@Black Aces 518:
I liked the Doctor Sleep movie although it's completely different from The Shining. Loved the movie The Mist but haven't watched the series yet. Intrigued by the Creepshow, don't know what it is.

@Dubnjoy000:
Interesting take, although I disagree with "It" (both the old and new one) being a "good" screen adaptation. Not that it is bad in itself, but it doesn't do justice to the book regarding the psychological fear imo.

I'll list a few of my favorite Stephen King movie and TV movie adaptations here, in no particular order, with the caveat that I've missed a lot of the streaming content that's come out in the last few years. Assume that I'm covering an original adaptation and not a remake.

The Shining: I love the book and I love the Kubrick movie and, having seen and read both many times, I don't think that they're terribly different from one another.

What might have driven King to hate the movie was Kubrick's (and Jack Nicholson's) portrayal of Jack as a psychopath and a manipulator almost right from the beginning, and of movie Jack sort of welcoming the Hotel's intrusion into his family life—he's like: now I can finally cut loose like I've been wanting to for so very long—whereas King's Jack in the book was a wavering alcoholic with a tortured conscience, a broken man who was too damaged to fight off the Hotel's nefarious influence.

The Mist: That movie's ending hit hard. I knew the novella ending very well going into the movie. The novella closes with the main characters stopping somewhere on their drive south from Maine with the words, "I'm going to bed now. But first I'm going to kiss my son and whisper two words in his ear... Two words that sound a bit alike. One of them is Hartford. The other is hope."

I won't spoil it, but the movie did not end on that note.

Stand by Me: Great movie, from start to finish. All four of the main kids became stars, as well as the villain, Ace Merrill, played by Kiefer Sutherland.

The Stand: I have a weakness for the original 90's miniseries, with Blue Öyster Cult's The Reaper playing the minute the virus gets out, as well as a great ensemble cast with many interesting characters, not to mention Randall Flagg's mullet lording it over post-apocalyptic Las Vegas.

Creepshow: The first one of the series; with King growing alien furze all over himself, and Leslie Nielsen burying a couple alive up to their necks just above the low tide line, and taunting them via closed circuit TV as the tide slowly comes in, and the evil business tycoon who's a neat freak getting assailed by millions of cockroaches. All good stuff.

Pet Sematary: The resurrected toddler's maniacal laughter...

Children of the Corn: The whole town, surrounded by high corn fields for dozens of miles around, with its adult population murdered, and its children in the hands of a psychopathic Lovecraftian god. HE WANTS YOU TOO, MALACHI!

Honorable Mention: Shawshank Redemption: I liked it, but I didn't fall head over heels for it and proclaim it to be one of the top 3 movies of all time, as some critics and fans did.

Same here : I enjoyed it, but the film buff/critic in me cannot assess that it is a good movie/series, while still appreciating it

Idem : I never got the EXTREME fandom that Shawshank has received, albeit I did enjoy it/believe it to be a solid if not just good movie

Creepshow is a 1982 movie that is 5 different horror stories presented in a comic book style with some campy effects and lighting. Two of the 5 are based on King short stories, and he stars in one of the 5. Love it, but dunno how much of it is nostalgia. My kids also loved it, although The Crate scared the piss out of them. They made a series recently that aired on AMC then Shudder, which I enjoyed a good amount though, as anthologies often do, the quality varied fairly widely. A couple of the recent eps also adapted King stories.

I went and saw this solo on a business trip and literally just sat staring at the screen for the entirety of the credits.

I never saw the Mist, outside of the final 5 minutes, randomly. That Dead Can Dance song is enough to give me shivers on its own, every single God damn time I listen to it

how does Carrie not make that list?

My list was quick and dirty, and I missed a few good ones.

I liked Carrie. The final destructive act was great, but you had to sit through a bit of writerly melodrama to get to it.

Directed by Brian de Palma as well, forgot about that one as well.

I woke up in the wee hours of Monday morning, feeling restless, so I decided to try to scoop the slot grinders at MGM by showing up at 4:30AM.

Even that early, the +EV slots were already cleaned out, but the X poker machines were not. I went to work on those.

After two hours, I made another quick slot sweep and found a Treasure Box slot that was now mildly +EV at the very high denomination of $25 per spin.

The deal with Treasure Box is that you have to get through 6 keys in order to open the treasure box and hit the recurring jackpot. Each time you hit a key symbol on the reels, it counts those keys down from 6. If you hit as many or more treasure symbols on the reels as you have keys left, it triggers the jackpot.

Typically, you never see more than 2 treasure symbols at once on the reels, so realistically you need to be down to 2 keys or 1 key in order to hit the jackpot.

The game becomes +EV when you have 4 keys left to go. And that's what I had to start, 4 keys. I blithely fed $500 into the machine.

3 minutes later, the $500 was gone, and I still had 4 keys left. I had hit zero key symbols. I shoved in another $500.

5 minutes after that, the next $500 was gone, and I still had 3 keys left, which meant that I needed to hit at least another key, and then hit 2 treasure symbols at once, as the best case scenario. I'd brought $1500 with me, so I shoved in my last $500. My hands were now starting to shake.

With around $200 left in the machine; 8 spins, I hit a key and went down to 2 keys. With around $100 left; 4 spins, I went down to 1 key.

On my last 4 spins, I hit neither a key nor a treasure symbol. The ATM was around 50 feet away—assuming that my bank didn't object to my casino withdrawal, as it sometimes did—and the machine was now in an extremely +EV state at its highest denomination. There was nothing to stop another grinder from swooping down and taking the play if I got up. The casino floor was still fairly empty, but was it empty enough?

Desperate, I opened my wallet and found in it my previous slot cashout ticket with $89 on it. I'd forgotten to put it into the machine at the beginning, having put in only cash.

$89: 3 spins left, and my stomach felt like I'd stepped off a high building, then suddenly changed my mind about that decision: whiff...whiff...treasure symbol.

The payout was $1315; a loss, but much better than losing the whole $1575, my entire daily bankroll. And here's where I made my first big mistake. I hit the cashout button.

Slot handpays start at $1200. I'd thought that they'd started somewhere between $600-$1000, but I had been wrong. That level of ignorance is a pretty big leak for someone who wants to grind slots on a regular basis.

I waited for the attendant to show up, and then I made my second big mistake. Handpays automatically trigger tax paperwork, and it doesn't matter if you'd lost money on the play, like I had.

When I'd started playing slots, I had resolved to pay all handpay taxes on the spot, in order to keep any red flags from showing up in my tax history.

I paid the taxes, and I only received $928 back for my troubles, thus compounding my losses. What I should have done was played the game down to less than $1200, then cashed out.

Another lesson that I've taken away from Monday is that I'm no longer going to make the big $25 and $40 per spin plays. Plays like that often require a recurring jackpot cashout of higher than $1200 in order to break even, and when that cashout is reduced to $900 something through handpays, the game becomes -EV.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 0 hours

MGM Springfield Slots: 4.5 hours
(-$394.90)

Running Poker Total: 430.5 hours, +$9023.00

Running Slot Total: 152 hours, +$4107.37

Grand Total: 582,5 hours, +$13130.37

I just had a shower thought: I could have left a few dollars in credits in the machine while I went to the ATM, then if anyone tried to mack on it, I could threaten to call security if they didn't get off the machine.

Still, the casino hates these sorts of kerfuffles, and that's why during the last generation of +EV slots, they started banning slot grinders from the premises. And it would be a big disaster for me if I was banned from the MGM.

Super confused on that, since the W2G should be based on the specific spin, not money in vs money out. The machine generally just freezes once that happens. Did that maybe happen and you didn't realize as you hit cashout and just thought it was b/c you cashed out?

Also dunno why just putting the W2G on your taxes and offsetting with any gambling losses would be a red flag, but I'm not a tax professional. Glad you hit it for the save though!! GLGL!

Sucks for the loss, but very compelling story telling nonetheless

Another bad session, ending with a preflop all-in AA vs KK vs KK, where I was one of the KKs. Hopefully my luck turns around soon.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 3.5 hours
(-$427.00)

MGM Springfield Slots: 2 hours
+$84.43

Running Poker Total: 434 hours, +$8596.00

Running Slot Total: 154 hours, +$4191.80

Grand Total: 588 hours, +$12787.80

Rolling Stone's 491st Greatest Album of All Time: Fine Line by Harry Styles

Journeyman BBV moderator Sheep86 had warned me that this album was coming.

Sheep86 shares my aversion to repetitive noises—in particular, the repetition of songs, which was something our US military used for psychological warfare in their 1989 capture of Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega. Military intelligence units blasted repetitive rock music day and night into the Vatican's diplomatic mission building, where Noriega had holed himself up, until he gave in and surrendered, having only held out for a few days.

I held out against a similar barrage for a longer time during my office job, but I was able to at least go home to a quiet apartment after enduring 8 hours of it for 5 days a week, whereas Noriega had it blasting at him 24/7. Still, I was probably no happier in my situation than he was in his.

The instrument of my discomfort was a corporate pop station, Mix 93.1, a self-proclaimed variety station.

You can't see me, but I am making the scare quotes gesture with my fingers around "mix" and "variety" very ****ing hard at this moment.

The station has a very small inventory of hit songs, and they play them over and over again. A quick search of the recently played songs shows Ed Sheeran's Bad Habits being played at 7:01 AM, and again at 9:51 AM, and Dua Lipa's Levitating played at 3:59 AM, and again at 8:59 AM.

Does that seem so bad? I'm telling you that it adds the **** up, cumulatively, hearing the same few insipid factory pop songs twice or three times every single workday as the months and years roll along.

The rest of my former co-workers love that station. They're playing it right now. They play it at home. And in the car. It blows my mind. It makes me think again of General Noriega, in sympathy. Obviously, I'm the outlier in this spot.

All of this overly long introduction is to emphasize that I could not go into the Harry Styles album, Fine Lines, with a baby mind. Thanks to the "variety" station, I have heard two of the songs on the album, Adore You and Watermelon Sugar, literally hundreds of times each.

There is no baby mind left in me for them, so I set about with trying to keep the sense of wonder for the rest of songs on the album. And I found two tracks that I really like.

One is Sunflower, Vol. 6, which has some very cool and innovative instruments, technical tricks, and neat sounds behind it...kind of a reggae beat with a sitar, steel drums, electronic beeps, backwards tracks and Harry having fun with the vocals.



Coming right after that is Canyon Moon, which sounds like a catchy early to mid-70's Paul Simon track, with acoustic guitar strumming, handclaps, whistling and a nifty baseline.



These two songs should have been the heavily overplayed singles, instead of Adore You and Watermelon Sugar; but then again, would that have ruined them for me?

It's hard to tell: I hate Adore You much more than I dislike Watermelon Sugar, possibly because I thought that Adore You was an Ed Sheeran song, until I saw it on this Harry Styles album.

Tyler Johnson, a cowriter on Fine Line, also writes for Ed Sheeran, and there are similarities with Styles and Sheeran on some of the songs from this album, songs that I like less, that is.

We will be encountering Mr. Sheeran again on this journey, and I'll have more to say about him at that time.

Harry Styles, however, is an obvious young talent, and I wouldn't mind running into his songs again, if he's on this list with other albums.

Rolling Stone Says:
Harry Styles achieved pop greatness with One Direction, but he got even deeper on his own. On Fine Line, he stakes his claim as one of his generation’s most savagely imaginative musical minds.

Sure, but how much help did he have from the other two guys—the industry regs—with writing the album?

Given the fact that those two hits were released in 2021 and 2020, respectively, that is quite concerning. For the record, I love "Levitating"; but if I would be forced to listen to it multiple times a day (or even once a day) for months, I'd prolly grow to dislike it and would need time to recover before I could start appreciating it again.

Yeah, this is not bad.

This is interesting, I seem to recall you saying you’re playing the slots not carded which I find somewhat surprising. I’d imagine you would’ve generated a decent amount of comped freeplay and cash back along with some decent mailers by now.

Was in Vegas for a couple of weeks and just caught up on your posts. Glad you’re back at it. I was at Dowtown Grand (old Lady Luck) for three of my nights.

They had a quarter 9/5 DDB at their bartops. Bad base game but they had a royal progressive close to and over $2400 and an Aces with a kicker progressive that went up to to $667. The game I believe was close to 103% with those progressives.

I grinded it pretty hard, didn’t hit the royal but did hit the AWAK and a few low quads aces no kicker and regular quads to come out ahead. Made me think of your epic post when you chased a nickel progressive while on meth for like 20 hours straight next door at Gold Strike and ran into Whitey Bulger.

Also met a friend there who does hustle advantage slots. Saw her find a WOF at an advantage hit it in like one spin for a $140 progressive. Was cool to watch but I don’t visit enough to start playing these and deal with the variance.

Yeah, the station has gone way overboard with Levitating, for years on end now.

If you recall the song structure, it's incredibly pedestrian and repetitive: just the same short bass riff over and over again, interspersed with an accompanying simple synth sting that punctuates the lyrics.

dan...
dant dant
dant dant
dant dant

dan...
dant dant
da da dan dant dant

(repeat)

I have been using my card lately. My first card had a problem with the stripe, so I replaced it. For that big $25/spin play I probably coined in around $3000, which got me $18 in free slot play and likely the equivalent in food or shopping comps.

The Wheel of Fortune High Rollers and the Buffalo Ascensions at the MGM are now so swamped by grinders that I haven't seen a play on either in weeks, and I've been there at 5AM, noon, 8PM, midnight...just about around the clock, looking for a sweet grinder-free time window that does not exist.

There is always at least one Asian grinder from a stable of a dozen or so on site, 24/7.

It would be insensitive of me to speculate that all of the Asian grinders look to be Han Chinese. I'd probably have as little luck telling between Belgian and Dutch people by sight as telling between Han People and other East Asians, but nevertheless my gut insists that it's true, for whatever that's worth, which is likely nothing.

I haven't reported the numbers here yet, but I've been playing poker and suffering through a serious losing streak. My drinking has also gotten out of hand. These two results are likely correlated; so, away with the drinking for the rest of August.

Today, I'm drying out: writing, reading, playing video games, listening to music, and being sober, with caffeine as my only crutch.

I'll return to the tables tomorrow, and then likely catch you up on the numbers after that.

Well if curious the easy WOF and Buffalo plays was found out Silver Sevens just off the strip quite easily. She spin them off while I played a BJ pays 2 to 1 on BJ coupon from American Casino Guide.

Oh wow, having issues loading pages on 2+2, the server is super slow. Didn’t even realize the above post actually posted and wasn’t able to edit my terrible grammar.

Rolling Stone's 490th Greatest Album of All Time: Heart Like A Wheel by Linda Ronstadt (1974)

Linda Ronstadt was a huge act in the 70's and 80's, selling over 100 million albums and selling out the biggest arenas in the world on a regular basis. Like her fellow megastars Elvis and Frank Sinatra, Ronstadt didn't write many of her songs, but instead used her incredible voice and talent to put her stamp on whatever she performed.

Heart Like a Wheel is considered to be her breakthrough album. Her two big hits on it are You're No Good and When Will I Be Loved. Her style on both of these songs is mid-70's country rock, a subgenre that had invaded conventional rock stations at the time under the auspices of bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd, Molly Hatchet, The Outlaws, Charlie Daniels, The Oak Ridge Boys, and some of the early Eagles tracks.

When Will I Be Loved is a cover of an Everly Brothers song from 1960. I'd never actually thought of the brothers as country rock pioneers; viewed them only as wholesome, very white crooners and blues dabblers, but now I can hear the country twang in the original.



I think Ronstadt made the superior version, but that's a matter of subjective taste. Your mileage may vary.



Much of the rest of Heart Like a Wheel comes across as beautiful, heartsick, country music from the old school; one exception being the title track, which sounds like a folk song from Ronstadt's early days with the group Stone Poneys, with whom she put out the (Mike Nesmith penned) hit Different Drum in 1967.

The most representative song on Heart Like a Wheel, then—aside from the two hits—is probably Faithless Love, with its simple, lovely banjo line and its seamless mix of folk and country elements.



Rolling Stone Says:

Linda Ronstadt completed her transition from California hippie-folk darling to soft-rock queen on her chart-topping fifth album, covering Hank Williams, Buddy Holly, Little Feat, and Kate and Anna McGariggle on the gorgeous title track. Her version of the Betty Everett oldie “You’re No Good” hits a perfect mix of desire and paranoia.

They pretty much nailed it. Except with this album I might replace the descriptor "soft rock" with "country rock." To me, 70's soft rock was more in the lines of James Taylor, Christopher Cross, Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show, Jimmy Buffett, and later Eagles stuff, but that's probably a minor quibble.

I like Linda's cover version, but slightly prefer the original. That's coming from a big Everly Brothers fan though.

Do you have a link to the full list with all entries neatly on one page, without huge images, endless scrolling and other modern cruelties? I cannot find a good website for that anymore.

Here's the link that I've been using. Somehow it has the #500 Arcade Fire album incorporated into its text, but it still works fine for getting to the full list.

I can't attest to the list's scrollability, though, as I don't peek at the next album on the list until I've finished reviewing the current one; like I know now what #489 will be, but not #488. This keeps me away from doing premature research on the upcoming albums beyond the next in an effort to preserve a baby mind for the first listen.

I always thought this was a monster album. It would be at least in the top 100 of any list I made, higher in specialized lists.

Btw, on the original vinyl, when will I be loved and willin were presented as a continuous cut.