May I add, skip Chrome for browsing, if you haven't done so. Firefox is much better anyway.
As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse. It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms
As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable. As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.
Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.
⁂
Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.
www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.
www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.
https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.
www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.
http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.
www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.
www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.
www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free
I'm avoiding re-installing this shit again, so in the meantime I'm sorting some stuff into lists. For Linux research purposes.
Edit: Standby Memory Allocation on Windows 10: New info coming in: That's not the issue. However, what i wrote below about TM is my own experience and has worked for me (without doing what Jessa was saying in the SB memory part, I remembered, hope I didn't waste anybody's time). Does it make sense? idk, but it's harmless, and if it's actually a thing and not just a freak coincidence, and can help anybody else then why not. I do remember trying it with and without cleaning cache :/ [for fuck sake the nerve on EA to put out for sale a new edition without improving it to 64bit]. As discussed by Jessa below, it's an OS problem. What worked for me, for some bizarre reason was to keep Task Manager on before and while playing the game. without it my game was crashing often, on my main non gaming computer. What solved it was fixing windows... for anyone's interested, the gory details are at the bottom of the post under the cut.
+ That combined with clearing cache often.
Jessa's video (Memory Allocation and 4GB Patch Repair). Edit: Turns out this video was pulled back, so basically just make sure the patch is applied?
1. Secound opinion on the whole matter by BrandiNotBroke [the whole #pink flash diaries tag is interesting]:
2. Leefish forum - Sims2 Graphic Cards:
3. @celebkiriedhel's Post (Texture Memory):
Linux:
@teaaddictyt & @niamh-sims About Linux.
2. @nonsensical-pixels about Linux.
3. @brandinotbroke, first Linux supporter I've encountered here. A comprehensive post:
Texture Memory Fuckery (Pink Soup, among other things):
Kiri's post linked at the beginning, first an foremost.
Original Post by @fireflowersims, plus; re-blog by @ovytia. Both of their tags, and comment:
2. A recap on Pink Soup/Texture Sizes by @rockethorse in the comments:
That's it for now. Any more information or good links will be welcome.
Task Manager thing briefly, for the curious (as if it interests anyone else but me, but in the interest of keeping track).
So the game was crashing often. That thing was easy to spot because the laptop would make loud airplane noises when I'd load the game. It got stuck or something, so I went to end it by force with task manager and noticed that all the resources where used to the max - right up until I'd open TM, and then everything would cool down. Like it was playing hide and seek with me. So I figured I'd get smart with it right back, and just leave TM open the whole time. Low and behold, the game stopped crashing. That combined with clearing cache often. Does it make sense? idk, but the computer works in mysterious ways.
Hey, folks. I have a major announcement. I'm stepping down as an admin from the Shenanigans Discord (creative differences) and moving my workshops to a different venue.
The SimForge- TS2 a Sims 2 server focused on content creation/ modding, and we'd love it if you could join. There won't be a workshop this Saturday, but I have upcoming workshops planned for the 10th and 17th of May (announcements to follow).
Goddamn it I just switched to 11, I knew I'll regret it. Bye Bye Microsoft..
I think every computer user needs to read this because holy fucking shit this is fucking horrible.
So Windows has a new feature incoming called Recall where your computer will first, monitor everything you do with screenshots every couple of seconds and "process that" with an AI.
Hey, errrr, fuck no? This isn't merely because AI is really energy intensive to the point that it causes environmental damage. This is because it's basically surveilling what you are doing on your fucking desktop.
This AI is not going to be on your desktop, like all AI, it's going to be done on another server, "in the cloud" to be precise, so all those data and screenshot? They're going to go off to Microsoft. Microsoft are going to be monitoring what you do on your own computer.
Now of course Microsoft are going to be all "oooh, it's okay, we'll keep your data safe". They won't. Let me just remind you that evidence given over from Facebook has been used to prosecute a mother and daughter for an "illegal abortion", Microsoft will likely do the same.
And before someone goes "durrr, nuthin' to fear, nuthin to hide", let me remind you that you can be doing completely legal and righteous acts and still have the police on your arse. Are you an activist? Don't even need to be a hackivist, you can just be very vocal about something concerning and have the fucking police on your arse. They did this with environmental protesters in the UK. The culture war against transgender people looks likely to be heading in a direction wherein people looking for information on transgender people or help transitioning will be tracked down too. You have plenty to hide from the government, including your opinions and ideas.
Again, look into backing up your shit and switching to Linux Mint or Ubuntu to get away from Microsoft doing this shit.
These bloody conversions.
tempted to call this Assassin Sims in Paris.
Great info! That's the reason some conversions from newer games have flat and unsaturated textures.
It's a great method for shading even if you don't have a normal map. Make one out of the texture with an image editing software, or with Nvidia Texture Tools Exporter. If the texture is too flat, it can be made out of the mesh itself in blender, like so.
You can retain many details by desaturating (the right way) normal map and using it as overlay.
New suit for TS2 based on a model from Detective Pikachu Returns, combined with Wingtip shoes.
16 recolors, EM enabled
Download: SFS | BOX Polycount: 7383, has "fat" morph
Recolors make use of envcube mask, if you don't have Sim Standard Material shader edit by @crispsandkerosene in your game, shoes will look a bit different.
More pics under the cut:
*This is for The Sims 2
I've shared my Splatoon 2 Wingtips (brogues) conversion as creator resource HERE (SFS) or HERE (BOX) - archive contains shoes (1742 poly) plus naked AM bottom with morphs, bumpmaps and new textures.
I've struggled a bit with adjusting this suit for TS2 body, not super happy with the legs part but it's acceptable. Original shoes are not bad but not formal enough so I decided to ditch those (might do them as separate shoe resource) .
I've included TXMT settings for the shoes (matt / shiny) - white, brown and black texture included with the mesh, so you can easily change shoe colors in SimPe. Also, shine can be switched off by setting 'reflection' mode to 'none'.
Blue stripey suit is original texture with edited tie color.
Three recolors with jeans are categorized as Everyday, other recolors are Everyday & Formal.
Magnificent! I was hoping to find something like this, it's spot on.
I never liked these fences (and it seems no one else liked it either, as I couldn't find any recolor or retexture of them), but that changed once I found out that they were inspired by the Parisian subway stations in Art Nouveau style:
Lovely, isn't it? Therefore, I decided that a less shiny texture would fit them well, applied @cluedosims' rough metal textures to them and voilà! Now they're finally useful:
These are default replacements for the two fences in-game ("Nouvelle Fence by I. Ron Smith"), the green and the iron one.
I also found two other textures in the game files ("brass" and "white"), which I put in proper packages so now you can use them as well, and they're recategorized to appear neatly together in the catalog.
Since I linked these directly to the hidden Maxis texture files, they will pick up any default replacement you might have for these textures. In my default replacement file, those textures are replaced with @cluedosims' "bronze" and "silver" textures, respectively.
⚠️ Not all the files are meant to be put in the Download folders! Here's what you need to know:
The three files inside the folder labeled "These ones go in your Res - Catalog - Bins folder" should go in this path:
C:/Program Files (or wherever else you installed your game)/The Sims 2/[your latest EP or SP]/TSData/Res/Catalog/Bins
If you don't want Cluedo textures, and you merely want to unlock the lost and found Maxis textures, simply abstain from placing the default file in your Downloads folder.
Please let me know if you have any doubts or if I screwed anything up.
Credits: @shastakiss / @cluedosims for the textures!
Good one! that's a neat find.
I keep coming across the simmer who’s responsible for this shitshow, so a friendly reminder, watch out. She’s still active:
https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/15yd5yj/video_gamesmodding_when_you_want_your_sims_to/
Oh, that's interesting. first time I'm hearing that claim. Now i understand what happened. in my legacy edition copy, I did notice a change to the graphic settings, but thought it was done by someone else, not EA. on the log it states that I have a slightly different card than what I actually have, and it did surprise me they didn't add mine to the pool, i was wondering what's that about. I tried to add mine manually, worrying its absence would cause issues, but it didn't change when I've added mine. I had no problems with it, so I just left it as it is.
Side note: I left this copy for testing (and forgot about it actually), I don't play it if I can help it, so there are hardly any mods on it.
Okay, I compared the Graphics Rules.sgr and Video Cards.sgr with the Ultimate Collection
They did EXACTLY what my brother has been saying for months but people have been debating him over it and didn't want to believe him
The new video cards.sgr doesn't include ANY new graphics cards. Wanna know why? Because the game doesn't fucking care. He has been saying for months that it doesn't care and that adding it via GRM doesn't do anything, it can actually potentially make it worse.
What they DID do is take out all the hacky stuff in the Graphics Rules.sgr to prevent the game from turning on and off certain settings depending on your hardware and software config. That's what I did as well, months ago, because he said it is the smarter solution.
Female, 30's. Sims 2.Elsewhere: CC Finds Side Blog, Art Reblogs, Dreamwidth (Main Sims Place), GoS, Simblr.cc, Pillowfort, Bluesky, Pinterest.
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