my tool sense about framing is mostly related to the space between objects and how to fasten them together

You have no idea how much a framing carpenter makes in Austin. The good custom framers go to work in limousines with a 2nd chauffeur driving their pickup truck.

Look up depth of field, and movie camera lenses. It becomes quite technical. Also good to know about in still photography. There are limits to what can be achieved.

Austin has some great bbq places. As far as carpentry goes some of the bbq places in Austin (and elsewhere in Texas) look as though they will collapse in a heap within a day or two. So get your bbq to go is my advice.

jedi
redeye
depth of field measured in eff stop every time i choke down swear words

Once they develop a pinhole movie camera, worries about depth of field will be a thing of the past.

I'll try to return to 40 hours this week: 10 hours each on Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.



I appreciate the insight, POWERlimp. The possibility that our inner universe is also vast is intriguing and gives me hope. Thanks for reading! As they say at the meetings: keep coming back.

Lenses and lensing are beyond my technical abilities, but I do appreciate the results when they look good.

Blocking used to be my nemesis, and something I would try to flummox and thwart at every turn, but that was back in high school when I was a defensive lineman on our football team.

we'll cross that bridge when we get there

SJ, are there any advantage slots you'd recommend for a slots noob who is going to Vegas for poker, but may occasionally want to try a different +EV game?

Hi Sheep. GL in LV!

Cash Falls can be fun.



Check out the 2nd column. See the blue frame around it? That's what you're looking for. When you spin, the coins marked 125, 100 (I think, as it's partially obscured) and 75 credits in column 2 will stay in place and the Q at the bottom of column 2 will disappear to be replaced, hopefully, with a coin with a credit value on it. Or more often you'll whiff and get junk there.

See those two yellow dots on the bottom of of the column? That means you'll get two spins to try to fill in the last coin on the bottom of column 2, where the Q is meow. If you do, then you'll win the value of the 125+100+75+the 4th coin value in credits.

However, whenever you see a blue frame in there, all the credits currently in the blue frame need to add up to 6x your cost in order to be worth it, as the odds of getting a coin in the last spot are worse than 6:1 (but the sought-after final coin should make up for the difference). So 125+100+75 is only 300 credits, so your spin cost needs to be 1/6th, or 50 credits or fewer. It would be a play for 50, but not for a single credit more. You can have 1, 2, or 3 tries left, depending on the number of little yellow dots at the bottom of the column. That doesn't matter. You'd like to hit on the first try, but if you don't, it's still a +EV play on the 2nd or 3rd attempts.

If there's no blue frame and the column is filled except for one spot, that means that the last person whiffed on that spin and everything in that column is going to reset on the next spin, so leave it alone.

Rarely, there's more than one column with a blue frame around it; in that case, you just add up every coin within however many blue-framed columns there are and see if it adds up to 6x or more the cost of your spin. If it does, then play it until you win and/or lose and it doesn't add up any more. It's only ever going to cost a few spins if you're unlucky.

On the Ultimate Fire Link version of Cash Falls, the coins inside the blue frame(s) only need to add up to 5x your cost, or if there's a Fire Link coin inside of a blue frame, play it no matter what, as that can be big money.

Check the bet amounts carefully, they can range form 50c to $150 per spin. Each bet amount gives you a different screen to check, so make sure you're checking every possibility on each machine.

Good Luck!

From the lack of updates, you might guess that I haven't returned to work. I'm still having some trouble getting out the door. When I get back to the casino, I will post about it.

Thanks so much for that write-up. I may give it a try spin.

The next movie I watched was The Red Shoes from 1948. Martin Scorsese picked it as one of his top 5 desert island films, and I vaguely recall other famous film auteurs being enamored with it, so I added it to the list.

Come to find out, the film is all about ballet, and I've always placed that genre on the same list with opera and NASCAR as Entertainment Forms That Don't Interest Me In the Slightest.

I mean, I have boundless respect for the incredibly talented and near-anorexic women and men who destroy their feet and toes, push themselves past the point of agony, are screamed at hourly by sadistic choreographers, live off fast food salaries, room together in slums and cheap motel dives, and eat bulk ramen and millet—when they eat anything at all—for their art, but all that dainty hopping and leaping and twirling to insipid chamber music just bores me stupid.

Instead of spurning it, I kind of fell in love with the movie pretty quickly. The plot has new and unknown composer Julian and poor little rich girl Vicky, both filled with boundless talent and potential, finding themselves thrown into a whirlwind chaos of high-stakes live performances, massive egos, and vicious public puncturing of same, within a famous ballet troop touring London, Paris and Monaco, filmed in beautiful color by co-directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.


Sure, it looks great, until you find yourself at the top of the stairs, completely covered in ticks.

The ballet performance within the movie is called The Red Shoes, based on a fairy tale by Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen, about a vain girl who loves dancing so much that she skips her adopted mother's funeral to go to a ball and show off her fancy red shoes, after which she is cursed to always wear the red shoes and to never stop dancing.

The movie is analogous to the fairy tale, wherein Lermontov, the head of the ballet troop, plays the part of the red shoes to his dancers, bringing them great fame and accolades, but never allowing them to stop dancing, by seeing to it that they don't have lives outside of the troop. The dance, to Lermontov, is the be-all and end-all of life. This is what first attracts him to Vicky Page, the ballet ingenue, when she gives him the answer that he's looking for by turning his question back on him.


Also, Anton Walbrook does the single most elegant spit-take here that I've ever seen.

Speaking of elegant, many of the male roles here are played—shall we say—daintily.





Several of the male characters are quite probably gay, is what I'm saying, and it's encouraging to see them in a movie in 1948, and to find them not being mocked, or portrayed as villains. In that way, this movie was far ahead of its time. Mind you, these characters are often shallow, ego-driven and bitchy, but no more so than the straight supporting characters in the troop. Everyone is more or less a prima donna in this movie, with the lone exception being Vicky Page, who is of course the biggest talent in the bunch.

I found arguments online about Lermontov's sexuality, because he's openly jealous of Vicky and Julian's romantic relationship, and he ends up firing Julian over it, but I still believe that he's either gay or asexual. Lermontov covets Vicky because he's the red shoes, and he wants her to dance and only dance and to never have lovers or any other distractions.

After Julian gets fired, he confronts Lermontov and says "You're jealous of her." and Lermontov answers. "Yes, I am. But in a way that you will never understand." I didn't find that way to be amorous or romantic, but I could be wrong.

Finally, there's a 15 minute slice of the ballet performance in Act II, and it's just lovely to look at.





The filmmakers cheat quite a bit and do things with projections and camera tricks that could never be done on stage, but that's all right. We're meant to realize that we're looking at dazzling feats of movie magic for that time, and it works as a great and lavish combining of the stage and screen.

I did not expect to like this movie, but I was wrong about that. It's very well written and gorgeous to watch, and I would recommend it.

I think you are doing the right thing. Live poker was never meant to be turned into a factory job with a time clock.

I think that the prospect of jumping back in for a 10 hour shift was intimidating. Last night, I showed up at the casino late and picked up $100 from the poker room for last month's hours promotion, but I didn't play poker. Instead, I ran an early AM slot sweep.

Tonight, I'm going to shoot for a 3 hour poker session, then a 6 hour session tomorrow, then an 8 hour session Friday. That's the goal.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 0 hours (promotional $ pickup)
+$100.00
MGM Springfield Slots: 4 hours
+$78.25

2024 Running Poker Total: 235.5 hours, +$1323.00
2024 Running Slot Total: 127 hours, +$5625.38

2024 Grand Total: 362.5 hours, +$6948.38

Baby steps at first, you got this friend