"The Pen:" Live NLHE Chat Thread

This movie scared the **** out of me as a kid.

Oh 67o? I would not say he was run off. I would say the avg age of the thread got older where as he seemed to be the 20 something like when I started posting. There is always a period of adjustment when establishing a dialogue with new people who think differently.

yeah i wouldn't say run off either upon further reflection, more just so much younger than the rest of us that it was a square peg in a round hole from day one

also had some weird rivalry with skip that i never understood

I thought for a while that RTP and 67o were the same poster, just using alts.

I got a lot of weird PMs from that guy.

I think I made a trolling comment about Michigan early on and became mortal enemies with him.

let's be real, skip, most people asking you to stop sending them dic pics will come off weird, it's new territory for a lot of men you send them to

He sent the PMs to me unsolicited.

If you’re looking for steak I had a great clamshell full of carne asada fries from the taco trailer outside this place

And they have some super soft tabletops

were they in the form of thank you cards?

please explain soft video blackjack, i'm too dumb to see the edge

unless you're talking about it incorrectly giving you a winner at your 17 vs dealer 20 (but isn't that why they have hand pay to see the problem?)

Well it’s great because it has a “let it ride” button so your $5 bet can turn into $160 super easily. Also it pays 1:1 for blackjack which I think might be good?

Champagnes is an old mob joint …. i only know this because of Jon Taffer.

gman, what are your thoughts on this?

I know absolutely nothing about the film. Never heard of it before, and not really interested in watching a 40-minute video critique. I will say that the intro pissed me off, as there is a huge difference between public affairs and propaganda. By law, all public information from the military aimed at US citizens must be true. Hometown news releases that say "Johnny graduated from basic training today and is going on to avionics maintenance training" is hardly propaganda.

As for the movies, the military will support (as in, let filming happen on base, etc.) movies they think will help recruiting or the military's public image. The Navy and the Air Force both saw huge recruiting booms from Top Gun, for example. Some films won't get such access. For example:

Reading up on the movie, it looks like it was based on an exaggerated memoir, which is unfortunately a pretty common issue. There may be a ton of lies, but they mostly seem to be Marcus Luttrel's lies.

SEALs be braggin'. Check out this fight with two of them claiming they were the one who shot Bin Laden.

interesting you haven't seen lone survivor, it was a huge blockbuster film

the main issue is that marcus luttrel didn't write it, he was too busy serving in iraq at the time, so who wrote it on his behalf?

the navy bankrolled the book and hired a ghost writer to write it on his behalf

the writer then gets a ton of very basic details incorrect, even things like misspelling the name of the operation

and yet it still passes navy fact checking

the entire central plot of the book hinges on the idea that the reason why americans are dying and losing the war (central theme that is repeated throughout the book that the military is too restricted and afraid of upsetting the liberal media who don't understand the reality of war and just libtard it up to ensure we lose all conflicts)

so the main theme is we are losing/dieing because we aren't killing enough innocent civilians - book even outright lies and fabricating events in order to better serve the idea that they should have instead just murdered those two goat herders who they came across, even fabricating a situation where the men held a vote to decide to kill the goat herders or not and luttrell was the deciding vote to spare them (and now knowing the consequence of that would not do it again) - garrick, i'm sure you can count with your fist how many times an important decision in your line of work was put up to a vote

in reality, the taliban already knew of their presence and had them surrounded prior to them even coming across the goat herders and actually delayed their own attack to wait until the goat herders were no longer in the cross fire and safely out of the way

stuff like inflating the number of attackers from 8 to hundreds and taliban having zero casualties to hundreds i understand for movie magic (it's fairly evident they were ambushed and fled and he was only one to get away, when luttrell was rescued, he still had 11 intact magazines of ammo, the same amount he left base with, strongly implying he never fired enough rounds to even require reloading)

but the main issue that youtuber takes with the book and subsequent film based on the book is that it strongly appears to be a navy funded operation to persuade the public to not get their panties in a bunch so much about things like abu ghraib (book directly talks about abu) and so forth

i have not read the books nor fact checked the youtuber (wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if he lied/took liberties) so wanted your opinion

really shocked you haven't seen lone survivor though, it was a huge film and highest grossing war film since 9/11 when it came out in 2013 (don't know why that's a category)

I've never understood the whole "exaggerated memoir" thing. Can't much of it be refuted? Then you're just left with a shitty reputation. Or is it just a "I hope this check clears before they find out," sort of thing.

Yeah, that YouTuber is factually incorrect in the first seconds of his intro, so I wouldn't take his claims too seriously. This dude may have had a ghostwriter, but I guarantee the Navy didn't pay for it. Also, the Navy doesn't fact-check books. They only check them for classified info, and that only if the book is submitted as it is supposed to be under the NDA that people with clearances sign. No Easy Day, for example, was not submitted prior to publication, and Matt Bissonnette got in some trouble for it.

As for not seeing the movie, I can't remember the last blockbuster I saw. I particularly don't watch "America! F*** Yeah!" movies, but I generally just don't watch movies.

sounds like you’re a Commie

I think there's a mix of people having exaggerated memories in the first place, them then "jazzing it up a bit," on the theory that it's close enough, and the details are classified, so who's going to contradict them? But yeah, they usually get found out.

i'm a fairly popular history writer on quora (they pay me about $15 a month for views on my old content, haven't written anything there in years)

main reason i stopped writing is that it doesn't matter if you spend hours fact checking and researching background info for an article, someone else is going to post absolute nonsense that sounds more interesting (just stupid stuff, literally writing an article based on their understanding of it from having watched hogan's heros - no i'm not joking) and despite that dozens of people are debunking it all in the comments, that doesn't matter, because most people don't read the comments and even having negative comments gives a boost to the algo to show it to more people

one of the most prolific writers on the site https://www.quora.com/profile/Steven-Had... is a guy who just spams out absolute nonsense

he says things like all lobsters spawn in the carribean and then the eggs ride the currents up to maine and canada where they grow up or even easily fact checkable stuff that anyone with a passing interest in it would know to be wrong like toronto is one of the biggest tourism destinations in the world or that Babe Ruth has the record for most times caught stealing (not even remotely true) and yet he thrives

been a huge lesson in life that facts simply do not matter, no matter how easily they can verified

oh, that indeed explains a lot, and the youtuber outright says the navy paid for the ghost writer and arranged everything so if that's all nonsense then i guess it's just a story about a terrible memoir

i'd still like to think about evil naval cabals though

Yeah, that's an "all lobsters spawn in the Caribbean" moment, as far as I'm concerned. The Navy generally hates it when SEALs write memoirs. All special operators are supposed to be "quiet professionals," but given the personality type that joins the SEALs, it's not surprising that the "I do not advertise the nature of my work, nor seek recognition for my actions" part of their code is often honored in the breach more than the observance. There's just too much fame and fortune to be had.

I'd want a serious citation on those claims. and his quoting some lame secondary source like the "Air Force propaganda" stats from the intro would not cut it.

gman, you should watch lone survivor & rosetta stoned by the end of march 😀