The invention we need is a snap-on port protector with a hinge that will fit on various phone cases.

Potential problems with that include the edges of the protector catching on material inside your pockets, and also having to open it every time you want to charge your phone, which could be more tedious over time than just cleaning the port every few months.

On the phone charging issue. When the Verizon guy de-gunked my port, he also suggested a wireless charger. Might be an idea rather than getting the port replaced.

Naturally, I still haven't gotten around to finding one.

I'm currently using a wireless charger.
The downside is that it takes longer to charge. The hidden upside is that charging more slowly is better for the lifetime of the battery. Besides, I charge it when I sleep so I don't really care if it's slower.

But the main benefit of wireless charging is that it doesn't loosen up the port. The 2 phones I had before my current one, I ditched them because the port was too loose and I couldn't keep the wire well hooked. I was regularly taking 10-20 min just to find creative ways to keep the wire stable and well connected.

Nowadays, I only use a wire when I need a quick charge.

Same things about my last two girlfriends.

Lack of poker updates!

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

-Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

I've played five poker sessions since I last posted numbers: three awful losing sessions and two frustrating breakeven sessions. The casino floor is swarming with advantage slot players, and I've mostly broken even on the few slot plays I've found.

My funds and credit are running out. I didn't post about this because I was employing the denial stage of grief. I have since moved on past anger and into bargaining. If I can just hit something, a few good slot or poker sessions, I can turn this thing around.

Stick around and find out.

"Tight rolls are better for sushi than for poker."
- Me

Well spoken written.

I've decided that today will be an online tourney day—my first and enduring love in poker. I'm playing a bunch of freeroll sattys on ACR, trying to turn a toothpick into a lumberyard. Tonight, I'll play the two $11 Bosky tourneys. Those carry a big bonus for getting to the final table on both in the same night.

Sorry to hear that. Good luck in your next session!

Thanks. Completely my fault. Just like the time before that, and the time before that, and the time before that.

I mincashed the Boskys, but I also found a (virtual) bag for Day 2 of today's $50k gtd Dime, with mystery KO bounties ranging up to $5k, so we'll see.

I bailed on a bucket list classic movie today after 30 minutes: John Ford's The Searchers.

In it, John Wayne plays Ethan, a proud ex-Confederate soldier, in typical John Wayne fashion: as an authoritarian whenever he's in charge, and an iconoclast whenever someone else is trying to give the orders.

When our hero isn't busy berating his 1/8th Cherokee adopted nephew Martin for existing, calling him a halfbreed, and reminding him that he isn't really his nephew, Wayne's Ethan is tasked with roaming through director John Ford's beloved Monument Valley, between Utah and Arizona, looking for the "savage" Comanches (pronounced as Comanch in the movie) who massacred his brother's family and kidnapped his 9-year-old niece.

The Indians are headed by Scar, played by a blue-eyed, German-born Henry Brandon.



And it wasn't long before I was done with this movie. What I saw was beautiful to look at, and I wish I could have been around to tell the the writers to go **** themselves.

The Dry 2024 Challenge Update

January: ✓
February: ✓
March: ✓
April: ✓
May: ✓
June: ✓
July: ✓
August: ✓
September: ✓
October: ✓
November: UNLOCKED

I'm getting into the final stretch of this dry year, and I'm busy overseeing a bad financial turn, and my luck seems to be completely and permanently lost, but I have something going for me with my sobriety, and I'm happy that my thoughts have not often turned to the sauce for solace from my troubles. The passage of time has helped to reduce a good portion of that connection.

Not that I haven't thought of drinking from time to time, but the impulse is only an echo of what it used to be, and for that I am grateful.

And yes, I'm still grudgingly getting on my knees and thanking my unknown higher power once a month, and asking it for help to continue with the program. The Twelve Steppers would want me to do this every day, but screw that noise.

I'm down four belt notches since the beginning of the year (I don't have a scale, so I don't know how much weight that translates into, maybe 35 lbs (16 kg?)), and I'm just moving around and doing normal things more easily, which is good, because I'm going to have to move around and make some money. Next week I cover for my former bosses at the old office while they take a vacation, so that will at least provide a week's guaranteed salary.

This is about as good an update as there can be that lacks oodles of winnings from poker and advantage slots. WTG, SJ!!!

twas an awesome update!
always thought a notch was an inch
how tall are you sj?

i also insert the buckle prong four doors down from a while ago
after months of empty calorie reduction
mostly beer but didn't quit

rarely weigh me as well, but happened to see 220 on a time scale early 2020

now we have a growing pup and i've become the weekly weigh-in tare while holding her
been hovering around 185 which would be about the same amount of mass as your estimate
as for her she hasn't quite yet tipped fifty and is captively vapid

Thanks guys!

I am around 6'1" (185 cm), but I'm shrinking as I get older.

I just finished reading The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, written in 1974, and considered by many critics to be one of the best modern science fiction novels.

The story is set 1000 years in the future, and two features about the book struck me. The first is that the heroes of the story mostly comprise a small group of high-ranking barons, dukes, admirals, senators, and ministers from an autocratic, all-encompassing galactic empire.

The book came out 3 years before Star Wars broke the box office, and the movie's empire got me wondering if that was instrumental in souring sci-fi writers and fans on the concept of imperialists as protagonists, given the plain villainy of Lord Vader, protégé to Star Wars' twisted, evil Emperor, and the empire's various militant lackeys, stormtroopers, and corrupt crime bosses.

But then I remembered Isaac Asimov's galactic empire in his early Foundation books from the 50s, and that empire was not exactly a benevolent operation, either.

Moving forward into the 60s finds us the reading through the galactic empire of Frank Herbert's Dune series, the emperor of which proves to be a backstabbing Machiavellian tyrant. He is replaced on the throne thanks to the efforts of our protagonist's fanatical, bloodthirsty, jihadist followers, and Paul Atreides's new galactic empire is run in a manner similar to Iran under the Ayatollahs.

So yeah, not many great imperial endorsements out there in Sci-Fi land.

Now, in The Mote in God's Eye, I ran into a cast of characters sporting all manner of five-jointed monikers, such as His Grace the Lord Commander Roderick Blaine, or Admiral Sir Vladimir Richard George Plekhanov, or His Imperial Highness Richard Stefan Merrill, Viceroy for His Majesty's Dominions Beyond the Coalsack, and I wondered: are these muckety mucks really the good guys in this story?

Indeed they are.

I call them the good guys because women's careers are marginalized in this particular period of this empire. This imbalance of power is vaguely explained away as being due to fertile women's numbers having been greatly reduced during one of the civil wars a few hundred years before the story commences.

Early on, we find ourselves following two expedition ships populated by thousands of scientists and military personnel, exactly one of whom is a woman, she being the Lady Sandra (Sally) Liddell Leonova Bright Fowler, B.A., M.S....so basically a weird Smurfette situation. And while Sally's degrees in anthropology prove to be occasionally useful within the story, she actually secured her spot on the expedition by being the niece of a prominent galactic senator. Mostly, though, she's the love interest and voice of conscience to His Grace Rod Blaine, the male lead character.

And yet, most of the high-toned characters are very charming and selfless and focused on the wellbeing of the citizens of the empire, and I found that to be a refreshing change from the standard evil monolith trope that we find in so much of the ruling classes in the other space operas.

The empire of The Mote in God's Eye isn't entirely benevolent; it is, after all, an autocracy, and in the midst of subjugating various rebellious groups at the edges of its territory when the story opens, but still it's definitely lacking the malevolent spirit that one finds in so many other fictional galactic empires.

The aristocrat-laden expedition of the two ships in the Mote in God's Eye is commissioned to make First Contact with the only sentient species that mankind has encountered up until that time.

And that brings us to the second thing that struck me about The Mote in God’s Eye, and that is the aliens, or the Moties, as they’re called. I’m not a big fan of most alien stories, as I carry in me an irrational fear and hatred of the mythical(?) Grey aliens, thanks in part to Whitley Strieber’s palpably terrified recounting—in his book Communion—of having his mind, his sanity and his family and friends messed with by the Greys over the course of several years.

The Moties, however, are great and fascinating characters. I don’t want to talk about them much here, because I don’t want to spoil them, as the manner in which Niven and Pournelle present them to us, sort of in dribs and drabs, laying out their extreme but understandable differences from us, really makes the book.

Throughout the story, we the readers learn about the aliens at a slightly faster rate than the empire does, and we can posit that—for various reasons—they’re going to be very bad for humanity if they’re not handled exactly perfectly. The Moties aren’t evil; they have their own morality scale, based upon their own unique biological and historical imperatives, but they are dangerous to us, just by being themselves.

The book wraps up in a satisfying manner. Niven and Pournelle did write a sequel to it, The Gripping Hand, but the reviews I've read on that book range from tepid to highly negative, so I've decided to stay away from it, as a bad sequel can sometimes retroactively ruin a good original, and The Mote in God's Eye is very good. I recommend it.

i'm an inch and a titch taller for now, also found out yestareday before lunch i weigh 180 and her 49.7, so it could be 40 lbs for you as well.
:shrug:

Good job on the weight loss! Feels good, man.

From a short conversation with myself yesterday.

"Stop picking your nose."

"You stop picking my nose."

glad you loved mote in god's eye

you make me want to revisit again - one of my favorites of all time


and extreme kudos to be able to discuss it in such detail without granting spoilers - something i've never been able to do other than recommend it to people with the caveat of "if i say anything i'll spoil it"

Thanks rickroll! I've since finished the 4th book in the Expanse sci-fi opera series, and that's still a great read after like 2200 pages. Those two guys who share the pen name James S.A. Corey know how to keep up a good yarn.

Now I'm reading Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. I've haven't read the book before, nor have I seen the movie, but somehow I've been spoiled on the story's big secret. I think I must have spoiled it by reading a review back when the film came out. I used to read the movie magazine Empire pretty faithfully, back when paper magazines still had enough money to hire great writers.

Even though it's been spoiled, I'm still enjoying reading my way to the big reveal. Ishiguro's an excellent writer.

After taking some shots at online tournament poker and leaving with only a few mincashes, I will take one more shot at the online tourney glory today, then I'm heading back to the casino tomorrow to try to rebuild my finances. Wish me luck.

Go get 'em!

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Why are Tuesdays mostly a nothing day? I can’t remember ever getting laid on a Tuesday; and if it did happen it probably wasn’t worth it.