Yesterday was my first day off in 3 weeks so I decided to get a bit high for the first time in ages. Was watching Con Air and while it starts off well, it sure gets ridiculous in the end and I never realized HOW ridiculous till watching it last night.
Anyway, after that I was like "OH YEAH I HAVE SEASON 5 OF LOST DOWNLOADED! TIME TO START WATCHING THAT!"
SPOILERS BELOW
Now, I am not sure if it's cause I was high or if the first 2 episodes of the season were insanely confusing / kind of stupid, but I had no idea wtf was going on. I mean, I've seen every episode of LOST and even played the stupid game, but I was still totally baffled. I also was thinking "Man they've gone so intense on this time travel shit that it's not the same anymore, I miss the 'lord of the flies' type of days when they first crashed on the island. I dunno if I like this show anymore".
But I powered through and watched till episode 6. By then I was really into it again. I'm not sure if it's cause it got less confusing, was a cooler story, and overall just made more sense, or if the reason I liked it more was cause I was less high. Basically every episode I watched I liked more than the previous one. So was the show getting progressively better or was I just getting more sober?
I have no idea. I'm curious to hear what other people thought about the first 6 episodes of season 5, and PLEASE don't risk any spoilers, just overall impressions =)
I'm actually gonna go rewatch episode 1 as soon as I finish this post, so that should settle it. I hope.
PokerStars is pleased to announce the release of two new Account Security Enhancements which will help enhance the security of your PokerStars account. We're sending this special email to you because you maintain a significant PokerStars account balance.
does this mean I'm rich now? I hope so... i haven't played in like a week so hopefully there was a mistake and they put money in my account, cause I don't think I have a significant pokerstars account balance, lol.
On April 18 2009 19:10 SfydjkLm wrote:
The better example of missing great things would be the Butterfly Effect that entered the theaters as a mediocre at best movie with a cheesy ending. Its only when the directors cut came out that it really shone as a psychological masterpiece.
I made a post a while back about good movies that were missed due to bad advertising, and sfydjklm made the above post. I decided to put the Directors Cut of Butterfly Effect on my DVD list and see if he was tellin truth. He sure as hell was, cause that movie was fucking awesome! Total mind fuck and really well done. I'm not gonna say anything more other than go put it at the top of your queue.
Now I have to go and look up what the original version was like. I mean, what were the differences between the original and the directors cut... if you can tell me then please do so in a spoiler. I'm dead curious to find out what the changes were.
A few weeks back there was a big drama because ASU said that they wouldn't give Obama an honorary degree when he gave the commencement speech at the 2009 graduation, because he hadn't done enough to deserve it. So when Obama spoke yesterday I wondered how he would handle it. And he came through to deal with it using humor, class, and to turn the situation into a teaching point and a seriously inspirational speech. Here's the humor part:
Now, before I begin, I'd like to clear the air about that little controversy everyone was talking about a few weeks back. I have to tell you, I really thought it was much ado about nothing, although I think we all learned an important lesson. I learned to never again pick another team over the Sun Devils in my NCAA bracket. And your university President and Board of Regents will soon learn all about being audited by the IRS.
The rest of the speech was fantastic. He talked about how we define success and how that focus on materialistic gain needs to be changed. It was insanely inspirational and I have a hard time understanding how people can hate him so much if they are openly listening to him. I guess the haters just don't listen, and that's the problem. I understand disagreement on policy, but the demonization of Obama is just ridiculous and it's moments like these where I sit and think "how the hell can people think this guy is the devil?"
In the face of these challenges, it may be tempting to fall back on the formulas for success that have dominated these recent years. Many of you have been taught to chase after the usual brass rings: being on this "who's who" list or that top 100 list; how much money you make and how big your corner office is; whether you have a fancy enough title or a nice enough car...
I want to highlight two main problems with that old approach. First, it distracts you from what is truly important, and may lead you to compromise your values, principles and commitments. Think about it. It's in chasing titles and status - in worrying about the next election rather than the national interest and the interests of those they represent - that politicians so often lose their way in Washington. It was in pursuit of gaudy short-term profits, and the bonuses that come with them, that so many folks lost their way on Wall Street...
The trappings of success may be a by-product of this larger mission, but they can't be the central thing. Just ask Bernie Madoff.
If you have some time or if you're feeling down, or downswinging, or depressed, then I suggest watching the speech as it's top notch.
This is kinda funny and sad and scary at the same time. A kid put a fake quote onto wikipedia to see if the news media would use it, and they took the bait.
DUBLIN (AP) -- When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news.
His report card: Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked.
The sociology major's obituary-friendly quote -- which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer's death March 28 -- flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India. They used the fabricated material, Fitzgerald said, even though administrators at the free online encyclopedia twice caught the quote's lack of attribution and removed it.
A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud. So Fitzgerald told several media outlets they'd swallowed his baloney whole.
"I was really shocked at the results from the experiment," Fitzgerald, 22, said Monday in an interview a week after one newspaper at fault, The Guardian of Britain, became the first to admit its obituarist lifted material straight from Wikipedia.
"I am 100 percent convinced that if I hadn't come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up," he said. "It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact."
So far, The Guardian is the only publication to make a public mea culpa, while others have eliminated or amended their online obituaries without any reference to the original version -- or in a few cases, still are citing Fitzgerald's florid prose weeks after he pointed out its true origin.
"One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack," Fitzgerald's fake Jarre quote read. "Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear."
Fitzgerald said one of his University College Dublin classes was exploring how quickly information was transmitted around the globe. His private concern was that, under pressure to produce news instantly, media outlets were increasingly relying on Internet sources -- none more ubiquitous than the publicly edited Wikipedia.
When he saw British 24-hour news channels reporting the death of the triple Oscar-winning composer, Fitzgerald sensed what he called "a golden opportunity" for an experiment on media use of Wikipedia.
He said it took him less than 15 minutes to fabricate and place a quote calculated to appeal to obituary writers without distorting Jarre's actual life experiences. He noted that the Wikipedia listing on Jarre did not have any other strong quotes.
If anything, Fitzgerald said, he expected newspapers to avoid his quote because it had no link to a source -- and even might trigger alarms as "too good to be true." But many blogs and several newspapers used the quotes at the start or finish of their obituaries.
He said the Guardian was the only publication to respond to him in detail and with remorse at its own editorial failing. Others, he said, treated him as a vandal who was solely to blame for their cut-and-paste content.
"The moral of this story is not that journalists should avoid Wikipedia, but that they shouldn't use information they find there if it can't be traced back to a reliable primary source," said the readers' editor at the Guardian, Siobhain Butterworth, in the May 4 column that revealed Fitzgerald as the quote author.
"It's worrying that the misinformation only came to light because the perpetrator of the deception emailed publishers to let them know what he'd done, and it's regrettable that he took nearly a month to do so," she wrote.
Fitzgerald said he had waited in part to test whether news organizations or the public would smoke out the quote's lack of provenance. He said he was troubled that none did.
And he warned that a truly malicious hoaxer could have evaded Wikipedia's own informal policing by getting a newspaper to pick up a false piece of information -- as happened when his quote made its first of three appearances -- and then use those newspaper reports as a credible footnote for the bogus quote.
"I didn't want to be devious," he said. "I just wanted to show how the 24-hour, minute-by-minute media were now taking material straight from Wikipedia because of the deadline pressure they're under."
Even though there was no source for the quote and it was on wikipedia, newspapers, tv stations and more all around the world ran the quote as if it were a solid fact. And this wasn't some tabloid shit, but papers like The Guardian. I guess it's not such a surprise as the quality of journalism has gone way down hill recently. But it's sad to see.
Switching seats on stars can be a very tilting experience, especially if you use tableninja. While I love tableninja I do have this one complaint... see, I have it set to sit down and buyin on any table that gets opened. This is a great feature and saves a shit load of time and prevents the distraction of having to deal with a buyin on a new table while playing a hand. But if you're already on a table and sitting OOP on a fish, and then the seat to the left of the fish opens up, you're in for a shitty time to get that seat.
Part of this suffering is due to stars. You can just click the seat and move there (unless there was an upgrade I don't know about). You have to leave the table, reopen the table via the lobby, and then choose the new seat. That's a pain in the ass as usually it takes forever to find the table in the lobby and then when you leave you often come back to find someone else already took the seat and you have to just sit back in the seat you had before... and sometimes your old seat is gone too, so now you're off the table. Balls.
If you try that procedure with tableninja on, you could be in for more suffering. Tableninja likes to take empty seats on the right side of the table first, so if you were sitting far right and the fish is far left, and you want top left, you gotta turn tableninja off. Otherwise you just reopen the table and it auto sits you in and buys in for you on the far right seat that you had before.
This extra step sucks balls. Cause now I'm not only dealing with the pain in the ass pokerstars way of moving seats, but I gotta deal with tableninja too.
I tilted really badly earlier tonight because of this... I was 250bb deep on a table with only 1 fish on it, the rest were regs. The 1 fish was directly to my left. He managed to double through me and at the same time knock out the guy to his left. So after getting raped I thought "I am gonna take all his monies" and then I see the empty seat! YES, POSITION ON THE FISH! I hunt the table down in the lobby, turn off table ninja, exit the table, reopen it, and take the seat, and turn back on table ninja. Seems like a success right? Nope, for some reason PS decided that despite me losing like half my stack the previous hand, they think I left the table with 250bb and force me to rebuy for that amount. At first I think this is some sort of mistake, so I try to leave the table and rebuy again for the amount I had when I left... I turn of tableninja, find the table in the lobby, exit the table, reopen it and NOOOOOOOOOOOOO, a reg has taken the seat to the left of the fish.
BALLS
Anyway, it takes a LONG time to play 1k hands while 3-4 tabling. I think I just played about 4 hours straight and got like 1.4k hands in. damn.
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