Author Archives: solidneon

Degenerate hoser convention, part 1.

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The following is a long-delayed entry from my experiences at this year’s World Series of Poker.

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Kyle had been telling me for the past year that the live players at the WSOP tended towards a very low average skill level. For example, I played(and hosed) the $1500 no-limit holdem event today. I had initially expected the skill level to be somewhere around the level of online $530s. Or at least, $215s.

Today was about the level of online $55s or $33s.

To say the least, I was not impressed with the general level of play. Sure, I could identify a fair number of good players at each table, but rather than having 1 or 2 donks at each table on average, there had to be more like 4-5 donks a table. At least, I was seeing some plays which were completely beyond my comprehension, implying that they were either strokes of genius or complete idiocy. My money’s on the latter.

Multiple people were getting on me for shaking, thinking that it was a tell. However, as former roommates can attest, my leg tends to twitch/shake constantly anyways, so this probably doesn’t indicate anything aside from me being the spastic type.
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Sin City, part 2.

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At the end of the March trip, the entire team had dinner at the Wynn Buffet. The Wynn Buffet is one of the best buffets in Vegas- personally, my favorite part was that they used a bandsaw to pre-open the snow crab legs for easier dining. Kyle’s favorite part was their thermonuclear candied apples, which had some excessively hard and brittle candy coating. In fact, it was hard enough that dropping it onto the table from a height of about a foot didn’t even chip the coating.

While there, we talked about various promotions and comps that casinos had. One comp involved going to a shooting range, where a store had many comparatively exotic firearms for rent such as M249s and Barrett .50 cal sniper rifles. A few minutes ago, we had been talking about pets and animal shelters, so I suggested a new comp thing where people could use their comps to go to the shooting range and donate to animal shelters. In exchange, when shelters needed to euthanize animals, they would instead be turned out onto a shooting range where people would take aim with the Barrett .50 cals. Considering that a bullet that size would blow a 200-lb mule deer into pieces, it’d red mist a typical housecat or pet dog.

At this point, everybody was staring at me, and one of the other degenerate gamblers in the group asked me what the hell was wrong with me.

Hey, it seems like a much kinder, quicker death than the asphyxiation methods that some places use. If I had to pick, getting my head blown off by a bullet the size of a paperweight seems a lot faster than being strangled.

Sin City, part 1.

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(In case you missed it, Wretched Hives of Scum and Villainy starts here and describes (mis)adventures in Reno, the Biggest Shitty Little City in the World.)

Last month, I joined Kyle and a bunch of other degenerates in Vegas as part of a team organized by a guy nicknamed Fixer. There was a casino- a decent sized one, in the Strip area- which was having a double payouts promotion for jackpots from midnight to 11:59:59 pm for one day. This was big. Depending on what game was available, it could turn something which is ordinarily a 95% game- that is, returning 95 cents for every dollar wagered- into a 130% game. We were looking at being able to pull a profit of about $1500 per hour per person.

Unfortunately, when we got there, it turns out they had Nerfed the two best plays. Sadly, this dropped things to around a 107% game- still good, still running around $300/hr per person, but not quite what we were hoping for given that most of the team had flew in for this. But hey, it could still turn out to be a solid profit if we could get in a half dozen hours of play before they pulled the promo. If we could get in a marathon session, so much the better. We’d work in pairs and sit spread across the gaming floor, hoping to avoid identification as a team.
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I remember elementary/junior high science fairs. They sucked.

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Really. I mean, we all knew that no truly novel question was going to be answered, the teachers often had no clue what the scientific method was, and grades were usually assigned based on how pretty one’s display was.

That being said, some projects are even worse than others. One wonders just what the teachers thought- or how some of these ideas got through in the first place. Though given that one elementary school classmate’s project was called “Astro Ants and Astro Gerbil” and involved sending the family pet up as the payload of a model rocket, I guess I really can’t be too surprised.

Return of the synths.

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There have been quite a few songs in the past couple years which are either remakes of or heavily inspired by stuff from the early 80s. Off the top of my head:

“Talk” by Coldplay, a remake of “Computer Love” by Kraftwerk. This is my favorite of the new remakes, and Partyben’s mashup of the two songs is just plain brilliant.

“SOS” by Rihanna, a remake of “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell. I think Soft Cell’s version was actually a remake of an even earlier version, though I don’t know who offhand. Now, as long as Rihanna doesn’t decide to continue taking riffs off of Soft Cell, she’ll be fine. I think Soft Cell’s use of chainsaws and naked dwarves in the video for their followup single “Sex Dwarf” was the quickest torpedoing of a career the early 80s had seen- and you gotta remember this was the age of Nena and A Flock of Seagulls.
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Wretched Hives of Scum and Villainy, part VI

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For Part V of Wretched Hives of Scum and Villainy, click here.

One of the casinos that I play at in the Reno area has a tropical rainforest theme. Now, I’m used to seeing all sorts of garish decor around casinos, but this one is pretty bad even by casino standards.

They have a “Storm Bar” or something which is supposed to remind people of rainforest storms. Every half hour or so, thunder plays over the loudspeakers, the lights around the bar flash, and water comes pouring down into a large(maybe 10′ by 20′), flat rectangular pool a few inches deep. Unfortunately, the water nozzles are all off of a single long pipe running the length of the pool, suspended seven feet above. This makes the entire array look like a giant stadium-style urinal, which I’m sure is the kind of image that encourage people to order expensive fruity drinks.

Far more annoying, however, is the presence of a supposed “bird of paradise” that zooms around the casino regularly. This mechanical contraption(which looks more like a badly painted flying chicken) is suspended from a rail track on the ceiling and emits ear-piercing squawks. The bird also drops chips and cash every so often, giving the impression that the bird is shitting money. I put in play only because it has a pretty good comps and cashback deal, but after a couple hours of listening to that infernal machine, I wanted to ask the casino staff whether I could spend some comps for the use of a 12-gauge shotgun and a box of shells. Blowing that thing out of the sky would’ve been as good as hitting four of a kind.

Wretched Hives of Scum and Villainy, part 5. AKA, I drive them crazy(ooh! ooh!), like no one else.

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For Part 4 of Wretched Hives of Scum and Villainy, click here.

My housing situation got all sorts of screwed up this summer, since the house I lived in was breaking up due to 5 out of the 7 occupants moving in with significant others. I found a place for this upcoming year, but the problem was that my old lease ended 8/31, but the new place wouldn’t be ready for movein until 9/23. Out of the people who offered crash space, only three households didn’t have furry pets- and I’m really allergic to furry animals. I didn’t want to stay a week at each place- talk about an easy way to get every one of my friends annoyed with me. I figure for pretty much anybody, three days is enough to get one’s hosts mildly annoyed.

The obvious solution, then, was to fly to Reno(tickets essentially paid for by casinos) to stay for free at the resorts for 3 weeks. So I’m back in the Biggest Shitty Little City in the World for a bit, playing some video poker, hanging out with Kyle, and trying to put up with the kind of tourist who comes to Nevada to die.
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Italo disco…was there a scarier music scene in the 80s?

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I may have posted about the hilarity of Silicon Dream’s “Andromeda” earlier. Here’s Wish Key’s “Orient Express”, one of the biggest Italo Disco hits of the 80s. I’m not quite sure what’s with this video- it looks like they shot it in the guy’s basement with the idea that adding a disco ball would automatically make things look cool. Catchy synth hooks though.