A new day. A lot of people have written about a new day.
I feel particularly sober at this moment in time. If that even makes any sense. If I had any sense I probably wouldn't be writing these things. I am a bit sleepy but not quite ready for sleep. A state that I enjoy writing in. I'm listening to Meshuggah pretty loud in my pro headphones. It is a fun experience even without the writing. My blue switch keys are barely decipherable but I still get the sensory feeling of hitting the sweet spot and the keys clicking into place.
The prescription drug issue seems to be resolved for now. American capitalism. What a great system. The only people that seemed to care about me was my mom and my therapist. That could be a metaphor for life by the way. I am not out of the woods yet. I don't know if any of the fuckers are going to budge but I did get a free two week "sample" from the doctor's office after I told them I ran out of meds.
I can play Heartbreaker by Led Zeppelin on the guitar pretty well at this point minus the crazy solo. I saw something today that Adam Jones (Tool guitarist) said. He said that guitarists need 2 things attitude and discipline. I found that to ring true although I am not sure I have much in the attitude department quite yet. I do play the guitar every day though even if I don't feel like it. I practice scales (blues and pentatonic). It's funny I used to love the blues scales and now I am into the pentatonic scales more now. Then I work on whatever my lesson was on. Then, if I am feeling it I turn the amp up and fuck around with my effects pedal and let it rip. Which is not very impressive at this point but it is fun. Although, I think playing with heavy distortion and delay can actually fuck with my good or bad habits. I almost always practice with a clean amp or without an amp. Just some newbie thoughts.
I don't know. I've written this much and could just as well delete it all. I usually only post when I am anxious, distraught, and discontent which maybe I still am but I have to say I was feeling pretty good today.
So long and thanks for all the fishby Ket, June 14
I’ve been recovering at home from covid for past couple weeks not doing too much, mainly bored. In the downtime I started getting some nostalgia feels of the poker golden days good times.
LP was started in Sept or Oct 2005 and I believe I probably checked this site daily from day 1 until 2013 or so when I quit poker. Those were some great times, I remember fondly and am super grateful for some of the good times I had with a lot of old LPers as we went on this adventure together. For the broodwar generation it was incredibly good fortune to be ~early 20s, right time & right place (here) when the ESPN/moneymaker/internet boom happened.
Going to just keyboard mash out some shout outs and memories, I think in roughly chronological order of when our paths crossed,
TwistedEcho (Jon), my starcraft bff (Clan VdP 4lyfe) who got me into poker with a $30 loan and told me in a 3 min MSN messenger convo how to beat SnGs and limit holdthem (all that was needed at the time). Later became a MTT herobluff+herocall monster that also liked to party more than almost all nerdy poker players. Biggest weakness in his otherwise beastly game was credit card roulette. Pictured below with Myth shortly after losing cc roulette in a LP dinner attended by quite a lot more people than in this photo, lol.
Tom (teej1985), my uni housemate. We dropped out to play poker together (actually Tom was 1st a few months ahead, and his mother blamed me for corrupting him, go figure?). My brother from another mother, we lived breathed sleeped the game together for the golden years, shared a house and battled common enemies in the stars 10/20 25/50 games. His poker career was nearly over before it began, taking degen big MTT shots with his roll. Down to last $5 in a $5 MTT and either won or came 2nd for a 4 figure score to get his start. Went on to crush very high stakes for very long. Beast
Rekrul – if you were a fan of broodwar and poker in this era there is no way Rekrul was not the top cat and you weren’t a fanboy. From TL.net grim reaper to being one of the forerunners of the bw->poker transition. If back in the day we were paper chasers just livin’ our life then it’s safe to say Rekrul paved the way for us cats to get paid pre-uigea (sorry I’ll try to stop this turning into shit). He may not have been so pleased about this, here’s an old chatlog: https://i.imgur.com/ptftNH0.png
Nonetheless it was a delight to witness some rekrul ownage personally beasting people on the Wynn $10/20 cash tables (some crazy games back then, people buying in $50k deep and running outrageous bluffs). Other memory highlights include railing Rekrul beast Vanessa Selbst for a bracelet in WSOP $10k hu with a bunch of LPers (including the lovable degen Raidan who beat me for a surprising amount at $100 a throw rock-paper-scissors while we were waiting for the action to start).
TOTMidiaN – my boy the best british starcraft player by a ludicrous margin. Proud to have ‘paid it forward’ what Echo did for me by loaning him some $ to get him started in poker. Another guy come to kill Dan’s EV. Lived the good life for a good nr of years in Korea and became fluent in Korean.
RiKD – good to see you still around here man. Good times in 2006 sharing Vegas rooms. I was a 21yo total life fish, I guess we all were. Bad sleep schedules, grinding online in the room, and getting up too late to go somewhere nice for dinner and settling on the default All American Bar and Grill in Rio for multiple nights in a row which was the only convenient thing open at midnight. Ugh! But funny. More good stories coming to mind I probably don’t want to share publically!
RainKhan – hilarious chap. I just cannot even think of a single good Khan story that it would be reasonable to publically repeat here.
MezmerizePlz (vvvvvvvQ) and his boy Alex – I can remember one great steak dinner we had in Dublin where we were abs pissing ourselves over one the aforementioned RainKhan stories that won’t be shared publically. Many more good times in Vegas on top.
Nazgul – super calm and smart persona in real life – though used to do 40 hour sessions to get unstuck, think he had one where he only stopped playing after coming back from some ungodly number of buyins down at 10/20stars; berated me for having a ‘spineless’ habit of quitting when I was losing and stopped playing well (or as “well” as anyone played in like 2008 – take this comment on a relative basis, this was pre-solver street poker we were playing here back in the day ????)
Daut – had many good chats (including about our favourite 3/6 stars player SOROS). Pleasure to watch his PCA win and owning Ike HU at the end with a high reliability live tell.
Mig – MTT beast, kept crushing me in sidebets. Good laughs had together in Vegas houses. Shortly after winning his bracelet, with his laid back ‘nothing special just another day in the office’ demeanor: https://i.imgur.com/kNnoA3c.png
RaSZi – legend but basically on tilt all the time for one reason or another from what I remember of the times. Remember a particularly awkward incident when a bunch of us were housing together for Vegas in some ridiculous mansion, Lex was outside the house life tilting very hard trying to calm down with a cigarette, and Echo had the idea of lightening the mood by pranking Raszi with a water balloon to the face…… That one, it turns out, did not have the intended effect and actually went down very poorly… LOLOL
Myth – true gentleman and good guy. Introduced me to scotch, general jovial bonvivant. I am rofling myself currently at an amazing pic of him I have here at the end of a Vegas night out, that is probably again not for public sharing.
PoorUser – master of winning with ludicrous J high calldowns where it’s not even likely he beats bluffs at showdown but manages to pull it off somehow.
MiPwnYa – Ultimate bonvivant French. Moved to London near the tail-end of my poker career, we were living not too far off each other and had many great squash/badminton battles, dinners and drinks. Got some excellent life advice from my brother Quentin at the time which changed the course of my life subsequently.
locoo (small L, two Os) – winning at life in Lima, beautiful family, thanks for your hospitality when I was travelling in South America. Hope you stayed away from those crooked local live games (or found they weren’t crooked and crushed them!)
straate – had many a stars battle with this legend at the tables. Probably only LPer I’ve met for a dinner (that I wasn’t already friends with outside LP prior) after transitioning out of poker, on a business trip to SF few years back. Guy’s made his own good transition out of poker and was doing interesting stuff
longple – epic grinder, one of the guys that was becoming the new generation of beast just as I was quitting the game, had a great dinner with him in London and was very happy to see him having deserved success at the time for his hard work
Liquid`Meat (made TL & LP websites, guy was ridiculously Dutch and loves his beer)[/b],
DustySwedeDude - guy was the most social/least nerdy I’ve ever seen an LPer at a live MTT table, was smashing the red wine at some semilarge euro main event donkament and being the table entertainer,
F4zi - flashiest LPer, knew how to enjoy his life,
Xervean - OG LP Degen taking high stakes shots for rolls back in the day. I understand through social media the man has cleaned up his act and crushes chess/responsible stakes poker now?
Cutssss – Insane Frenchie doing ridic stuff and crushing the games on weird euro sites.
And LPers I don’t think I ever met but who I chatted with online a lot or just enjoyed the posts of: Baal (great guy, lots of life wisdom and lots of car wisdom)
Ggplz – actually ha we did meet but before poker, at WCG UK! Good guy
Arya – more well known as a TL.net mod (just not by me because I can’t remember his name or more well known ID anymore, just went by Arya on LP). Introduced me to GoT books in 2006 way before there was any murmur of a HBO show. Has a great story of taking a degen underrolled partypoker 10/20nl shot. Played 1 orbit. Limps utg with AA. Hsnl proto-crusher loloTRICKEDu isolate raises, Arya limp-reraises ALLIN FOR 100BB. Gets timebank-called by AK or something, wins $2k, sits out next hand, never plays a hand of 10/20 again. 10000bb/100 lifetime winrate lol.
Other names of posters I liked that come to mind- Loco, byrnesam, SakiSaki, Tomson, Rhaegar.
I almost don’t want to even press the post button at this point because I’m scared I’m forgetting people here. Pls don’t take it personally and kindly post your own stories of our shared good times if you see this!
Would always love to reconnect with old LP friends at some point in life, send me a PM if any of you guys are ever in London and want to get a dinner or drink. Am assuming many of you check this site from once every two years to never, so even if you’re reading this a few years down the line offer stands ????. Actually just reach out to reconnect anyway, would love to know what you guys are up to now etc. Let me know where in the world you are (incase I’m travelling there anytime soon like with work or something.. likely in US + Toronto few times a year now that travel is a thing again)
As for me I quit poker in 2013 and rejoined the zz traditional route. Got married, started a family (my daughter is 7 now), got a finance job looking at stocks.
Fresh day, fresh thread. I want to keep it brief so I can watch some Better Call Saul and sleep.
What got me bummed today is I finally have an anti-psychotic that seems to work for me and they are trying to charge me $200/month for it. I have to negotiate with the damn insurance company. Anybody have any pro tips for this? I am thinking my leverage is I just don't take the drug but I am not sure if there are better options. Just not taking any anti-psychotic I don't think is a great idea. I just got hit with this news today because they gave me the first one free like some heroin dealer and then when everything is stable WHAMMM $200/month.
I got asked out to lunch by a co-worker today for Monday but I work Monday. I told her Tuesday or Thursday would work. We will see. I am unsure if it is a date or just a lunch date. I figure fuck it I'll figure it out as the time passes. Life is too short.
Life is too short to be writing these damn blogs, man.
I wonder if everyone is holding their breaths thinking about whether or not the site will be closed in the near future. I have been too busy to think about that recently actually but now that I can take some breaths it is on the mind.
I also remember it has been over a week since I have played on Ignition due to issues with the site. Ignition say they are going to compensate players in some way but I haven't seen it yet besides some extra fpp points. In fact, most of my funds are locked. Fun stuff.
I have been getting into techno recently.
Really diggin' this track:
Coming back to LP's potential closure. Maybe we are all in agreement that it is sad but true?
I log in and it's a black screen or a white/grey screen. Finally, I restart enough times and get to the lobby but I can't join any games. It loads up to 99% and then just stays there.
I googled it and it happens to other people. I was wondering if this stuff happens to you and how often?
I set everything up. The Ignition Hand Grabber recognized the tables I was on and was presumably grabbing hands but when I go to PT4 there is nothing. It just says I need to put in a player name but there are no names on Ignition. I'm overly tired and feeling desperate right now. I thought maybe someone on here might have a quick fix.
So this is my 4th(?) attempt at it and is probably my best attempt at running a blog.
I've done all the research that goes with hosting/domains/wordpress/ga4 + gsc/SEO and a ton of tiny details in doing it right.
Shrimping is great but I do not love doing it. I still work there but I've decided to take a backseat for now. I'm old as fuck so I'd rather do something I love and spend more time doing this tbh. I've done everything from the ground up so it's not perfect but it'll have my favorite movies and shows so please check it out.
Gomorrah has ended after 5 seasons. Fantastic show. Highly recommend it!!!
"This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.
The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.
It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
"This is water."
"This is water."
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.
I wish you way more than luck."
— David Foster Wallace (This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life)
"That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built."
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