Thanks Da_Nit! I'll be back at it again tonight.

Flamingo: 3 hours:
+$67

GREEN IS GREEN MOTHER****ER

Got damn right!

The way your posting has died down and the consistent in the red at the end of so many posts I had a feeling this might be close to happening. Sorry to hear it SJ. Have you considered investing in a solver? GTO+ is awesome and is only $75. You can solve a ton of spots and play against it to really learn all the common spots you'll face in depth.

Yeah congrats for the latest in the green post!

Thanks guys! I didn't make it to the tables yesterday. I'll head out again today.

My Stephen King reading jag continues. I just finished reading his and Peter Straub's The Talisman. At 768 pages it's a standard-sized mid-80's King doorstop. What's unusual for him is that he had a co-author in Straub, a well-respected fantasy and sci-fi author. I last read the book as a teenager, more than 30 years ago, and I loved it unconditionally. At the time I could not spot a single place where one author left off and the other began.

Reading it again, now many years later, and having been a fan of King for all these decades, and having pored over his style, I find that I still have a hard time telling who was writing what. I can only pin a few of the most flowery and transcendental passages on Straub, and even with those I can't be sure, as it came out in the mid-80's when King was on his daily gram of coke and 12-pack of tallboys diet, and thus he was known to go off from time to time.

Below is a passage that I think might be Straub's. I'll give a quick rundown of the plot first: A 12 year-old boy needs to save his cancer-stricken mother, and the only way he can do this is to recover an artifact located across the country, and by travelling in part through a parallel universe where magic works.

Later on, King would tie the Talisman's magic world, known as the Territories, in with his otherwise-unrelated Dark Tower series world, and declare them to be one in the same world, though to a careful reader there are some obvious discrepancies between the two.

Anyways, the passage: King or Straub. And spoiler alert, I guess.

Far out in the ether a million universes away, three specks of dust floated near one another in interstellar space. Jack was the dust, and Jack was the space between. Galaxies unreeled around his head like long spools of paper, and fate punched each in random patterns, turning them into macrocosmic player-piano tapes which would play everything from ragtime to funeral dirges. Jack's happy teeth bit an orange. Jack's unhappy flesh screamed as the teeth tore him open...

[H]is heart skipped and a thousand suns flashed up in novas.
He saw a googolplex of sparrows and a googolplex of worlds and marked the fall or the well-being of each.
He died in the Gehenna of Territories ore-pit mines.
He lived as a flu-virus in Etheridge's tie.
He ran in a wind over far places.
He was...
Oh he was...
He was God. God, or something so close as to make no difference.
No! Screamed Jack in terror. No. I don't want to be God. I ONLY WANT TO SAVE MY MOTHER'S LIFE!
And suddenly infinitude closed up like a losing hand folding in a cardsharp's grasp. It narrowed down to a beam of blinding white light, and this he followed back to the Territories Ballroom, where only seconds had passed. He still held the Talisman in his hands.

So I borrowed the infinite universe nexus idea from the Talisman and grafted it onto the Hotel in my Twitter The Shining tribute. King's original Overlook Hotel in The Shining was just a spooky sentient hotel with ghosts. I thought that if he ever ran into it, he might not mind, given that he's spent the last couple of decades tinkering with his bibliography in a gentle attempt to sort of hammer together as much of it as he can into an expanded universe.

Now that I've reread The Talisman in my middle-age, I find that I still enjoy it, but this time around I noticed more than a few huge and blatant plot holes that I'd blithely sailed past when I was a teenager. I won't get into the plot problems, because then I wouldn't stop for another 10,000 words.

What's of interest to me is wondering if the book would have been torn apart for these inconsistencies if the Internet had been around when the book was published.

Let's face it, tearing popular **** apart for the sake of finding something snarky or witty to post is half the joy of the Internet for a lot of people, myself included. The old idea of good storytelling was that if the reader cared enough about the characters and the story, they would forgive or maybe not even notice the holes in the plot line. I wonder if the advent of the Internet has changed that, and if today's writers are more conscientious about keeping their storylines tight and consistent

Epilogue:
In 2001 King and Straub wrote a sequel to The Talisman called Black House, and in that book--which I found to be mostly tepid and joyless--it was blatantly obvious to me which author wrote which passage, to the point where it essentially ruined the story for me.

Black House read more like a passive-aggressive competition than a collaboration. The book went something like this: King would type up a dozen or so pages and leave the grown-up character of Jack in a bad spot, then turn things over to Straub. Then Straub would extricate Jack from that spot, only to write him into a new and even worse predicament, then he would turn things back over to King, who would write Jack out of that spot, then hit the ball harder and with more of a spin back to Straub, and so on, for hundreds of pages.

It was an exercise, not a book. And also, to me, it was an indicator of how people travel on different trajectories that may meet up for a brief time, then go on their separate ways, so that no matter how close the two of us are on the same page today, we may find ourselves entire chapters apart ten or fifteen years from now.

Next up: The Stand. Yeah, it'll be a while before I finish that one.

^^ I had forgotten about those two books; especially the first one was pretty good though. "God-pounders"

I will be doing solvers if I get up to $2/$5 or higher. Right now at $1/$2, I need to be concentrating on paying more attention at the table to better classify bad players for exploitative plays.

Back in March there was some talk of a Talisman movie, directed by Mike Baker from the Handmaid's Tale, but I haven't heard anything since. Stephen King adapted movies and shows are high variance in terms of their quality, so the best I can feel for an upcoming one is cautiously optimistic. It's too bad that Zach Galifianakis is middle-aged now. He would've made a good Wolf. Same, I think, for Jack Black.

Yesterday, for a change of pace, I hit the Golden Nugget. I rode the bus downtown, swam through the stream of the Fremont Street crowd and chaos, but when I got to the poker room I didn't feel like sitting down at the table.

I had one of those fights with myself where I walked back and forth, towards and away from the room, making three or four narrow oblong 30 yard circuits, and probably looking a little crazy if anyone was watching me. Finally I talked myself into sitting down, and I played an okay albeit short session.

Afterwards, I walked through the crowded and overstimulating Fremont Street Experience and noted some of the changes from when I used to work my advantage slot machine downtown "fun runs" there nearly 20 years ago.

Compared to the Strip a lot of the FSE hasn't changed much in two decades. Back then they committed to a look and a style that couldn't be subsequently modified without some new strikingly original and bold vision, and a lot of money, and the tacit cooperation of the dozen or so entities involved in the FSE. So, to use a turn-of-the-century phrase, it is what it is.

Back around the year 2000 the FSE was fighting in the courts for the right to have their security guards harass the homeless people and street performers who flocked to the open air corridor. Today, it's obvious that the FSE lost that battle.

As a seeming compromise, They have drawn 40 or so circles on the concrete pavement below the dome inside which street vendors and performers can do their thing and ask for money. The result is an aggressively unattractive cacophony of blaring music, bad costumes, plastic bucket drummers, at least a half dozen corn husk flower weavers, buff shirtless men in army and cowboy outfits, women dressed as nuns or sexy cops, or wearing only g-strings and tape on their nipples, and all manner of wheelchair folks holding signs.

The area of the FSE under the dome is an open public forum, and I support everyone's First Amendment right to be out there asking for money--I don't see begging as being philosophically different from conventional advertising--but it's not a good look, though I don't have any solutions in mind that wouldn't trample on the rights of a whole class of people.

I decided to take a walk down to the El Cortez, for nostalgia's sake, and to see if their old decent and cheap coffee shop still existed. It doesn't. In its place is a pizza joint, along with a franchise cafe that was going to put me on a 20 minute waiting list when they clearly showed half of their seats empty. I chose not to reward poor (or skimpy) staff scheduling management and declined.

After stepping out of the El C, what to my wondering eyes did appear but the lit up signs from my old barrio card counting casino; and here I'd thought that the place had been closed for years.



I walked the few more blocks towards it, down into the barrio, down to the end of the line, only to find that the Western was indeed closed. If I were a mugger, that would certainly be my spot every night; perfect for picking off clueless tourists following their phone cameras too many blocks down to their doom.

Speaking of phone cameras, here's an 18 foot (5.5m) tall praying mantis that shoots fire out of its antennae to the baseline of various club songs.



The container park holding the mantis went up where there used to be only a fenced in gravel lot with human feces in it, so definitely an improvement.

Golden Nugget: 3 hours:
+$64

GREEN AGAIN WHAT IS THIS CHRISTMAS LETS SEE NO RED THOUGH **** PUNCTUATION THIS IS UPSWING TIME

SJ for a guy who lives in Vegas I find it somewhat surprising you’ve never made it to the East Fremont area. Too bad you didn’t make it to Atomic Liquors, that place has changed a lot. No more whores at the bar offering there services in the bathroom.

Good to see another green session.

My HS friend tends bar there for a while I love going in for old fashioned’s.

Had a gay guy tell me that my best friend I was talking to at the bar “wasn’t hot enough for me” (SJ can confirm I’m a looker for a cist half white male) so I would say the bar hasn’t come a long way from its seedy days, the whores are just different lol

Nat?



Also what’s a cist?

It's pronounced "sis-tee" and it means he identifies as a lumpy standard issue model

Can confirm that Nat's a good-looking guy. He has his own look and he pulls it off effectively.

I lived in the Fremont/Stewart East neighborhood for long enough during my blackjack days. There's not much there to revisit if you're not looking to score rocks and/or questionable sex work. As a white guy always walking through these neighborhoods, I was hit up a lot by friendly drug dealers.

"How you doing, man?"
"You all right?"
"You straight?
"You 'aight?"

Very nice and professional: not at all like surly TV and movie drug dealers.

I do miss the Tacos Mexico that used to be on Maryland and Charleston. They had the best burritos in town. I was one of the only gringo regs there and I had to brush up on my Spanish numbers so I didn't embarrass myself when they called my order number. They have a few other locations, but a few years back I tried the one on Trop (now also gone) and it wasn't the same as my old neighborhood spot.

I went to the Atomic once many years ago to buy an overpriced bottle of vodka for underaged bookstore co-workers. I was still fairly new to town (but not really, I should have known better) and I had the New England sensibility of looking for a liquor store, instead of knowing that I could've just hit any grocery store or pharmacy.

SJ yeah I read your Nittastic tales so I know you’re familiar with the are. That’s why I thought it would be interesting to get your take on how much it’s really changed.

It's gotten a little better around the edges of the FSE, with more funky bars and shops, but out past the Western it's still the same too-large stretch of crack motels, pawn shops, bail bondsmen, 7-Eleven's, dollar stores and failed strip malls that it was 20 years ago.

Sorry to hear about your cyst Nat!

Congrats with that spam ad, Suited. Yours truly took care of that with a One-touch Ban & Clean.

Interesting to read about downtown Las Vegas. I opened Google Streetview and "drove" along Fremont Street in eastern direction for a bit. In locations like this Google is nicely up-to-date so you can see how the area looked only half a year ago, or a couple of years at most. This is in sharp contrast to many country roads in, say, rural Kansas or the Outback, where blurry images from 2008 is the best you get.

Anywho, I could also see how the street gets less and less appealing as you move away from FSE. I noticed a record store though, so it could be worse.

I also dropped the yellow Streetview man in front of the Mob Museum, which I visited when I was in the city. It's nice to recognize the building, and it brings back some memories. Oh, to be in Vegas again!

I’m having a gay doctor remove it next week. He swears he’s not the same one who caused it

Thank you, Sheep

Nuking that spam from orbit (i.e. BBV) was the only way to be sure.

As far as the LV barrio goes: it's not Detroit or Gary, IN or anything like that. A lot of folks who live there work full time, or sometimes work 2 or 3 jobs, chasing after the American Dream, which is kind of letting them down, but they keep their chin up and keep plugging away.

Last night I sat down and almost immediately ran a flopped top set into a rivered backdoor flush for most of a buyin. I shook it off and stuck around but I didn't make any headway towards winning any of it back. I'm getting very close to Diamond Status on my Caesar's reward card; however, I won't be diamond enough to use the Diamond Lounge for free. That's a few thousand more tier points.

Flamingo: 5 hours:
(-$272)

I’m not sure who finds value in Caesars players rewards but I’m sure someone finds it worth the coin in (I never have sadly)

It turns out that I don't have to address the issue. I misunderstood the lady at the Caesars Rewards booth. She told me that I had 7400 points and that I needed 7600 for Diamond status. I took that to mean that I needed 200 more points, when in fact I needed 7600 more points.

Flamingo: 3 hours:
+$127