sixth sense

walk around atlantic city this week and there sure are a lot of people who have it. at least if you ask them.

in fact, every time i sit at a poker table there seem to be nine people who have it. it's like morgan freeman said in the shawshank redemption; he's the only guilty man at shawshank. well at the poker table, i'm the only one without esp.

i've always thought it's hilarious that people try to elevate what they do to some transcendant level in order to eleveat their self-value. you take the average card player and what you get is someone who gives his money away during 12-hour sessions where the only movements he makes are lifting the corners of two cards to see what he's been dealt. their hygeine is generally subpar, their social skills limited to ogling at cocktail waitresses, and their families generally undercared for.

yet they seem to gloss over these details. if their english were better, they'd describe their compulsion as a way of life; an unflinching battle of wits where strategy is neither finite nor constant, but rather an evolution of style which combines mathematical analysis, pattern analysis and comprehension of human nature at the highest orders. yes, it is warfare, humanized; the physical bruatality of battle removed, distilled into a matching of social intelligence.

to illustrate, here's a scent that transpired at my table. note: poker jargon has been translated into standard english.

"That's a helluva bet." (translation: you're really smart) He pauses to cotemplate the correct course of action, activating his extra-sensory power to deconstruct the meaning of his opponent staring at the table. He shakes his head in disbelief of his challenger's adroitness.

"Wow, that is a great play." (translation: this borders on genius on your part. I am truly impressed by your abilities.)

"I'm going to lay this down." (translation: I have determined that you hold the winning hand. Despite losing the hand, the fact that i'm able to unravel your brillant stratagem demonstrates that i am operating on a higher plane than mere mortals.)

yes, this is what passes for social interaction among poker players. next time, you're at the cardroom, try it for yourself. acknolwedge the complex web of thinking that your opponent used in deciding on how to play his hand, and by showing that you are able to decipher it, you will indirectly showed your superiority.

and best of all, the people will see you as a really nice guy!

you really do learn something everyday

in case any of you aren't aware, poker is really popular right now. if you own a television for any other reason than deference to societal norm, you've come across it on the tube. by my count, there's three weekly programs dedicated to the "sport". and trust me, i'm not searching the tv guide looking for more.

i'm typing this from the desk of my atlantic city hotel room because i've made the cross country journey to the world poker tour borgata event. for a while, i supplemented my income playing texas holdem, but that was mostly online, and this is my first major ($10k) event. so despite logging hundreds of hours playing cards, i've spent relatively little time in the company of actual poker players. thank god.

but it hasn't taken me long to figure out something about a large number of the people and how they think. i also think it explains part of what is behind the poker boom.

in reality, any person with half a brain and the patience to sit in a chair for hours at a time can be a winning player. one of the big skills of the game is pattern recognition and doing quick computations in your head -- otherwise known as nerdiness. not nerdiness in the sense of getting stuffed in your locker before homeroom every morning, but real nerdiness of the ab (and bc) calculus variety. these are the people who pick the game up the fastest, and they are flocking to it.

why do you ask? it's because they're thrilled to have something they like to do that would be considered "cool" by girls. now on a friday night, they can play online poker instead of starcraft, earn money and not have to make up something to impress the receptionist at work they have a crush when she asks (rhetorically) how their weekend was.

if you need more convincing, just take a look at the poker groupies running around the borgata this weekend. they approach the various television pros requesting autographs, as obsequious as a trekkie asking spock for one of his ear tips. poker groupies even have their own uniform: cargo shorts and a swag white polo with a stretched out collar.

don't get the pesce

This was my second journey to this Italian tapas eatery. And if there's one hallmark of this Russian Hill restaurant, it's inconsistency. The service was spotty, lacking both the professionalism of a formal dining experience, but also the easy familarity of the place around the corner. It continued with the food. Some dishes, like the steamed clams, spicy corn and bread pudding were delectable. On the other hand, the oysters and swordfish rolls were just mediocre and the drunken tuna was terrible, tasting like microwaved Chicken on the Sea slathered in Bullseye BBQ sauce.

The wine list was suprisingly inexpensive, but I found out why when the first two bottles we ordered had all the complexity and body of a grape-flavored Capri-Sun. Then we asked the waiter to recommend a full-bodied bottle and he brought one twice as expensive as anything else on the list. That was annoying.

yes sir.

i'm really down on intelligence right now. what i mean is that i'm beginning to think that being smart doesn't count for shit. in fact, i'm not so sure being above average is really better than being average when it comes to brain power. after all when you're smarter than the people around you, all you think about is how everything that people are doing sucks.

take my job for example. a couple months ago, we designed ads on a pretty tight budget using stock photography that really did set us apart from most of our competition in the backward world of online gaming (think dot coms at their heyday).

now, one month into launch, the financier decides that everything is wrong with the ad.

his reasoning: don't re-invent the wheel.

yes, instead of trying to be different than all your competitors, why not just be the same? just imitate what all your competitors are doing and grab some market share.

if that isn't the pearl of wisdom that has advanced human civilization over the last 2000 years, i don't know what is.

the shocking thing is that all the other people in the room simply nodded their head as if the ceiling had opened up and light from heaven was shining down upon them.

two months ago, everyone in this room loved this ad (i myself thought it was decent but not great). here are the two main excuses that people put forth as to why we were unable to foretell the problems with our campaign.

- sometimes, you need to see it on paper. hmm. well let's see; each of you was sent the proof and could've printed it out. we also got a match print done so that we could see exactly what it would look like.
- we had to see how it would look next to other company's ads. oh, this one is my favorite. wow, is this because it would've been so difficult to actually open one of the magazines and see how other ads compared to ours? or is it because the idea of evaluating the competition prior to developing a campaign was just too abstruse?

did i mention the man behind this project is probably worth $100 million and has a business that he nets close to $2 million a month?

obviously smarts don't help you get rich.

fuck yahoo personals

for a moment, let us return to our dear missy.

our poor watertown bloke has pulled himself up by his bootstraps and risen off the bed and forced himself to his computer two steps away. he has pledged to move on, see who else is available in his little town. so he opens his 56k modem and dials in to his ISP. five minutes later, he's connected.

isn't the internet remarkable, he mutters to himself.

full of resolve, he returns to the yahoo personals page. but 45 seconds later when the page finishes loading, his mouth drops open and he unknowingly slumps into his folding chair. the muscles in his neck give out and his chin drops to his chest.

this is what he sees.












his beloved missy in the arms of another man.

tears begin to streak down his face, more quickly than he can wipe them away. his breathing stops and starts in fits as his chest heaves.

he does the only thing he can and hits the continue button, but alas the modem can only process information so quickly. he curses the town, wondering when they too will have access to this technology rumored to be out there known as dsl.

little does our naive young boy know of the horror that awaits him though.
















he can no longer help himself. words begin to pour out of his mouth. harlot, slut, skank, slag. she has given herself up to not one but two different guys, this after he had waited a quarter of a century to give himself to her.

the horrid thoughts begin to creep into his head. why is she clad in the same shirt in both pictures? and then he realizes what it must be; she must have been with them at the same time. he covers his eyes trying to block out the image of missy spinning around like a merry-go round as each of the guys take one side each in filling her up from both ends.

but nothing stops. he screams and begins to pull on his hair. he wants everything to stop. he needs it to. he just can't go on like this.

so he makes things stop in the only way he knows how and he sprints down the stairs and out the front door, stripping off his clothes while in full motion, until he is, moments later, naked and standing in the knee-deep snow. he then dives into the white powder clawing his way to the bottom until the whole body goes numb and finally everything stops.

look what you've done yahoo. all because you've lied!

missy from watertown

with pretty good frequency when i open my yahoo mail, i find the pleasant countenance of a late-20's blonde with unblemished, pearly-white skin staring back at me. perhaps you've seen missy too -- she's the cover girl for yahoo's personals service.

pretty faces are so abundant on the internet -- although this one stands out because it leaves out the ample bosom that normally accompanies a woman's smile -- that i usually just gloss over them. but this one caught my eye for another reason: she's from watertown, ny.

for those unfamilar with this place, consider yourself lucky. during the winter, it quite regularly boasts being the coldest city in the continental us, and during a particularly desolate winter of 2003, the temperature didn't break zero (fahrenheit!) for more than 30 days consecutively.

i only know this, because my brother happens to make this arctic village his home. after finishing his residency at a harvard hospital, he had the choice of a faculty position at johns hopkins and a lucrative private practice in watertown. inexplicably, he took the money and a long-term residence in the frozen tundra.

as the good brother that i am, i decided to see if missy were available for my brother to date. after all, in a town where fixing a pothole warrants a front page headline in the town paper, a doctor is a small celebrity. and in fact, he made appearances on the local network twice within the first three months of moving there.

but after looking through several pages of personals, i was disappointed to find missy absent. intentionally, i filtered out characteristics that it was obvious missy did not possess. from her face, i knew she had blond hair, i knew she wasn't fat (no double chin) and i knew she was under 40.

still no missy (as a consolation, however, i did find a somewhat goth looking female in search of a nsa tryst).

think of that poor bloke in watertown who shoveled a dozen driveways of 2-inch thick ice to save up the $200 to buy that yearly description (as a gentlemen, he would need time to woo missy) only to find his cherubic girl has deserted him.

and now our pimple-faced 25 year old just sits in the bedroom he's called his own for the last nine years, curtains pulled, staring at the cream-colored paint peel off his walls, as his mom berates him for wasting so much money on a girl he should have known he'd never have.

giving for katrina

i made a small donation to the relief efforts for katrina victims, but i made a serious mistake in doing so. of course, i'm not saying i shouldn't have given money, but what i should've done is found a friend whose company had a matching donor program, and had the friend give the money on my behalf. you could make an argument that's unethical, and takes advantage of the generosity of certain corporations, but the argument's bullshit.

on a similar note, walmart, mcdonalds and ups have stopped paying regular wages to employees who can't get to work because they don't have scuba gear that would be necessary to get to their offices. apparently, they've decided that since they won't be making money in the new orleans area, no one should.

let me be the first to say how weak that is.

on walmart's page describing their relief efforts, they cite that they are delivering two trailers of water daily for the new orleans police force. WOW! maybe they're using the lost wages to fund the program.

i've never been one to extol the virtues of starbucks, but at least they've decided to keep cutting paychecks for disaster victims. of course, starbucks has nothing on their site saying they've done anything else. i'm guessing that's because they don't have anything else to say.

it's not the la sports club

i'm beginning to think the ymca where i work out attracts a bit of an odd crowd.

every gym has their one gross guy, and i figured that's what i found with the lotion guy. but now, just a couple days later, i've already come across someone else doing something totally inappropriate.

near the entrance of the men's locker room, there's a little enclave with an armchair, a loveseat and a little coffee table. ostensibly, you could relax there after a workout and read a magazine while you cool off. not the most hygenic setup, and i'm pretty sure i wouldn't apply the 10-second rule for food i dropped on a cushion there, but it's not soemthing i ever thought twice about.

well that was until today. after finishing a quick workout, i jogged down the stairs and entered the sitting area to find a portly asian man, probably in his late 40's seated in the armchair, apparently having dozed off, one leg propped up onto the armrest of the chair.

doesn't seem so strange, until you take into consideration that he was completely naked -- except for a towel covering his pubic area. but i'm not talking about the kind of towel made of cotton you use to dry yourself off.

no i'm talking about a paper towel, and not even a proper one at that. this was the brown variety that you find at classy locales like truck stops and high school bathrooms, the ones that can't absorb moisture but are pretty useful if you want to spread a liquid out so that it will evaporate more quickly.

yes, a man 50 pounds overweight, legs open as if expecting a delivery, with a single paper towel, so crumpled that he might have stuffed it in the pocket of his missing pants earlier in the day, to cover his genitals.

make-out tax

this morning, a cab ride from cole valley back to hayes valley cost me $10 (8.25+1.75); certainly nothing out of the ordnary there. what i did find odd was that an almost identical cab ride cost $17 just five hours earlier.

cab drivers have a bit of a reputation for trying to run up the meter on customers, but honestly i don't think it happens all that much. at least in san francisco. this doesn't mean i have a deep belief in the virtuosity of people in this occupation, but just that it's too hard to know who you can take advantage of. since every ethnicity is represented in this city, it's not like you can see a chinese person and think, score, foreigner. and you have to be pretty confident you can get away with it, since the moment someone figures out the driver's taking the great circle route, he not only loses his tip, but maybe the entire fare. so unless you're carrying nine shopping bags in each hand and bust out in japanese, you'll probably get to your destination for a fair price.

of course all this goes out the window when you start to hook up with somebody in the back seat. at this point the cab driver could basically pull over to the side of the road, shut off the engine and take a nap with the meter on, because he knows that all your attention is going toward trying to get the girl's shirt off/pants unbuttoned. and even if you unravel the ruse, there's not exactly a whole bunch of options. what would telling the driver to pull over so you can get out accomplish at this point (except not getting you laid)? besides, even when you reach the destination and realize your fare is twice what it should be, are you really going to haggle for the eight dollar overcharge when only a flight of stairs stands between sex.

plus, chances are good both of you are pretty wet. after all, people who aren't wasted don't start in the back of the cab. which means you won't even know you were screwed until the taxi home the next morning.

freudian slips

as a sometimes film reviewer for sfstation, i spend a fair amount of time at the theater. and having learned that writing a scathing review is more satisfying than writing a nice one, i see my fair share of absolute crap.

one of the things i've come to notice is how often comedies-that-don't-make-me-laugh and romances-that-make-me-want-to-puke incorporate freudian slips into the dialogue. i'm not sure whether these screenwriters have never seen a movie before and think its clever or if they just want to show off their knowledge of psychoanalysis, but i do know its annoying.

now i'd always thought slips were an old wives' tale like the crust of the bread having more nutrients (i learned this wasn't true a few years ago), but to my surprise and chagrin, i proved this was not the case, and found myself a victim of such a faux pas.

during the disastrous meal that was la suite, i had waited in excess of an hour for my entree to arrive, throwing my body into a bout of hypoglycemia. so when my lamb chops - which tasted like they had been left out of the refrigerator -- finally arrived, i blurted out thank god instead of the customary thank you to the server.

so it appears that the freudian slip is a genuine phenomenon. it still doesn't mean they have to be part of every picture that comes out of southern california.

thoughts of a food snob

i eat out a lot, both fancy and not so fancy. usually, i'm disappointed, but like all humans i get hungry. and like most americans i'm lazy, so that means excessive amounts of take-out and other cheap faire. it normally tastes about as good as the box it was delivered in, but i'm morally opposed to expecting a reward for wasteful and slothful behavior.

fine dining introduces a whole different set of standards though.

over the last 10 days, i'd patronized three separate expensive restaurants (at least $$$ in the standard pricing system) and for the pittance i must subsist on, this is a signficant expenditure. yet, not once did i leave the restaurant satisfied. was it possible that good food has reached the point of cloying?

for someone practical, this would be a terrific development, like saving a bunch of money on your car insurance by switching to geico. instead of clearing out your bank account for an ounce of goose liver, you could take a weekly visit to the grocery store for a 24-pack of top ramen. and with the savings, you could open an ira or something else people approaching their 30s are supposed to start learning about.

but for me, as much as i yearn for financial security, this development would deprive me of one of my true joys in life. when i have a spare evening, i plan the night's events around the restaurant i want to dine at. when i make my way to another country, the first section i turn to in my lonely planet guide is food.

which is why my visit to myth signified much more than just another dinner.

and i'm happy to report that i can now return to my free-spending ways and lavish dinners with a clear conscience. almost everything we ordered ended up delicious, and the buttery richness of the mushroom dusted scallops will be a sensation you still recall many months and hundreds of meals later.

the ladies of emmy's

on a quiet saturday night, i decided to wander down to the san francisco establishment emmy's spaghetti shack with my roommate for a quick and dirty meal.

it's a place i've known about for a while now and a name that arose frequently in those ubiquitous 'what do you feel like eating?' discussions that all groups of friends have time and time again. yet while it always ended made the podium, it never earned the gold, meaning that after almost five years in the city, i'd yet to sample their famed spaghetti and meatballs.

and i'm happy to report that emmy's is the type of restaurant that you reminisce about when you move out of town. i'm not sure of all the ingredients -- definitely garlic, capers, chopped onions -- in those meatballs, but they were tasty.

still, i suspect good meatballs aren't unique to sf, so it's not just the food.

the whole dining area isn't any bigger than your average sf studio, which when you have a small bar and a live dj eating up space, means that the tables are lined up side-by-side with a couple of booths lining each of the walls. the plastic chairs and vinyl-upholstered booths lend no air of sophistication nor does the mystery door that joins the restuarant to a predominantly mexican dive bar that doubles as the waiting room.

but a restaurant can't claim itself as a piece of the neighborhood unless the staff creates that environment of familiarity. whether intentional, or as they claimed, not the hostess and two waitresses clad themselves in spaghetti-insprired garb -- matching red (maybe orange; the lighting is set to mood, making it hard to tell) apparel with white stripes. and as they shuffled between kitchen, table and bar, they broke stride briefly to chat each time they crossed paths, perhaps passing on wait duties as different members of the trio took our order, checked on our food, offered dessert and brought the bill. very communal indeed.

all through dinner, interspersed between bites of pasta, i found myself conjuring a back story for the charming little eatery. the staff, actually, three daughters of a single mother with just a year separating each of them, grew up as best friends, but had drifted apart when they spread out to opposite parts of the country to pursue their various careers. when their mother, emmy of course, fell ill, they returned to sf to sell the family business, but over a plate of spaghetti and meatballs, they decided instead to run the restaurant themselves.

i'm certain that i'm romanticizing what took place, but after two mediocre at best and pricey dinners this week, well i just can't help it.

it rubs the lotion on its skin

i walked into the men's locker room at the ymca where i work out yesterday and in front of the mirror stood a man, naked as you come, admiring himself as he adopted various bodybuilding poses. while i admit he was quite well built, i couldn't help but chuckle as i watched this unabashed show of vanity.

however, as i sat down on a bench to change into my gym gear. i noticed as the well-muscled man lifted his right leg so that it was parallel to the ground and pressed his foot against the wall to balance himself. from this position he began to apply lotion, first to his calf and then slowly working his way up the leg.

i turned my face away in time, before he could reach the nether region between his legs, but despite my best efforts, i still caught glimpses of him as he moved from on the leg to the next and then to his torso. he may have continued to other sections of the body, but i sped up my changing time significantly to escape this exhibition without further harm.

it made me wonder if this sort of thing would be deemed inappropriate by the rest of the guys in the locker room. i don't consider myself homophobic but every guy must draw the line somewhere. and to me if the line is drawn at a guy massaging lotion on to his testicles in front of a mirror in a public place, i'd consider that pretty reasonable.

i'll call you

acquaintances has to be the weirdest state of a relationship.

meetings are never planned and everytime they take place, you have to start completely over getting to know each other. the last chance encounter is too far removed to remember what the other person said they were doing with their life, and in all honesty neither person cares all that much -- otherwise you wouldn't be acquaintances to start with.

yet no matter how the conversation goes, it inevitably involves the exchange of phone numbers. one person asks, probably because there was a lull in the conversation after each of you reminds the other of what they do for a living, and it would be rude to say no, so it happens.

really, why's it so hard to admit there's no connection between the two of you? well at least it's an easy way to end the conversation. after all, now that you know how to get in touch, the two of you will just pick it up next time.

kiss kiss

as a 13-year old, my presence constituted 50% of the asian population in my 8th grade class. that was a bad thing, because middle school isn't one of the places in the world that values diversity.

fortunately, my asian counterpart had the misfortune of being named duong. and if you didn't know, pretty much every mocking chinese sound that kids make rhymes with that, jing jong wong bong gong, etc. it kept a little heat off me, but when your name rhymes with a popular video game featuring an orange ball with legs that hops around, you're not exactly exempt.

this all changed when i moved towns for high school, as i entered a virtual beijing, with 10%(!) asian folks. but more importantly, i was first introduced to a filipino family and their particularly, for asian, odd customs, most notably kissing on the cheek as a greeting. it was affection that would be totally misplaced in the culture that i grew up with. plus i had a serious crush on one of the three filipino sisters and that was as close as i ever came to consolidating that crush.

nowadays though, i see the cheek kiss employed everywhere and my feelings toward it have taken the proverbial full turn. people lean in, their cheeks come maybe an inch from each other, and they make a smooch sound with their lips. what used to be a sign of closeness now is the epitome of affected acquaintance.

to me that's a bad trade.

the time has arrived

at some point -- for me it was post #5 -- one has to decide if their blog is going to just be g-rated musings that includes people's names or if the intimate details of those around the blogger will be exposed to the unforgiving judgements of the tiny subset of the world who stumbles to the site.

i've never been much for general audience material, that sort of stuff is to be reserved for cross-country flights on us based carriers.

plus, i suspect my life is not so fascinating that i have the option to censor the embarrassing stuff and still have enough material to entertain even the least discerning of readers.

singing lessons for fat chicks

well if i ever get any female readers, this post should pretty much guarantee they'll never come back. oh well; it's my blog.

i've met girls who have lost weight. they started pilates, or more frequently these days training for a triathlon, and dropped a few pounds. but i've never met a really fat chick -- one who has to wear pants with elastic waistbands to deal with the normal 5% weight fluctuation in people, which for her is 22 pounds -- who managed to get skinny. except on reality tv, it doesn't happen; their metabolism is just too slow and too many stores carry hostess products.

which is why these rotund ladies should stop spending their money on south beach diet books and get themselves a voice teacher. cause a girl can have ankles so swollen she can't zip up a pair of boots, but if she can sing on a stage, she's instantly attractive.

this is really just a roundabout way of admitting that i'm completely infatuated with feist. from the pictures on her website, she's on the opposite side of the weight spectrum, but by celebrity infatuation standards, she falls far short in the looks department.

however, her unspectacular appearance hasn't stopped me from visiting her site a dozen times in the last week, checking to see if any new photos have been posted. it hasn't stopped me from googling her name and actually scroling to the second and third pages of search results to make sure i wasn't missing out on some good feist content.

in just over a month, miss feist will be making a stop in my home town, but in a cruel twist of fate, i'll be on the other coast to play the wpt borgata in atlantic city. perhaps it's best though; seeing her perform in person might take my groupie love to unhealthy levels.

as for the fat girls stuff, i like them as much as the next guy (not very much). blame society.

god damn it windows

not unlike many of you out there, i spend the hours between 9am and 6pm behind a desk, eyes fixed on the screen of my laptop.

basically, this means that my computer is my best and only friend for the majority of my waking hours. so when i call it a day and get to move my mouse clicker to the bottom left of the screen to start->turn off computer, it's all i can do to stop myself from hurling my laptop to the ground, leaping over my desk and sprinting out of the office, never to return again. what i'm saying is that i'm happy to leave work.

so nothing irks me more than when windows tells me that windows needs to make system updates before it shuts down. would it really have been so difficult to perform these updates in the last ten hours instead of forcing me to spend my free time staring blankly at the screen while seven more patches get installed.

i swear to god that windows is the electronic version of duct tape. yes, i am a microsoft hater, and it's stupid design like this which is why.

take my money

for those of you who don't know, care is a really great charity and i encourage you to donate to them frequently and in high dollar amounts.

but today they pissed me off.

well one of their lawyers did. i tried to give care 10000 dollars and they said they didn' t want it. i understand why my money wasn't good enough, since it's coming from an online poker company but still.

yes, there's legal issues. yes, the us hates online gambling. at one point, the rumor was that online poker was funding international terrorist organizations. now we know it's funding greedy businessmen, the same kind that line the streets of financial districts in cities everywhere.

2/3 of the rest of the world lives on less than $2 a day though, and that makes $10000 a lot of money to a lot of people. i know care's budget is almost a billion dollars but clearly they need more.

hey, there's greedy suits at my company (check out pokerfantasy after Sept. 1) too. some people might even call me one, though i wear jeans and a hoodie to work every day and have to walk down the sleazy sixth street in san francisco to get to my office (which i'm 99% sure used to be a garment factory (read:sweatshop).

the difference is that i got these suits to part with some of their so-called hard-earned cash. and while i sold them on charity as a marketing ploy -- and it is -- it's also something i believe in, even if they don't.

as someone with a strong math background (800 on gre math to prove it), i understand risking $1 billion for $10000 makes no sense. but in a better world, care's lawyers would have said take the money, and if the department of justice ever comes asking for it back, tell them we decided to feed 5000 starving children in niger who have no food because of a locust invasion instead.

so unorginal

it's august of 2005, and i've finally decided to start writing my blog. normally, new things get me excited -- lasting upward of a week -- but being that there's probably 570 million people in china alone who have a head start on me, well you know the rest. oh well, i used instant messenger for the first time about a month ago too. pretty sad considering i'm a computer geek, at least according to my diploma.

i feel like the girl who found the diesel section at macys for the first time, bought one pair of jeans and suddenly feels high fashion.

but that doesn't stop stupid girls from buying diesel jeans, and it's not going to stop me from posting boring slop every day for my personal gratification.