I dropped by the MGM yesterday for less than an hour, on my way to breakfast at Cracker Barrel (they have a good small breakfast sirloin—a bit tough, but tasty enough). The slot floor had been heavily checked over; someone's getting there very early, and I commend them, so I just farted around for a few minutes looking at the new (to me) Ultimate X video poker variant.
I found no +EV plays for it. The game doesn't seem to be as popular with regular players as the standard X, and it requires a much higher bonus in order to become +EV, a bonus that is obvious to even the most clueless normie players, so they're much less likely to abandon it in a +EV state as they would with the normal X.
I'm not going to record the trip in the running tally, as I wasn't there for very long, and I wasn't in serious work mode while I was there.
I also stopped at the bookstore. Here's the haul.
A few years ago, I decided to stop reading Stephen King; not because his quality was suffering, but because I was buying all of his new stuff in hardcover, and that gets expensive.
So now, years later, I'm catching up on his newer paperbacks.
Neal Stephenson is an excellent cyberpunk writer if you like that genre. I believe I reviewed his
Snow Crash novel in this thread a few years ago, but I'm not 100% sure about that.
I've actually read
REAMDE before, but then I loaned it out to my friend Will. He didn't read it, which was disappointing, as I thought he would like it a lot. Then, when I tried to get it back, he told me that he'd already given it back to me, which is certainly possible, as I donated a lot of books before my Las Vegas move.
In any case, I wanted to read it again, so here it is.
I like to read Cormac McCarthy, author of
No Country for Old Men,
Blood Meridian and
The Road, for his prose. It's spare and wild and brutal, more Ernest Hemingway than Hemingway could ever be. I'll check him out whenever my own writing starts to creep into flowery territory.
Back to work later today.
Last edited by suitedjustice; 07-21-2023 at 05:47 AM.