Suitedjustice's Ongoing Mid-life Crisis

HTTM is an awesome movie. Seen it 5 times.

Shocked you havenÂ’t seen Trainspotting. Similar to Fight Club & American Psycho, the movie is far superior to the book. The best books in the TS universe are Glue and Marabou Stork Nightmares, though the later is a rough read.

Never Let Me Go is an incredible movie (I cried!) but the book is fantastic too.

Matthew Scudder not Alfred. 😀

Was just recommending more in gods eye and fire upon the deep to a friend yesterday

Patiently awaiting your review of It's A Beautiful Life.

EDIT: Just saw that it was It's A Wonderful Life, so might not be the same movie at all, lol. I'm talking about the Italian movie with Roberto Benigni. The official English title is Life is Beautiful.

Will you be reviewing more Top 500 albums?

I look forward to it. Is the sequel any good? I remember that being anticipated, coming out in theaters and then quietly disappearing. Same thing happened with Super Troopers 2, which was kind of a dud compared to the original.

I did see Trainspotting, once, soon after it came out on "video", as we called it back in the day, but it was just once, and I believe that I was messed up on something, quite possibly the same thing that the boys were doing. I have only a vague memory of the dirtiest toilet in Scotland. The movie deserves another view. I've also seen Spaceballs only once, but that was 35+ years ago, so I put that back on the list as well.

Noted about Matthew Scudder. I think I borrowed the Alfred from Mr. Bester.

I found the first one, but will have to order the second. The local Barnes & Noble had nothing at all by either Bester or Vinge, and their Philip K. Dick selection was just one or two titles.

It's a Wonderful Life is a feelgood Frank Capra joint from 1946 starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed, with Lionel Barrymore as the big baddie. It used to play every Christmas season on US TV, before they switched over to Die Hard, but I'd never caught it until yesterday. It's a great flick; I'd recommend it. I was never a big fan of Stewart, but he killed it in this one.

I got stuck on Red by Black Uhuru for some reason. It's a perfectly fine reggae album from 1981, but that's all I got. I couldn't find anything else to say about it, and it deserves more than that. The fault is in me.

I still have THC gummies left from that big cheap batch I bought at the beginning of this year. I was going to drop one or two and give Red another listen, but I haven't gotten around to it. I haven't done any gummies in months.

The answer is yes, eventually.

some jabroni uploaded all of these audiobooks up on the pirate bay
http://scifilists.sffjazz.com/lists_book...

it's in 4 sets of 1-25, 26-50, 51-75, 76-100

"Guess who is coming to dinner, naughty dreadlock!?!"

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And then there is the "Boof n Baff n Biff" remix by Fila Brazilia that dubbed my 20s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctx3zGYF52A

YouTube

Black Uhuru-Boof' N' Baff' N' Biff' (Fila Brazillia Remix # 2) DanceHall Queen OST

but yeah, definitely not Black Uhuru's best album, so weird that it made the list...

2nd one was a dud. Still had some funny moments though.

First one is all about the 80s. The scene immediately after they go back in time is amazing.

Thanks rickroll!

by Dubnjoy000 k

"Guess who is coming to dinner, naughty dreadlock!?!"

Spoiler

Show

And then there is the "Boof n Baff n Biff" remix by Fila Brazilia that dubbed my 20s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctx3zGYF52A

YouTube

Black Uhuru-Boof' N' Baff' N' Biff' (Fila Brazillia Remix # 2) DanceHall Queen OST

but yeah, definitely not Black Uhuru's best album, so weird that it made the list...

Work today, gummy and reggae tomorrow.

6 hours and +$375 at the poker table last night, $100 of which was football promo money from a real dud of a game, so that was lucky. The slots have been breakeven over the last few sessions, with the coverage from other grinders always growing and the number of plays always dwindling, as expected.

I changed my mind—big surprise, I know—I want to try the poker room's new "First 15" promo on Wed. and Sat. That's where the first 15 players to make any aces full or better get an automatic $300 payout; they don't have to have the high hand, and it doesn't have to be a specific hand, they just get paid for their hand right away. Showing up early for this should be profitable.

So the remaining schedule for this week should be Wed., Thur. and Sat.

Jeez, that sounds like a greatly +EV promo, especially for a Saturday where I suspect games are already decent enough... Run good friend

Thanks Dubnjoy000!

So the question is: Is it +EV to try to slowplay aces on the flop and/or turn in order to try for the instant $300 payout?

I think it's complicated. I almost never slowplay, but as a rule of thumb, I would consider doing it if I made a set of aces on the flop, then I would have 10 outs twice to either boat up or make quads. That's ~40% chance to win an additional $300, or +$120 EV.

Otherwise, if I don't slowplay, I would have to make that EV up through value betting, in which case I might still boat up and win both a big pot and the promo bonus. The danger from one side comes from everyone folding to a bet on the flop or the turn before I boat up. The danger from the other side comes from slowplaying, not boating up, and losing a big pot with top set to a straight or flush, when slowplaying let the Villain get there.

Because the above seems kind of close either way, I would definitely not slowplay just a pair of aces on the flop, and I wouldn't slowplay just a paired flop either.

Slowplaying a set of aces on the flop can be good even without any bonuses. Since you double-block top pairs, your opponents are less likely to have a hand to continue with. With this promo, the play gets even more attractive.

Apologies in advance for being the "probability police," but you actually have 7 outs on the turn and 10 on the river to boat up or make quads. This works out to about a 33.4% likelihood, giving you just over +$100 EV. (Oddly enough, Card Player's Poker Odds Calculator has it at 34.4%, but my own math as well as a second poker strategy site [GetMega] say otherwise.) So the question becomes whether there's more than +$100 EV to be had in fast-playing the flopped set. [Strategy derail ended.]

Thanks Topgun in VA! That makes sense. I was counting outs that paired on the turn and river but didn't appear on the flop, like with a A6422 runout, but that is wrong according to the authorities.

The Promo Strikes Back

My first orbit on Wednesday:

UTG limps, I pick up A♥A♦ in UTG+1 and I raise to $12. It folds to the blinds, who both call. UTG folds.

Pot ($38) - 3 players

Flop: A♠6♥T♥

I've barely sat down, and I've flopped set of aces. Here's my chance to try for the $300 aces full or better payout.

SB checks, BB checks, I check.

Pot ($38) - 3 players.

Turn: 2♥

The flush comes in, but SB and BB check. I check with my A♥ as a redraw, along with board pairing outs to the $300 promo.

Pot ($38) - 3 players.

River: Q♥

SB Checks, BB bets $13. I have the nuts, but I don't sense that BB feels very strong. I raise to $35 to try to get a call and salvage a small piece of this botched promo slowplay.

Pot ($108) - 3 players

SB folds, and BB calls with K♣J♣ for the rivered gutshot straight.

The pot is pushed to BB. I protest, only to find out that—from my 2 seat—I have misread the Q♦ on the river as being the fourth heart. I have a set of aces, the losing hand.

I go on—what is for me—monkey tilt for the next hour and I lose $500 before I finally pull myself off the table.

Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges

I'm not the smartest guy in the room, but over more than half of a lifetime, I've read widely enough to recognize when I've run into a first-rate mind, and when that mind is running circles around me. This happened to me with Ficciones, Borges's collection of short stories and other short pieces which defy classification.

Borges was an Argentinian writer and intellectual from the last century; born in 1899, died in 1986. The writer slowly went blind during middle age, but he didn't let that stop him. For his day job, he was the director of Argentina's National Public Library, as well as president of the Argentine Society of Writers, and a professor of English and American Literature.

My boy David Foster Wallace (author of Infinite Jest, reviewed a few hundred posts upthread) had a few things to say about him:

"Borges's stories are very different. They are designed primarily as metaphysical arguments+; they are dense, self-enclosed, with their own deviant logics. Above all, they are meant to be impersonal, to transcend individual consciousness -- "to be incorporated," as Borges puts it, "like the fables of Theseus or Ahasuerus, into the general memory of the species and even transcend the fame of their creator or the extinction of the language in which they were written." One reason for this is that Borges is a mystic, or at least a sort of radical Neoplatonist -- human thought, behavior and history are all the product of one big Mind, or are elements of an immense cabalistic Book that includes its own decoding."

Dense is the operative word. Ficciones is a thin work, only 174 pages, but I had to do a lot of reading while making my way through it, had to do extra work like I did just this past moment, which was to circle back and look up the fable of Ahasuerus (I had a vague idea of Theseus, at least: he navigated the Labyrinth and killed the Minotaur.)

I felt that Borges had put me into the Labyrinth while I was reading Ficciones; the writer mixes fake personages, reference books, fables and events in with the real ones, and does it so seamlessly that it knocked me topsy-turvy throughout several of his stories.

Now, the defense mechanism of the standard pseudo-intellectual, when confronted with a first-rate mind running circles around him, challenging him, demanding that he up his game, is to dismiss the challenging work as boring and pretentious. Ficciones is neither of these. Far from it.

I liked the way that his writing made me feel; young again, really. Like I had an entire library's worth of things that I still needed to read before I could stay up with the big boys and girls.

The feeling reminded my specifically of when I tried to read Nietzsche early on in my college adventure, with me thinking this: I'm not old enough to be reading this dude. I'm only 19. I'll need to be like 40 or 50 before I'm ready for Nietzsche.

But I never did get around to reading him.

Here's a quick sample of Borges from a page that I dog-eared:

Like all men of the Library, I have traveled in my youth, I have journeyed in search of a book, perhaps of the catalog of catalogs; now that my eyes can scarcely decipher what I write, I am preparing to die a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born. Once dead, there will not lack pious hands to hurl me over the bannister; my sepulcher shall be the unfathomable air: my body will sink lengthily and will corrupt and dissolve in the wind engendered by the fall, which is infinite. I affirm that the Library is interminable.

DFW compared Borges to Kafka. I have not read enough of Kafka to comment on that. I would like to say that Borges reminded me a little of William S. Burroughs, only without the latter's omnipresent, hovering heroin cycle, nor his compulsively drawn-out gay sex passages, but Borges was around first, so I should say that Burroughs reminds me of him.

In any case, I enjoyed Ficciones. I had to fire up my brain in ways that I haven't been required to in a very long time; but that—as Martha Stewart says—is a good thing.

My phone had been touchy about charging lately. It wouldn't connect with the plug until I'd made several attempts, and the charger itself is less than a year old.

So I took it to a kiosk at the local zombie mall. I chose that place, in spite of it having a hinckey website and only being open for a few hours a week, because it had 19 good reviews on Yelp, which was 15 more reviews than any other local phone repair shop.

I figured that my phone needed a new charging port; but what do I know? The young woman at the counter pulled out a special set of angled needle-nose pliers and pried two year's worth of packed-in pocket lint out of the port. Works fine now.

I asked the woman how much for the plier magic, and she didn't want to charge me, so I gave her a ten-spot (tenner) for brightening my day.

The zombie mall is nearby to the local bookstore. I stopped in and bought this.

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i make sure to listen to this at least once a year and constantly spam it out to people in texts who likely never listen to it

A couple of personal notes on Borges : when I went back for the second time in University to complete my literature degree (which I never managed to fully complete, as I wandered off with 2 courses left before graduating), I took an amazing Latin American literature course. When it came time to decide to select an author for our final paper, I told myself "whatever you do Dubn, don't choose Borges!!!"

And visiting the Borges-induced-labyrinthe in Mendoza, Argentina :

I decided it was a good idea to visit the structure with my (ex and impatient as frack) gf and our dog in the mid 30s celsius scorching Argentina afternoon. After 2-3 minutes of having engaged into the maze and noticing that our dog is constantly seeking shade/water, we think better of our initial decision of exploring the heart of the web, so we head back thinking that we would find the entrance in a heartbeat, but of course find ourselves in constant dead ends, circling back nonstop, until we desesperately ask some folks where the entrance/exit is... But of course, they were as clueless and as disoriented as we were 🙄 It would take a good 20-30 before finding a way out and me having to deal with the constant blaming of my (ex) gf

I am happy that the book did not leave you indifferent/marked you that much Suited and nice review friend

I've used the fish in water parable several times without remembering where I stole it from. I must have seen it in one of his essays. His talk of the drabness of everyday life and suicide hits hard when we know what he was going to do just two years later. His extreme intelligence and insightfulness came with some severe downsides.

Wow, I didn't know anything about his famous passage in The Garden of Forking Paths.

The thread has been lost; the labyrinth has been lost as well. Now we don't even know if we are surrounded by a labyrinth, a secret cosmos, or just random chaos. Our beautiful duty is to imagine that there is a maze and a thread. We will never find the thread; we'll find it and loose it in an act of faith, in a cadence, in a dream, in the words that are called philosophy, or in mere and simple happiness.

When I brought up the Labyrinth, I was just snatching a cheeky transition from the Theseus myth. That's wild.

Thank you for recommending Borges. I'm better for having read him. I'll give him a second reading at some point, as I'm sure that I missed a lot on the first go-through.

My pleasure! I was pleasantly surprised - and very happy - to see an extensive and exhaustive post about his book I remember being thoroughly shaken by reading his short stories when I was 29 years old and when looking back in hindsight, one is never too sure if the emotions are a pure product of the reading material at hand or of just being in your 20s... I am happy that it is the former!!!

Here is a similar story about port lint. Or gunk, as AppleGuy calls it. 😀