"The Pen:" Live NLHE Chat Thread

I had a beer with him in Melbourne. Was a nice kid, just very naive

thanks a lot, this means a lot to me. I really appreciate it!

Curious question for you four but any of the older guys here:

Before social media—and before kids—what did life actually look like day to day?

If you had a small blog and small online presence like pman back then, what do you think you would’ve posted about?

What filled your weeks? What mattered more than you realized at the time?

* Also curious about the logistics of the time: what kind of phones were around then, and how connected (or disconnected) did you actually feel day to day?

Cliffs: I was a mess in my 20s. And I'm not that old, Facebook came out while I was still in high school!

Nokia made the trendiest cell phones before the iphone came out.

RTP- holy crap, your questions make me feel old.

I felt way more connected to people before social media, but that’s likely just a stage of life thing. There was nothing to do but school / hang out with friends / play sports / etc.

I’m sure I could have some of the interactions still but I’ll tell you that the couch is appealing 11 times out of 10 after parenting and working.

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Yeah Jesus…’what filled your weeks’.

Honestly, that’s a bleak question and makes me concerned for you.

+1,000,000

that post should be stickied and put in the OP of the LVL Vlogs thread.

We are all Al Bundy

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RtP, it was TV that filled most American's "wasted" time before the internet.

Interested in thoughts from anyone who's played the big games in the south Philly/Chester area on this post:

+1

And the doxxing / etc. does seem way out of-of-line.

GcluelessfirstdayoninternetnoobG

Pretty sure I haven't seen any post reports from either of you guys in there. No way in Hell I'm reading that thread on the daily, so if you want something done you're going to have to report the posts. While I agree the world would be a better place without that thread, it kinda serves a purpose of keeping all that horrible posting in one easily avoided place and not contaminating the rest of the forum.

I posted in there a couple of times when I first discovered poker vlogs (extremely late to the party), before I quickly realized what the forum was actually about. It's a fenced in burning mountain of tires so prolly fine just letting it burn.

GcluelesstireburningnoobG

Exactly

It’s no surprise that our boy Dream Crusher loved that thread. Is he still posting under a different name?

people watched a lot more of "let's see what is on" - it was super common to just choose a channel and stick with it - you started watching nbc for seinfeld, so now you'd give the next show up a chance and it'd have to be particularly bad for you to bother changing the channel and seeing what one of the 2-3 other viable options were

some people would try to organize things around the shows they loved - i was always going to try to avoid any gatherings on sunday night because that meant i'd miss the simpsons and would probably never get another chance to see it - it wasn't uncommon to see adults say "can we do it wednesday instead so i don't miss seinfeld"

a whole lot more time just being alone with your thoughts - right now whenever someone has 5-10 minutes of waiting for a bus/flight/etc they'd alway pul out a phone - we wouldn't carry around books or magazines for small daily waits and would just learn to be alone with our thoughts

cell phones changed the game far more than internet imo - it used to be that you'd arrange times and locations to meet, "ok we'll all meet you at the front of the mall at 3:15" and then inevitably everyone has to make a judgement call over whether to wait a little longer for joe to show up or just let joe try to find you guys himself

once cell phones became mainstream, people stopped planning and things went from "let's meet at this exact spot at this exact time" to "i'll see you tomorrow" - this is why i ultimately caved and got a cell phone of my own in 2005 because it became very difficult to meet up with people because plans started centering around assuming any details could be hashed out in real time over the phone

i read 1% as many print media in books and magazines as i did back then - i used to read a lot of books and magazines cover to cover

but i now read far more overall, just mostly little snippets here or there from the great anthology of the internet - whenever i am able to set aside some time to read a proper book it's a real treat for me

but mostly, before social media, pman wouldn't have had access to strangers, his blog would only be known to people he knew directly in real life - and it would have much likelier been in the format of an email that would be sent out to a large group

it really wasn't until social media that people gained access to people outside their immediate social circles - yes i could have found someone's "blog" on a listserv but that would be a painstaking process where i really, really wanted it - wouldn't just come across it by accident - so you wouldn't have "lifestyle blogs" but rather very esoteric stuff like a blog dedicated to tying salmon flies

it's funny because one summer i had to clean out this storage room in our house, it'd been filled with nothing but boxes my entire life so it wasn't part of the house at all, in fact, the passageway leading to the living section of the house (very big family in a very big house) was itself blocked with boxes and this room had its own doorway leading outside - so when it was time to move and pack things up, i was assigned that room and i spent a lot of time in there - going through the contents, sorting it out and moving the stuff into either the goodwill pile or directly onto the box truck we rented

it was a period of time without any fans/air conditioning, no electronics, just used an old fm radio like this

at the time, that was one of more boring weeks in my life

but i find myself more and more these days using it as a touchstone memory, one i regularly recall with joy of simpler, easy times without all the distractions and fluff - kinda wild how much i now yearn for the mundane - where i'd find myself without anything super engaging just a few clicks away and instead need to find joy in some basic activity

you don't use the legacy site? gross

yes it's very much a containment thread at this point 😀

i wish, i miss him

this is why i love that thread - the posters are bigger lolcows than the people they discuss

Only when the functionality on the new site doesn't work--so quite often, actually.

holy **** still buzzing after last night in a 1/3 home game when my 99 pwned AQ on a 9AQ9Q board for $2700+

biggest pot of my life

oh man, if i witnessed that happen my spidey sense would be tingling

Were you worried about overquads? Gotta be something to worry about when there's nearly ~1K bb in the pot.

I wouldn't go broke with 3rd nuts in this spot without reads or bloated preflop ofc.