#paradoxcase

[doyoulikethissong-poll]

Complete Song List (updated after every Showdown)

Spreadsheet by @paradoxcase

Songs by decade

Songs by language

Spotify Playlist

Currently Open for Votes

Latest Reveals

⚠️➡️ Questions and Answers ⬅️⬅️⬅️ (that means FAQ)

⚠️ THE BLOG POLICY ON SPOILERS ⚠️ - more detailed answer here

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[longroadstonowhere]

paradoxcase hat auf deinen Eintrag geantwortet

Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m somewhat glad to hear that someone actually did their taxes later than I did this year

ahahahahaha no worries, i'm glad i could be of service! ahahahaha

[eye-lantern]

📷 🐰 💞 (for the ask game)

Hey Nony

📷 What’s set as your phone’s lockscreen?

a pic of my partners, or an old Zenyatta artwork, depending on what phone we are talking about. I never change those so the first one is like 3yo and the second 4

🐰 What do you think says the most about a person?

How they talk about others in their absence. Criticisme is okay, but if it is not accompanied by an understanding of why they are that way, or help for dealing with the issue, I'm out.

💞 @ your favorite blog.

I have a terrible issue with favorites as it changes all the time. Right now i would say @paradoxcase 's, reading their liveblogging of The Locked Tomb is great!

[longroadstonowhere]

paradoxcase hat auf deinen Eintrag geantwortet

Neat. I don’t think there’s any way I could do that, because my handwriting is a bit fucked and I get constant hand cramps when trying to write lots of stuff out, and it’s also not a sure thing that I’ll be able to read the handwriting afterwards. But that’s very oldschool, I like it

in all honesty my handwriting is basically indecipherable to other people, and when i'm reading it back myself i'm mostly using it as a memory aid to remember what i was thinking when i originally wrote whatever i'm trying to read, ahahahaha - i've definitely looked back at some older notebooks and could not interpret what i'd written for the life of me

[zenosanalytic]

Reply-Reply to ParadoxCase: Practical Prophetics

paradoxcase replied to your post “Reply-Reply to ArrowsforPens: Second Suburb”

The potential to create SBURB improved hugely with the introduction of VR

Yes u_u

I’m surprised that they got the essential control scheme, a two-player game where one character is basically an overseeing Ghost able to change the environment and the other is IN that environment, down so quickly.

Though I guess I shouldn’t be since it’s essentially a DM/PC situation and that’s a fairly well-established gameway u_u u_u

[conservativemalarkey]

paradoxcase replied to your post

“Okay, now I'm curious about what you saw of the Tea Party. (Not a new...”

This is fascinating. Can you offer any insight into why McCain picked Palin as his running mate? It seemed very out of character. Was he trying to appeal to the Tea Party?

As I remember it- note, I was a young teenager and may be misremembering things- that was one of the biggest factors (the Tea Party was a bloc by then, though I don’t remember if they were going by that name yet-- I think that wasn’t until after the election). But there was other stuff at work here and it’s all pretty fucking interesting.

See... McCain has always been a pretty establishment Republican, for all his I’M A MAVERICK! A MAVERICK, I TELL YOU!!! spiel. Where he does diverge from the party line, it’s to the left, not the right- for example, he has a principled objection to torture because he was a POW.  And... I don’t quite understand how it works, but in the establishment chunk of the Republican party, there’s a practice where sometimes in an election there’s an understanding that it’s one particular candidate’s turn this time and the party leadership will throw their effort behind getting that person elected. It’s quiet, genteel, unspoken, but it’s there. 

In 2008, it was McCain’s turn. He won the primary without too much fuss- sure, there were other candidates, but it was his turn. He was getting older, 2008 was probably the last year he could run for president and serve a full eight-year term, and he had built up a lot of political capital. So party leadership backed him and the primary went... relatively smoothly.    

But when he won, there were two things he just plain hadn’t counted on.

1. Barack Obama, not Hillary Clinton, had won the Democratic nomination for president. 

No one on the Right saw this coming. No one. Before 2008 Obama was a senator with a not-especially-flashy record; sure, he was an up-and-coming politician, he’d had a distinguished career as a lawyer and he’d written a few books. But no one thought he had the political capital to run for president, and he was super young. In 2008, he was the guy you kept your eye on to see what he’d be in 10 years- and then he won the nomination. He was charismatic, funny, and relentlessly optimistic-- while also being intelligent, diplomatic, and statesmanlike.

In 2008, Hillary was almost as anointed as she was in 2016. Before the primaries really got under way, the media consensus on the right was that it was going to be Hillary vs. McCain, and McCain would win. Because, as everyone knows, Hillary is kind of a wonk and is bad at playing to the crowd. She didn’t have the ~folksy, down-home charm~ that McCain was planning to bank on. 

Obama had it in spades. And Obama had the youth vote. And the black vote. And the Hispanic/Latino vote. If he was elected, it’d be historic- he’d be the first black president. His campaign managed to get people who almost never voted to vote in the primaries, just out of sheer faith in the guy and knowledge that they were making history. 

 He came out of nowhere and zoomed to prominence overnight. He did everything they’d hoped their candidate would do, and did it better, while clearly being smarter and more Presidential. And he did it all while being black. 

By the time the primaries were done, conservatives were fucking terrified of him.

2. The bloc that would become the Tea Party haaaaaated how close McCain was to the party establishment. Haaaaaaaaaaaated. 

You could have seen this one coming, even if you were on the right. But most people didn’t care enough to pay attention until the end of the primaries, because it was McCain’s turn. Ron Paul (among other hopefuls) got a fair amount of the vote, because people wanted something Different. Something that the main branch of the party wasn’t going to give them. They wanted someone who’d be like Bush, but even more so- someone ‘dumb’ and folksy, a ‘man of the people’ in the pejorative sense. someone who held their positions on Moral Issues and wasn’t going to back down, or someone who wouldn’t support the neoliberal economic agenda the Clintons and Bushes more or less consistently had. 

And what they got was McCain, who looked to be more of the same. They weren’t too happy. 

So when it came time to pick a Veep, the qualities they were looking for were something like this: 

Culture warrior 

Outsider- not a mainstream Republican

Can pick up southern and/or Midwestern states that McCain can’t grab

Can get disgruntled Ron Paul + etc. voters interested in the election again

Can get disgruntled Hillary voters to consider voting R

If possible, black and/or female 

Yeah, at least half of the reason for choosing Sarah Palin was really naked, ugly identity politics that would make your most identitarian leftist indignant. See, both Obama and Hillary were historic candidates- if she’d been elected, Hillary would have been the first female President, and of course Obama was the first black president. McCain was... well, just another white dude. No one wanted to vote for McCain because he was historic; it was just business as usual.

So McCain’s campaign thought, rather cynically, that they could peel off some disaffected Hillary voters by putting A WOMAN!!1! in the vice presidency. See? It’s historic if you vote for us, too??? We have A Girl????? You voted for Hillary because you wanted A Girl President, right?????    

The other thing was, of course, the kind of identity politics even Republicans think is valid; IE: dealing with the voting bloc that would become the Tea Party. Since McCain had never been much of a culture warrior and stuck with the massively-unpopular ‘establishment’ side of the Republican party most of the time, they did what they could to counteract that- mostly, McCain played up how much of a MAVERICK he was in all his ads and the debates, and they picked a vice president who was about as hard line of a culture warrior as they could get.

Sarah Palin has a huge family, a child with Downs’ Syndrome and a pro-life stance based almost 100% around using said child as a prop, a gun fixation, and that frontier backwoodsy kind of “HEY, I’M FOLKS LIKE YOU” thing that Republican voters like. She’s perky and snarky, but nonthreatening. She’s much more traditionally femme than Hillary and in general reminds most conservatives of the women around them- their mothers, wives, sisters, + etc. She’s a culture warrior. She set herself up to be sort of an avatar the Tea Party bloc could project their hopes on. And after all, McCain was pretty old, whoever he picked to be his VP could wind up much more prominent than expected...... 

Of course, Sarah Palin wound up being much, much more of a liabiliy than an asset, and she’s one of the things that cost McCain the election IMO. She was supposed to be an anti-Obama, anti-tea party nuke, and someone forgot that nukes don’t just blow up the people you point them at. 

But that was the reasoning behind them picking her, instead of a ‘safer’, better choice. 

[rikudera]

paradoxcase replied to your post: “Is the plural of Batman Batmans or Batmen?”:

Excuse me, Batman portable cassette players

Those things only play dark and gritty nineties music, right?

[episims]

Split Character Files

I was let known that my personality-based witch idles mod causes new sims to have split character files.

It made me look into the issue. Since the information about it is spread across various forum threads and lacked some details too, I decided to gather what I've found in this post.

What does a 'split character file' mean?

Each sim has its own character file in Documents directory. For example, Neighborhoods \ E001 \ Characters \ E001_User00024.package is Samantha Cordial.

When a character file is split, in addition to the usual E001_User00024.package there's also a file named E001_User00024.1.package. It would still be Samantha Cordial, but her data would be stored in two files instead of just one.

What kind of mods cause it?

Mods that edit character templates. That means: TemplatePerson (group 0x7FEDFE16), TemplateCat (0x7F99E646), TemplateDog (0x7F3C1917), and TemplateSmallDog (0x7F593B25). In addition, NPCs have their own character templates too.

These templates seem to get copied whenever a new sim or a pet is created. If you have a mod that includes a part of them, it appears the game creates a second character file and then copies any related BHAVs from the mod into it.

Do split character files cause problems?

In SimPe's neighborhood browser, a split character file might not be displayed properly and it's possible that you won't be able to edit the sim's stats with SimPe if that happens.

The game itself seems to be able to parse the sim together from two character files in most cases. However, it's plausible that it causes the empty/wiped face glitch to appear. As I tested the issue, I was able to replicate this myself multiple times with split character files and others have seen this happening in their games, too.

There are also people in related threads who say they have split character files and haven't noticed it causing problems.

Why do mods edit these templates, then?

I don't think it's been common knowledge what exactly causes the issue. And to be fair, creating new sims and then inspecting their character files isn't probably a part of many modder's testing routines. It sure hasn't been a part of mine.

The unpleasant fact is that if we want to make some things happen through mods, editing the code related to templates might be necessary. Ideally, Maxis would've only used them to create new sims and pets, but that's not the case. Their code gets called in various other situations – when witches idle, for example.

Now that we know which groups are involved, I hope modders can at least alert players when we share mods that cause this issue.

How can I know if the mods I use cause split character files?

It's not that common for mods to edit the templates, so suspecting all mods isn't necessary. Here are some mods that do edit them:

My Personality-based Witch Idles (includes code from TemplatePerson, the NPC witch template, and the NPC servo template) the latest mod update doesn't cause split character files anymore

Object Freedom 1.02 by @fwaysims (TemplateCat, TemplateDog, TemplateSmallDog)

lobonanny by Pescado (the nanny NPC template)

Spectral Cat Variety by @hexagonal-bipyramid (the spectral cat NPC template)

AntiGoodWitchIdleAnims by @paradoxcase (the link is broken and kestrellyn hasn't reuploaded this one to MTS, but assumingly involves the same templates as my witch idle mod)

Landlord Gardens Only Communal Areas by simler90 (the landlord NPC template)

Business Mod by simler90 (the chef NPC template, the reporter NPC template)

Gypsy Matchmaker Fix by simler90 (the matchmaker NPC template)

Buy Build Enabler for BV by cathair2005 (the social worker NPC template)

More points for woohoo with professors by Marhis (the professor NPC template)

No Relationship with Servers by Neder (the server NPC template)

Baby Toddler Mod by simler90 (the nanny NPC template)

There are probably more but in most cases, only specific NPCs are affected. Quite many people have reported having split NPCs in their games without noticing any issues with them.

Using these mods doesn't affect existing character files, but it will affect any new ones. You can prevent the split from happening by temporarily removing these mods from your game before creating new sims or pets, but you should keep in mind that this also includes spawning townies and NPCs (when their template is involved, that is) as well as born-in-game babies.

Can we stop the character files from splitting altogether?

If we can, it's sadly beyond my skillset as it appears to be hard-coded. I'm interested in testing if split character files can be safely merged back into one but I don't know about that either, yet.

I hope this clarifies the issue for someone! If I missed some crucial info, please comment.

[earlgraytay]

paradoxcase replied to your post “unpopular opinion: literary fiction is good, actually, BUT in order to...”

What would a story that doesn't have a linear plot but does have a central viewpoint character who wants something very much look like? Because the only real sort of non-linear stories I remember reading are stuff like Catch-22, where it's not so much about Yossarian as it is about giving you a general picture of things and having a lot of mini-protagonists with intertwining stories, or it's some sort of generational story like One Hundred Years of Solitude.

The Master And Margarita might be a good example, especially the second half 

[longroadstonowhere]

paradoxcase hat auf deinen Eintrag geantwortet

Well, technically, yes, but grades in grad school are a bit more ephemeral than grades in undergrad, you’re primarily going to be judged based on other things

this is true, but i am also definitely receiving a numerical grade, like 94/100, that is very much a thing that is also true

[midgethetree]

 @paradoxcase replied to your post “Would you consider making it so that SiMidge can...”

Yes, just now, I made a mod that overrode the TTAB and TTAs of sim-created paintings, which conflicted with the override of the same resources in TwoJeffs’ Paintings Stay Viewable hack, and SiMidge didn’t find it and I had to find it manually and it took like hours

For some reason TwoJeff’s mod stores instance (high) differently than most package files... I’ll study it more and see if I can figure out the problem.

[overtrolled]

Troll Tumblr Posts

I read a bunch of @paradoxcase‘s old ‘troll homestuck fandom’ posts, about the fandom of Homestuck if it were a piece of troll media written by and for trolls. I had an idea for a tumblr post in the early fandom, before the end of Act 1 (before Rose’s introduction actually, so very early on). The following is a ‘transcript’.

tarnishedarrows:

So my followers know I've been reading Homestu(k, and it is pretty interesting. Granted, I do enjoy a lot of 'weird alien (ulture' stories, but I know I'm not alone on that, so my followers ought to (heck it out.

It does not hold your hand and reveal every aspe(t of the (ulture at on(e, but here is the stuff I've pie(ed together so far:

The aliens are called 'humans'

The humans measure time in weird alien time frames. The main (haracter begins as '13 years' old, but this is apparently still a juvenile age, so it must be far less than a sweep, or perhaps the aliens have much longer (hildhoods. Perhaps both.

Humans (all their wriggling day their "birthday", hinting that they might be a viviparous species. I admit I find this appealing for personal reasons.

They give ea(h their friends/a(quaintan(es/lovers gifts on their birthday [it is un(lear what the nature of the human John's relationship to the other (haracters are yet]

No hemospectrum [the main character wears an off-spectrum green symbol, but types in highblood blue].

The main (haracter John lives with a lusus that is the same spe(ies as he is. This looks like some sort of sentient version of the relationships between some viviparous Alternian animals.

And the (omic is just getting started. It will be fun to see where this goes.

teextuaality: "I admit I find this appealing for personal reasons" lool just saay yoouree a muscleebeeaast feetishist aand moove oon dudee. i caant eeveen phaathoom why yoou aaree eeveen trying too bee cooy.

aalsoo whaat is this shit aaboout thee humaans noot haaving aa heemoospeectrum? thee maain chaaraacteer joohn is oobvioously soomee kiind oof aalieen greeeenblooood. hee's proobaably inaaccuraateely heemootyping aas aan aact oof deefiaancee oor soomeething. but thaat woould bee toooo much likee pooliticaal coommeentaary in aart, soo yoou caant seeee it.

tarnishedarrows: Being a pissblood philistine, with a sadly underdeveloped appre(iation for literary art, you are (learly ignorant of the tropes asso(iated with this genre. The hemospe(trum after all is a very trollish thing, most large animals and most actual aliens do not have anything like it. It is (ommon for alien (ulture stories to have aliens with no hemo(astes, and the deliberate use of symbol-type dissonan(e is a (ommon expression of this idea.

sixteenhues: @tarnishedarrows iZ right about it being a common trope, but i think there might be more to it. i Zorta got the Zense that hiZ text color blue iZ Zupposed to inform uZ about his Zocial rank relative to the otherZ. heZ clearly above turntechgodhead and beneath tentacletherapist.

also, and this is juZt a riff on what tarniZhedarrows Zaid at thiZ point, but what if they were Zexually dimorphic and mother grubless, like actual mammalZ? ThatZ Zuch a rare trope Zince its Zo weird, but it would totally add another cool dimenZion to their 'mammal' thing.

teextuaality: thaat's just fucking weeird. why woould hussiee maakee theem soo aalieen? wee aaree suppooseed too bee aablee too reelaatee too theesee chaaraacteers right? i think moost peeooplee woould find it haard to haavee aa coonveersaatioon with a person if yoou knoow it coould staart raandoomly pumping oout wiggleers.

Aalsoo, @tarnishedarrows ‘pissblooood’? whaat cooloors yoour piss, aasshoolee?

tarnishedarrows: Don't be (rass. If they are anything like real mammals, they may only reprodu(e at certain times in their (y(les, and only then if they su((essfully mated. Reprodu(tion is far from random, even in mammals.

teextuaality: yeeaah whaateeveer dudee. wheen hussiee droops thee eexploosioon deeviicee oon yoour dumb kink theeooriees i'll bee theeree too saay i toold yoou soo.

[zenosanalytic]

Reply-Reply to ParadoxCase: A Climate of Normalcy

paradoxcase replied to your post: Minor Winter Interlude

I never thought it would start snowing in Texas before it started snowing in Massachusetts

Yeah, that’s TOTALLY not weird at all or anything, is it :| :| :|

And, like I say, even when it does snow in Texas, it usually doesn’t snow in This part of Texas. It’s usually in places like Austin or Dallas or Amarillo.

[paradoxcase]

@zenosanalytic:

@paradoxcase I'd never heard that bit about aragorn!

Oh yeah, apparently back in the original conception of Fellowship, Aragorn was just supposed to be a ranger who helped the Hobbits on their journey, and not actually secretly the heir of Isildur and all that, and he was originally a Hobbit ranger and had a different name (a name that was more along the lines of "Strider" rather than "Aragorn"). There were notes about Hobbit-ranger!Aragorn all through the Fellowship in the LOTR companion I read back when. I think the last time he was mentioned was in a quoted note of Tolkien's about how Hobbit-ranger!Aragorn should not see anything of importance on the high seat at Amon Hen.

[nowordsforsnow]

So, I’ve successfully backed up this blog in light of recent events (there aren’t many images on here, but there are a few, and I’ve seen screenshots of a post with the IPA vowel chart in it getting flagged, so...)  Anyway, my plan is to reformulate the contents of this blog into nice “chapters” with nice formatting for posting on AO3 (hey, it’s fanwork, right?).  I also might continue working on some things and maybe producing more content in the future, but it will all be over there.  My AO3 account is paradoxcase, in case you didn’t know.

[earlgraytay]

paradoxcase replied to your post “[content warning: discussion of violent homo/transphobia, misogyny,...”

I don't think the definition you're using is the real one. Privilege is just certain things being easier for some people than others. Power is a separate thing, although it can be related. There is no "level" of privilege, there are only different kinds of privilege, which can't really be compared on any scalar metric. Any kind of analysis like this that starts with technical social science terms as defined by tumblr is doomed to failure.

The problem is that a) there’s no written-in-stone definition of most SJ-related words and concepts, even in academia, and b) the loose, Tumblresque definition of the word ‘privilege’ is the one you’re most likely to see in the wild.

If there were clear, objective definitions of words- like the 1 kilo weight they keep in a vaccuum chamber to keep the kilogram standardised- then you’d be right, I’d be wildly off-base here. But most words have fluid definitions, and many words have different definitions in different settings. Furthermore, the most common definition of the word is the one that’s used (and misused) in popular settings, regardless of whether there’s a more ‘correct’ definition. 

I’m sure there are academic definitions of the word ‘privilege’ that are clearer and more elegant than the one most commonly used on Tumblr, and do not fall into the pitfalls that bad Tumblr discourse can fall into. Multiple definitions, which are fiercely debated by various feminist/afrohumanist/queer-theorist scholars. The trouble is, no one is using those definitions outside academia. 

The definition of the word ‘privilege’ that people use on Tumblr is derived mostly from a badly-remembered version of Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. It looks like the full version of the essay is more complicated than the version I read on Tumblr (hah, fancy that). But the Tumblr understanding of ‘privilege’ is based on the metaphor that ‘privilege’ is like not having a knapsack full of rocks; every marginalised person has one or more rocks of Disadvantage in their knapsack, and privileged people can’t understand why they can’t keep up. This definition combines the academic concept of privilege (which I always understood as ‘having blind spots; not having to notice other people’s problems’) with the academic definition of social power (being able to do more in the world than other people).

I think this is a good (if flawed) metaphor, but when you combine it with several other toxic tendencies of Tumblr... well, you get the really shitty understanding of privilege I talked about in my essay. 

The whole ‘privileged people should sit down, shut up, and listen’ thing, for example, means that in order to have a voice in SJ communities, you have to prove that you are as Disadvantaged As Possible for people to take you seriously. For example: if you’re a man who wants to talk about male rape/abuse, you absolutely have to be a survivor and be willing to talk about it in gory detail. If you aren’t or don’t, people will assume you’re trolling. (And even if you do, they will accuse you of going ‘what about teh menz’. I’m not speaking from experience here, why do you ask. </sarcasm>) 

Another example is the way that people - again, on Tumblr- tend to assume that someone who disagrees with the Prevailing Tumblr Opinion is a privileged person. I have an acquaintance who’s mixed-race and disabled, and has unpopular opinions about both things. (For example: she doesn’t think alternative medicine is culturally appropriative, and she is strongly pro-recovery.) You would not believe how much hatred she gets for ‘being a white girl’ and ‘being an abled person’, because she has an opinion that other people don’t share. Clearly she doesn’t have the same amount of rocks in her backpack that they have, or she’d see that they were right; she must be privileged.

And the thing is, because Tumblr culture has a pretty large amount of influence on younger feminist/queer/anti-racist communities, this definition of privilege is the one that’s spread in the wider sphere, and it’s kind of choked out any other definition when it comes to SJ. Heck, ‘privilege’ used to mean ‘the rights noblemen have that common folks don’t', and outside of the UK, you don’t see the word used that way often. If enough people start using a word a certain way, that becomes the prevailing meaning of the word- regardless of whether it’s the ‘right’ one or not.  

So this definition of privilege is the one you’ll find on pop-feminist websites; it’s the one you’ll find when Very Serious People in the more mainstream media start talking about those ~wacky feminists~ and the ~things they believe~; it’s the one that’s (maliciously) misinterpreted by conservatives and by the alt-right. 

I think that definition is extremely flawed, especially because (again) it doesn’t recognise that privilege is a fluid quality, that it changes over time, that the whitest-cissest-straightest man in the world can still lose privilege by doing certain things and the blackest-transest-gayest woman in the world can still claw out a certain amount of privilege for herself, or that the amount of privilege you have is highly dependent on your society and the circumstances around you. I think even some of the more academic definitions I’ve heard are flawed in this way, but the prevailing Tumblr understanding of the word is completely broken.  

So, yes, I’m defining social terms as used by Tumblr. But a) whether or not it’s the ‘right’ definition of the word, it’s the one used most often in common parlance, and b) this essay was aimed at people on Tumblr anyway, not at academics.