it, friend! I have lived in poverty all my life. I do not begrudge the impulse to find a way to make passive income off of your every waking moment. Increasingly, it seems like that is the only way to survive! Unfortunately, you will not be able to do that with this specific community. We know that we have something special here, having resisted monetization's encroach for so long, which makes us fight all the more viciously to maintain it. You are entitled to try to find ways to supplement your income, just not here. Personally, I consider that a feature, not a bug.

Bonus Round: Remember, That's Not Just Yours!

I said it earlier, but I want to reiterate: you are not making any TS2 CC alone. You are making it with tools, resources, knowledge and code that people have provided on the condition that they not be used for pay content.

To use myself as an example, "my" hair textures are a blend of resources provided by other creators. Namely, Nouk's original hair texture was edited by Vintage D, which I then further edited over the years, using parts by the creators Ephemera and Helga. It would be extremely shit of me to say "well, I think that the time that I put into my edit is worth money, so I'm charging for it" when the edits that I made would not exist without the work of those people. And it continues on down the line with edits that other people have made of my texture blends and color actions, and the content they make with them.

(If you see someone charging for these, btw, lemme know. I'd love to have a talk with them.)

In closing,

The knowledge base, the resources, the coding required to make any and all working content for The Sims 2 has been compiled for 20 years. Please understand, I'm not trying to denigrate anyone's creativity when I say: you cannot bring anything wholly "new" to TS2 CC-making, something that uses no one else's resources or programs, something you can point to and say "no one helped me with that. I did it all on my own. It is my property." Nor should you aspire to! The fun of The Sims 2 community is to share and share alike, to credit each other for our contributions, to hype each other up and iterate on shared works and resources. We've been doing it for 20 years, and hopefully we'll be doing it for many more! Wanting to be a #simfluencer is utterly antithetical to the community culture. No one is influencing anyone else. You need to leave that shit at the door if you want to be invited in.

TL;DR:

Don't show up to the commie circle-jerk trying to charge for handjobs. We're already giving them to each other for free, and nothing about your wrist technique is special enough to justify the cost.

[captaingalaxia]

just got something small and simple for you today :]

this is @gryning's ffxiv form & function hair conversion with new, updated textures from the game! ffxiv got a big graphics update last year for those who dont know, and while my own attempt at converting hair from the game was largely a failure, i do at least know enough to get textures out of it, so i thought id give this lovely conversion the newer look of its counterpart.

mesh included! per my preference, its in poppet v2 naturals, but if you want the updated textures for yourself in other colors i also included the base texture in volatile in the zip.

Download (Alternate)

credits: gryning, ffxiv, poppet-sims

[captaingalaxia]

Requests! Haven't done that in a while, huh...

amhairmodbangs replaced with Peggy 0067 by @suratan-zir, anonymously requested.

Download modbangs: SFS

amhairhatfronds_browngrass replaced with Kijiko Short Dreads by @captaingalaxia, requested by @citoyen-robespierre.

Download hatfronds: SFS

These are currently the only hair default replacement requests I have, so if you've sent me one and it's not posted yet, it means I either didn't get it or it was not a valid request.

[captaingalaxia]

Hi sorry to bother you, but i'm trying to decide what hair system to use for my game and I was wondering what drew you to poppet v2?

youre not bothering me! thats an interesting question!

ok so. i used to actually consider myself hair system agnostic i guess. my game was a mess of various different systems all together. a whole lot of poppet, but also a whole lot of simgaroop and nhs and others. it was a big problem, with shit like the same hairs in multiple systems.

one day i decided i had enough and i had to trim down on it all. i figured out stuff i disliked about different systems: i realized i hated unrealistic yellow blondes (like, say, simgaroop blonde) and i hated really orangey reds (like, say, nhs red) and much preferred them more, well, red. nothing against those hair systems, just a personal preference.

poppet v2 gives me both a realistic blonde and a more red red, with textures i rly like too! if theres anything wrong with it i do wish the brown was a little darker- as it is i think it starts looking kind of bad as a sim's skintone starts getting darker. but whatever, i guess i can individually recolor hairs darker brown if i need them for sims.

fun fact, me picking a hair system is what lead to me getting into hair retexturing- i was scrolling the hair database, lamenting the hairs i liked that didnt come in poppet v2, and then thought to myself 'well... how hard could it be to do it myself?'

[captaingalaxia]

Just wanted to say i'm a big fan of your hair cc uploads! i use them a lot in my cc folder 💖 thank you!!!!

no thank YOU!!

[captaingalaxia]

BIG BATCH OF POPPETED HAIRS BECAUSE IT'S MY SIMBLRVERSARY! \o/ \o/ \o/

one year ago today i made my simblr and posted my first creations! time sure flies. thank you to everyone who has ever shared or downloaded my stuff. here's to a year of cc making and many more to come!

meshes included. everything’s in the usual colors: binned and familied poppet v2 naturals and unbinned unnaturals in these nyren’s kosmik colors.

downloads under the cut since we've got a lot here!

Ginko G133 F and M: converted by powerpcinside. teen to elder. Download (Alternate)

Nouk Dark Lady Braids: just a recolor, not a retexture. all ages. Download (Alternate)

Nouk Afro Knot Yakum Edit: mesh edited by yakumtsaki. just a recolor, not a retexture. child to elder. Download (Alternate)

EbonixSims Cleopatra: converted by profesionalpartyguest. just a recolor, not a retexture. young adult to elder. Download (Alternate)

S-Club Manie: converted by roxanna-moxie. child to elder. Download (Alternate)

Simpliciaty Florence: converted by KazeWindKW. child to elder. Download (Alternate) (not included in this download: a cute bow accessory that goes on the back! go check out kazewindkw's original download post for that.)

Simpliciaty Cassie: converted by profesionalpartyguest. teen to elder. Download (Alternate)

credits: Ginko, powerpcinside, Nouk, yakumtsaki, EbonixSims, profesionalpartyguest. S-Club, roxanna-moxie, Simpliciaty, KazeWindKW, poppet-sims, Nyren

[captaingalaxia]

got a fresh new batch of poppeted hairs for ya!

meshes included. everything’s in the usual colors: binned and familied poppet v2 naturals and unbinned unnaturals in these nyren’s kosmik colors.

Cazy Aura: converted by Martini. all ages. Download (Alternate)

Cazy Unofficial: converted by Martini. child to elder. Download (Alternate)

LeahLillith Anya: converted by LilRoisin. poly count reduced by roxanna-moxie. teen to elder. Download (Alternate)

LeahLillith Riku: downloaded by powerpcinside. child to elder. Download (Alternate)

DarkNighTt River M and F: converted by KazeWindKW. all ages. Download (Alternate)

credits: Cazy, Martini, LeahLillith, LilRoisin, roxanna-moxie, powerpcinside, DarkNighTt, KazeWindKW, poppet-sims, Nyren

[captaingalaxia]

[captaingalaxia]

hey everyone!! as thanks for my first 100 followers on my simblr, ive made a little gift for you guys! cute beachy rowhouse apartments i built for the beach neighborhood ive been working on!

they come in a three floor, three bedroom version, and a two floor, two bedroom version for sims on a budget. the floor plan pics are from the three floor version, but the two floor one is exactly the same, just with the bottom bedroom slightly larger because it takes up the space where the second set of stairs would be.

theyre unfurnished and light on cc - all i used is some walls, primarily mustluvcats' beachfront siding, and a few pieces from my beloved bespoke build set. enjoy, and thank you again for 100 followers <3

Download Beachside Rentals - Three Floors

Download Beachside Rentals - Two Floors

[captaingalaxia]

Would you ever make default replacements of your hairs please??

probably not, i actually dont use default replacements for anything except eyes and skins. if anyone else ever makes defaults with my stuff tho ill reblog it

[captaingalaxia]

hey look at that! 100 people care about the stuff i make for ts2!

thank you to all my followers, along with everyone whos ever shared or downloaded something i made. ive been at this for less than a year, but i love being a part of this community and i cant be happier that i joined in. i hope to keep making cc for a long, long time!

[captaingalaxia]

ive gotta try out making stuff that arent just hair retextures from time to time, so i fulfilled a wishing tree request to recolor these nails by shadylady482 on MTS in pooklet unnaturals. theyre unisex, for child to elder. you'll need the mesh from the original, right here. the previews show blasting agent, hangfire, and powder cake. the original is from 2006, so they're a bit flat, which you can probably tell just from looking at them. i find it a little charming, honestly.

Download

EDIT: get them in pooklet's 2020 addon colors here.

[captaingalaxia]

what was that i said about how everyone who ever demanded this official rerelease were the biggest idiots in the world

[captaingalaxia]

poppeted hairs poppeted hairs poppeted hairs \o/

finally got around to a two-month old request i only just recently noticed i received at all (my apologies!) and then i also discovered @kazewindkw 's lovely conversions and just had to retexture a couple.

meshes included. everything’s in the usual colors: binned and familied poppet v2 naturals and unbinned unnaturals in these nyren’s kosmik colors.

downloads under the cut!

Sonyasims Cornelia: converted by KazeWindKW. child to elder. Download (Alternate)

Magpiesan Undo: converted by KazeWindKW. all ages. Download (Alternate)

Osoon 06: requested by anon. converted by minicule and nervousxsubject. child to elder. Download (Alternate)

credits: Sonyasims, Magpiesan, KazeWindKW, Osoon, minicule, nervousxsubject, poppet-sims, Nyren