The Remains of the Day...

Along with experiment with high dynamic range photography, teaching myself to be a better illustrator, upgrading to Xorg 1.5 with the 8.522 ATI drivers from AMD, I also ranted at the radio, twice, left a hopeful message to Jay Lake, who's having a very bad day, studied anti-akrasia tricks, read up on how to convert visitors into paying customers, making high-quality backgrounds in GIMPPhotoshop, and looked in on Jeff Vandermeer's excellent book on publicizing your writing life. I had lunch with my daughter and spotted a doomed propaganda campaign.

That's what I did in public view. In other news, I sent out two resumes, neither terribly hopeful, spoke to a recruiter who again tried to pimp me the Microsoft Marketing Job (that PSD to HTML job I ranted about on Monday), a call which ended with, "Well, I'll keep an eye out for ya."

I drove Omaha up to her hairdresser, which she's been putting off for a month because of our budget shortfall. While she was getting her haircut I wandered over to The Crypt and saw toys and books that reminded me of my glory days when I was young, flexible and healed quickly. My eyes are still too big for, er, my other body parts.

I tried to install Native Client, a kind of x86 "virtual machine" that does the chaperonage of the Java VM as a first-pass through your code and then lets the code run natively inside your browser window. It's like Active-X, only by Google. Unfortunately, it didn't build. I considered doing a custom build of Chromium, but it's got a nearly one gigabyte download to start; I'll let that run tonight. I also tried to install Drupal, but it apparently hangs, badly, on any machine where there's no proper reverse DNS lookup for that machine (i.e. on a statically routed home NAT system). There's no fix for it yet.

I moved the lawn and rotated the compost bins again. They're starting to feel right and hot, which is a good sign. I took care of the garden, checking the working bed for weeds, watering the plants, and got another meter cleaned out of the long-fallowed beds. It was nice to get outside for an hour and do manual labor.

Weeding the fallow beds won't make much of a difference if the neithbor and I don't come to an agreement on the fence though; a few years ago he decided to let his children have their own garden, which has long since fallen into disrepair. The problem is that they dug up the grass which was holding back the hillside from sliding onto my property. It's now in a state of slow decay, it's already smashed the fence between our properties, and it's encouraging the growth of blackberries from the ditchline between.

We had leftovers for dinner; we've gotten sreious about making sure nothing goes bad since we need to slash out grocery budget. We played a few rounds of Uno, and I let Kouryou-chan play Plants Vs. Zombies on my computer for a while.

What is Ed trying to say? Maybe it's just that I don't get poker.

Ed Brayton tells a story about a woman playing poker and her confrontation with a young, brash asshole at the same table with her.

To understand this tale, you have to grasp the concept of the "bad beat pot." The "bad beat pot," as I understand it, is a pot maintained at larger casinos that is divided at a poker table among the participants if a hand that unquestionably should have won (and casinos have differing ideas of what "should have won") is instead beaten by someone with an even better hand. Half the pot goes to the loser, a quarter to the winner, and the remaining quarter is divided up among the other participants, with one extra divvy being allocated to the house to seed the pot again.

As Ed tells it, this woman had been dealing with a foul-mouthed player at a table of five all afternoon. The game was "small," only a couple of thousand dollars on the table all told. Finally, after a particularly frustrating round, the young man turns over four jacks, undoubtedly the winning hand, and says loudly, "Beat that, bitch."

The woman calls the floor manager over and asks him what the house's bad beat pot is worth. He informs her that it's $350,000. She says, "Well then. I fold." And reveals that she had four queens-- surely a bad beat. In doing so, she denied him his winnings of the bad beat pot, which would have been $175,000.

Ed calls this "the best poker story I've ever heard."

I don't get this story. When you play poker in a casino, the people at the table aren't your only opponents. The house is just as much an opponent as the others, right? Your objective, when you go to play poker, is to leave with more money than when you entered. Everything else is secondary. This woman not only lost the money she'd put into the pot that round to the jerkwad, she voluntarily gave up $87,500. Not only that, but she denied the other three people at the table $21,875 each.

This woman leaves the poker table poorer and with four cases of bad blood against her. I can't begin to imagine the rationale for doing so.

I don't know if the story is true. I also don't see why other people admire this story. As near as I can tell, this is a case of what sociologists call "egalitarian dynamics in storytelling." By repeating this story with admiration, Ed is signalling to his readers (his tribe, in our environment of evolutionary adaptation, the thing his brain is still evolved to consider) that he admires this woman's willingness to sacrifice what is (for me at least) an immense amount of money in order to enforce a social norm: politeness.

This is a very common trope in fiction: whether or not there's anything to be gained by the protagonist's actions, token slaps to the face of the antagonist, even at real cost to the protagonist, are satisfying messages between author and reader that both of them support and celebrate an egalitarian norm.

Ed's story falls precisely in that vein, but it doesn't make sense. She didn't enforce it, only stuck her tongue out at it. She paid a price, and generated ill-will among the others. I can't help but think that this story only appeals to us because our instincts still assume a zero-sum game, and the idea that money is dirty, and in this case ill-gotten, and so the price she paid is worth more than is apparent.

But I'm not superstitious. And normally, neither is Ed.

I got some sun today.

Spent the morning mowing the lawn at Kouryou-chan's elementary school. The field desperately needed a mowing, too. Used the weed whacker until, as I put it to Omaha, "I ran out of whack." It was a bright, hot day that topped 22C (72F), and I enjoyed every minute of it. I also checked my own garden, and Omaha and I spent some time trying to figure out how to fix our garage door, which took a hit recently and has buckled. It's safe, but stuck half-open and can't be moved either way.

We stopped at a garage sale where I got a leaf blower for ten bucks. Score. Omaha called it "the most ridiculous example of man buying" she's ever seen. Still, the thing worked well and now I can clean off my damn driveway.

The weather was so beautiful I got to grill pork chops outdoors, made cauliflower and rice pilaf (with a very healthy handful of oregano from the garden). Omaha is making old-fashioned pudding, not the stuff from a box, and I had to show her how to scrape vanilla out of a bean. Mmmm, that stuff smells good.

I got some sun, got a lot of exercise, and even had time to read about 125 pages of Joe Abercrombie's second First Law book, Before They Are Hanged. Damn, that's a good book.