Night of the Living Sims

What. A. Disaster. The notes I have from the editor for all the stuff I have to do today? Unutterably fucked. List of referees for papers? Single spaced, no spaces between names, misspelled names ... if less than half of the e-mail addresses he had to give me are unusable due to typos, I will be greatly surprised. Looking at a paper for which we simply cannot get a referee, he asks me "Do you remember this chap we suggested? My secretary would have sent his e-mail address to you", which of course his secretary has not done. And yet, somehow, things get done. I don't know how they get done, but they get done.

I want to go home. I want to bulldoze my Sims 2 beach resort hotel to the ground and build a new thing. Not that I don't like my beach resort hotel, but it's all nice and packaged in case I want to install it again. The problem is that it's kind of ... well, huge. It slows the game considerably, at least on my poor humble computer. I swear, I have more fun with the architecture part of Sims than I do with the actual gameplay. But since it started as an architecture simulator thing in the first place, I suppose that's not such a bad thing. I think my next project will be a shopping mall, complete with all the amenities. Or a country house hotel. Possibly a water park. Or a house of horrors -- I have the meshes for it, so why not?

Hmm. Well, as I have the hacks for this, I'm thinking of starting a whole new neighbourhood, complete with shops and a shopping mall and restaurants and parks and suchlike. I'll create a whole bunch of new Sims, move them into the neighbourhood, then spend a happy few days killing off the vast majority of them in new and interesting ways. For instance, I will lock one in a room with nothing but a bookshelf, a small fridge, some counter space, a chair and a stove; they won't starve to death, but they will wind up being unable to take out the trash, will wind up wetting themselves and have repeated visits from the Social Bunny before they die of disease, which is one I haven't seen yet. In every household, though, I will leave one Sim alive, and have them call up the Reaper to resurrect the others, ensuring that they come back as zombies rather than being fully resurrected. Land of the Dead! Whee! ...Okay, I take far too much enjoyment from the idea of a community of zombiefied Sims. But then again, if that works out, I recently got a hack that lets your Sim become a vampire without having to go through all the trouble of befriending one of the leeches first. So I'll have a community of zombies and a community of vampires ... and when I get bored with that, I'll combine the two factors and throw them all into a Silent Hill sort of neighbourhood. I needed a proper theme for that one anyway.

So yeah, I want to go home. But that's not going to happen anytime soon, more's the pity.

Anticipation

My boss (Michael) is nice. Generally distant, and I never know what he thinks of me, but he's nice. Still, I think he at least gets a better inkling of a) what I have to deal with and b) how good I actually am at my job after this last couple of days, where the bloody chief editor has been making my life a complete hassle zone. (Plus he's been talking to Hilary all day. Hilary likes me and compliments me often, which is nice. Today's comment was how well I know what's going on with the papers that are in, which I think has to do with years of practice tracking patient notes in various hospitals.) See, Michael had to leave early for a meeting, and on his way out:

Michael: So it seems that you're keeping up okay.
Me: Yeah, pretty much.
Michael: And I see you've got the hang of telling [Editor] that you're right and he's wrong.

Then we started bagging on the editor's grammar (which sucks rocks, incidentally; sentence structure is off and he punctuates pretty much at random). I like my job. I like my people.

Except that editor, who rang me twice on the wrong phone number after Michael left. First time was to tell me "That letter regarding [name] on one of my documents? Don't send it; I just realised I completely messed it up" (I paraphrase, but not much). The second time was to tell me, "Oh, I'm terribly sorry, but when I said [name], I meant [other name that sounds nothing like 'name']." I see why he has at least two secretaries now.

End of Lost today. I'm totally knackered, but I wouldn't miss it for anything. It's nice just to have some little event to look forward to every week. Yes, the adverts suck, and there are certainly benefits to downloading the episodes, but just for this one thing, it's nice to have the anticipation, not just of the show but of having that one block of time reserved for nothing else but you, any friends / lovers you might ask to share your viewing experience, the warm comfy sofa and something cool on TV. Instant gratification is all very well, but some things are meant to be savoured. I just wish they didn't, in this particular case, have to be savoured with those 118 yahoos.