Suitedjustice's Ongoing Mid-life Crisis

On one hand, the reforestation of New England represents the death of many thousands of dreams; first of the farmers who failed, and afterwards of the Native Americans further west who lost their lands to the settlers from the east.

On the other hand, I like trees. More trees is good. And some of those put out some pretty good maple syrup.

Yesterday I played well and didn't get anywhere with it. Towards the end of the night I was moved to a table where a stack punter was in the process of dusting off his $900 stack, but I was card dead at that point and I didn't get any of it. Even a huge stack punter doesn't justify my getting involved with big-little offsuit or blackjack double-down offsuit; other savvy players would have gotten involved if I'd tried to isolate, and if I'd somehow gotten heads up, the stack punter could have still outpipped my trash hands for heaps.

The punter told a story about how he'd found hundreds of dollars on the casino floor of the MGM Springfield. That might ring a bell with regular Kind Readers of this blog. He claimed that MGM had filed a complaint with the police against him for larceny for picking the money off the floor, and years later, during a seat belt pull-over, he was arrested, fined, and briefly jailed due to an outstanding warrant for this.

I've recently renewed my license with no problems, but it was something to think about going forward. I'm guessing that there were extenuating circumstances in his case, assuming that the punter was not completely full of it. Like, why was he still playing at the casino? He claimed that he'd been banned from MGM for 3 years, and that he was back there now after that period, which is interesting.

Poker: 5 hours, -$33
Slots: 4.5 hours, +$93

Today I showed up at the casino and checked the slots for 2 hours, then I went home. I have the tight scratchiness in my throat that presages a cold coming aboard, and I don't want to show up sick on Monday morning for my Connecticut job week, though I may have no choice in the matter.

I'll rest tonight, pack and get ready tomorrow, and leave early on Monday.

Slots: 2 hours, (-$34)

Thanks to the funeral and the job prep, I worked only 20 hours this week, and I lost $4 in total. In terms of the tally, I'm going to call this an orphan half week and save it for when I have another 20 or so hour week, then I will put the two together and add them to the tally as one full week.

If anyone has complaints about that, I will be happy to take note and then do nothing.

BTW, if you want to know how the worker I'm replacing died, read the first post in this blog. He was 51. RIP brother.

My Google home page on my phone used to be filled with interesting articles written by humans, now it's all AI slop, all of the content generated—it appears—specifically for me based upon my Google searches.

I won't read any of it in solidarity for all the good writers who are losing their jobs. So now think of all the kW Hours burnt and gallons of cooling water wasted generating slop specifically for me that I'll never read.

Spoiler

Show

I have enough clean pants and socks for my trip next week, so instead of doing laundry, I went to Walmart and bought a six-pack of underwear and a six-pack of tee shirts. I needed a refresh on both in any case.

While there I also bought some SPF 70 sunblock and a can of compressed air to clean out my cellphone charge port. I had previously gone to a Verizon store and asked them if they had any charge port cleaning kits, since it's a bad idea to use metal tweezers in the port.

The clerks looked at me as if I'd asked them for a set of pink and purple polka-dotted heffalump hooves. "We don't carry anything like that." Sure, no one needs to clean the lint out of their charge ports, even though we had a big discussion about exactly that in this thread a while back.

Next to the Walmart is a Barnes & Noble; here's the latest haul.

There are very few Stephen King titles that I haven't read. Here are two of them.

Score on three classic sci-fi titles from my media bucket list. B&N hadn't carried these on my last few visits. I asked the clerk if they'd recently done inventory, and yes, they'd done that a few weeks before.

Why does that matter?

Barnes & Noble's algorithm tells them to carry qty 1 of a number of classic titles; when that title sells, it automatically reorders qty 1 of a replacement. If the title is stolen, the algorithm doesn't know that and can't reorder it.

When physical inventory comes around once a year, all of the stolen algorithm titles are set to qty 0 and replaced. It appears that someone has been stealing a lot of classic sci-fi titles from my local B&N.

When I was the manager for the mall bookstore, I used to get a good idea of how much was being stolen by the size of the replacement shipment a week or so after physical inventory. This was Las Vegas, and people stole a lot of books, in spite of my dedicated, meth-fueled efforts to discourage shoplifters.

Speaking of meth-fueled: today marks 20 years after I quit the gack for good. I was afflicted with the habit in my late 20s and into my 30s for around 7 years. Curious folks can read more about that in my [U]Nit-tastic Tales thread[/U].

There's little chance that I'd be alive today if I'd continued along that path. Very few old or late middle-aged speed freaks exist in this world. You'll see a mugshot of a tweaker, age 42, and they'll look like they're 71, and not a healthy 71.

A notable exception to that was my speed dealer, Dean. When he was 42 he looked like a Hollywood B-list actor, replete with a full set of gym muscles. In late May of 2006 Dean died of a heart attack at age 42, and he made for a good-looking corpse.

On June 7th of 2006, I ran out of meth. Over the next week I went through some horrible physical withdrawal symptoms, yet I was still too lazy and/or socially awkward to make an effort to find a new dealer.

Soon after that, I moved from Las Vegas back to Massachusetts, where meth is not nearly as prevalent. I've neglected finding a new dealer ever since.

As I've mentioned earlier in this thread, I'm a bit of a Stephen King fan, and have read most of his works from before 2005, but very few of his works since, as I just don't read for pleasure much anymore. I've read Firestarter, and would rank it in the lower half of his works. Even the movie, with George C. Scott, Drew Barrymore, and several other recognizable actors, wasn't that good. I hadn't read, nor heard of, Never Flinch. My research shows it was published in 2025, and is the fifth in a series that features a detective named Holly Gibney. Looking forward to any thoughts you have on this one, earlier works in the series, and whether it's worth diving in to.

Hope everything goes well for you in CT this week!

Congratulations on the 20-year mark, keep that going!

any sort of white powder is one thing my silly sided bent mind somehow seemed to have avoided throughout life as experienced so far
what an awesome milesone to achieve

Congrats on the 20 years. Here for the next 20.

TytyTopGun in VA! I'll let you know. I'm not a huge fan of Holly, but I don't mind her either. King seems to have developed a late-career infatuation with her, but I'm okay with that, as long as it keeps him pecking away on the word processor.

At some point I might do a list of all the post-2005 King novels that I like. There are a few.

I know of one exception to the rule.

Spoiler

Show

I've never read it because I haven't yet muscled up the gumption to steal it. Since I agree with you on a personal level about stealing books, it's kind of a Catch-22 for me.

I'll prolly just read it on .pdf some day.

Tyty fellas! I hope to live to relate my OMC adventures.

In order to keep my cousin and his business anonymous, I can't go into detail about what I'm doing, but it's outside work and I'm moving a lot. I've averaged 5 miles (8km) per day so far, and I'm sore and tired, and it's only Wednesday morning.

Is it Four Season Landscaping? :p

No answer means yes! 😀

I wouldn't have to walk that far just to make a major campaign announcement.

Yes please, though I would be using the cash tornado machine strat for that spot.

I'm a working man. I don't have time to be extremely online.

I had Thursday and today off from the manly job. I'll be back at that gig for one more day tomorrow. Today I might visit the casino, if for no other reason than to deny some equity at the slots to any other pretenders who might be thinking about moving in while I'm pursuing another project.

Next week I'm filling in at the old office, and I hope to have the energy to hit the slots afterwards. We'll see. After that I'll hit the casino for a week or two, and then consider taking some vacation time, depending on my results at that point.

Yeah, street drug dealing is tough 😉 Aside from that just wanted to say good content here as always, I wanted to comment on the extraterrestrials and the AI and the meth and various other stuff for a while, ain't nobody got time for dat though. Anyways, carry on and happy weekends all.

it's funny, i often think about how much better it is for the other aps now that i'm out of the game 😀

I'm just happy that you're still reading, my friend. This thread has the best regs.

One person can make a difference in this world :p

I hit the MGM for a 2 hour slot run and picked up $153. I'll add that to the orphan week total. Now for a few hours of sleep, an early awakening, a long commute to CT, and a long workday tomorrow.

Tomorrow on my way home I'd like to stop by the MGM for another slot run, as it's not super taxing, other than walking around a lot. I guess we'll see.

Which can be counted towards exercise, which is not a bad thing after a day of work, right!!!

I'll walk several miles before then, is all.