Excuses, excuses.

Astute readers — in other words, those with a set of functioning eyes, and those with screen readers don’t even need that — will notice that I haven’t posted for over a month now, which I blame on the summer internship that I’m working at from 8:00 to 5:00 every weekday and my inability to be particularly creative before about 10:00 at night. I guess this is what you could call a trade-off. Or laziness.

So I’m just going to babble on about random subjects instead.

Elevators. There are two extremes to my personal scale of elevatordom: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory–style transcendent, soaring liberation from gravity on the one hand, and slow, lumbering steel coffins straight out of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (as opposed to the film’s actual elevators, which were surprisingly decent-looking as long as they didn’t stop a metre shy of the floor). Guess which type I get to deal with every morning and afternoon? Bonus points if you can tell me which Lovecraftian hellbeast it most resembles in the noises it makes.

Commutes. SimCity roads can be widened instantly just by dragging a higher-capacity network over a lower-capacity one, so why can’t the state of North Carolina just fire whoever’s working on the widening of Davis Drive from Cary to Research Triangle Park and hire Will Wright instead? A few thousand Simoleons isn’t that much. My guess is that they can’t find anybody capable of fluent Simlish… in which case they should fire some of their HR department as well, since there are only about a few hundred million native speakers.

Music. You can probably beat me to the punch on this month’s review (which is beginning to look increasingly like next month’s review) by downloading maudlin of the Well’s Part the Second and tossing a few hundred artsy words into a salad mixer. If you manage to do so, please let me know so that I can just link to you instead of bothering to actually write anything.

Television. For those of you with a more animistic bent (and by that I mean this, not this, a distinction over which I can probably make people that are easily confused by homonyms that don’t actually exist cry), you can go ahead and watch Minami-ke Okawari so that, when I finally post a review like I’ve been intending to for the past month, you can complain about how I’ve got the series completely wrong and that I should have written either more or less favorably about it. In any case, feel free to inform me that I’ve failed to review the original Minami-ke first, leaving my readers without any sort of context whatsoever. I’ll probably respond with an indifferent shrug.

Endings. If you read this first, you ruin the rest of the post. Shame on you.