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Learning a new language by watching period dramas, my friend says I’m doing a good job but I should stop talking like a scheming royal harem concubine

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The Doctor. Holy SHIT but in this the Doctor…

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Imagine your Magnificent Century's Youtube channel admin

Your role consists of :

Churning content every day for a show that ended a decade ago, which means reposting the same thing over and over again

Coming up with the most unserious, clikcbait-y video titles known to man, who sometimes have little to nothing to do with the video (there's a video called "Selim and Nurbanu seize every opportunity" which I thought would be a compilation of their hottest moments but it's just an extract of ep 118)

Make 4h+ compilations (who the hell watches that?)

Tons of shipping (this guy really loves Rustem and Mihrimah)

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We ask your questions anonymously so you don’t have to! Submissions are open on the 1st and 15th of the month.

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Friendly reminder that you're not required to publicly take sides in any geopolitical conflict you don't understand.

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GOOD OMENS - 2.01 “Chapter One: The Arrival”

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Yes. She gets married to Hunyadi obviously and while he is fighting abroad (and cheating on her), she is running his estate. A mine operator tries to assault her when she confronts him about his sex slaves (I'm not making this up) but she escapes him and even later offers one of the girls to become a nursemaid to her son. This is a bit resolved by Hunyadi wanting to execute the mine operator later but actually Erzsébet stopping him and then doing it herself.

Later her useless, cheating dirt bag of a husband gets himself captured in Transylvania together with their oldest son. She asks her former fiancé's help (I always forget his name 😅 but he is like the biggest landowner in Hungary) to free them and he is only willing to help her if she sleeps with him. She is reluctant but eventually desperate enough to free her son (and husband) to go to his chambers and get the deed done.

Well that was quite the character assassination of Mehmed the Conqueror. Having Mara raped by Vlad for simply stating she belongs to Murad's harem and isn't his mother? Seriously? Who wrote this?

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I definitely agree. I just wonder how Erzsébet fits into it. What exactly is she punished for? Like she remains loyal to her husband all throughout until her scene(s) even if he is quite the scumbag to her and has an affair while in Italy (and even that affair is not really willingly by the woman involved but arranged by her uncle and she more or less has to go along, so he sticks around for her uncle's political gain).

Is it just for being a capable woman? A woman with a mind of her own? It would most certainly fit everything I read about the books' author and his own ideologies.

But yeah the use of rape and doubtful consent in this series is insane and apparently even worse in the books (I was told there it is a teenage Mehmed himself who rapes Mara. Like what the actual fuck?)

Well that was quite the character assassination of Mehmed the Conqueror. Having Mara raped by Vlad for simply stating she belongs to Murad's harem and isn't his mother? Seriously? Who wrote this?

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forget "would you love me if i was a bug." would you hide me from the US government if things start getting worse.

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And today I learned that William Hartnell was only 55 when he played The Doctor for the first time. I would have added at least 10 years by how they dressed his Doctor.

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32 Lot-Adjusted Empty Lots

Now available from Simblr!

Have you always wanted to build on small 1X1 lots? Or have a smaller sized beach lot for your surfer shack? Well, now you can! I have done all the Lot-Adjusting work for you.

These lots were made with the UC installed. If you don't have all the EPs/SPs (or at least AL/M&G as your highest one,) then, you probably can't use these! (I provided links for similar "empty lot" collections - some of them don't need all EP/SPs.)

ALL possible lot sizes are included (within the game's original size limit of 6X6) - including Beach lots.

These are all perfectly flat lots (well, all except for the beach lots...)

The Sun is oriented to the front of the lot.

These were made on Lush Terrain, but whatever terrain you put them down on (Desert, Dirt, Lush, or Cement) the game will change the lot's "base terrain" to match.

Lots are shrunk/expanded with Moo's Lot-Adjuster

Lots are cleaned/compressed with Chris Hatch's Lot Compressor.

New easy-to-read Thumbnails made by me.

The lots can be found in your LotBin catalog.

There is No CC used in these empty lots.

Download @ Simblr

or Sims 2 Virtual Realty or MTS.

This is Part 3 of my LotCatalog Refresh Project ~ 32 Lot-Adjusted Empty Lots Part 1 of my: LotCatalog Refresh Project ~ a complete Lot Bin overhaul Part 2 of my: LotCatalog Refresh Project ~ a complete overhaul of the Specialty Lot Bin

Enjoy!

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Wait? When? What episode? I have skipped through the series quite a few times for @magnificentlyreused but I don't remember that scene and now I need to see it. I only remember Mustafa's son dying of the plague the season before.

Süleyman’s children in order of how much he loved them

Mihrimah

Mehmet

Cihangir

Mustafa

Selim

Bayezid

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I mean I knew her name but I can't fault anybody because girl just disappears after her mother's *cough* accident. Like is she dead? Is she alive? Did someone take her out with the trash? No one seems to care. Not even the aunt that pushed for her birth or her father who banged her barely out of teenagehood mother. So much for dynasty blood is sacred.

Süleyman’s children in order of how much he loved them

Mihrimah

Mehmet

Cihangir

Mustafa

Selim

Bayezid

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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.)

"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.

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Hypothetical: time travel is real, but you only get to use it ONCE (one round trip to the past and then back to the present), purely to observe– you can't change anything, and you won't catch a disease or get injured by animals/natural disasters/etc. You can stay as long as you want, but will still die within your expected (modern) life span (i.e. no "Observing all of human history only counts as one use! 🤓" and so on).

We ask your questions anonymously so you don’t have to! Submissions are open on the 1st and 15th of the month.

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current fan creation landscape is kinda like if you went to a party with a homemade cake and everyone takes a slice and silently thumbs up at you with no attempt to start a conversation except for occasionally some guy sits in the corner with a tape recorder critiquing the cake as though he was a restaurant critic and another guy is handing the cake to an uber driver like "yeah i need you to find a restaurant that makes cake like this so i can have more of it" and the only person that's talked to you in 30 minutes is a very sweet little guy who was like "hey i liked your cake" and then ran away apologizing for bothering you the moment you said thank you.