UPDATES

JUNE 30 2025
While isn't the total integration of previous pages I've written, we're proud to bring you the brand-new, long-awaited Post Oak Mall page on Carbon-izer!! It covers most of the major stuff that I've previously covered on Brazos Buildings & Businesses (including major anchor departures). The timeline I decided on was based after the timeline that MallOfMemphis.org had rather than the usual prose (though dramatically improved). I think Mall of Memphis' story appealed to me because it was similar to Post Oak Mall in decor (but larger, with an ice rink and second floor), and as badly as Post Oak Mall has declined it was still humming in summer 2004; meanwhile demolition permits were being procured for the closed Mall of Memphis...and its Luby's was longer-lived too (1996-2000 vs. 1997-1998). It's only a Version 1.0 of the page but I tried to make it diverse--openings and closings both major and minor alike, events, and crime reports without irrelevant nonsense (what does the death of Elvis have to do with the Mall, and why is nonsense like covered instead of important stuff like when Thalhimer's closed and sold its store to Dillard's?).

Otherwise...
- There's a few new flavors added to Melted Blue Bell Ice Cream with new flavors added.
- The Kegon Falls page received a minor update. The Insanely Great Mac review now works with its original screenshots (except one, I can't get it to work).
- The Katy Freeway page got a minor update.

A few notes regarding last month as well...
- While I finally updated Gessner Road it's clearly in the "diminishing returns" era of the post. This is really something I should've mentioned last month but this is the end result of the road pages.
- An examination of the removed article from the old blog was that there was a malware site link.
- The FM 2154 page got removed but the Jones Crossing page wasn't, so I created a new page on Brazos Buildings & Businesses to link to it.

There's a part of me that just wants to rip out everything and put back only what makes sense—but it's a pessimistic process that has the chance of no recovery. We'll see next month. The thumbnail this month is a reference to a game I've been playing recently.

Until next time...

MAY 31 2025
Some re-working has been done. Bad news first--five pages from the College Station/Bryan history have been removed: Southwest Parkway, Harvey Road, Texas Avenue - Bryan, Other Bryan Roads (listed as "Highway 21 in Bryan"), and Wellborn Road (FM 2154).

The removal of content is not just arbitrary or out of spite, it is also to gauge interest. If people were actually interested in it, they'd start asking questions about it and some of those will reappear on Brazos Buildings & Businesses as they already have. Since last summer, there have been over a dozen posts that have had their full posts added to the page. However, Brazos Buildings & Businesses has poor traffic and the other site, Numbered Exits is abysmal. The "directories" were already hard to maintain and trying to sync it to BB&B was difficult. If Carbon-izer was the more popular mainstream site it might've worked but it doesn't and didn't.

With the previously-mentioned A/N/N/A/R/C/H/I/V/E dead it only emphasizes the need for content to be on the Carbon-izer Archive. New additions to the Archive include the Japanese Wii Manual with its fun illustrations (though the sillier ones you might have seen around are just fakes) and V-Notes Chronicle for Ys Books I & II as was previously linked.

I had thrown up my hands when it came to adding back the games from the 2019-2023 Games Lists, partly because I didn't want to make a whole page on say, Rhythm Heaven when I had literally written two sentences about it. That was the problem, there were few games that I could say much about, the games I really hated aren't worth talking about (I'm not making a page for The Fish Files) and the ones I liked I don't have much to say about them (Deus Ex—great! But at the same time, what can I say that hasn't been said?). There are a few updates to the list...
- INK's page has been fixed.
- Mario Paint has a new page.
- The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past has an additional page added.
...and there's a new section on the site with general articles on video games. I hope this goes okay...I used to have a blog (Carbon-izer.blogspot.com) which had a number of video game articles (and other stuff) that didn't age well. One of the articles (which I felt was one of the better ones) has been taken offline permanently not by choice and I have no idea why, whether it was for the reference of violent acts, the term "whorehouses" (in reference to the final days of The Sims Online / EA-Land), or if one of my links that I added has turned into a malware farm. They weren't specific, and it was straight-up removed as opposed to demonitized (not that Carbon-izer Blog ever saw enough visitors to make money). Anyway, the article is on EarthBound (and is far more critical than my original EarthBound review).

Despite the removal of many of the B-CS Road Directory pages, Gessner Road has been updated as well as the triumphant return of the long-running Westheimer Road page! It's brought friends too. The "Other Houston Roads - Inner Loop" page has been transformed into the Inner Loop Westheimer Road page, and the old West Houston Roads page has turned into Westheimer Road beyond Beltway 8. The Austin section features a minor update to the Casis Randalls page.

Moving forward, at least I have a clearer picture of what I want the site to be.

This update's picture is from Wikimedia Commons.

MARCH 31 2025
Rather than push out something incomplete for February (which was a short month anyway) I decided to keep working on a bigger March update but major changes still got pushed back. (Partly because I don't know how to do those major changes...)

The two parts of the site that really got updated was the Houston pages and Exor's Dungeon. Under the Houston page more changes were made.

- The FM 1960 West page now has Version 11. Despite the loss of the WHA pictures, the expanded and updated page regales tales of a number of departed stores and restaurants. While there's only 17 new entries (some of which have appeared on the site or page in some form), the entries that were updated in some way totals to around 30. The updates include adding North Oaks for the first time, a belated goodbye to the Willowbrook-area TGI Friday's and Boston Market, dogs on a rampage, another long-dead Kmart, some stuff from the old "former restaurants" list, a proper entry for Games People Play, the demise of Big Lots, and a whole lot more. The only removed entry, 17203 Bamwood, was moved to Numbered Exits.
- The Katy Freeway page has been updated with the same idea of Southwest Freeway's page in mind with combining pages. Some parts have been replaced, but overall a bigger and more impressive page.
- Northwest Freeway - Inner Belt got retouched as well. Because of its "complete" status it actually had more content removed than added, but it was to make a tighter, more focused page. As part of this, the Northwest Mall memories page has had its first update in a decade regarding a long-broken link (ha ha, oops).
- Another "tighter, more focused page" was the Loop 610 page to just West Loop South. The second-biggest portion of that page, North Loop West, was moved over to Numbered Exits. The rest...we're waiting on that. This is contrast to the Clay/W. 43rd/West Crosstimbers/Crosstimbers superpage (though I don't think I ever added any Clay Road entries) that when pared down hardly had anything.
- Additional Numbered Exits posts were cross-linked.

There were some minor fixes and changes to a few existing titles in the list (The Urbz: Sims in the City, NewCity, Umihara Kawase) but a whopping ten new games have been added to the list. It's a mixture of stuff that's largely a mixture of older writings that I had made but never published, and some updated versions of the "Games I've Played". None of these reviews are particularly long, generally lack pictures due to time constraints, and rank no higher than "SOLID" (except for one). These ten games are, in alphabetical order, Crystal Quest, Full Throttle, Hotline Miami, INK, Maniac Mansion, Portal 2, Psychonauts, Shiftlings, Tetris Attack, and WarioWare Gold. Mario Kart 64's thumbnail was fixed. Some of the new games are in fact broken pages, there's usually a thing or two broken when the site updates (and I only hope it's not one of the big features). Since I in fact KNOW they're broken they will get fixed in the coming weeks. WarioWare Gold provides the update thumbnail.

I've found that even the mediocre/bad games can provide good and interesting thumbnails (Otto Matic, Zak McKracken & The Alien Mindbenders, Beyond a Steel Sky) so I hope this works out.

Finally, there were a few other updates.
- A Brief History of Albertsons was updated again for a few things including Susan Morris, the Mountain West stores, Maxx of Boise, and more. There's also a link to it from the main page.
- 1940 Downtowner Occupancy Map and the article "Historicist: Opening the Eaton Centre" from the late Torontoist were added to the Archive.
- While there are officially no updates to Yoot Tower Guides just as of yet but I did get a nice email from Kirinn Bunnylin, who updated his FAQ in response to my site (no, no plagiarism)—but it does mean the parts where I said "Kirinn's guide is wrong/didn't mention this" will have to be changed or clarified now.
- The former restaurants portion of the Wendy's page has been excised. I have all that information saved and updated.
- The Abandoned Hempstead Shell got a small update with a photo from 1987 with the Winn-Dixie #2441 page also getting a small update as well.

JANUARY 31 2025
While I've been hard at work adding a few new updates to Brazos Buildings & Businesses (do NOT expect this rate to continue through the rest of the year) and neglecting Numbered Exits (which still mostly gets this site's leftovers), I've been working on improving two major portions of the site.

The first is Exor's Dungeon. There are a few games I played a bit of and have thoughts about, stuff I used to write about instead of making a full review page for. I was intrigued by Sullla.com, a long-running webpage (ACTUALLY dating back years) which describes various game experiments or even tips (like for Crypt of the NecroDancer). I like its description: "My website is high on content, low on graphics." Works with a lot of the content on Carbon-izer as a whole.

To distinguish which pages have extra content and which ones don't, a new column has been added in the main page.

So, there are various updates to that:
- American Truck Simulator got a rewrite in which I elaborate why I gave it a poor review.
- Beyond A Steel Sky and its sub-pages had a few coding issues, these have been resolved (I hope).
- Cuphead changed out its picture for a banner.
- Dropsy has been added and provides this month's update picture (yes, I realize it has artifacts which I tried to at least clean part of it up).
- Final Fantasy VI got some errors in page code fixed.
- Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number got an extra picture removed.
- Mario Kart 64 has been added back as a new review.
- Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! has been added.
- Space Junkie has been added back. The old review for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is not going to be added back anytime soon; otherwise this finishes off the removed games.
- Super Mario Bros. 3's page got a broken picture fixed.
- Umihara Kawase has been added as a new entry.
- Urban Yeti! got a broken picture fixed.
- Yoot Tower got its box art trimmed down to a reasonable size. (It has been that way for TOO LONG).
- Yoshi's Island DS had a minor typo fixed.

The list is getting longer and more unruly-looking. Is that necessarily a bad thing?

Moving on from games, I'm continuing to streamline the City Directories pages. Rather than be split between Inner Loop, Outer Loop, and beyond, the other freeways out now have their own page with some new entries added to substitute for others. The new Southwest Freeway page, for instance, features Fry's Electronics, Texas Land & Cattle Steakhouse, J.J. Mugg's, and Carl's Jr., well, their replacements anyway. New pages were also added for Gulf Freeway, North Freeway, and East Freeway. Updates for Northwest Freeway - Inner Belt, Katy Freeway, and Westheimer Road are still in the works.

Finally, the Archive continues to grow just a bit. It's not exactly nothing, but there's some interesting retail-related stuff including on Randalls and Forest Fair Mall. Overall, the wheels are moving slowly on this site but they are moving.

DECEMBER 31 2024
This update is pretty small but I'm trying to make the moves to streamline the site. This is not necessarily "removing" things but in the City Directories page the disorganized "Other [_________] Roads" will be outsourced to Numbered Exits. For example, the Antoine Drive entries, for example, have been consolidated and moved over here with the Research Boulevard entries of Austin seen here. Nothing much will change here officially until they're all done.

However, the full "road directories" are staying. Shepherd Drive got updated with a net increase of sixteen entries. Come revel in the current line-up on this major Houston avenue as well as the stuff no longer there, including Pappas Seafood Kitchen, Bookstop, King Olaf Roast Beef, Frost Brothers, and Der Wienerschnitzel. Northwest Freeway (Outer Belt) also received a major update. As far as the other updates go...

- I've added even more games to the list. Machinarium (used as the thumbnail) and The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks have gotten re-inducted with M.C. Kids and Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number. There were a few other games on the list that got some small fixes.
- I'm experimenting a bit more with guides for games, this time saving a Steam guide (without the sidebar) and adding it as a PDF; for a game that I haven't added to the main list yet (Dropsy). Then again, I haven't added Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! yet.
- The Grand Avenue Mall page is officially back.
- The Archive continues its cautious expansion with some HTML fixes, with the addition of Santa Fe Place, Madam President, Snootz Math Trek, SuperCard, several articles, and others.

NOVEMBER 30 2024
It has been a few months since I last updated this website. I had plans, lots of plans! (Which will continue to wait for the time being.) I had also, in secret, organized documents of information on various addresses like on the website, but much more extensively. Some were more detailed than others, some had addresses that meant something to me like family members, some still had the HTML from not being finished as actual projects. It was meant to serve a resource for future plans, not the sites themselves, especially that it's formatted. The pages started out as a small project to catalog various highways and roads, as well as catch other errors that I saw on other websites like WHA and evolved into a complete nightmare. No wonder one of my "inspirations" for the pages, Downriver Locations Through the Years stopped updating after three years, he wasn't even dealing with 10,000 square miles of potential and hundreds of entries (I stopped counting) that demanded complete entries. Likewise, these "secret lists" also involve the old Former Restaurant list, which in some cases were inaccurate or outdated (I'm sure those have gotten ripped off at some wiki somewhere without credit by now), but I don't know to actually use that data. As I've mentioned before, some of the stuff on the site is being recycled on Numbered Exits but it's been slow going and Numbered Exits has poor traffic. If I'm not enjoying it (after an intense start I got burned out) and no one else is, what is the point? If anything is to be done with them, at least it should be that the actual dedicated road pages (Westheimer, Katy Freeway, FM 1960 West, I-35's multiple pages) stay up, everything else should be dissolved or built into larger pages. Even then, it would still be a pain—Other Houston Roads - Inner Loop could make for a good Westheimer Road Inner Loop page seeing as how I did actually do all that, but there's the other stuff; stuff that's going to be close to 60 new pages on Numbered Exits (or whatever) the way things are going, and that outnumbers the Westheimer entries three to one. It makes my head spin thinking about it, which is why the whole thing is so sticky to begin with. That's why I think it would be better if I continue to develop separate pages, though without updating them as constantly, or letting my latent perfectionism force history for almost everything (that was the biggest problem). In terms of that, the master list here isn't updated to account with the Numbered Exits blog yet. Either way it's a work in progress, and compatibility between the two sites (or other blogs) is the key.

As far as games go, with some games still in the "boneyard" (e.g. Bachman), games that were in the "Games I've Played" but never got a proper write-up (e.g. Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!), and games I've played and developing stuff for but haven't gotten posted (e.g. Umihara Kawase). I ended up scrapping making other guidebooks because other than just rewriting StrategyWiki's stuff, my own stuff wasn't really "high quality" enough for a guidebook (even exclusive material) and for the games I was working on (particularly Glider PRO) I either REALLY needed more enthusiasm or getting paid for it, neither of which was happening. Someone did thank me for extracting SimCity 2000's samples and asked me where they might have come from, and that was a nice exchange but that's literally some of the only feedback I've gotten recently. Looking at something like Cythera Guides, even the "official hintbook" (as good as a real guide as you'd guide) is a black-and-white annotated version of actual maps of the game. Cythera Guides itself has no such annotated maps, but there are other maps out there, like stuff on VGMaps (specifically their Yoshi's Island stuff) but none of that stuff is really printable. I had made some line-art stuff for Power Pete but I don't think there's high demand for it...and some of my other ideas for other games basically boiled down to "stuff from game wikis without all the awful things from game wikis". I had specifically made the page for SimCity 2000 small because there wasn't much I could add to it that I couldn't find elsewhere (or more specifically, in the book)...but that is changing.

However, the recent instability of the Internet Archive (which rendered specifically the book link useless) prompted the idea of a reformatted Carbon-izer as my own archive, looking at sites like A/N/N/A/R/C/H/I/V/E (warning: some items in there are NSFW) as consideration. It would be mostly compatible with existing content, which I liked the idea of.

So there's a lot of noise and not much content in this update (hence the picture) but in short, here's the list of everything else that has been updated:
- The entry for Factorio has been updated for 2.0/Space Age as previously promised.
- Bachman has been re-added, giving the list 101 games.
- Various fixes/corrections for several games on the list: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Last Call, WingNuts: Temporal Navigator, and BurgerTime.
- A chart of power plants was added to the SimCity 2000 page.
- One Piece Censorship was updated with a new entry, this time where a scalpel becomes a thermometer.
- Albertsons History has received a few new updates. Still no merger news (how much longer can we hold our breath?)
- Last but definitely not least, the Carbon-izer Archive has been launched. I will warn you—if this causes issues in any way I deem unacceptable I can and will pull the plug on it. Got it? Cool! Let me see if this doesn't cause major issues down the line!

AUGUST 31 2024
While I've covered a few of the Pokémon spin-off games like Pokémon Pinball and Pokémon Trading Card Game, I have yet to have done a mainline game. That changes with Pokémon Gold. Additionally, new posts on BurgerTime (thumbnail for this month, derived from the box art), The Dig, Urban Yeti!, and Hollow Knight have all been added. The "returning" games include The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (fully rewritten), plus Osmos, Portal, Milestones 2000, and Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures. While a few more titles remain to be restored, that brings us to 100 games in the list, all with thumbnails. Huzzah!

With games like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time restored on the list and a good number like 100, the remaining entries to be re-added (Bachman, The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Machinarium, Mario Kart 64, and Space Junkie...they can wait! I did use this update to add new "box art", actually the Steam banner, to Sam & Max Hit the Road and SimCity 3000...) and made some improvements/fixes were made to The Urbz: Sims in the City as well (though it still needs real screenshots), as well as a few others. Ultimately, this means this page and all its subpages will be purged from the site. This won't happen for a while yet.

I'm slowly moving toward the big Carbon-izer reorganization project that I've thought about for a few years and what it needs. Numbered Exits is still young but has been going swimmingly with a plan in place (some of it is reposted stuff from Carbon-izer as part of an eventual plan to re-do much of the website); meanwhile, the layout of The Houston Files feels far too limiting. It copied The Arch-Ive a little too closely and started to become irrelevant when the Houston page was launched on this website. Longer term, the full city pages like Carbon-izer in Houston will go away, leaving only the dedicated entries. I used to have individual pages for Bastrop and Temple-Killeen, those were eventually subsumed by the Austin and Waco pages respectively. As a result, the "Main List" of the site looks a bit different. This is still experimental.

Of course, we're not ready to give up everything that easily. Two new pages were added to the Houston page (well, not all-new, but working off existing content). There's Defunct Apartments of Greater Inwood and the return of another page that has long since been forgotten—The Dead Restaurants of Beltway 8 and Northwest Freeway. Beyond that, there's even more things that were added or fixed...

* The Albertsons History page was updated once more with some non-merger updates, though I'm not sure of the result anymore. Will Kroger push it through or is this last struggles of a desperate company? (My personal hope is that Kroger pays for these shenanigans by not just failing but also breaking apart somehow).
* There's a page under "Junk" on Honey Nut Clusters.
* Grand Avenue Mall was delisted from the Mall Map Index until I can run some fixes on it and expand it. (Because of the format switch it was never really intended to have a full article anyway, but...).
* Franklin Avenue and New Road has a working picture of Wienerschnitzel now.
* The Corsicana Outlet Mall page got a minor update.
* McDonald's Schulenburg got an update and an upgrade to look more like a proper page now.

JULY 31 2024
As you may have noticed (or not—who really reads this site anyway?), I didn't do a June update, as it was going poorly. I ended up doing ten more games which will be posted this month instead (going up to 90). The entries that are new or returning include Blaster Master Zero, Hammerfight, Home, Last Call, The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages, The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons, SimCity (1989), Spectre, Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People, and The Urbz: Sims in the City. (Due to being abandoned sometime in June, some of those entries might come across a bit slap-dash; I am aware of issues of The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages (needs more screenshots), The Urbz: Sims in the City (needs box art or title) and SimCity (needs box art or title). But hey, there's ten of them! I did make some fixes to Beyond a Steel Sky and Mother, however. Anyway, what the "theme" was celebrating a 2004 road trip to Panama City Beach but the map I had wasn't in great shape, either.

What I really needed was a long NEW road trip, and that delivered. Sure there were a few rough parts but I greatly enjoyed the adventure, going through six states beyond my own, and seeing a lot, doing a lot, eating a lot. It made me realize some of my other projects wouldn't be best for the site as-is and maybe some sort of "third blog" for everything beyond the blogs for Houston and College Station-Bryan was needed (a separate Austin one would be cut). I saw a bunch of supermarkets as well including a number I had never been to before (Rouses and Ingles being highlights). In news slightly related to that the Albertsons History page has been updated. There's some stuff on the merger progress (which is now officially stalled but not dead) and a few updates; like accounting for the first Albertsons in Mississippi, first opened in 1997 and not 2000 as originally reported, mentioning the closure of the Upper Marlboro distribution center.

My initial thoughts for this new site were Ryan Road, an "anything goes" site (sadly both it and History of the Signature Inn have not updated since 2017, but his Flickr account lives on). The other inspiration for the site was Crème de Memph, a Memphis blog, which covers the history of the city by old planning documents.

Let me proudly introduce to you Numbered Exits, which covers everything beyond those two cities. What's on Carbon-izer will largely stay on Carbon-izer. The Abandoned Hempstead Shell would've been a good topic there, for instance, but it will stay on the site). I had tossed around the idea of a third blog (including an Austin area blog) but decided that maybe just a third site would be fine. I had actually considered reviving my outdated Two Way Roads for that purpose. As of this writing it has half a dozen posts, composed of a mixture of Carbon-izer.com updates and original content (or in some cases, both!). Don't get too attached to the idea of one post every weekday; there has just been a big content backlog. Likewise, The Houston Files got a big burst of content (mostly recycled from this site, though Leo's Coffee Shop is original). Some of that is partially integrated (it's not completely done yet); the Houston page lists some of its "exclusive" pages. I plan to do the same for Numbered Exits. Numbered Exits is a plan forward for re-making the site as previously discussed.

Beyond adding the ten new/updated games nothing else on the games front. The "Guides/Walkthroughs" still idles as does Yoot Tower Guides...but there is news of SimTower becoming open-source under a limited license, maybe Yoot Tower but there's no complete code. The link is here and I've reached out before.

Finally, in addition to a minor fix at Memorial City Mall where I repeat myself, I proudly induct Sawmill Square Mall into the site! That's where the thumbnail comes from, a still-operating Corn Dog 7. Yes, I DID get something there to eat.

MAY 31 2024
What's new for this month? Once again there were a few things that went for two weeks before anyone noticed, like Bugdom's page not linking properly or First Colony Mall's mall map page not showing up. See something, say something!

The thumbnail is usually video game-related and today it's "Mr. Spankles" from Beyond a Steel Sky, which has a new entry under Exor's Dungeon, and that includes a full story summary AND some additional thoughts on it. Other new/revived entries include Super Metroid, BurgerTime Deluxe, Beneath a Steel Sky, and The Sims: Bustin' Out (the Game Boy Advance version). This brings up the number of titles to 80 (I intend to do a full ten next month). Additionally, the SimCity 4 page has a few new sub-pages, including on Dr. Vu and the Barry Sanders Project.

After being a dead link for the longest time, the "Guides & Walkthroughs" page of Exor's Dungeon has been rolled out. The first game to be added does not have a dedicated page yet, it's for Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, a nifty printable PDF. I chose that game as a prototype to roll out the content with, and in that case, the content was pre-made. This is of course, proof of concept. Future updates will focus on games that aren't as extensively documented, but those will be coming in the future.

As part of phasing out the longer "road directory" pages, the Waco section has three new pages, though largely they're re-cut from older material (as part of this the Toys R Us page got an update). Under Houston, the McDonald's in Seabrook page got a fresh coat of paint and is now on the Houston page. "Hilton Inn Intercontinental Airport" received an update. Victoria Station got an update, too (finally featuring a picture). Unfortunately Bayport Industrial Development wasn't able to make it to the Houston page, it got re-filed in "Junk/Other Stuff".

Yoot Tower Guides got a new scan of the jewel case insert. I also reached out to Gaming Alexandria to see if they had the Japanese strategy guide but no dice.

No new mall entries this month, though Town & Country Mall got touched up.

Per an email from Dion Williams, two Columbus, Ohio China Coast restaurants have been added to the China Coast page. Additionally a Houston location has been updated to account for Red Lobster closures (that I know of; there may be more).

APRIL 30 2024

Various things in this update. The main page hasn't been rehabbed yet and of course I ran out of time on other things but there are piecemeal updates.

In Yoot Tower Guides, the section for Kegon Falls has received a major update (Kyoto Station has received some work but still wasn't available for this update).

At home, I was doing some reorganizing with a new spreadsheet that allowed me to plan out what games I had and what I needed to tackle next (settled with a full "currently playing" with half a dozen titles, and that doesn't include a minor Tetris addiction via Super Tetris 2 + Bombliss (already covered). The issue is that I'm getting burned out on the Games List. With the latest entries of Bugdom (the original—the thumbnail for this month is from one of the screenshots on its page) and The Sims (also the original) getting real pages and the three getting added back: Grim Fandango (featuring a new thumbnail!), Plants vs. Zombies, and New Super Mario Bros.—I'm risking burnout for this page. (Additionally, some errors with entries for Billy Frontier and SimCity 3000 got patched.)

The idea of them being game "pages" to add additional content isn't very practical from a site with very low readership making nothing. Part of the issue is that there's nothing I can say that hasn't already been done, even if I don't particularly like how it's done: you'll have to use Internet plugins to make some of these wikis tolerable for browsing (I recommend the Fandom Enhance plug-in for Chromium browsers)...yet at the same time I'd just be treading old ground if I posted my own stuff. On the flip side, for the less popular games it's more effort to put in effort than to get out of it. There's the issue of the axed extended Bugdom maps, my YouTube recording of Blobbo solutions, and a few others. I'm disappointed in myself that my Power Pete maps aren't printable, but the Prima guide didn't either. I'd rather add rare and original content, which is why the main list of Games will probably cease updating short of getting some big rush of activity. The other reason it's only the stuff that I'm not embarrassed to put it up there (not even the 2021/2022 Games list had EVERYTHING). As of this writing Prison Architect is the only M-rated title on there (though Hotline Miami was briefly mentioned). I'll probably stop adding to the Games List when everything from the backlog has been added back. There's still at least a dozen games to be re-added, and I'm trying to add new content (or stuff from the 2019-2022 pages) on a roughly 1:1 basis.

The other thing to note is that I'd rather collect new and rare information rather than re-tread old ground, which leads us to the "Places" section. I now have a better idea of what I want to do and how to integrate "Places" into the greater site, but my trial of trying roads/neighborhoods (in this case "Westheimer MidWest") was a disaster, and was a more complicated version of the Westheimer page. I really should've just added version 13.0 to the main page...but I've got a plan for the future that uses both The Houston Files AND the main site. But the US-290 blog...that's a different issue. Part of US-290 that made it special was taking it as a whole...but is that what people want to read, to look up specifically? Migrating everything to a new format would be a challenge enough as it is.

Still, new content continues to come in—new additions to the Houston page include The Restaurants of Wirt & Chimney Rock (which is an expansion of something originally mentioned on the Katy Freeway page, with some changes to make it less complicated) and TWO malls (see next paragraph).

Richland Mall got an update and added to the main mall page. Two competing malls were added with maps: First Colony Mall and West Oaks Mall.

There were a number of things cut out from this month, but I've got my work cut out for me! See you next month.

MARCH 31 2024
First up, I'd like to apologize. Not only did I not do an update last month but the Games Index that actually got updated was the one that was from December, not the new January one. Not that it was perfect, the link to Bugdom 2, was, well, bugged, and Prison Architect's updated page had issues as well. (It doesn't talk about the recently-announced Prison Architect 2. My opinions are wholly negative. There is no reason to expect it will show up in the page anytime soon unless as a guest article.) But there's a lot of new stuff in this update.

First up: Exor's Dungeon and its ten new articles, not counting the ten articles that were added to the list but never actually showed up (so you'll see TWENTY new ones for a total of 70). In the "all-new" category there's Billy Frontier and Zak McKracken & The Alien Mindbenders, neither of which got accolades from me...under "has a dedicated page for the first time but previously covered" there's Mother, SimCity 3000, and Wave Race 64 Kawasaki Jet Ski. Finally, five games are being brought back...The Adventures of Willy Beamish, Back to the Future: The Game (which received a major rewrite and update), The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, Lemmings, and WingNuts: Temporal Navigator. Another thing that I should note in games going forward is they're not going to have "Buy/Info" if they're more than five years old from the addition of them to the pages. There are a few reasons for that:
- I no longer trust GOG as a storefront due to their changes in terms of service.
- I found it unfair that some truly great games (if a bit old) like Super Mario 64 were legally unavailable while Cities: Skylines was...or other issues. I wasn't going to link to GOG's version of SimCity 2000 because that version is terrible.
- People aren't visiting Exor's Dungeon to learn what exciting new games (or interesting ones they haven't heard of) are out there.

The city-related pages...that's still an issue. I dabbled with my other site, Brazos Buildings & Businesses during this time. What kind of hinged on it was something a bit more...digestible. That being said, there's a few more things that I haven't yet gotten ready for prime time yet. I didn't want to start completely re-writing my website en masse unless I had something more substantial, not to mention the "identity crisis" issue. As far as the Baton Rouge page goes that I hyped up only for it to be a dead link, I decided to permanently scrap it as I was quite dissatisfied with the page and couldn't figure out to fix it. Of note, one of the things I remember getting from the U.S.S. Kidd's gift shop but can't find any Internet evidence of, was "crawfish eggs", in a small yellow or red box. I don't remember what it was made of, but it was candy.

I'm giving the new style a spin with "Mid West - Westheimer Road" which is an update of the Westheimer Road page (if somewhat downscaled). Northwest Freeway is another issue...I'm proposing breaking up was three articles back down into a dozen again. Should I do it on the blog version?

Other than that, what else is there? A Brief History of Albertsons has been updated. Not just to account for the merger being blocked but a few other things as well...and to complement that, an article entitled "The Conversion of Jewel-Osco" (found under the Albertsons page)...Yoot Tower Guides now has the manual in PDF form.

There's a mild shakeup in the "Mall Directory Index & Quick Links" page, adding an actual page for Grand Avenue Mall and removing a stand-alone directory on Santa Fe Place (More on that later I suppose). But more importantly, a page on Houston's Town & Country Mall has been added, including a map and some information. If you purchased something from the mall in 1983 it may be worth tens of thousands dollars...details inside!

The thumbnail from this month is derived from the box of Zak McKracken & The Alien Mindbenders , which is unusual since most of the games on the list have a screenshot or other asset-derived picture as their representation, but the precedent for such things is already set with Batman: Arkham City, and besides, if/when we get into text-based games (without graphical representation, like Quarterstaff: The Tomb of Setmoth or Eric the Unready box art IS going to be the main standard.

JANUARY 31 2024
As I alluded to in the previous month, Carbon-izer is facing a bit of an identity crisis. One of the things I've written the most for is "Places" but it's not easy to navigate or readable, and even though it came as an idea to expand upon Brazos Buildings & Businesses, it still has very poor integration with the site as-is, and because the site is a personal endeavor and makes hardly any profit or views (much less for the "Places") entries, it's difficult to justify further additions on that front, even if I have further plans and ideas on it.

I tossed around a few ideas—with the existing blogs, I thought up a blog for Waco-Temple-Killeen, a blog for Austin, and a blog for everything else...but what was I going to do, add 200+ entries to The Houston Files? While I did in fact consider that for a second, it was too impractical. I had built a page a few updates ago on "The H-E-B Stores of Houston" but I had a problem. I couldn't effectively make that the "only" page for H-E-B because it crossed over with so many other different stores. 2300 North Shepherd Drive was a Fiesta. A proposed addition to the page (the 249/Louetta store), was later a Stein Mart. 16811 El Camino Real and 10251 Kempwood Drive both used to be Albertsons. The difference between H-E-B page and what it was compared to, in this case, Waco's Ivy Square page, is that they were physically close together.

Compounding the existing issues with "Places" is something I discovered this month: West Houston Archives' photos seem to be gone now...for a while, the actual webpages were still up, but the FM 1960 West page, which hinged on WHA for completion as well as a few other pages. As far as FM 1960 West goes, the list of photos and some descriptions can still be found on Archive.org but it's the photos that were the most valuable. (While I've confirmed John is alive and well, the pictures are still MIA). Nevertheless, I'm making a few notes on FM 1960, namely that Golden Chick at the Shell (11702 FM 1960 West) finally opened, G Motors is moving due to some dogs ripping apart fenders, and the old Jack in the Box at 1602 FM 1960 West became Daiquiri Island To Go.

On top of ALL THAT, somehow the Baton Rouge section as mentioned last month never got added! Well, it was never that good to begin with. Mostly it was just a few disparate items without many pictures or something new to add. No one has asked about it anyway.

While I do have some ideas on how to fix the existing pages without completely ruining what I did, it would require a significant amount of work and I'm not sure I want to commit.

Even if I was to fix all the issues with the pages, the "Places" page is sizable enough to be its own site, with everything in between--the random stuff that doesn't really fit, Muppets, Barbie dolls with weight problems, getting angry over soap, and so on...could be considered sideshows to either site.

The other site being Exor's Dungeon, of course.

Like I said back in February of last year, building themed sites-within-a-site is interesting but it's outside the scope of this site...and the only "sub-site" that was completed, on SimCity 2000, wasn't meant to be a "complete" page. Sure, it has links to SimCity 2000: Power, Politics, And Planning, Revised Edition but that's not much of what I COULD do (why, I didn't even explain the menu options myself)...and other content is buried within their respective "review" pages. The Shivah's page features the soundtrack (of the 2013 "Kosher Edition" anyway), there's a maps page for Power Pete, the entire in-game help menu of NewCity, an exclusive scan for The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (see the page), and so on.

What came to mind was the game pages of Nintendo circa 2002 (the early Game Boy Advance/GameCube years), which had a page for each game with a description and release dates, with some extra information, some not. Naturally, the games that would get more information were Nintendo's own games but otherwise forgotten third party games would be discussed. You can see an example of Jonny Mosely Mad Trix (it was a snowboarding game basically in the vein of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and sequels)...though rarely were these completely filled out, even recent first-party games.

The good news is that the way this site is built that's easy to adapt, but because I only do games that I play, I can't do it for every game. There are over 700 licensed SNES games released in North America. The list as of December 31, 2023 has eleven of them. 13 if you count SimAnt and SimCity 2000 (which got SNES ports as well). Super Tetris 2 + BomBliss isn't counted due to its Japan-only release. I don't see myself covering every game, and the format for it is too antiquated to be crowdsourced. No one has asked for any requests ("Could you write about Deus Ex?") or asked for a submission ("I want to do a guest post on Mister Mosquito!") or asked about a currently-unavailable entry ("Hey, what happened to your thing on Beneath a Steel Sky?").

Part of my vision for Exor's Dungeon is to be more like an ever-growing quirky video game magazine. Strategy guides, of course, are generally seen as off-growth from that, with plenty of them have been published over the years with varying degrees of quality and I kind of wanted to have that same sort of feel here. Of course, some of them are expensive and not everyone has the time or space, and some of them never GOT strategy guides, some of them just sketches of levels made by designers. (This was the modus operandi of Nintendo's hotline, some pages were basically color pages from the official guides like the NES Game Atlas, while others were just aforementioned sketches that were photocopied.

In the absence of "Places", most of the "other" content can be shuffled along to the side, especially if it's some sort of adjacent hobby or other small page. Kentie.net (home of the "Deus Exe" launcher and my basis for the "Games I've Played" by year page) has some bicycle stuff. Random Hoo Haas has a somewhat sizable page on Red Dwarf, and the late Game Urara magazine ranges from maps of DOOM II to weird Japanese fetish pornography. (Link is somewhat NSFW, as it doesn't show the content in question, just discussed).

Recently, the Yoot Tower manual, as seen on Yoot Tower Guides showed up elsewhere...which while not unexpected, is discouraging since I've gotten no feedback about the page, enraging even!

So that's the main issues. Still, I wanted to restore four titles to the Exor's Dungeon Game Pages: Prison Architect (rated GOOD), EarthBound (also rated GOOD), DOOM (rated NO RATING), and Five Nights at Freddy's (also rated as No Rating). This brings it up to 60 and surpassing the original peak of 57.

While there have been the customary touch-ups and fixes to other games on the list, two changes to be made is that there will no longer always be a "fun" stat, which for every game was a wholly unique item in the "Game Info" section. Just a random selection, Batman: Arkham Asylum got "Hardest Boss", E.V.O.: Search for Eden has "Japanese Title, Lit.", Factorio has "Best Achievement", Mother 3 has "Original Subtitle", Quarterstaff: The Tomb of Setmoth has "First Discovered", Stunt Race FX has "Assistant Developer", and so on. Nothing was removed but it's not sustainable.

Due to next month being shorter (even though it's a leap year), I don't see myself doing an update. Maybe we'll see something March 31st.

Additionally, there were some other touch-ups and fixes to other games as normal.

DECEMBER 31 2023
This is going to be another underwhelming update, and there's reasons. Part of it is just personal issues (and as stated I won't give up on the website due to that, but that's not an absolute promise). Part of the issue with this update is that I've already added lots of content, with the August 31st update getting over 100 item updates. Some of those were fun to do, but the "Other Roads" only diluted the original concept, and digging through archives, I've mulled over reworking the section somehow.

That said, I wanted to celebrate December 2003 somehow, something I touched on back in the old Carbon-izer Blog (the predecessor to this site). While I couldn't do everything...the "World's Largest Entertainment McDonald's" (the one in Oklahoma at the time was technically larger) could've been a contender I decided to trim down the concept and instead at least expand Places to have links to everything related and added a new Baton Rouge section. Of course, in the process, I realized that one of the reasons I've never added Baton Rouge is I barely have photos of the city and none of the resources I use for Houston, Austin, et. al. are available, and the more think I about it I question even keeping the site in its current form...obviously this won't happen for a few months at the minimum but it feels very "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic"-esque.

Instead we focus on Exor's Dungeon (which has a few of its own problems, though not as pressing, we'll discuss that next month), specifically the game reviews. I added five to celebrate 2003 in some way (all of which were games at my uncle's house): Mario Paint (returning), Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Monkey Ball, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (returning), and Stunt Race FX. To make it an even 56, Mother 3 was added (expanded from the original version posted and with some information on the N64 version: it got a "Flawed" rating). Because I screwed up last month and only put 49 games when I thought I put 50, Façade has been dredged up from the boneyard. Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island and The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening from last month had a few problems, those were fixed. (The original page before I started redoing had about 57, we'll be adding back everything and adding more).

Additionally, the Books & Strategy Guides section has a review for The Macintosh Bible Guide to Games while Magazines has Nintendo Power Volume 170.

NOVEMBER 30 2023
I'm back! While I didn't do the super-big update I wanted (it was supposed to reorganize the main page), one big change that did get done was the Exor's Dungeon Game Reviews. The number of reviews is the same. Like with previous updates, some stuff got removed temporarily. As part of the convention, the following games were temporarily removed from the list: EarthBound, Hammerfight, Home, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass,The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, Lemmings, New Super Mario Bros., Plants vs. Zombies, Super Metroid, and WingNuts: Temporal Navigator.

In their place is a number of returning entries or "ported" from the 2019-2022 lists, but a few are all-new.

* Batman: Arkham City is entirely new, though it references "Zero Punctuation", which has since ended as part of Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw departing from The Escapist. (This was written before the falling out and ending of ZP).
* Bugdom 2 is entirely new, referencing the old review to the original Bugdom review, which was posted as part of the 2021 Games.
* E.V.O.: Search for Eden is back. What a mess that was, the Wikipedia link was set up to link to EPCOT Center for some reason, that mistake must have been there for years.
* Glider PRO is back. The new review is a little shorter because it cuts out information on Glider 4.0.
* The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening has been added with a dedicated page.
* The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker has returned. The review has been completely rewritten.
* Pokémon Pinball has been fixed and back up!
* Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins now has a dedicated page.
* Super Mario World now has a dedicated page.
* Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island is back. It has been partially rewritten with the Yoshi's Island DS content (which was re-added earlier this year) stripped out.
* Wario Land 4 now has a dedicated page.
* Yoot Tower has received a full rewrite and is back up!

Everything else that hadn't been updated already (Batman: Arkham Asylum, Blobbo, Bubble Trouble, Donkey Kong Country, Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest, Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble!, Evil Genius, Quarterstaff: The Tomb of Setmoth, and SimAnt) stayed on the list and got new ratings.

The big SimCity 2000 page received a new section on the water model (not only was it downscaled, it does not work as advertised). NewCity received an important update...and not just to note that the photo is from Wikimedia Commons in Portugal. It's gone open source; unfortunately, it still means very little in the progress of the game. Pokémon Card GB2: Great Rocket-Dan Sanjō! also received an update/fix, with a minor fix to American Truck Simulator. The good news is that all entries here on out will not replace anything else, and we'll eventually add new entries and "retired" entries back, because there's a still of number of entries that were taken out and yet have to return, and this makes 33 of previously-added games alone. (Additionally, the Steam Banners and the "Games Played by Year" pages are now deprecated).

The re-addition of Yoot Tower was supposed to be the main feature of this update as it segues into the 20th anniversary of when I first really got into it...so some things have been added to the Yoot Tower Guides section! Kegon Falls is now verified as complete and Hawaii has some minor errors fixed. Tokyo has the fourth star added. Unfortunately, I didn't get around to adding any of the Towerkit entries, but that's okay!

The Yoot Tower page ties into an updated page for Grapevine Mills, another addition to the Malls page. It adds a brief overview of the mall and all of its many, many anchors over the years, up to Meow Wolf.

No other "Places" article has been updated. Although the "Misc. Roads" pages diluted the original "linking roads" concept I am in a bit of a jam about how to best reformat the pages, especially some of the larger ones. Still, they're not abandoned, and I want to build more of them, though some pages that were intended to appear this month sadly didn't make it.

However, various other pages (not related to Exor's Dungeon) have seen updates:
* The Legacy of Rattlers has been updated.
* The China Coast page was updated. I was informed of another restaurant in Chattanooga, TN.
* The Albertsons History page received a few minor tweaks. Let's hope the merger falls through!
* Casis Randalls has been added.

Finally, the thumbnail depicts Princess Peach with the Lazy Shell equipped (original source requires a login for "sensitive content", though there's really not much to see)...this is to celebrate the re-release of Super Mario RPG on the Switch (titled simply as such) though we already have a page on it. Of course, it is also the namesake of Exor's Dungeon. Also, my YouTube channel is active again and adding retro/vintage commercials.

SEPTEMBER 30 2023
This is another "maintenance" update, unfortunately, but I will discuss a few things: to better integrate the site with "non-core" cities in the future and to better showcase individual projects, one of the newer things I'm trying to do is moving away from the big Road Directories pages and focusing on smaller, individual items. While I was working on this, I asked myself "isn't this basically The Houston Files" then? Not exactly. That site was designed to have brief, short articles, a bit of a hybrid between Brazos Buildings & Businesses (which was idling during that time, for about a year and a half the most recent article was "Café Eccell's Former Domain") and another site, Arch-ive.org (which sadly sees very infrequent updates). Here, though, the idea will combine some common themes when necessary, similar to the Waco section having a section on Ivy Square and the adjacent buildings, most of which were all torn down at around the same time, while The Houston Files will keep its entries (well, the stuff that hasn't been transferred over yet) while gaining a few entries based on the stuff on the Road Directories. It will tend to follow convention--a new H-E-B page was developed (check it out, even if it doesn't have pictures at this point) while the Kroger pages keep their individuality on The Houston Files.

As of this writing, some of the entries on The Houston Files have received much-needed maintenance and updates: exclusive articles like Tejas Materials Inc. and 2100 Memorial have gotten much-needed updates. Overall, it's a work in progress and I'm not 100% sure on how I want to move forward.

The most recent change to the North Houston Roads page, but instituted a week or two after going live, was removing OYO Townhouse, which already was an out of date article. As a result, the Hotel Ibis page has launched. This was actually "added" a long time ago but was a broken page with no other links to the main website.

The only other change was adding more games. This time, I added three new titles that haven't appeared on the list before. The first is American Truck Simulator, an update from the previous appearance. The thumbnail is from a pre-release shot with "Heart's" (a parody of Love's Travel Stop) and what appears to be some sort of fast-food co-brand, though is more of a nostalgia-fueled lament. There's Untitled Goose Game, which got a middling score and not much of a review, really...and the one that actually got the thumbnail is from NewCity. Yes, that's from the game. Sort of. Read on and find out why I gave it the first "No Rating" in the bunch. DOOM, Osmos and Beneath a Steel Sky all got bumped off in this update.

Most of what I actually added or updated otherwise is pretty minor. To note:
- Westheimer Road got updated to v12.1, this covers a few minor errors from 12.0 while adding or updating a few other minor things.
- South Austin actually had one removed: the Pilot Travel Center, which was never supposed to actually be on the list to begin with (removed in v3.0).
- Small updates in Exor's Dungeon: The "Game Info" box for The Shivah (which came back last month) was still outdated. This has been fixed, and includes the "fun stat". Cuphead had the size of the picture reduced. The SimCity 4 article got a few touch-ups.

Along with a more major update to the site that was cut for time, there's other (less pressing) issues with the site that I need to address, and I'll take some time off. Carbon-izer will return in late November.

AUGUST 31 2023
Yes, technically this update is September 1st, but August 31st was a Thursday, and besides, the initial launch is usually riddled with problems. Inevitably, something will link wrong or a page be broken in some way, so I just made the decision to not worry about it and do it on Friday. (Good thing too--I collapsed into my bed almost immediately when I came home).

This month, I've decided to, in order to prevent burnout, to focus on more of the things that got cut last time as well as making minor updates/fixes to other pages. Arlan's in Navasota, Italy in 2014, Texas Avenue in Bryan and Nintendo Power - Volume 145 all got touched up. Additionally, Greenspoint Mall got a new PDF detailing its aborted "Renaissance at Greenspoint" plan.

Once again, the four corners of Houston have been updated: North Houston got the Jones Road entries from the Outer Loop page (which was updated to replace the entries and got a bunch of stuff on Pasadena inside), East Houston got a focus on Garth Road and some other fixtures including a well-maintained classic Wendy's (with a handful of Beltway 8 additions), South Houston added more Bay Area Boulevard and Gulf Freeway entries, and West Houston got more Westheimer and Beltway 8 updates.

Additionally, the long-awaited Version 12.0 of the Westheimer Road page has been added. (While it is not 100% complete, this is the last "major" update that I'll do for it.) Gessner Road got another update...and Inner Loop is finally up...Version 10.0 of FM 1960 West has been added...

There's over a hundred brand new entries that cover a wide range, from office towers to restaurants (two former Kettle, two former Krispy Kreme) to malls (Baybrook Mall) to retail stores (at least three Walmart stores and four former H-E-B Pantry locations) to apartment complexes to gas stations...there's a lot. Too much, actually...and a dedicated page on Rice Village is still in progress. In the Updates page a few years ago, I mentioned that what was originally called "Project Aerostar" as "a real new direction for the site", but it ended up becoming a bit too successful...and really became a problem, because all of those pages are just liabilities now (I wanted to continue changing Houston's official color to cerulean but can't guarantee that all pages were updated). Interstate 35 also has gotten more love: I added another twelve entries to Waco I-35 but I'm reaching at that point when a "12 item update" is unfeasible. Austin I-35 was also updated (no danger of running out yet, at least for another few updates), and a curious focus on hotels this time around. I'm interested in more one-and-done projects.

There is ONE update to Exor's Dungeon which I've applied as this month's update (120+ item updates and not a single good picture), swapping out Space Junkie for The Shivah.

JULY 31 2023
I must say that in addition to being somewhat burned out (in the past, I've avoided summer updates for this very reason), I was discouraged by the fact that no one called out how broken Chaparral Restaurant was...in the past, this also happened with Texas Land & Cattle. Meanwhile, there are things that I want to get out as they idle in various states of completion. I don't know what the proper solution is. Part of the problem is that I'm essentially running at least three different sites within this one. I was at least able to isolate Exor's Dungeon but the Road Directories page is another issue altogether...and even with that, it has a lot of problems. For example, it was initially developed for Waco, Houston, and College Station, but because Bastrop was in there as well, Austin had to be added just for "compatibility" reasons, and eventually got more focus as I moved there later. Meanwhile, the idea of a Dallas-Fort Worth page was planned at point (I never decided on a color scheme though the idea was navy blue and white), I still wanted something on it, considering I had a lot of disparate stuff I wanted to cover. The problem was, how to organize it? I had already written something on Italy, for instance, that focused on truck stops, and I did have stuff for Hillsboro that I had written up but never implemented, though it was mostly execution. I had considered stuff like whole neighborhoods (or small towns) to be covered in separate pages but even that seemed too unwieldy. Perhaps a blog, but blogs need pictures. If there was an easy answer to this then it'd be on the site. On the issue of running multiple sites, I'm still one person, and the only thing is adding more sites, especially if they're through different domains, just means more of a headache.

I've already thought up a few potential solutions to this, but the problem is that a lot of these things simply overlap. And even so, should more radical solutions be dreamed up, like breaking up the sprawling Westheimer Road page?

One problem is that the pages as written far outstrip their inspirations. When what was known as "Carbon-izer City Directories" was launched, it cited (and formatted almost directly after) Downriver Locations Thru the Years, as well as New York Songlines. I can't just flip-flop back to the blogs, as while The Houston Files could use some updates, Brazos Buildings & Businesses got worked into a corner by the "anything and everything" approach...and what of the spaces in between, like Navasota, Hearne, and Caldwell?

The last time this came up for debate was the August 31st 2022 update, where the "compromise" was to build what is now stuff like the North Houston page, which admittedly has some fun memories on there, from Papa Tony's Kitchen to Splashtown, but it also became unruly. No spoilers in trying to fix everything, any work will basically be done parallel to the existing site until it's ready.

With that being said, there aren't many updates this month as far as the road updates go. Under Houston, the next update of the Inner Loop page was canned because a few entries somehow got deleted in copying them over to HTML. They can be rebuilt from older drafts but it came at the wrong time. Some of the Houston ones got new colors but some didn't. Hempstead and Conroe got minor updates. Outer Loop and North Shepherd saw updates, the latter now featuring South Shepherd starting from Rice University. Under College Station, Texas Avenue Bryan got an update. Over in Austin, the old "Other Austin Roads" became the new South Austin page, with a new complementary North Austin page, while Other Hays County Roads was expanded to include Caldwell County as well (the Lockhart page was closed). With nearly 50 new entries between the three pages, there's coffee distributors, hot air balloon accidents, defunct supermarkets, and a lot more.

Exor's Dungeon got skipped last update and it almost did this month—Glider PRO was swapped for Factorio (this month's thumbnail—I wanted to wait and post Factorio on the list once the DLC was finished but Wube Software still seems to be dragging their feet on that). Once we finish swapping out or updating the remaining 25 entries, we'll add more entries permanently.

Other stuff: the pre-2019 updates have been officially banished from this page, Citipedia has been removed from the main page (though the corresponding page for NewCity didn't make it for this post).

JUNE 30 2023
This time I'm running a little late.

This is about the time when I start running out of ideas and getting frustrated with the site. The last June 30 update was back in 2015, and I normally run "summer break" hours. Still, last year was not all that good, compared to the wonderful tour de force that was the August 31st 2021 update. It might not have been three months' worth, but it had Ivy Square, it had Westheimer Road, it had video games, it had Yoot Tower Guides, it had Gonna Electric Shock O.J., it had Rattlers', it had SimCity 2000 Newspapers, it had The Treasure Ship! So this year it will be just normal updates with a normal schedule and seeing how that goes.

Two mall-related posts were updated. Memorial City Mall has become a dedicated mall page with a few mild updates. Likewise, the page on Mall of the Mainland, formerly known as "Carbon-izer Goes to the Mall of the Mainland" has received some updates and similarly inducted. (Don't worry, the page on Sharpstown Center isn't going anywhere).

The newest page/"feature" for this month is "Junk/Other Stuff", which is stuff that didn't fit elsewhere and was not fit for a full article (no photos and/or no point), if it was even an article to begin with. So here's what's incorporated into it: