I play in a couple regular home games, and I do pretty well. Over the year, I usually win a little bit more thn I lose, but I've never gotten the balls to go play at a card casino.
It's not that bad. Sometime last year, I hit the Grand Casino in Gulfport, MS and dropped about forty dollars playing 1-5 seven stud. It was a learning experience, teaching me not to get impatient and playing marginal hands.
A couple of weeks ago, I hit Vegas and played Hold'Em at the cozy Luxor Poker Room. Nothing like the Bellagio, the Luxor just has six tables, playing either 1-5 stud or 4-8 Hold'Em. They even have a daily tournament which starts at noon--25 dollar buy in gets $250 in tournament chips, and extra two dollars at the outset gets an additional T$50. It's a great "introduction" of sorts to tournament play.
Playing at the low limits, it's not too bad, and even the occasional noob rivering a straight over your trips doesn't bite into your stake too much, especially if, as I can guess from your description, you're a tight player.
Man, I want to play now. Is it Saturday night, yet?;)
You want to fly on down to Atlanta? We've got a game going tonight...:)
It seems to me that entering into the poker tournament you were sent to cover, and then betting increasingly more, becoming increasingly more involved -- this is not a good example of journalistic detachment.
I think journalistic detachment is of particular value in certain arenas, politics being the foremost example, but when it comes to subjects which fall under the umbrella of entertainment or recreation, I tend to give writers far more leeway. Not having any sort of journalism coursework, however, I can't really speak to how the media in general feel about this. I'd wager to say that they're ok with it, though...
Jon Krakauer's original assignment when climbing Mt. Everest in 1996, for example, was to report on the details of companies selling Everest summit experiences. His Into Thin Air is an expansion of the article he wrote for Outside magazine.
Once i was playing poker and I was dealt 4 kings and some other card. I tossed the one card for another. A couple of other players kept raising the pot to its limit. when I showed them my cards, one guy said "why did you draw one if you had 4 of a kind" I said "so you would think I was going for a full house, or an inside straight" He actually came across the table at me and was dragged out of the casino.
How sad. This was probably some guy who did ok at his local Thursday Night Game with foolish rules like no check-raising, and everyone always shows what they have.
For a great overview of poker culture, A. Alvarez's Poker: Bets, Bluffs, and Bad Beats is a great coffee-table book. Biggest Game in Town is a bit dated, going into the details of the World Series of 1982.
If you're looking books on how to play, the veritable bible of poker, Doyle Brunson's Super-System, has been re-released by Avery Cardoza Press. You should be able to find it all over...
The only problem with "Fray" (note the lack of "The") is that Karl Moline is holding up issues. From rumor, I believe he took another project without completing "Fray."
It's too bad, too, because the art was well-done, and the writing above average for what you'd expect from BTVS...
As for Marti Noxon, don't be a playa hata. She gets a bad rap for being the person who wrote the Buffy/Spike "rough sex" scene, but she's also written some great episodes, and the direction of season 6 (which I actually liked) was every bit as much Joss's idea as it was Marti's.
While one of my favorite episodes of the entire series is her "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered" where she uses her love of "smoochies" and milks some pretty funny relationship situations, I'm more referring to some of her pre-season six episodes, like "Dead Man's Party" and "Consequences," both episodes where she foregoes characterization for spectacle (in the former the big zombie fight to "resolve" the Scooby strife, and in the latter, the strangling of Xander to show Faith is evil).
They are named Whedon, Noxon, Espinson, Fury, and Greenwaldt.
Actually, I'd daresay we're missing too many stellar writers. Whedon, of course, is quite capable, but I've found that Marti Noxon's writing and plotting to be far too concerned with interpersonal relationships. In an interview from an early issue of the Buffy Fan Club Magazine, Noxon indicates she wants to bring more "smoochies" to the show; while I can appreciate some elements of it in the series, the focus that fourth, fifth, and sixth season placed on sex and relationship robbed those seasons of effective plotting, and sometimes, in extreme cases, effective character work ("Where the Wild Things Are"... anyone?).
Of Espenson and Fury, I generally like their episodes, but not with the same fervor that I've appreciated episodes by Rob Des Hotel and Dean Batali, Ty King, Dan Vebber, and Tim Minear.
Greenwaldt is currently working on ABC's Miracles, and doesn't really have an active role in Buffy/Angel.
Buffy came in as a mid-season replacement, so you are saying you only thought the show was up to par for a season and a half!?
Yes. Par for Buffy is not par for the rest of broadcast television.
Only to "appear" to improve this year? Why do you even care enough to post here?
Because I have a deep, deep devotion to Buffy despite the fourth and fifth seasons. I've created websites for it. I'm still writing code for it.
And finally, because if we don't question the faults we find in the art that we love, then we might as well just sit, slack-jawed, staring at the television, chuckling to ourselves like Beavis and Butt-head at SMG's nice boobies.
I'm so fucking sick of all these "go out on top"/"don't jump the shark"/"Don't overstay your welcome" jackasses calling for the show to end while it's still good... Sometimes shows bounce back from slumps. Some of the best episodes of Cheers and M*A*S*H were made after the shows went through major cast changes.
Indeed, that's what I'm seeing with season seven.
But forcing a story to go on when the primary party/parties responsible for that story do not wish to continue would be simple profit-seeking. I would liken it to trying to force some other writer to write Sandman for DC/Vertigo comics after Neil Gaiman has finished his part of the story.
While significantly stronger than most of the subsequent seasons, the third season is marred by a couple of issues.
The Mayor's character, while well-quirked and fleshed-out, never really had any ambitions beyond turning himself into a giant snake. The Master wished to free himself, Angelus wanted to foment chaos, and even Glory wanted to escape the mundanity of this plane of existence. But for all the buildup, for all the anticipation for what the Ascension was to be, turning into a giant snake was a bit of a letdown.
Faith's turn to darkness wasn't so much a spiraling descent more than a flip of the "Let's turn her insane" switch. The problem with this particular facet of season three is that from "Consequences" on, we're to assume that (at least according to what's presented and Angel's somewhat authorial edict) Faith has "got a taste for killing" following the accidental manslaughter of the deputy mayor--it's this lame reason that she tries to strangle Xander in that episode. The writers decided to ignore the more compelling (and more foreshadowed) reasons Faith could turn to the dark side.
While you might find the Buffy-Angel romance of season three a prime facet of season three, the execution of it showed that the then multiplying writing staff had some trouble deciding what their week-to-week status was. One week, Buffy would breakup with Angel, the next they'd be all over one another. It got so melodramatic, they parodied themselves in "The Zeppo."
All of these are minor cracks in the veneer of season three. The main issue I can't really forgive it, despite the general fun of the villainous Mayor, is the failed metaphor that the writers try and foist upon us for the season finale. When faced with the prospect of losing the world or losing her boyfriend, she chooses to risk her own life--the life of the only person who's really capable of preventing Apocalypse--to save her lover. Despite the touching scene at the end where Giles hands Buffy her diploma, the two-part "Graduation" shows that Buffy is still very much a petulant child, and not at all ready to "graduate" to the responsibilities and sacrifices of adulthood.
You can catch edited episodes of Buffy daily on FX, and old eps of Futurama on Cartoon Network. I think Cartoon is also going to be showing new episodes of Futurama, too, but I'm not as well-informed about that series.
After dealing with some sub-par allegory and poor storytelling in the third to sixth seasons, I'm kinda happy that the series will end with this season, where the writing has appeared to improve despite Joss Whedon's attention to Firefly.
Although that one scene with Lucy Liu as the dominatrix consultant showed teeming masses of geeky wage slaves, it did have the redeeming quality of her shouting, "Who builds the company's products?! YOU DO!"
I remember watching that at about the exact same time our own tech team was denied free sodas by our pigfarking CTO.
Of course you're being sarcastic, but that silly looking 3D system was actually an SGI product called fsn, pronounced "fusion," and it ran on IRIX 4.0.1+ machines...
Re:Okay, I did well on my verbal SATs, but...
on
LOTR: The Two Towers
·
· Score: 4, Informative
It's the equivalent of a authoritative fugue...:)
In poetry, the caesura is a break in rhythmic flow in the middle of a verse. What the author means is that TTT is a well-crafted midpoint or something to that effect.
It's pretty good. I found I liked Fellowship more, because the separate stories in TTT slows the pace of the movie and makes you feel the long running time more than Fellowship's pace (understandable, given the costraints of plot). This could also be because I saw it at 12:01 am in a very hot, crowded theater, with people discussing Guinan's friendship with Picard behind me.
For the purists: I'm going to have to re-read the book, but Jackson does make some big changes to plot (far bigger in the plot-sense than substitutiing Arwen in or eliminating Tom Bombadil).
Visually, the film is spectacular, from the siege at Helm's Deep, to just the amazing scenery of Edoras.
My primary complaint with the movie: Not enough Ents. But what you do see of them is awe-inspiring.
"Writing something provocative and intresting, and timing it so that it gets a lot of exposure and revinue is not trolling."
troll 1. v.,n. [From the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban] To utter a posting on Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or flames; or, the post itself. Derives from the phrase "trolling for newbies" which in turn comes from mainstream "trolling", a style of fishing in which one trails bait through a likely spot hoping for a bite.
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I play in a couple regular home games, and I do pretty well. Over the year, I usually win a little bit more thn I lose, but I've never gotten the balls to go play at a card casino.
;)
:)
It's not that bad. Sometime last year, I hit the Grand Casino in Gulfport, MS and dropped about forty dollars playing 1-5 seven stud. It was a learning experience, teaching me not to get impatient and playing marginal hands.
A couple of weeks ago, I hit Vegas and played Hold'Em at the cozy Luxor Poker Room. Nothing like the Bellagio, the Luxor just has six tables, playing either 1-5 stud or 4-8 Hold'Em. They even have a daily tournament which starts at noon--25 dollar buy in gets $250 in tournament chips, and extra two dollars at the outset gets an additional T$50. It's a great "introduction" of sorts to tournament play.
Playing at the low limits, it's not too bad, and even the occasional noob rivering a straight over your trips doesn't bite into your stake too much, especially if, as I can guess from your description, you're a tight player.
Man, I want to play now. Is it Saturday night, yet?
You want to fly on down to Atlanta? We've got a game going tonight...
It seems to me that entering into the poker tournament you were sent to cover, and then betting increasingly more, becoming increasingly more involved -- this is not a good example of journalistic detachment.
I think journalistic detachment is of particular value in certain arenas, politics being the foremost example, but when it comes to subjects which fall under the umbrella of entertainment or recreation, I tend to give writers far more leeway. Not having any sort of journalism coursework, however, I can't really speak to how the media in general feel about this. I'd wager to say that they're ok with it, though...
Jon Krakauer's original assignment when climbing Mt. Everest in 1996, for example, was to report on the details of companies selling Everest summit experiences. His Into Thin Air is an expansion of the article he wrote for Outside magazine.
Once i was playing poker and I was dealt 4 kings and some other card. I tossed the one card for another. A couple of other players kept raising the pot to its limit. when I showed them my cards, one guy said "why did you draw one if you had 4 of a kind" I said "so you would think I was going for a full house, or an inside straight" He actually came across the table at me and was dragged out of the casino.
How sad. This was probably some guy who did ok at his local Thursday Night Game with foolish rules like no check-raising, and everyone always shows what they have.
For a great overview of poker culture, A. Alvarez's Poker: Bets, Bluffs, and Bad Beats is a great coffee-table book. Biggest Game in Town is a bit dated, going into the details of the World Series of 1982.
If you're looking books on how to play, the veritable bible of poker, Doyle Brunson's Super-System, has been re-released by Avery Cardoza Press. You should be able to find it all over...
Marvel Girl
sheesh.
The only problem with "Fray" (note the lack of "The") is that Karl Moline is holding up issues. From rumor, I believe he took another project without completing "Fray."
It's too bad, too, because the art was well-done, and the writing above average for what you'd expect from BTVS...
As for Marti Noxon, don't be a playa hata. She gets a bad rap for being the person who wrote the Buffy/Spike "rough sex" scene, but she's also written some great episodes, and the direction of season 6 (which I actually liked) was every bit as much Joss's idea as it was Marti's.
While one of my favorite episodes of the entire series is her "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered" where she uses her love of "smoochies" and milks some pretty funny relationship situations, I'm more referring to some of her pre-season six episodes, like "Dead Man's Party" and "Consequences," both episodes where she foregoes characterization for spectacle (in the former the big zombie fight to "resolve" the Scooby strife, and in the latter, the strangling of Xander to show Faith is evil).
They are named Whedon, Noxon, Espinson, Fury, and Greenwaldt.
Actually, I'd daresay we're missing too many stellar writers. Whedon, of course, is quite capable, but I've found that Marti Noxon's writing and plotting to be far too concerned with interpersonal relationships. In an interview from an early issue of the Buffy Fan Club Magazine, Noxon indicates she wants to bring more "smoochies" to the show; while I can appreciate some elements of it in the series, the focus that fourth, fifth, and sixth season placed on sex and relationship robbed those seasons of effective plotting, and sometimes, in extreme cases, effective character work ("Where the Wild Things Are"... anyone?).
Of Espenson and Fury, I generally like their episodes, but not with the same fervor that I've appreciated episodes by Rob Des Hotel and Dean Batali, Ty King, Dan Vebber, and Tim Minear.
Greenwaldt is currently working on ABC's Miracles, and doesn't really have an active role in Buffy/Angel.
Buffy came in as a mid-season replacement, so you are saying you only thought the show was up to par for a season and a half!?
Yes. Par for Buffy is not par for the rest of broadcast television.
Only to "appear" to improve this year? Why do you even care enough to post here?
Because I have a deep, deep devotion to Buffy despite the fourth and fifth seasons. I've created websites for it. I'm still writing code for it.
And finally, because if we don't question the faults we find in the art that we love, then we might as well just sit, slack-jawed, staring at the television, chuckling to ourselves like Beavis and Butt-head at SMG's nice boobies.
I'm so fucking sick of all these "go out on top"/"don't jump the shark"/"Don't overstay your welcome" jackasses calling for the show to end while it's still good... Sometimes shows bounce back from slumps. Some of the best episodes of Cheers and M*A*S*H were made after the shows went through major cast changes.
Indeed, that's what I'm seeing with season seven.
But forcing a story to go on when the primary party/parties responsible for that story do not wish to continue would be simple profit-seeking. I would liken it to trying to force some other writer to write Sandman for DC/Vertigo comics after Neil Gaiman has finished his part of the story.
While significantly stronger than most of the subsequent seasons, the third season is marred by a couple of issues.
The Mayor's character, while well-quirked and fleshed-out, never really had any ambitions beyond turning himself into a giant snake. The Master wished to free himself, Angelus wanted to foment chaos, and even Glory wanted to escape the mundanity of this plane of existence. But for all the buildup, for all the anticipation for what the Ascension was to be, turning into a giant snake was a bit of a letdown.
Faith's turn to darkness wasn't so much a spiraling descent more than a flip of the "Let's turn her insane" switch. The problem with this particular facet of season three is that from "Consequences" on, we're to assume that (at least according to what's presented and Angel's somewhat authorial edict) Faith has "got a taste for killing" following the accidental manslaughter of the deputy mayor--it's this lame reason that she tries to strangle Xander in that episode. The writers decided to ignore the more compelling (and more foreshadowed) reasons Faith could turn to the dark side.
While you might find the Buffy-Angel romance of season three a prime facet of season three, the execution of it showed that the then multiplying writing staff had some trouble deciding what their week-to-week status was. One week, Buffy would breakup with Angel, the next they'd be all over one another. It got so melodramatic, they parodied themselves in "The Zeppo."
All of these are minor cracks in the veneer of season three. The main issue I can't really forgive it, despite the general fun of the villainous Mayor, is the failed metaphor that the writers try and foist upon us for the season finale. When faced with the prospect of losing the world or losing her boyfriend, she chooses to risk her own life--the life of the only person who's really capable of preventing Apocalypse--to save her lover. Despite the touching scene at the end where Giles hands Buffy her diploma, the two-part "Graduation" shows that Buffy is still very much a petulant child, and not at all ready to "graduate" to the responsibilities and sacrifices of adulthood.
Sheesh. I'm a geek...
You can catch edited episodes of Buffy daily on FX, and old eps of Futurama on Cartoon Network. I think Cartoon is also going to be showing new episodes of Futurama, too, but I'm not as well-informed about that series.
After dealing with some sub-par allegory and poor storytelling in the third to sixth seasons, I'm kinda happy that the series will end with this season, where the writing has appeared to improve despite Joss Whedon's attention to Firefly.
Although that one scene with Lucy Liu as the dominatrix consultant showed teeming masses of geeky wage slaves, it did have the redeeming quality of her shouting, "Who builds the company's products?! YOU DO!"
I remember watching that at about the exact same time our own tech team was denied free sodas by our pigfarking CTO.
Of course you're being sarcastic, but that silly looking 3D system was actually an SGI product called fsn, pronounced "fusion," and it ran on IRIX 4.0.1+ machines...
Five years in prison to get fame and perpetual job security?
I think my anal virginity is a rather high price to pay for fame and perpetual job security...
Those still sucked.
From the previous article, the patent was filed by Mirabilis (later purchased by AOL), which came out with ICQ in 1996 or so.
I'm not sure how AOL's patent application is worded, but if they specifically mention a windowed environment, MIT's Zephyr system operates under X.
-I'd like Peace on Earth, Good will toward Men
-We're the United States Government. We don't do that.
Duh.. He's hittin' it.
It's the equivalent of a authoritative fugue... :)
In poetry, the caesura is a break in rhythmic flow in the middle of a verse. What the author means is that TTT is a well-crafted midpoint or something to that effect.
Why didn't you just gut him?
At first they look a bit cartoonish, but when I saw them in action, I found their battle more compelling than the one at Helm's Deep...
It's pretty good. I found I liked Fellowship more, because the separate stories in TTT slows the pace of the movie and makes you feel the long running time more than Fellowship's pace (understandable, given the costraints of plot). This could also be because I saw it at 12:01 am in a very hot, crowded theater, with people discussing Guinan's friendship with Picard behind me.
For the purists: I'm going to have to re-read the book, but Jackson does make some big changes to plot (far bigger in the plot-sense than substitutiing Arwen in or eliminating Tom Bombadil).
Visually, the film is spectacular, from the siege at Helm's Deep, to just the amazing scenery of Edoras.
My primary complaint with the movie: Not enough Ents. But what you do see of them is awe-inspiring.
"Writing something provocative and intresting, and timing it so that it gets a lot of exposure and revinue is not trolling."
troll
1. v.,n. [From the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban] To utter a posting on Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or flames; or, the post itself. Derives from the phrase "trolling for newbies" which in turn comes from mainstream "trolling", a style of fishing in which one trails bait through a likely spot hoping for a bite.
But let's not get pedantic now here...