Suitedjustice's Ongoing Mid-life Crisis

beautiful scarring from impacts of us counter cultures sixty orbits ago is actively being brazilian rainforest waxed off the face of the earth

I don't know much about Snyder, but I should have gone to see HST when he was around. He did the lecture circuit often enough.

I've mentioned before that I don't own a scale, but I know that I'm losing weight due to the fact that I no longer have to invent strenuous yoga poses in order to trim my toenails.

I made it sober through my nephew's wedding rehearsal dinner, rehearsal afterparty, and wedding reception—I declined invitations to the reception afterparty.

Booze-sober, in any case. My cousin coaxed me out for a few hits of Vermont Northeast Kingdom weed, grown between Christmas trees (Abies balsamea) and tasting pleasantly of pine, with a natural menthol cooling effect.

I ran good on the pot and didn't get hit with social anxiety; in fact, I was told several times that I'm a good dancer, and not in a pitying "good for you, you really tried" manner.

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People seemed surprised, which made me self-conscious, but I shook that off and lost myself in what those of us in the arts call The Dance.

Oh yeah, good job suited!

And with the toenails freshly trimmed, you were certainly lighter on the dance floor!

Congratulations on getting through sober, suited! Now you've shown you can do it, I assume that breeds confidence in being able to keep it going, going forward.

never a doubt

Sorry for the lack of updates, I haven't fallen off the wagon or anything, I've just been sitting at home replaying Fallout: New Vegas on my old PS3, so not much to report, only that the game has become more buggy than ever on the old console, so I have likely finished my very last playthrough on it.

Now here I find myself at the end of the month again, and needing to scrape up funds to survive. I went to the MGM last night and saw that the slot and video poker situation has worsened; competition is fiercer than ever. As a short term solution, I've had to change my hard-won normal sleep cycle in order to find a time slot where I can chisel out some EV.

The long term solution is that I'll have to go back to playing poker again, and that will ramp up my risk of ruin given my present funds. But I don't have a choice.

My friend Gambelina and I have texted each other every day without fail for the last five years, swapping positive greetings and affirmations and whatnot, and encouraging each other to fight our deeply embedded procrastination habits.

Yesterday: no text from her. My text bubbles to her turned from blue to green at some point during the day. I looked up the color change, and apparently her phone has switched from a rich text format to a standard text format. It could be that she's having some problems with the phone or the service; I have no way of knowing.

I could send her a PM here, but she lost her password to her Gambelina screen name years ago, so that's a non-starter. I might have DMed her on Twitter, but I quit that site after the owner started throwing unambiguous Nazi salutes in public.

I'm a little worried.

Today, I couldn't tell her that I vacuumed my floor for the first time in two years. I started the project a year ago when I cleaned my vacuum and changed the filter, but that was as far as preproduction got for a long time.

My floor is carpeted, and after two years of neglect, it actually wasn't terribly filthy. I'm not a hoarder, so there's no clutter, there was just dirt. My apartment is small, so most of the floor is a high-traffic zone, on which my stockinged feet tend to either wipe up the dirt or shunt it over to the walls and corners.

Bordering the walls and piling up in the corners was a half inch (1.3 cm) thick patina of dark grey dust, dander, and—well—dead pieces of me.

For the last year, I've been worried that the apartment managers would do one of their occasional inspections—of which I approve; keeps potential tenet hording and/or explosive drug lab activity to a minimum—and see my floor filth fringe. Obviously, I wasn't worried too much about it, because I didn't do anything, other than tsk at it every day, and think that something ought to be done to clean it up, and then go on with my day, satisfied that I'd done something by tsking at it.

Today I cleaned it. I would have texted that fact to Gambelina and received warm praise for taking down that particular bugbear of procrastination. But she is incommunicado.

You might have to go 1990s on her and ring her.

did you say anything to offend her, could indicate you've been blocked

I tried calling her cell just now and it went straight to voicemail. I don't think she has a landline.

No. Our texts in general and leading up to this have been unambiguously positive.

maybe you helen'd it and wasn't forthcoming enough with the hj?

Maybe you freaked her out with not vacuuming your carpets for 2 years. And, to be fair, that's a reasonable reaction.

2 years!!!

Hope you enjoy not sniffing as much...

In regards to the slot play, I've made a lot of notes over the past few months as to which regs are on the floor at what times and what they're checking, as not everyone checks everything. Last night, I used that resource to hit the floor at the right time and scoop the competition...for now. They'll adjust eventually. If any of their personal schedules make it so they can't adjust, then they'll just have to pound sand. I found a lot of good plays, though at +$80, I didn't exactly break the bank, but it was better than a kick in the ass.

I also sat down at the poker table for an hour to shake off the rust. I was card dead for that hour, for the most part, and only I played 2 hands, but I made boats on both hands and walked away +$200 on the poker.

Aren't you "scared" to play "scared money" though now?

I've knocked my buyin down from $500 to $300, and I try to play that boldly. It's still 150 bb, which is not shallow.

Last night I once again clipped the Max Bet button on the Ultimate X $1 Triple Play, which at $10 per hand is a $30 play, and a misclick carries no bonuses.

X has two Max Bet buttons; one right next to the change game button and the other right next to the change denomination button, both of which buttons I hit many times while scrolling through screens looking for bonuses. Once you hit Max Bet; there is no appeal, no "Are you sure?" disclaimer. The game designers know what the **** they're doing.

This time, however, I dealt myself trip sevens. I did not make quads on the draw, but I drew one boat and I generated some nice bonuses for the next hand, which I played at 5 coins for a dealt high pair. The total take from this misclick was more than $150. It's better to be lucky then to be good.

Three and a half hours of slots work garnered $250, and two hours of poker brought me $300; not a bad night.

The poker game is super soft (albeit splashy and highly variable) after midnight on the weekends, as you might suspect. Several of you have told me to play these non-promo hours instead of my usual practice of bumping heads with retirees and promo nits on weekday mornings, and I've politely ignored all of you.

Well, my current slot schedule warrants me to play the late night poker game, so hopefully I'll catch the good end of the high variance and get my bankroll and groove back.

My best rungood by far last night came when Gambelina called me from her landline. She is well; her cellphone is not.

thank you for the post and postiive Gambelina update
may i predict now that you're free and unincumbered you will run at temperatures most accurately measured in kelvins

Thanks REDeYeS00! I appreciate you, brother.

Yesterday I lost $150 playing poker; the after-hours table was actually pretty tough, and we were shorthanded, so that precluded a table change, as they won't change you if you're at the shortest table, until someone new shows up, or unless someone else wants to swap. So I only played for an hour.

Four hours of slot work yielded a goodly amount of plays but no joy, (-$10). After months of checking, I finally found a play on Buffalo Link—Allen "Chainsaw" Kessler's favorite machine—but the play was marginal and carried the possibility of a significant loss if it went bad, so I passed on it.

As nitty as I've always been, my personal Internet algorithm seems to think that I have a major gambling problem, as I've been getting numerous ads encouraging me to seek a professional assessment regarding my gambling activities.

So let's do this...

I've felt restless and/or irritable after I've cut short bad poker sessions, so yes.

Needing money to live is a personal problem, so yes.

ldo

I have told family members several times that I'd been at the casino, when I'd actually been at home, goofing off.

One time, at a non-MGM property, I found a hundo stuffed into the wrong part of a bill acceptor, and I fished it out with my keys. That's a bit of edgework there, and I still feel uncomfortable about it.

I have quit several jobs in order to gamble.

I have run up credit card debt with my financial institution.

That's 8 yeses for me.

Thanks for sharing that survey. 😀

Do they lower the rake when the table gets shorthanded? I remember a session from last year in Resorts World, LV, where we even played rake-free for a bit. That was 3-handed $1/3.

Regarding the survey: I don't believe that I have a gambling problem. I hate putting money in without an EV advantage, and I won't do it. Problem gamblers have trouble avoiding -EV situations.

I wanted to illustrate the flaws in diagnostic surveys, particularly self-assessments, where in this case I was disingenous with some of the answers in order to generate the results I was seeking.

I don't think that diagnostic checklists are completely useless; in the hands of professionals they form the basis of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals that diagnose psychological disorders, and the self-assessments could wake some folks up to problematic behaviors that they've been ignoring or downplaying, but they should be taken with a grain of salt.