Today, I did an honest day's work in the office, and it went well, and I still didn't like it.

Back to poker and slot machines.

Honest work is for sycophants and morons.

Stand up and be proud suited.

Thanks, Zeno!

The system is rigged to make plenty of smart and independent people toe the line—whether they like it or not—particularly if they have dependents to care for: kids or elderly parents or disabled loved ones, as examples.

That said: being child, dependent, and debt free has made it easy for me to thumb my nose at the middle and working class work ethic. And while I don't feel that mine is a better or more desirable life than others, it's been a good fit for me.

You make a good point. Not having a spouse and children isn't for everyone (or, indeed, for many). But, I'm glad I realized early enough on that I had no interest in children. It's worked very well for me.

I don't think most people have the self-analytic ability necessary to say, "is this really my thing?". Or maybe they do, but don't invoke it. Sadly, a lot of people go with, "I guess I'm supposed to get married, have kids, etc, etc because that's the societal norm" and end up being unfulfilled..

Important to note what SJ mentions: this isn't objectively better, it's better for me. Many people who have a more "standard" life love it.

Today is a scheduled day off; however, I woke up very early, and I was feeling restless, so I hit the MGM Springfield with the hope of scooping the other slot grinders with my 6:30 AM arrival.

At least two other grinders were already on the premises when I showed up; however, I had a flash of early-morning inspiration, during which I realized that there were more than two dozen potentially +EV slot plays that I'd previously been missing out on, plays that I knew the other two grinders wouldn't make, as I hadn't seen either of them active in that particular genre of slot before today.

I immediately went to work on what proved to be an epic slot run, and I racked up an impressive number of Sklansky bucks over the next 3 hours. This being gambling, though, I found myself down a few real dollars after all of that work.

Fortunately, Wheel of Fortune and Ms. Vanna White's electronic avatar bailed me out big time in the last half hour of my session. At one point, I caught myself saying "I love you, Vanna!" out loud to the machine—me with nary a drink in me at the time.

I think I might do this slot run again early the next few Saturday or Sunday mornings.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 0 hours

MGM Springfield Slots: 3.5 hours
+$323.73

Running Poker Total: 407.5 hours, +$8916.00

Running Slot Total: 136.5 hours, +$4844.00

Grand Total: 544 hours, +$13760.00

Rolling Stone's 492rd Greatest Album of All Time: Nick of Time by Bonnie Raitt (1989)

With this album, my attempts at listening with a baby mind ran into Bonnie Raitt: pop/country/blues earth mother and smooth, assured voice of experience.

We often find Ms. Raitt's song protagonists going through some serious life or relationship business, but we also know that they'll get through it just fine, because Bonnie's been there, done that, and she knows what she's about.

Her album Nick of Time was a big hit, thanks to the enduring pop country crossover single Thing Called Love, which cycled through heavy rotation on what seemed to be 80% of all radio stations for around 25 years.

Backing that up was the single Have a Heart, which to this day can still be heard regularly inside and outside of half-empty Las Vegas Strip casinos during the early morning hours.

Did I like the album? Well, I love Ms. Raitt's slide and blues guitar work; she's one of the very best. And the honky-tonk harmonica is always a welcome addition, as it is on my favorite track on the album: The Road's My Middle Name.



Parts of the album, however, didn't age well. Some of the tracks suffer from a case of perfectly produced, overly smooth late-80's blandness.

Take Love Letter, for instance.



And the synthesizer work; we could probably do without some of that, as it sounds like it was cribbed from the incidental music from such 80's TV dramas as Thirtysomething and St. Elsewhere.



Overall, though, it's a pleasing album. Bonnie Raitt was already a critically acclaimed industry veteran when Nick of Time came out, but her commercial success had been limited up until that point. Nick of Time catapulted her into stardom, and her subsequent albums kept her there.

Rolling Stone says:

After being dumped by her previous label, blues rocker Bonnie Raitt exacted revenge with this multiplatinum Grammy-award winner, led by an on-fire version of John Hiatt’s “Thing Called Love” and the brilliant title track, a study in midlife crisis told from a woman’s perspective. Producer Don Was helped her sharpen the songs without sacrificing any of her slide-guitar fire.

I called the production overly smooth; they called it sharpened. Who's right?

Today, it was the slot machines' turn to remind me of one of the fundamental laws of gambling: higher average payouts often correlate with greater variance.

The machine brands that I added recently to my slot runs had been paying out very nicely. There is, however, a flip side to that coin.

Just after the third machine in a row fleeced me of another precious layer from my rapidly tattering coat of many hundos; Bad Day, the one-hit wonder song from a while back, came on the casino music feed.

How apropos, I thought. But I didn't turn around and go home, because I don't believe in omens.

Fortunately, I stayed and hit the poker room, and my diversified gambling portfolio helped to mitigate a portion of today's losses.

Tomorrow, I'm going to try a somewhat complicated route to the casino, one that involves more country backroads and fewer major highway interchanges, as the latter are starting to become tiresome.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 8 hours
+$392.00

MGM Springfield Slots: 2.5 hours
(-$614.20)

Running Poker Total: 415.5 hours, +$9308.00

Running Slot Total: 139 hours, +$4229.80

Grand Total: 554.5 hours, +$13537.80

I can't remember if you mentioned it. Are you tracking comps as part of your win/loss?

I do not track them for the blog, golddog. Some combination of laziness and a sense of entitlement keeps me from doing it.

Great content as always Mr. suited. Careful not to hit the dimensional portal though, glgl.

Thanks, Fire!

Someone has helpfully marked the portal with orange cones and wet floor signs.

Another mixed day. Late in the poker session, I was up a little bit, until I made a loose call for heaps vs a serial bluffer, who had made his backdoor flush on the river.

Serial bluffers are allowed to have it sometimes.

Back at it again early today, in order to get a seat at the excellent promo that hasn't paid me yet.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 6 hours
(-$181.00)

MGM Springfield Slots: 3 hours
+$283.75

Running Poker Total: 421.5 hours, +$9127.00

Running Slot Total: 142 hours, +$4513.55

Grand Total: 563.5 hours, +$13640.55

What's the promo. And do you know the people that won the hours played promo and what it took to cash?

I don't know who won the June hours played promo or how many hours they played; I missed cashing the minimum by a few hours, as I flaked out and went AWOL for a good chunk of the month.

The July promo runs for 8 hours per day. The high hand of each hour draws a prize between $300 and $10000, weighted towards the smaller prizes.

Average prize is $696 per hour. Given that the room carries a few more than an hundred people on average during the promo hours, the promo adds around $6.75/hour per player, which isn't too shabby.

And I hit a $500 high hand prize today, which was very nice, as I wasn't playing my A game, and I couldn't talk myself into playing my A game, so I planned on leaving early.

Tomorrow is a scheduled day off, but instead I'm probably going to drop in at the MGM and spend a few hours looking at slots, as I've just today learned another variant of Ultimate X video poker, so I'm excited about that.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 3.5 hours
+$460.00

MGM Springfield Slots: 3 hours
+$33.25

Running Poker Total: 425 hours, +$9587.00

Running Slot Total: 145 hours, +$4546.80

Grand Total: 570 hours, +$14133.80

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.

I've not heard of Stephenson, and when looking at your picture, I first read the title of his book as REMADE. Then, when you typed it out above, I initially read it as README, before realizing it actually was REAMDE. Without giving away any key plot elements, is the title intentionally misinterpretable, or does REAMDE actually mean something?

As for King, I read many of his early works years ago. For years, I thought that I had read all of his early works other than Christine and Cujo, which I had intentionally avoided, as the plot line seemed just too silly for me (as opposed to books like Tommyknockers, which was definitely a silly concept, but a book I thoroughly enjoyed). Upon review of King's entire catalogue, though, I find there are additional works from his early period that I have't read (Rage and The Long Walk [unless these were two of the Bachman books], and the Dark Tower series). I got away from King for several years, but in the past couple years have read a few more recent works (11/22/63, Cell, and The Institute), all of which I thoroughly enjoyed. I hadn't heard of the works you purchased, and they aren't listed in the catalogue I found with a simple google search, but that only runs through 2020. Are they more recent?

Love King, but also am behind on the newest stuff. It is interesting that you said the plotline to Cujo seemed too silly, as it has to be at minimum in the top 3 or so most "realistic to happen" novels he has haha.

For "most realistic," and also the one that scared me the most, I'd have to go with "Misery."

REAMDE is a misspelled email subject line for a virus in the book that threatens a World of Warcraft type MMO. It should be READ ME, as you suspected.

The main character is the creator of the MMO, which in the book is much bigger than WOW ever was, and the gold farming exchange within the game accounts for a not-insignificant chunk of the real world economy, which pulls in Chinese underworld and Russian mafia figures.

REAMDE came out in 2011, around 4 weeks after the Ready Player One novel, which was also based around an eccentric world-dominating MMO creator. It's interesting to note that in popular art these sorts of high concept ideas often come out in pairs, particularly in movies like Deep Impact/Armageddon, Antz/A Bug's Life, The Prestige/The Illusionist, and so forth.

The two King books from the picture both came out after 2020. Around that time, I'd caught up with almost all of his books, so I took a break from then until around now, so I didn't have to buy everything new from him in hardcover.

Cujo is the only older King book that I haven't read. King admitted that he doesn't remember writing it, because he was far gone on coke and booze at the time, which is not exactly a ringing endorsement for the book.

I'll get around to Cujo eventually.

Saturday was not a good day. I didn't play well at all, and the results fell into line with that. I'll need to fix some leaks going forward.

On a good note: I actually did play enough hours in June to mincash the promo for $100; I had calculated that I had fallen a few hours short.

The floor tracked me down and made sure that I got paid. That's some damn good customer service.

On the slot front, I found a very rare +EV $50 video poker play ($2 per credit x 5 credits per hand x 5 hands. Getting dealt 3 of a kind or better in this spot with the multipliers in place could be very lucrative, but I completely whiffed it.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 5.5 hours
(-$564.00)

MGM Springfield Slots: 2.5 hours
(-$44.27)

Running Poker Total: 430.5 hours, +$9023.00

Running Slot Total: 147.5 hours, +$4502.27

Grand Total: 578 hours, +$13525.27

Good choice, plus completes the trifecta with the pretty rare King "very good screen adaptation".

Which are the other two in your opinion?

Surely Pet Sematary has to be one of them?

For the other I'd go with The Stand.

Personally not a fan of either (of the 2) Pet Sematary adaptations, nor The Stand, tbh. I know King hates Kubrick's take on The Shining, but come on, top notch imho. Others have to be The Shawshank Redemption, Stand by Me, It, Misery and perhaps The Green Mile, The Dead Zone and The Running Man as honorable mentions...

I meant the trifecta of realistic, scary, and has a good film adaptation, not that there are only 3 (but def way more bad than good).

I def have soft spots for Pet Sematary and The Stand (haven't watched the new miniseries).

I like dubnjoy's list, plus would recommend 1922 and Gerald's Game, two solid Netflix adaptations that went under the radar, both versions of It, Doctor Sleep, and definitely The Mist, though wouldn't be for everyone.

Also absolutely adore Creepshow.