Suitedjustice's Ongoing Mid-life Crisis

I was back at the old office yesterday, covering vacations. I'll be there again today and Monday. Then I'll have a long stretch to myself, during which I'll be obliged to return to the casino and convert some Sklansky bucks if I'd like to put food in my belly and keep the rain off my head.

My old boss left extra work for me yesterday, which ticked me off a bit, as I'm doing them a favor. here. He was probably just trying to please the old me, who liked to keep busy, but the new me has learned to enjoy goofing off for long stretches without getting bored.

There was a couple of good stories but most weren’t too good. When I compared your writing to your peers how good your stuff is.

Hey did you ever become a pharmacist?

NATAMUS LIVES sup bro

On topic: Garza and the Supermutants is a fantastic pen name. Missed that part.

Off topic: Yeah dude, been licensed for > 4 years, can't believe they give me the keys to the narc cabinet.

♥♥♥

Thank you brother!

Garza is a minor Fallout 3 NPC stationed on the ruined former aircraft carrier known as Rivet City. Most of the time you'll find him working on the ship, but sometimes you'll find him torn to shreds by psychotic supermutants skulking the wasteland outside Rivet City; and occasionally you'll find him peacefully sleeping in a camp nearby the ship, with the supermutants, just before the latter spring up to attack you without mercy.

It's a mystery as to why Garza sometimes leaves the safety of Rivet city to sleep in the supermutant camp. It's possible that having your Lone Wanderer sleep in the common room causes another NPC to sleep in Garza's bed, but I haven't been able to verify this.

The area outside the supermutant camp is no-go for NPCs; supermutant sentinels patrol and attack on sight, and Garza has no armor, and for a weapon he carries just a low level sledgehammer, if he's lucky. Sometimes he has just his fists.

The area inside the supermutant camp; however, is designated as safe for human NPCs, as the supermutants occasionally keep human hostages, so the developers had to code it so the hulks wouldn't aggro on their hostages. So if Garza can make it into the camp without being detected, he is safe, until he tries to leave in the morning. It's a high stakes game that Garza almost always loses.

I was firing missiles into the supermutant camp the first time I found Garza , and that upset him. Rather than run at me with his sledgehammer, Garza grabbed a handful of grenades from a nearby ammunition case and performed an astonishing coup mortel on my character, I switched over to my current Fark handle on that day to commemorate his victory.

when my friend moved back to the states i inherited his 360 and fallout was the only game of his that i ended up playing

became such a huge time suck for me - got nearly to the end and then got the red light of death and it was not under warranty since it'd been hacked to play pirated games so that was the end of the line for me

every single time i hear others talk about playing the game - i realize how oddly a path i chose since i somehow missed all of the good stuff and instead really honed in on dumb things instead

ie i had basically no encounters with supermutants and cheesed the hell out of the game by discovering the pipboy sniper hack and just allocated everything towards that so i basically played it as a turn based game that was insanely easy with zero challenges except for death claws, something which are way too powerful to be defeated that way despite that everything else is

watched some speed runs of the game a few years back and was astounded

been tempted to get it again on pc and play again properly but worry my productivity will go to zero if i do

All I know of Fallout is that it is a great tv series and that season 2 is about to come out pretty darn soon... end of (my) derail 😉

tv show is great 😀

They're remastering FO3 now; should be out in the next year or two. My PS3 copy crapped out, so I haven't been able to play it in a while. I played it once with the PS4 on the PlayStation network, but that version didn't come with the DLC, and it felt incomplete.

I love the show. It perfectly captures the tone of the games. Lucy is the quintessential Fallout protagonist. They're going to be in New Vegas in the upcoming season. I hope they continue with the same verve and energy as S1.

On a different note, after putting up with 3 episodes of Dirk Gentlly's Holistic Detective Agency, I am dustbinning the series.

In it, good actors are poorly directed, I assume by showrunner Max Landis, whose past efforts include an Ariana Grande video, along with a full-length feature from 2021 called The Death of Batman, which doesn't have a Wikipedia entry. Only a stub on IMDB alerted me to it.

Whoever it is has the actors constantly mugging at each other and to the camera, and I just can't picture any of Douglas Adams's characters doing the same to me from the page. It's a creative departure in the adaptation, and it's a bad one.

Our title character, Dirk Gently, is a chirpy, jumpy, annoying twit. Landis possibly seems to recognize this, and he shifts a lot of the screen time over to Elijah Wood's Todd Brotzman, who over the years has proven himself to be a big talent with a huge range, and who is poorly served in this series.

Then there's the baddie (from season 1 at least, as he's in only 8 episodes) Aaron Douglas, who was great as Chief Tyrol in Battlestar Galactica, doing a bad Mr. Plinkett voice. Why?

Mr. Plinkett is an over-the-top character found on Red Letter Media's YouTube channel.

Landis was on one of RLM's shows, though not the one above. Is the Mr. Plinkett voice a coincidence, a theft—conscious or otherwise, an homage, or an Easter egg? Whatever it is, it doesn't work.

Then there's Bart, the holistic psychotic murder girl—heavily dirtied up so as to be unpretty—played by Fiona Dourif, with...again, what's with the voice? Is it Brooklyn? Philly? A 70s era Loony Tunes gangster?

I sighed an awful lot in just 3 episodes. Maybe it gets better, but I have a lot of shows to get through, and I can't see as how they're going to mug and chew on scenery and speak dumbly any less as the show goes on.

Note that the show is highly rated on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes, so I am in the minority here.

The starter went out on my old Jeep. Hopefully it won't take too long for the shop to fix it. I need to get back to work; I'm running out of dough.

Didn't see either series. Will say that, as much as I loved the Hitchhiker's books (well, at least the first three), I never could get into Dirk.

It is incredible how, in this day and age, there a TON of good, very good, and excellent series out there It helps that many top notch directors put their grain of salt on series - Alex Garland, Jonathan Nolan, Scorsese, David Fincher, David Lynch, Soderbergh, the Wachowskis rapidly come to mind... - as did uncountable quality actors, of course, hence making us a far cry from - and miles/kms away - from General Hospital, Dallas, Days of Our Lives or whatever soap opera from the 80s we can think of 🙄

I find that Rotten Tomatoes/critics in general, are very soft when it comes to rating tv series as opposed to movies for some reason...

Adams's later books grow more cynical and melancholy. I like them less than his early stuff, but I still find some great nuggets in them, like the purloined train station crisps story I copy/pasted a while back.

I think we're just coming out of a golden age of television. The enshittification principle has finally caught up with streaming series, but only just recently, and there are still a few great shows left.

The Popcorn (audience) Meter on Rotten Tomatoes is highly variable. Either fans who love the show pump it up, or incel brigades offended by touches of wokeness knock it down.

continuing old jalopy stories, my old volvo has been steadily leaking power steering fluid - so had the boys check it out during a routine oil change and they say parts and labor will cost about 2k to fix it

so... i'll be topping it off with that fluid on the reg until i find someone adventurous enough to take it off my hands

Borrow a bike, how far is it?

a question better asked of a french bicycle batallion from wwi

It's a 30 minute drive, including around 6 miles (9.6 km) of 6 lane highway.

Today I watched the movie 21, which is loosely based on Bringing Down the House, Ben Mezrich's book about the [U]MIT blackjack card counting team[/U].

It seems strange that I'd never seen the movie before, given that I was a card counter in the 90s and early 00's. I had heard about the team even before the book came out. Their exploits were discussed on Stanford Wong's mid-90s bj21 web forum, and at the time I wanted very badly to get a tryout with them, but I didn't have any connections at MIT.

The movie is an entertainment. It wasn't meant to be a treatise on card counting methods and execution. As such, a number of things set off my nerd alarms. At one point, the team's big player is signaled to come over to a table where the shoe is running at a true count of +17. I practiced and played hundreds of thousands of blackjack hands, and I don't remember ever seeing a true count as high as +17 in a shoe with 4 or more decks, though it's been more than 20 years since I've played, so my memory could be faulty.

It's more likely that the team was using an unbalanced, non-true count, where they didn't divide by the number of decks remaining; due to the unbalance and the lack of division, the positive numbers can get large before the end of the shoe, but the screenwriters showed them practicing a balanced, true count, which is odd.

Again, this is nerdy stuff that's deep in the weeds, and has nothing to do with the entertainment value of the movie.

Also, when the team plays well, they win every time; when they screw up the count or stay too long after a shoe goes south, they lose every time. Even with the Big Man strategy they used—where their high roller is signaled over and drops big bets on a table where the count is high—they could expect to win around 55% of sessions at the most, and lose the rest of the time. Card counting variance is comparable to poker, although you get to the long run a little quicker with blackjack, but not that much quicker.

Again, this variance could be confusing to an audience who might expect to see skill rewarded with bling, and lack of same rewarded with misery, and they certainly get those outcomes in 21.

Finally, showing Kevin Spacey, the head of the blackjack team, grooming a young, naïve college boy, is a plotline that has not aged well. Spacey is great in the movie, if you forget about the stuff that he did afterwards...um, allegedly did, I guess. I think he might have had his court cases overturned.

Overall, I enjoyed the movie, in spite of my "well, actually" geek moments.

And I enjoyed the review. 😀 I saw the movie about ten years ago and liked it too.

I'd probably be slightly annoyed by this as well. Maybe I was, at the time - even though I've never played a single hand of blackjack in a casino in my life.

You don't wanna play with suited's life guys. Well, I had a look, according to google maps there are several options to avoid the highway but really, you don't wanna do that. It's a nice idea, I would agree it's good PE, but you can't do that seriously, it's too dangerous. Although it's in a pretty well-developed state, it's like most rural areas. If the wreckless driving cars or trucks won't kill him, maybe some lowlifes in Springfield will.
And what is he going to do if bad weather suddenly kicks in? Uber in Murica is crazy expensive. Maybe it is possible to do in Boston, not sure, but I think without breaching privacy too much, I can disclose he doesn't live in Boston or close to it, so there's that.
All I know about Boston, basically, is on the record of suited bcos I was there with him, thank you. But let's just say I wasn't impressed too much, but also I was there exactly at the most wrong time. I haven't even mentioned the temperatures, I know because I was an avid bicyclist as long as I was living in Germany, there it has better structures for doing that but also the winter is no fun. And after I left Germany I have also been basically almost exclusively in places where biking is not a good idea, I suppose that's also why I got fatter during that time, but you just can't ride a bike in places where other trafffic participants think you're kind of a hostile alien or something.
Go to the Netherlands, that is bicyclist heaven. Even some cities in China (not HK). But in the US, even NYC, no, at best average, sorry, it doesn't work that way.
This is not a bash of Murica, I have seen plenty of other parts of the world where I would never do that, and it would be even worse.
Anyways, I looked at your youtube clips. Yeah, that one guy sounds super-British ofc, but apart from that, doesn't look too interesting yep.
If you have no other ideas, I repeat my call, watch Babylon 5, yep it's the 90s (still the best decade of humanity though, prolly) and the first season, and maybe also some parts of the second season are a little bit dull on their own too, but you will appreciate them more if you have seen it all. Everyone I know who has seen it all wouldn't want to miss it. If you are skeptical watch Season One, Episode 20, "Babylon Squared", that is a lil bit of a preview of what is about to come, you can watch that without many spoilers of what happened before. If that is of interest to you, watch it in chronological order, if not, you're just not the type I guess, nothing wrong with that.

I've played like less than 100 hands I suppose and although not being supergeeky, with some of suited's knowledge. But not a fan of pushing small edges. You want to go where the easy money is.

It is insane to what extent Montreal (and its suburbs) has become a bicycle heaven in the past decade, as well as more pedestrian friendly, now that major axes in the city have been converted to one Ways with bike lanes or become pedestrian/bicycle streets all together End of derail 😉

Kevin Spacey would never REALLY groom a college-age student because their true count was...

+21