Suitedjustice's Ongoing Mid-life Crisis

How do you eat an elephant?

The good thing is that DFW is easy to read compared to other 20th century literary giants. He occasionally sends me to the dictionary, but I always enjoy learning a new word.

Could be the head of a shillelagh.

Could be 75% of a four-leaf clover.

I believe that self-praise levels should correlate with personal difficulty levels. If you ask Gargamel to be nice to the Smurfs, and he somehow pulls it off, then he should be quite chuffed with himself, even though it would be plain easy for many of us to be kind to the Smurfs.

As for Hotel California, I would think that a committee voted for the top 500. If the realists within it prevail, it ought to be in the low 2-digits; if the snobs prevail, it might be in the 100s.

Nice. suitedsevenduck?

I am the one who chases.

My days of prematurely calling out the end of advantage slots are coming to a middle.

This wasn't the Big Score, but it was a nice one. I set it up by accidentally misclicking on the previous hand. At the time, the board only had one upcoming 3x multiplier on it, which is a marginal play 10-handed. You don't see it here, but it read "Next hand 3x" on the board. The correct play was to bet 5 coins per hand and collect whatever came down, and hope that something nice hit on the 3x hand. Betting only 5 coins per hand resets the screens to no multipliers for the next hand.

The game, however, makes it easy to misclick and accidentally max bet 10 coins per hand. That costs twice as much, but it potentially activates the multipliers for the next hand. I max bet the previous hand by accident and got the 10x multipliers you see on the board for this hand. Then I bumped it down to 5 coins and hit a nice hand. Easy game.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 8 hours
+$130.00
MGM Springfield Slots: 2 hours
+$758.39

2024 Running Poker Total: 133 hours, +$1396.00
2024 Running Slot Total: 85 hours, +$4459.94

2024 Grand Total: 218 hours, +$5855.94

Well said. Congrats on the 40 hr week!

This. I find Proust easy to read. I even find Joyce easy to read, but I have to read him out loud. If I don't, my head starts swimming.

For some inexplicable reason, my days of reading fiction have come to an end.

Then the non-fiction of the Bible should be next, old man.

At least that'll be a quick read.

Thanks bob_124!

I won't be rereading Proust's In Search of Lost Time any time soon. Those several hundred pages of him whining about his lost Albertine—after only a few pages of him barely acknowledging her while she was alive—wore me down.

I mean, I get it. Lost opportunities in romances have shaped the course of my life as well, but I've never been able to get more than 10 pages out of any of those before even I got bored with them.

I've read and enjoyed Joyce's The Dead and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but Ulysses has eluded me so far and Finnegan's Wake was just appalling gibberish. As always, your mileage may vary.

I read the bible. I read Job in the Hebrew Bible and I read the gospels of Mark and Thomas in the Christian Bible, but try as I may, I haven't found any non-fiction yet.

Stick with the Tao Te Ching and the Analects if you want non-fiction.

Rolling Stone's 472nd Greatest Album of All Time: Ctrl by SZA (2017)

SZA, aka Solána Imani Rowe, had already been a highly regarded songwriter for superstars like Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj and Rihanna before she wrote and performed her 2017 debut album Ctrl: a huge commercial success with 5 certified platinum singles on it. The album would go on to hit#3 on the Billboard top 200. Ctrl was also widely praised by critics across many publications, and it brought recognition and stardom to its young singer/songwriter.

As I've mentioned before, I have no pretentions towards being a professional critic. I don't possess the musical background for it. I only know what I enjoy and don't enjoy, and in the case of this album, I'll give you my CliffsNotes up front:

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IMO; mind you, IMO.

One of the functions of music over the past several thousand years has been to help young people along in their never-ending quest to get laid. I've been out of that demographic for several decades now, so I may not be equipped to judge an album on which the lyrics are largely about the libidinous surface of things: partying, hooking up, getting laid, cheating, and being cheated upon. I'll post a few lines from the track Doves in the Wind as an example.

Real n***** do not deserve pussy
Meanin' it's more, you see right through walls
Ain't talkin' about pussy
Meanin' you deserve the whole box of chocolates
Come at me

Forrest Gump had a lot goin' for him
Never without pussy
You know, Jenny almost gave it all up for him
Never even pushed for the pussy
Where's Forrest now when you need him?
Talk to me, talk to me, ay, ay, ay

As far as the music is concerned, SZA sings over a barely present, often atonal electronic musical backing, accompanied by a dull series of sparse drum machine tracks. According to the wiki, this is an example of the trap subgenre of hip-hop. If that's the case, then I'll consider myself duly warned about that category.

In a previous review I floated the opinion that the music in rap songs doesn't need to be dense and intricate, because the focus of the song is on the lyrics. SZA's Control, however, is not a rap album, and in any case its lyrics may not stand up to careful scrutiny by the poetic-minded. Again, a ton of critics loved this album, so I'm probably wrong about that.

SZA's voice on the record is good, possibly great, but the album doesn't put it to the test often enough. The songs are laid back and largely undemanding, and her voice is occasionally auto-tuned.

The Weekend is one song that allows SZA to show off some of her vocal chops, and it also has a musical track that isn't entirely characterless, so I'll post that.

Rolling Stone Says:

Thanks to SZA’s lyrics about insecurity, jealousy, loneliness, and her search for “lovin’ and licky,” this assured debut brought a new self-searching spirit to R&B. The tracks are gentle and erotic, but beneath the singer’s soft-grained style, there’s fierceness; in “Dove in the Wind,” she tells a lover she can easily replace him with a dildo. On “Love Galore,” a duet with Travis Scott that describes an ambivalent breakup, she makes clear the vulnerability beneath the bravado: “Gimme a paper towel, gimme another Valium.”

I don't know how much of a "self-searching spirit" I found on the album versus searching for someone new to hook up with, but okay.

Huh, SZA was just at Lollapalooza Buenos Aires this WE, which is literally 5 blocks from my house, thus why I have been attending it for the past 3 years. Lolla is obviously a far cry from what it was in the 90s and the EV is now getting 1-2 solid shows per year over the 3 day festival, not 5-6 like it was for the single day festival of yesteryears 😊. Last year, this honor belonged to 21 Pilots and Jane's Addiction ; this year it was alas only Arcade Fire that popped : The Offspring sucked balls and I (fortunately?) did not attend SZA 😉

I didn’t believe you that those were actual SZA lyrics, had to google it to believe it, wow.

How much of your advantage slots is vulturing Utlimate X? I’m guessing the slot hustlers are getting all the good slot plays.

I went to the first Lollapalooza and enjoyed it immensely. There was a lot of moshing going on with Rollins Band and Ice-T's Body Count, who just about tore up the place with their set.

I got into the pit and was trying to do one of these moves...

At one point I pivoted, and my back arm came swinging around like a flail, and a 10 or 11-year old girl ran straight into my fist. She was short, as you would expect, and I clocked her square in the face by accident. She and I got pushed to opposite sides of the pit, and I swam back over to see if she was all right, but I couldn't find her.

By that point, I was tired and needed to get out, but the spectators surrounding the pit—when they weren't themselves being pushed into the pit—were pushing the dancers back into it.

I had been a defensive lineman on my high school football team, so I knew how to bust through human obstructions. A space opened up in the pit, and I was able to get a running start and burst through the wall of people, only to stumble a few more steps into the middle of an adjacent mosh pit that I had to then fight my way out of.

Good times.

I'm getting very few plays on the non-X machines. The Asian syndicate has them locked down pretty well. They have 2 or 3 players on hand most of the time. One grinder will sit by a likely machine that looks like it's going to be abandoned in a +EV state by a regular player, while the other grinders wander the floor looking for similar scenarios. Their coverage of the floor is excellent.

The syndicate doesn't check the Ultimate X machines, for whatever reason, but there are currently 4 or 5 other white guys, besides myself, who check them on a regular basis, so there aren't many plays on those either. I've just been running good lately with the few plays that I've found.

Last night, the slot floor was unusually soft, and I found a larger number of plays, so I subtracted an hour from the poker session and added it to the slots. I have today and tomorrow off; back on Friday.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 7 hours
+$14.00
MGM Springfield Slots: 3 hours
+$320.44

2024 Running Poker Total: 140 hours, +$1410.00
2024 Running Slot Total: 88 hours, +$4780.38

2024 Grand Total: 228 hours, +$6190.38

i was also at the first year of lollapalooza, shoreline amphitheater
nine inch nails, butthole surfers, jane's...it was a blast.

Great Woods for me. Also, I want it to be clear that accidentally punching a girl in the face was a distinct exception to the good time that I had there.

I felt quite bad about that, and I still worry about her to this day. I kept an eye out for anyone getting medical attention after that and couldn't find any evidence of it. I hope that she came out of it all right.

I play Ultimate X from time to time and I never want to walk away with active multipliers, which sometimes leads to me playing more hands than I want until I get one that leaves none, and I am just equal parts flabbergasted and embarassed that it never occurred to me to just play a 5 credit hand instead of a 10 credit hand.

You were very much not alone among X players, and that fact has made me several thousand dollars over the last year or so.

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BTW, you can't jump down to 5 credits with the Bonus Streak variant of Ultimate X. That particular version won't give the the multipliers without a 10 credit investment. Bonus Streak is still beatable, but there has to be a lot of multipliers on the board to offset the 10 credit cost, and that's more rare of a find.

They would likely be replaced by a syndicate who wouldn't be benign to their competition: i.e. the Hard-eyed dudes. That's how easy money works.

I'm just getting back into David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. The last time I read it was around '99, and I was living in Las Vegas without the Internet as a resource. DFW finished the book in '96, and most of it took place in his near-future, which equated to around '09, which is now our near-past.

I say around '09 because sometime around '02 in his world, the Organization of North American Nations (aka O.N.A.N., with its biblical masturbatory reference intended) started selling naming rights to the years.

The first time I read the book, I spent a lot of time puzzling out which year was which; I believe that I tried organizing all of his scattered references into a chart. Now, with the Internet, I can just look it up. It's going to be a good read-through with all these easy resources nowadays.

CHRONOLOGY OF ORGANIZATION OF NORTH AMERICAN NATIONS’ REVENUE ENHANCING SUBSIDIZED TIME™, BY YEAR

2002: Year of the Whopper
2003: Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad
2004: Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar
2005: Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken
2006: Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster
2007: Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office Or Mobile (sic)
2008: Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland
2009: Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment
2010: Year of Glad

TBH reading about the Year of the Whopper makes me want one. Not so much the Depend Adult Undergarment though.

Poker is stupidly easy when you hit the board and you hit your draws, especially in the large-group multiway pots found in the $1/$2 game. You look like a whiz kid, and table mates start complimenting your play, as if dumb short-term luck had nothing to do with it. The thing to do in this case is not to believe the hype and by that way avoid winner's tilt.

Mind you, if you're showing down the goods, you will get more bluffs past the table, at least vs players who are paying attention, but that doesn't give you a license to turn into a maniac.

If I work a 10-hour day tomorrow/later today, I will complete my second 40-hour week of gamblework in a row, a feat that my lazy ass has heretofore never been able to pull off in 25 years of card counting and poker playing and slot grinding. Let's go.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 8 hours
+$658.00
MGM Springfield Slots: 2 hours
+$30.12

2024 Running Poker Total: 148 hours, +$2068.00
2024 Running Slot Total: 90 hours, +$4810.50

2024 Grand Total: 238 hours, +$6878.50

In the words of Jean-Luc Picard, "Make it so."

Or, in the words of one of the Redneck Comedy guys, "Git 'er done!"

You talk about your days of card counting, poker and slot hustling. Figure with the somewhat recent legalization of sports gambling in Massachusetts might still be some good sign up bonuses worth chasing. Also there seems to be a market for beards, guys in different markets with fresh accounts and can go into different areas to make live bets.

I listened to a recent podcast of Risk Of Ruin about a couple guys who specialize in getting bets down for groups that are professional sports bettors.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XX_HmkcsuA...
These guys I think are in Arizona but have bettors throughout the country that get money down for their originators. It’s something I’d be looking into if I was in your shoes. It’s sort of a job as if your actually getting bets down for them instead of just handing over accounts they will likely message you at random times to put in a bet, possibly live.