#but y’all know me

[aheathen-conceivably]

Hey Alexis. I have to say your Darlington legacy is amazing and Zelda is the cutest and I love her story, and omg don't get me started on Antoine. I want to start the decades challenge myself, I’ve tried and failed before, but reading your story is making me want to do it. BUT, how? I’m not asking for a long detailed explanation, but more like your top 5 ways or something, you used to start it? Mods, cas-blogs, etc? And only if you got the time and of course want to share it with us/me?<3

Hello, there! Thank you so much for the kind words! And I’m incredibly glad to help. The Decades Challenge is a bit of a beast compared to other sims gameplay. It takes a little more research, effort, and organization to make it really enjoyable. So if I can push a few people deeper into historical sims life I’m happy to do so 😉

A key point before we get in resources below the cut (because prepare for paragraphs babes), how do you want to play the decades challenge? Do you want to stick to the original challenge? Do a version with more realistic aging? Just play casually for the gameplay? Have a meticulous storyline planned out (ahem 👀)?

In case it isn’t super clear, I’m not playing the decades challenge anymore. I have used it as a jumping off point for storytelling. Truly, I play the game very little. Usually I try to recreate the story posts in gameplay for myself but I do not try to achieve any of the challenge goals or gameplay rules (although I do have my own rules).

For this reason, I am not the best resource on gameplay mods. There are some mods that I’m dimly aware of that make the challenge more fun, like those by @janesimsten and this mod which I used a lot in the 1900s.

That being said, there is a lot of freedom in the the historical simblr community to craft the experience that you want. You can always try one idea and change it as you go. When I started the Darlingtons it was meant to be about 50/50 gameplay/storytelling with randomized death rolls and challenge goals. Then, I realized what I enjoyed and leaned further into that. I think this is the key to sticking with the challenge, because otherwise it’ll just feel like checking off boxes and you’ll give up sometime around 1900.

So without further ado, let’s get on down below the cut:

First and foremost, and I cannot stress this enough, start a mod organization system from day one. Playing historically requires a good deal of CC and if you don’t organize at the beginning, it gets very very difficult to sort stuff out later. This can easily make historical simming overwhelming and frankly, unenjoyable. I personally would start with a clean mods folder. Keep this separate from your regular (modern) mods as well. I have three mods folders, one for regular (modern) gameplay, one for building vanilla, and one for the Darlingtons.

For the Darlingtons, I have everything organized by mods, CAS, and then BB. Within these folders I organize by decade. That way when I enter a new decade it is easier to pull things in or out. I also have a folder on my desktop for subsequent decades CC, so if I ever find anything that isn’t easy to save on my Pinterest (more on that later), I download it then and there, and put it into the appropriate folder. Then when I hit a new decade I already have a bit of a CC collection going.

Now for finding CC, I am really not the best resource on BB stuff. I just don’t download a lot of it, and what I do is usually super specific or things that I see others using regularly. There are a couple of pieces of mainstay BB CC that I use consistently, and I’ll be glad to point you in the direction of those if you see something you’re interested in. However I don’t really have a central resource on BB they way that I do for CAS. So without further ado (because CAS is really why we’re here for historical simming, isn’t it?)….

Lookbooks, lookbooks, lookbooks. Seriously. Pixelnrd’s lookbooks we’re one of my first references, and I find them so helpful that they’re the reason I started to make my own. Just looking at a couple lookbooks can be much quicker and easier than scrolling through pages and pages of CC. But if you’re willing to go a little deeper down the rabbit hole, @twentiethcenturysims has truly made the resource to end all recourses. Their CC is categorized by decade for easy scrolling, and they also have a lookbook tag if you prefer to get your CC that way.

Now, and this is a personal one, I have used Pinterest SO much for this legacy I cannot even stress it enough. I have two boards: one for poses and one for CC. The poses one is a whole different beast, so if you ever want an answer for poses and storytelling please send one. But I’ll refrain from diving down that rabbit hole right now too.

My Pinterest CC board is organized like my mods folder, by decades. I also have a board for BB, general mod finds, hair, and (this one helps me a lot) CC that I have already downloaded so when I do lookbooks or get a WCIF, the link is already there for me.

These boards serve two purposes. Whenever I find a piece of CC that I like, I do not have to download it immediately. I save it to the appropriate decades board and it’s there, waiting for me, whenever I reach that era. This makes the hunt way easier, and also makes me SUPER excited to get to the next decade because I already have CC that I can see the characters in.

Secondly, Pinterest is an amazing resource in and of itself. Once it “learns” what you’re looking for, Pinterest will pull CC from all over the internet, including stuff that I’ve never seen in people’s lookbooks or the resources listed above. Then it’s an easy click to save this link for myself for later.

So scrolling through Pinterest then turns into a sort of inspiration board as well. This is a broader point regarding the tendency of people to quit the decades challenge: find what inspires you to do it and what makes you excited for the next decades.

For me, part of this is the storyline and seeing my characters reach the next plot that I’ve written for them. But much simpler, it’s the clothes! I’ve always been into fashion history and historical CC is actually how I found this community in the first place. So often if I’m tired out with writing or editing I’ll just go look through Pinterest for new stuff or scroll through my historical inspiration blog (which is linked in my pinned post if you’d like to check it out).

But above all, honestly, just don’t take it too seriously. Sometimes I see rather stringent calls for fashion accuracy or anachronisms but like…it’s your game. Start whenever you’d like, play however you’d like, for as long as you’d like. Hopefully this just gives you a bit of a framework for making that happen ❤️

[alaraxia]

needless to say the vibes were in shambles

[spineless-lobster]

Hozier went from “I’m not a morning person” to “fuck the british empire, fuck capitalism, look how far we’ve come and look how far we have to go” in the span of a few minutes and this is exactly what I fucking signed up for

[the-cat-and-the-birdie]

It JUST occurred to me that if Hobie left Gwen the watch in her universe that means he went there and met her dad

The implications of this are SO interesting

Hobie had to go there, find Gwen’s dad, explain who he is and how he knows Gwen, then ask him to give her the watch

He even describes Hobie as a piece of work!!

I’m so curious -

Did Hobie have some choice words with Gwen’s dad? Did he say that he’s the person that housed her when she was homeless?

Hobie met Gwen’s cop dad and gave him the watch WHAT DID HE SAY WHAT WAS THAT CONVERSATION

WHAT DID HOBIE SAY TO GWENS COP DAD

[transmascissues]

it’s so funny to me that people used to try to warn me “if you go on t it won’t make you androgynous it’ll just make you look like a man” because 1) i do want to look like a man, that is famously a major part of being a trans man but also 2) t literally has made me androgynous?? like they were wrong on both counts. i got most of the looking-like-a-man changes that i wanted (deep voice, broader body, hair all over my body including my face) and i also give every single cis person in a five mile radius a stroke every time they try to figure out my gender. the assumption that trans men wouldn’t actually want to look like men and the assumption that cis people are good at correctly gendering us once we’re on t are both weird as hell.

[britcision]

Guys I have spoken to teens on this website and it never occurred to me before but

How are the kids finding us these days

Y’all seeing the memes and posts on other platforms and just following over? Are we “cool” again? I’ve only been back since mobile was a feasible option but I find this fascinating from an anthropological perspective

I’ve got a decade on most of my cousins and I doubt any of them have even heard of tumblr but they’re hitting 20s now so have we looped back around?

Guys is tumblr retro????

Please do not tell me your actual age just give me the vibes

[transsexula]

Please please please reblog this and put in the tags your music recommendations. I’m not talking about big artists and bands either— what’s a niche group, band, or artist that you can’t get enough of? What song or album do you enjoy the most? Why?

[aziraphalalala]

What if it’s 4am and you can’t stop thinking about two ageless eldritch horrors divorce-kissing? What then?

[aesthetic-uni]

Misha Collins is the funniest straight man ever. He’s the only person to arguably queerbait in real life. He had to come out as a straight. He was told by WB to just stay bisexual. He’s living every homophobe’s nightmare scenario but the only difference is that everyone actually loves it for him

[memray]

obnoxious meowing

my pinterest kept showing me men in shit like this so i had to draw gale…

[phleb0tomist]

happy disability pride month to people whose main mobility aid is an adjustable bed

people who need to lie flat all the time

people who only sit up to eat or use the bathroom

people who are too unwell to be transported anywhere, even within their own home

people who structure their whole week around recovering from a single planned trip out of bed

people who are technically wheelchair users because they can’t walk, but can’t tolerate being upright for long enough to use a chair either

people who can’t adapt activities to be accesible, and instead have to just miss out on 90% of life

i see you and i respect you and love you. if you feel limited, confined, sick, or bound to your bed, i see you.

[reipx]

Bunhe and shizun’s frist kiss caught in 4K

[the-meme-monarch]

hey imagine the parallels with me of undertale asriel and chara and deltarune ralsei and (knight) chara

“there is not a chance in hell chara’s the knight” 🫵one be nice. ☝️two but imagine the parallels with me

also I’d like to link this post of mine bc it also pertains to said parallels

***if you ship any combination of the dreemurr kids (And This Counts frisk chara and ralsei) then like. get outta here. like for real

[transmascissues]

local cis man makes a “joke” tiktok that excludes trans men from the phrase “trans people” and mocks the music we make based on a stereotype that’s already been mocked to death, then makes a follow up video directed at the trans men who told him it wasn’t a funny joke or just made them feel shitty where he just doubles down and says the joke was fine because it “wasn’t serious” and that the trans men who didn’t like it are “directing their energy in the wrong place”.

maybe one day cis people will learn that 1) most trans jokes simply are not for them to make, regardless of how funny they think the joke would be, and 2) it’s not for them to decide if the trans people they chose to joke about are allowed to be upset that the joke was made. i honestly wouldn’t have even bothered making a post about this if it was just the original video because a lot of trans people also make jokes like this (which i still don’t think are funny or fair) so he could be forgiven for thinking no one would be upset, but the doubling down really rubs me the wrong way.

like, if we can’t even trust cis people to listen to our feelings on something as silly as a joke tiktok about music, how can we trust them to listen to us when it really counts? you can say it’s not that serious all you want, but when it’s already been demonstrated that you don’t always know how something will actually affect trans men, can you really expect us to trust that you’ll know when it is that serious?

because the message that response sends is this: “i find you fun to laugh at, but i don’t think you’re worth the trouble of caring about your feelings. i would rather enjoy myself and entertain others at your expense.” and is that the kind of message you want to send to anyone, especially a group of people you seemingly interact with enough to be familiar with the jokes made about them in their community? even if it wasn’t anti-transmasculine, it would still just be mean, and it’s certainly not a message that will make us see you as trustworthy when shit gets bad.

[eledsart]

say cheeeese

[yendts]

doodles of my boy jason with lyrics from i think there’s something you should know by the 1975