...or in my case, when you see Valles Marineris Airstream Park 2 and think, "It's like a horizontal, shiny, Redneck Mansion!" (Look, it even has a little stage/patio set up for some reason! And cars on rotated driveways in the back that would teleport to the road!) Thankfully I did not say that out loud, or I'd have had to explain the Redneck Mansion to my father, as we were on a weird "road trip" that started at some town on Chesapeake Bay he had known someone from years ago, which I decided to show him (nasty place!) after explaining wasn't getting through, which led to several other places he wanted to see once he realized the potential of Street View and wound up at Starbase -- by means of hops to somewhere around Low Earth Orbit on the map, of course, with occasional reflection on the plague overlay. No, I can't build an emulation of that place or anything close to it at the moment (curved walls, ugh!), but it definitely was an inspiration. The surrounding houses I could do something close to, but that style has been done before and better. (My father was impressed as well, but that led to me having to repeat variations on, "Yes, those are very nice. Yes, people live here. No, I don't know where HE lives.") So...now I have inspiration for a third hood I want to build, as well as the two I'm trying to play.

@AndrewGloria @Sunbee -- While we're being off-topic, I've definitely noted a type of person who in-depth TS2 players tend toward. I'm the youngest of the three of us, also caring for elderly parents (my mother is a few years older than AndrewGloria, but severely physically disabled, while my father's a decade older) and spookily close to a millennial version of AndrewGloria. Expected nuclear cataclysm to mean I didn't really have to worry about growing up (this might have to do with childhood reading of many old books!), became a teenager very late in my chronological teens, strong dislike of alcohol, so bewildered by the application of human sexuality to myself that I seized the concept of asexuality with relief after more than half a decade of considering myself "broken" (I'd been reasonably happy with the "coaches don't play" role for my pre-pandemic social life, although lockdown made me wonder hard about whether settling for someone tolerable if distasteful in desires is better than risking being entirely alone -- though I'm extremely glad not to be sandwiched between parents, significant other, and children like so many of my peers are!), and the "Bohemian Puritan" thing... So we're socially awkward, caretaker types, probably with a skewed stimulus-reward balance, very personal sense of taste and style, highly imaginative of course... I'd hazard a guess that most of us are maladaptive daydreamers to some extent or other, with the game a medium for making the daydreams "real" and channelling them away from reality-disrupting fantasizing. Please, please, please, don't take that as an insult, because it's not meant to be. My own belated discovery of maladaptive daydreaming was a massive relief when disputes over its potential inclusion in future editions of the DSM brought it to my attention, although I didn't have the leisure to think about the correlations between daydreams, writing, and Simming until last year. If it means anything, the discoverer -- who is not a daydreamer himself -- considers it a gift to be made use of. I'm trying to with my dabbling in hood-building -- I have a bunch of daydreams I didn't wind up living that would make terrible writing due to their convoluted and entangled plots, but those very plots work well in the intertwined-lives world of TS2.

I love that airstream park, Phaenoh's upload was based on an image which turned out to be a stage set for a production of Ivanov. I made something similar but on a smaller scale for one of my hoods, but have not tried an airsteam park- I know I have something similar in my downloads, gives me an idea!

I accidently clicked the "This PC" button on my file explorer and was baffled to see my Saved Sims folder there. Before I panicked I looked closely and it actually said "Saved Pictures I'll just excuse it with the fact that I didn't sleep well last night, so could be still half asleep

Went to a relative's birthday - she turned 85.
Met some friends of hers (I have known them slightly, but not well). It was also their 65th wedding anniversary.
I congratulated them and he gave a naughty smile and said: "And you know, I still find this old thing beautiful." And then he looked at her.
And I thought: He is looking at her in the exact same way Stirling Hamilton looked at his wife Faith when they had their golden anniversary
(Find yourself somebody who looks at you that way - full of love and admiration ).

My husband and I are house searching at the moment. Any time I look at the kitchen of houses online, I count the counter space as if it were sim counters. It's actually really helpful in deciding if I like the size of the kitchen!

Me: *looks outside and sees the gardener shuffling back and forth in the middle of some flowerbeds*
Me: Are you stuck? Do you need help?
Me: *picks up gardener and moves her* There you go.
Gardener: *walks back to the same spot and starts shuffling again*
Me: Oh. Okay. Sorry for trying to help.

Edit: I meant to put this on the "Things you've said" thread. Ah well. I blame the fact that I was on my phone.

...when you pick up an (empty, don't worry!) lot and hold it over the road to try to figure out if what you're building should be laid out as a single- or double-wide trailer...because the point of trailers is that they can be moved by road! Now I want to do that with the Pleasantview trailer park... (I have a new semi-obsessional interest, clearly. This one just might be useful IRL at some point...)

...when you almost tell a worried-looking tradesman that the large, barking dogs next door can't get at him while he works because they're on the next lot. I meant (and actually said) "behind a sturdy fence", but "on the next lot" felt right!

@Freefalldreams I do have a spouse and we have six kids, but definitely otherwise very similar. I know we've got two published authors at least on here (Maxon and Peni) and I think that Sims 2 offers a story-telling creative type outlet for those of us who aren't that polished or interested in polishing. We'd probably have been telling stories around the campfire back in the Neolithic!

In my class where I'm usually working on non-computer-related stuff, there are portraits of famous scholars and other creatures of a kind. Yesterday when part of my class did not show up on time I almost "mentally clicked" on these portraits trying to spawn students in, like you'd do with custom school in the game.

And I though that all that remote teaching stuff did not affected me that much

I tell my rock band members that I can just make a sims 2 video of one of our songs with sims and they don't even have to be in the video IRL

...when you have the following dream: I was playing TS2, apparently a Decades Challenge variant (which I want to do someday and am slowly collecting CC and knowledge of ACR modifications for) and decided to pause and ask the selected Sim (1930s Klara Vonderstein, I believe) if I could have some of the excessive amount of Sun&Moon coffee she'd bought at an owned shop while not being played because she wouldn't have to deal with shortages for at least half a decade and my mother was worried about them (which is true -- I have been nagged). She beckoned me in, and somehow I stepped through the screen into her house, where she insisted I come outside and "fix the sunset". Out on the porch we went, where she showed me the beautiful sunset-lit skybox -- or at least the top of it, as there was a dark-blue box blocking off the lower part of the sky. I immediately realized that I must have lost skyFix in my change of lighting mod and somehow not noticed it until I saw it from the inside! I was ready to step out, save, and put skyFix in, but she had a list of other complaints... Including the lack of a hospital suitable for babies to be born in, since we were finally getting into a time period where it should be becoming more common. I told her that there was already a suitable place, and somehow we walked across town, under the glitched sunset, without loading screens...to a period-accurate public toilet. I tried to point out how often Sims give birth in the bathroom. She was unimpressed and unamused. I realized, to my surprise, I had both given and received extensive sarcasm without getting confused. Maybe I am getting better... (My father and I don't understand sarcasm very well, especially from strangers. We can be sarcastic, but I often feel guilty doing so because I get confused by it so easily. We both lost even more of our ability to understand sarcasm and read context over the past year or so, and I rarely even use basic sarcasm now for fear of it being returned in kind. Online is actually easier, because some incomprehension is expected! It was very refreshing to be able to have that conversation in the dream, even if both sides were really some form of myself...)

Not to self-plug but threeeeeee *raises hand*. And you know you play sims too much when one of the main things you do to gain inspiration for a book you're writing is to design and build the main setting in the game so you can look at it.

That's just using the tools you have available to assist you in the process, StrangeTownChick! You do what you need to do.

When my D&D characters build strongholds (which doesn't happen very often) I build them in Sims so I can show people the layout.

I've published scientific papers... if that counts

I use to always write sims stories on the BBS, it's a shame none of them ever got archived (though, looking back they were probably terrible. Think Twilight... but with aliens). I have a handful of notes on my phone for various Sims stories I want to write, some are even pages long, but I never get round to even making the sims.

Sims 2 is one of the best tools for creativity I have ever experienced, I feel like I always have so many ideas to play out and stories to write and pics to take I will never be able to get them done. I know I play sims too much, because I'm constantly thinking about things related to it. I should be doing work but I want to write out mini biographies for my less played single sims right now. I also think, checking out the community of sims 2 players as a whole adds into creativity such as bouncing ideas off each other or getting inspired based on someone else's gameplay rules or techniques.

You're watching a video where, in reference to a bathroom, someone says "This is where you're gonna start and this is where you're gonna end" and you immediately think "Just like a sim"--since many are born and die in bathrooms.

You fall asleep thinking of what you wanna do in your game, and annoyed that you must sleep.
Your dreams are related to the sims.

I had a dream tonight in which a priest figured, who had an unrequited crush on... one of my sims. Had nothing to do with The Sims or sims otherwise. Well then.

When you keep hitting "insert" instead of "print screen" trying to get a thumbnail for a youtube video. I use fraps to take pictures in my sims game, and the key for that is "insert" but I also make youtube videos and tend to take a thumbnail picture from the video which requires "print screen" and I keep wondering why nothing shows up when I go to hit "paste" into paint and then go "I hit insert for a thumbnail again ... oops" lol.

I'm also a published author & have two very short stories coming out in an anthology in November!

The "foreign neighbourhood" thread reminded me of one of my visits to America, I was walking down a 'sidewalk' past some mail boxes and thought "Wow its like being in Sims!"

I finally went clubbing after almost 2 years and at the front of the dancefloor I saw a girl whose face looked a lot like Renee Andrews (the Newspaper girl from Veronaville) and she had those tomboy vibes as well XD. So basically I saw Face 27 in real life.

*my partner walks into the bedroom*
Him: ...are you listening to the Sims theme songs?
Me: yes.
Him: why?
Me: It relaxes me better than my sleep hypnosis
Him: ...OK yeah that makes sense for you.

I can't watch live action shows anymore, because I just take one look at a character and say "Damn, that nose looks so interesting! That would make one cute kid!"

I've been playing too much when I come to the realization that sims are a much better bunch to hang around with more than real life people.