because i want to play different strangetowns; want to know if it's even possible. if it's not, nbd

Yes it is, but you would have to give them different names and hood numbers.
The original Strangetown is N002, so you would have to renumber your second Strangetown as something else. This includes all of the files inside the N002 folder too. Best to use a bulk renamer program for this; I use Ant Renamer. You can use any four digit/letter name you like as long as it's different to all the other neighbourhoods you have in your Neighborhoods folder.
When you load the game, rename one of the hoods. If only one shows, rename that and reboot and the second should show.
Be aware that the game will renumber these neighbourhoods internally when you start the game, so this will break the original storytelling folder and the scripted scenarios. If you want those to work you'd have to use SimPE to edit the NID. See attached image.

You can't play them at the same time, but with some tweaking you can have different (separate) copies of Strangetown or other neighborhoods.

You can go about it in a few ways:
1: Multiple "The Sims 2" folders (copy and then rename them, make sure the one you want to play has the proper name, the game will ignore the rest) - it does take up space, but the folders are separate from each other, so the only files the saved games share are the ones in the install files. The AnyGameStarter would probably work for this, too.
2 (?) : I think I've seen a version of clean templates that were set up as a custom hood (not the usual N002 but a higher number), which would allow for two Strangetowns in one game. Can't remember who made the templates, though. Could be these were without sims.
3: Renaming everything in the folder to a different number than N002 (a bit more complicated, EDIT: See Simsample's post).

You can also add Tarlia's subhood versions of the premade hoods to the main hood versions, if crossovers appeal to you.

Yes it is! If you want a detailed walkthrough of how to do it without borking anything up, I followed the tutorial on Pleasant Sims' website and it worked perfectly! I'm now running two parallel Pleasantviews where I played the scripted events completely differently and I'm watching the subsequent events unfold differently. It's great fun!
One thing she doesn't mention in great detail that is very important though: if you want the graves to appear in the second version of the neighbourhood, then once you have it in your game, make sure that you go into the neighbourhood and open one of the lots that DOESN'T have a grave or tombstone on (e.g. a community lot), then exit out of the game and use Mootilda's HoodChecker on the second neighbourhood. This will detect the graves and assign them correctly. If you don't do this step, all the graves will disappear. I didn't know this and had to start from scratch!

i apologize for the late response, i JUST figured out that for whatever reason i'm not being notified about replies to my threads. i'll have to figure out what's up with that. but i appreciate all the responses, thanks