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annaraebananawriter · 1 year

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"Someone who’s eaten that much ice cream is clearly not okay. come on, talk to me." With Dream, Ink and Blue for the quote thingy please I love them

I think this drabble is actually 100% fluff. Which...is a first for me, I think. I am unsure how to feel about it. (Lie: I am really happy with this drabble and I hope you are too. I had lots of fun.)

Now, will all my talk of Star Sans Poly lately, I have gotten myself in the mood for it, so some of that might've bled into this drabble. But I think it's more so in a 'before they realized they loved each other' sort of way than anything else.

Small warning for cursing and mentioned animal death and I think that's it. Let me know!

Happy reading! Prompt is italicized.

~oOo~

Ink checked his phone as Blue pulled into the driveway. "Still haven't heard from him."

"Well, he can't ghost us anymore."

See, last week, they had agreed--all three of them, that is; Ink, Blue, and Dream--to go out on a fun little night this weekend. Ink needed some more yarn, as he was on a knitting kick lately and had run out of the bulk of the yarn he bought at the beginning. They planned to go shopping first, first art stuff, then maybe clothes and a few other places, then it was dinner time, where they would be eating at a dinner they all liked and frequented, and then it was off to the movies, where they would watch the one that was finally here that they'd been looking forward to all year.

Blue had been looking forward to this night all week. It'd been a couple of months since the three of them had hung out together. No fault of any of theirs, things have just been busy. But he was missing his friends, a lingering ache in his chest the longer his messages on his phone remained bare and the more nights he had with uninterrupted peaceful sleep.

That's how he knew it was getting bad--he was even missing Ink's late-night phone calls that kept him up for an hour before he finally convinced the artist to either sleep or reminded him to do something else.

And, finally, the night came. He met up with Ink and they wandered around the shop they agreed to meet at, waiting for Dream...who never showed.

They tried reaching out, texting and calling multiple times, but nothing came of it. Dream seemed to ignore the attempts. Which was frustrating. Concerned, they weighed the decision of continuing on with the night with just the two of them. If Dream knew they gave up a night of fun just because of him, he'd be immensely guilty. He'd try making it up to them by buying them expensive gifts, which they would accept, though the gesture indirectly made them guilty as well. They didn't want Dream to get upset, but it seemed like, no matter what decision they made, it would end in that.

What other reason would Dream have for ghosting them if he wasn't upset in the first place? And if he was upset, then he needed his friends more than ever. That took priority over any kind of fun they had planned.

With a shared nod, Ink and Blue hopped in the car and drove to their friend's house. It was their first guess as to where he might be; Dream loved to isolate himself inside when he was sad. And sure enough, the lights were on, though Dream's car wasn't in the driveway. Nor was Nightmare's.

They didn't bother knocking. Blue already had a spare key, entrusted to him for emergencies. And he considered this an emergency.

As soon as the door was open, Ink strode in and followed the sound of the television, stopping briefly in the doorway before disappearing. "Scooch over," Blue heard Ink say, and the sound of someone sniffing and shuffling over.

Shutting the door behind him, setting down his things, and taking off his shoes, he entered the living room as well, being faced with a sorry sight he hadn't seen since high school.

Small ice cream bins littered the coffee table, along with tissues and a cracked phone. The source of the mess lay on the couch, cocooned in the quilt from his bed, now having moved over to make room for Ink, who leaned against Dream, focus already on the TV. Smiling, Blue locked eyes with Dream, who sniffed again. His friend handed Ink the halfway-eaten ice cream and held up his hands, silently asking for a hug.

Which Blue was happy to give. Squeezing himself into the corner on Dream's other side, he wrapped his arms around his friend and he started crying all over again. "Hey, it's okay," he said, rubbing his back. "What's wrong?"

Dream sniffed. "Nothing." His voice was muffled by Blue's shirt.

Ink snorted, eating a spoonful of the ice cream. "Bullshit. Someone who’s eaten that much ice cream is clearly not okay."

Shaking his head, Blue nudged Dream, asking him to look at him. "Come on, talk to me." Giving him a smile, he tried to do the puppy dog eyes his friends always did. He couldn't tell if they worked, but Dream did sigh, sitting up to rest his head on Blue's shoulder.

"It's nothing, really," Dream said, "Just a whole bunch of bad days. Which made this a shitty week." Pausing, he sighed again, more heavily this time. "Which sorta made me forget about our plans. I'm sorry."

"Not important right now." Ink said. "Plans can always be remade."

"Ink's right. Please, continue. Tell us about this shitty week."

Chuckling, Dream stifled a cough with his hand. "Okay. So, you know my boyfriend, right? Well, my ex-boyfriend now, I guess. Broke up with me. Through text, of course. This was back at the start of the week, which pretty much makes it the start of it all.

"Because that day, I got stuck in the middle of the rain without an umbrella. And this was after being trapped in traffic, which made me late for work. And speaking of work, all week long it seems like it's just been putting pets down or animals brought in from the road that we can't save. All week! And then, just a couple of days ago, my car wouldn't start, which meant Nightmare had to come and pick me up from work. My car's in the shop now, but it won't be fixed until Monday."

Taking a breath, he rubbed his face, continuing. "And then yesterday, my phone fell and broke. So, if you called me or texted me, I never got them. Sorry. Nightmare left this morning for a small work trip. He wanted to hold off on it, but I convinced him to go. He'll be back on Monday anyway. So, I've been stuck here in the house, which was fine at the start. I thought it could work as a reset, make next week better. But things have just been breaking, all over the place! First the sink, then the freezer, then a couple of plates and glasses."

Dream sniffed. Again. "And I decided to just take a break, lay down and watch a movie, eat some ice cream. Turned the TV on, and what seemed like a normal rom-com was playing. So I watched that. But then it turned sad, and no matter what I went to, all of it was sad movies! So, then I just started crying, and just couldn't stop." Sighing, he leaned further into Blue. "And now I think I'm getting sick."

"Aw, you poor thing." Ink cooed, grinning. He pulled Dream over to him, wrapping him in a big hug. "I did think you were being dramatic at first, but no, that is a shitty week." Tightening his grip, Ink's grin widened. "This calls for an exorcism."

Dream struggled to free himself from the hug. "Ink, I can't breathe!"

Ink hugged him even tighter. "I won't let you go until all the shittyness is expelled from you."

"Ink!"

Blue laughed before finally taking pity. "Okay, okay. Ink, stop." Huffing, Dream sat up, glaring at Ink. Blue grabbed him by cupping his cheeks and turned his head side to side, looking him over closely. "Hm...have you eaten yet today?"

Dream blinked, thrown by the change in subject. "Nightmare made breakfast." Pausing, he closed his eyes with a sigh. "But I forgot to have any. I even put the leftovers in the fridge when he left."

"So, you've just had ice cream?"

"Yeah."

"I see." Blue gave him another inspection. "Just as I figured, then. You need a proper meal. Maybe some medicine, then, if you're getting sick. And then, a cheerful movie, which Ink will pick, along with some cuddles." Before Dream could think of protesting, Blue held up a finger. "And that's doctor's orders."

"You're only in med school." Dream rolled his eyes. But he was smiling. "Not a doctor yet."

"Still."

"But, yes, that does sound wonderful." Dream smiled up at him. "Thank you, Blue." He then turned to Ink. "And thank you, too, Ink, even if you tried to suffocate me."

Finishing off the ice cream, Ink wagged a finger. "I exorcised you."

"It felt like suffocation."

"Good! Then it was working. We should get back to it then..."

"Ink!"

Dream tried to get away, but Ink was faster. He knew all of Dream's ticklish spots, too, which was an advantage. Dream shrieked with laughter, making Ink laugh, and the sound of both their laughs made Blue laugh, a hint of a blush on his cheeks as he beamed.

Yes, he thought to himself. That's more like it. These two deserved to be laughing, not mopping around. They delivered to be happy and passionate, a bright future ahead of them. And Blue loved them so much, more than anyone else he was friends with, he would make sure they got what they deserved.

That's what friends were for, after all.

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baticeer-sims · 11 months

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A couple of experiments with TS2 loading time

I wanted to test out some things I've commonly heard around the Sims 2 community as ways to affect your load times. Disclaimer: I have a powerful gaming computer so my game loads fast anyways, so there might be small differences that I won't notice that are more obvious on other machines. I don't know how much of this generalizes to everyone's computer! I run the UC with Sims2RPC as my launcher on Windows 11.

My method: I loaded the game and timed how long it took the game to load from the end of the intro movie, to the neighborhood selection screen. I did it 5 times in a row for each different thing I tested and averaged out the times, just to reduce variance as much as I could.

Test #1 - Control

First I just loaded my game with my downloads folder the way it is right now (8.2 GB of pretty disorganized CC) to get a baseline value. Result: 55 seconds average

Test #2 - Do special characters affect loading times?

I used a bulk file renaming program to replace the letter "S" in every filename in my entire downloads folder, with š - if you can't see that character it's an S with an accent mark on it. (I picked S because it's one of the most common letters in English and it's also in some words common in cc filenames like "sims" and "mesh" so I thought it'd be one where I'm hitting almost every file even if I only replace one character.)

Result: 55 seconds average Conclusion: This one surprised me because it's such a piece of repeated common knowledge around the TS2 community, but I think it's unlikely that special characters affect loading times? If nothing changed from turning the vast majority of my CC from files that don't have special characters into files that do.

Test #3 - Do non-CC files in your downloads folder affect loading times?

I remember hearing you shouldn't keep preview pics in your downloads folder, because it'll slow down the game, and I was confused because I always thought it won't even try to read non-.package files at all. So to test this one, I temporarily moved 17.5 GB of photos, videos, and audio files from elsewhere on my hard drive, into my sims downloads folder.

Result: 55 seconds average Conclusion: If tripling the size of my download folder didn't change load time at all when the new files were all non-sims files, I think it's almost certainly fine to keep preview pictures (or zipped-up backups of something you don't want to use all the time, or whatever) in with your CC if it helps you keep track of your downloads.

Test #4 - Merging your CC

I knew this one was going to actually make a difference because I've directly experienced it before (on an older, worse computer where my load times were longer) but I thought I'd give it a go anyways just to see how much difference it made for me. So I merged some of my CC subfolders I knew would be the biggest (clothes, buy mode objects, & hairs) with CC Merger. According to the logs, it went from 4,308 individual files to 148 merged files.

Result: 46.5 seconds average Conclusion: This definitely makes a difference but it will make a lot more of one for people who already have long load times. For someone like me it might not be worth the amount of time it would take to be bundling every little thing I download lol.

A few other things I've heard that I couldn't think of an easy way to test

1- "Default replacements don't affect your load times as much as if you had a custom version of the same thing" - It feels to me like this doesn't make sense because surely the game still just has to read the files but I have no clue how to test this, I'm not about to spend hours gathering up the custom versions of all my defaults just to try it.

2- "The game will load faster if you have shorter file paths / fewer subfolders within the download folder" - I heard of and started doing this long enough ago that all my downloads are already only one or two subfolders deep already. I couldn't think of a quick way to make my folder structure a lot more complicated lol, and I think even if I found out this wasn't true I wouldn't change how I organize my downloads, so I didn't spend time on it.

Everyone draw whatever conclusions you want from this post, I'm not telling you to change how you organize your CC or anything, just wanted to share what I found is true for me specifically, I would be interested to hear other people who have longer load times repeating my tests and see if you get the same results, or to hear people who know more about the programming side of this weigh in, maybe something like the special characters is dependent on your computer or operating system!

#the sims 2 #ts2 #sims tips and tricks #if anyone wants to try the special characters one for yourself I can explain how to do the bulk renaming thing #I actually really wanted to try this with a longer baseline loading time #but I don't know of anywhere that I can go to download like. a huge bulk file of 10+ gigs of CC that I could put in temporarily

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digital-corruption · 3 years

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Oof, I'm at 30 already. When did that happen?

Haunted by the Past Part 30

Normally I'd start by saying the next day, but let’s face, it was the same day. I woke up to the room being dimly lit by Jake sitting on the sofa using his laptop.

“What time is it?” I groaned.

“Three,” Jake answered.

“Seriously?” I clumsily grabbed my phone to double check. “Wow, ok. There went the day.”

“It’s not like we had any plans,” Jake laughed.

“You don’t know! Maybe I was planning to get my nails done!” I joked. I got up to turn the lights on.

“Ahh, warn me before you do that!” Jake winced.

“You do know using computers in poor lighting IS terrible for your eyes?” I leant over the back of the couch to look at him.

Jake scoffed, “An unproven theory.”

“Ahh,” it was my turn to wince.

“What’s wrong?” Jake looked at me worried.

“Damn it, Aunt Flo had to rear her ugly head today!” I whined and left to search for my basic necessities.

“Who is Aunt Flo?” Jake questioned.

I snapped around, “My period, Jake!”

Jake blushed, “Oh, sorry.” His blush turned to a sneaky smile. I could’ve sworn I heard a “good” come out of him.

“Not good! I need to stock up!” I shouted heading into the bathroom. I came back out a few moments later. “Hang on, I wonder if Phil has a toiletries dispenser upstairs.”

“Why would he have that?” Jake looked at me perplexed.

“Because they usually dispense condoms as well,” I pointed out.

I left the basement and headed upstairs. Phil was putting out clean glasses at the bar. I avoided him and went into the ladies bathroom. Sure enough it had one of those toiletry machines. One tampon cost a damn fortune though for a cheap brand. I groaned and stepped out of the bathroom to complain to the proprietor when I ran into him.

“I thought I heard you sneaking around,” Phil smirked. “Did you need something?”

“Um, that machine with the toiletries, could I buy some off you at a bulk rate?” I smiled innocently.

“You want cheap condoms? No,” Phil frowned. “I’m not supporting your sex life with another man.”

“No, the damn tampons!” I said annoyed. Yeah, good job MC, trying to negotiate at the beginning of your damn period.

Phil laughed, “Yeah sure. Those things rarely sell anyway. I think I have a box of spares in the basement. They don’t have a use by date, do they?”

“What? No, as long as the plastic wrap hasn’t been broken,” I said matter of a factly. “Where would they be?”

“Uh, no clue. On the shelves maybe?” Phil stepped away. “We open in a couple of hours. I assume you want to eat something before customers start arriving.”

“Yeah, ok. How much do you want for the box?” I questioned.

“Nah, just take them,” he winked at me. “It'd be wrong of me to take money from a woman in distress.”

I smiled, “Thanks Phil.”

I went back downstairs and searched the shelves for the fabled box. Jake watched me puzzled. “Do you want help?”

“No, I know what I’m looking for,” I said snarkily. Ugh, let me find the damn tampons so I can focus on not being PMS driven. I finally found the box beneath a ton of other stuff. It took me a while to free it, but once I did put it in the bathroom and breathed a sigh of relief.

“You found it?” Jake looked at me hopefully.

“Yes, I’m good for the rest of the week,” Relieved, I sat down on the couch next to Jake. “Tell me something good.”

“An endangered elephant gave birth in a zoo today,” Jake said randomly.

“What? Why do you even know that?” I laughed.

“I don’t know, the news thought it was important. It sounded like good news. Then again, being born in captivity is terrible, so maybe not as good?” Jake went back to his laptop.

“You could tell me that we’re no longer wanted people,” I suggested.

“That would be a lie,” Jake frowned. “I suppose the only good news is that people are doubting the words of my ex. There’s some Anonymous members spreading a theory around that she was paid to make those claims, which is most likely true. I don’t really know what else to do to stop her.”

“It’s probably better to do nothing than try to protest it. The more airtime we give her claim, the more it diminishes the message,” I explained. “We can’t let one false claim outweigh hundreds of actual crimes.”

“You realize I feel incredibly guilty for what I did,” Jake sighed.

“I know. You are still you after all,” I smiled.

“Why doesn’t it bother you?” Jake questioned. “You aren’t afraid that I'd do the same to you?”

“I’m pretty sure I would’ve hit her too. I know I want to hit her now,” I ran my fingers through his hair. “And I know you’re incapable of hurting me.” I paused for a moment, “What about last night?”

“Oh, you mean the feud between the federal agents and the band of anarchists on Mt. Victoria?” Jake swapped screens and showed me an article with a picture of the anarchists waving their flag at dawn, declaring their victory. Only one wore an Anonymous mask and he was front and center.

“No mention of us?” I was confused.

“Not a word. The feds probably didn’t want to admit they failed in apprehending us in the process,” Jake smiled.

“Poor Laurel…” I gave her beautiful resort a solemn moment of silence, then I stood up, “Come on, we better go eat something before the doors open.”

Jake pulled his hood over his head and followed me up the stairs. Phil was signing for a delivery when he saw us.

“Give me a moment, I want you to try something,” Phil shouted out. He carried a heavy carton to the kitchen.

“Do you want a hand?” I offered.

“Nah, I’ve got it,” Phil refused. He came back out in a huff. “So I've been experimenting with our house burger and I could use someone to try it out, if that’s ok with you?”

“Yes, of course! We owe you big time so if there’s anyway we can help, let us know,” I smiled.

Phil nodded, then glanced at Jake, “I guess I’ll make one for him too.” He then turned and went back into the kitchen.

Jake rolled his eyes. I giggled then sat down at the bar.

“Are we just going to wait here?” Jake asked.

“You don’t have to. You can go back downstairs,” I offered.

“Yeah, I’ll keep her company,” Phil stepped out from the kitchen for a moment.

Jake immediately sat down next to me, then pulled out his phone and pretended to be busy. His free hand slipped onto my thigh. I held in a laugh at Jake’s obvious distrust of Phil.

I looked around Aurora, taking in all of the details, especially the photos on the wall. There was a small memorial to Richy and another to Jessy, which made my heart sink. I felt like we failed them. If only we worked things out sooner. If only we found Hannah faster.

Jake gave my leg a squeeze. I turned back to see he was looking at me with concern. He saw my eyes were fighting tears.

“I’m ok,” I whispered and sniffed. I put my hand on top of his and he turned it around to hold my hand. “Jessy really wanted to show me the town. We have to walk her tour one day.”

“We won’t be able to do that for a while,” Jake said solemnly.

“I know, but we need to do it,” I insisted. “It'd make her so happy.”

Jake leaned over and pressed his lips against my forehead for a moment, then leant his head against mine, “We will.”

I gritted my teeth, “We have to get him this time. We cannot let him get away.”

“We will get him,” Jake looked in my eyes intensely. “He will be brought to justice.”

I wanted Jake’s confidence to be my own. He could tell I was still conflicted. He put his phone down and caressed my cheek, before giving me a tender, loving kiss.

And the kiss was interrupted by the sound of two plates hitting the bar. Jake gave Phil a death glare, while Phil seemed amused to have interrupted him.

“There you go, my special burger. I haven’t named it yet, so if you have any suggestions, let me know,” Phil smiled at me.

“Wow, it looks good! What makes it special?” I asked, pulling my hand away from Jake’s to inspect the burger.

“Well if I told you that, it wouldn’t be so special anymore,” Phil winked at me. Jake’s annoyance went up another level. This was going to be a long meal...

#duskwood #duskwood jake x player #duskwood jake #duskwood jake x mc #duskwood fanfiction #Haunted by the Past

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