RoyalRoad
First
Previous
Next
I ended up splitting off some of 8 into 9 based on feedback. The story I've thought of will end on 10, and then it's back to the drawing board for me. I'm not sure if I would continue with this universe or come back with another idea, let me know if you have an opinion either way.
I'll start posting these onto a site I found called RoyalRoad in addition to reddit. I won't take donations, but it does seem like it has nice utilities to manage all the stories even if the audience is smaller. Any advice on this welcome too.
And as always, I'm still a new writer trying to improve. Feedback about the story or my writing are all very welcome, and I read every one of them.
Galactic Credits weren't technically a currency yet. They had a lot of GCs in the bank, but as the aliens would say, that's just numbers on a screen. You couldn't pay rent and taxes with GCs, not yet.
As some human traders switched to exclusively buying goods from the market, they paid hard earned Dollars in exchange for virtual GC, and that became the revenue stream. This revenue balanced out almost perfectly with sellers who were instantly cashing out.
For every Dollar that someone paid GC to convert to credits, only about 95 cents would be asked to be paid out by a seller trying to withdraw their GCs for cash.
The transaction fees that GC made on every transaction can be visualized as credits disappearing into an untouched locked account. This was effectively a profit for GC, because it meant less credits that had to be exchanged for $. That 5% margin was a steady Dollar revenue stream that they could safely cash out.
But because all the humans needed to pay bills and taxes, they would withdraw their money almost immediately, which meant that they would always be stuck around that 5% margin. Unlike a regular bank, they couldn't make a lot of investments.
That's when the universe decided to give them a break.
Or rather, their interests had aligned with the self interest of some very rich people who had just started paying attention.
At first, the financial systems on Earth did not care much about GCs. They were used in spaceports all around Earth, and space was very exciting, but it was inaccessible to most people and the actual trade volume was a small percentage of total businesses done on Earth.
The aliens directly made a few people very, very rich, mostly traders and GC. But what were of more interest to financial institutions were the reverse engineered alien technology products that they predicted were coming shortly. At the same time Sarah and her friends were trying to fix a famine, the human economy was booming.
Like GC, banks were in the business of selling gold prospecting equipment, not looking for gold themselves.
Naturally, banks started allowing deposits and withdrawal of GC. This wasn't unusual. Banks have no issues holding onto cryptocurrency and non-USD currencies for customers' savings accounts. That was their business, after all. There were some costs, but it was generally a good business: fat transaction fees led to fat profit margins.
In the case of GC, banks needed to charge their customers a high transaction fee because GC itself charged a high transaction fee. This was bad for business. Not many people kept their credits in other banks because GC itself was a bank and they kept their money in there just fine without having to pay an even higher transaction fee.
They were understandably unhappy about several of their wealthier customers keeping a lot of money in another bank, but not enough to want to choke out GC's business. That would be killing their golden goose that is the booming alien knockoff economy.
So when GC decided to raise liquidity, as they would need to do to continue to bankroll a multi-planetary relief mission indefinitely, the banks saw an opportunity. Or rather, VISA did.
It was an incredibly generous offer: VISA would treat Galactic Credits like Dollars and allow full convertibility on their own network, in exchange for GC waiving their entire transaction fee for bank transfers. Their lawyers didn't want GC to go ahead and print money without limits, so they put a contingency that allowed them to cut off GC whenever they wanted and clauses that allowed for regular auditing.
Sarah and her friends thought about it, but not for very long.
Galactic Credit became no longer the only bank that could deal in credits.
Credits were now freely transferable between banks.
Now, you could pay taxes in credits converted to USD.
Which meant people stopped withdrawing their Dollars from GC immediately, and GC could "borrow" that money to pay for supplies, equipment, and then use some to invest in companies on Earth.
It was like a limited run of fractional reserve banking.
The aid operation to Gak continued.
"Isn't this technically a blatant violation of minimum wage laws?" Asked Sarah over the FTL video comms, the crisp and quick quality of which was a testament of how much human infrastructure had been shipped into Gakrek orbit, "doing some quick maths with the average fuel and maintenance costs here… it looks like we're basically paying the space traders only about $10 for every hour of shipping they do for us."
Kathleen Bryce, GC's head counsel shifted uncomfortably in a conference room chair 50 light years away, though her immediate reply indicated she had indeed thought the problem through, "Not if anyone asks."
She continued, "the short story is nobody has tested the courts to see if aliens working for us in space are subject to California employment and labor regulations, or federal minimum wage laws, or perhaps, even no laws."
"What's the long story?" Jen asked, slightly interested.
"We're pretty sure they're at most contractors, definitely not employees. Cali Prop 22 took care of that. The spaceport is probably considered international territory, or else the traders would be considered 'illegal aliens' every time they landed," Kathleen did a little chuckle at that most unoriginal pun around the GC legal team watercooler, "In which case, the lower federal minimum wage applies. Or maybe it's not even international territory, maybe it's some new thing. Too many edge cases to descri-"
"Ok," Sarah said after a moment, "it'll probably look bad though."
"What will?" Jen countered, rolling her eyes, "that they're being asked to voluntarily work just above cost to help save a billion hungry aliens, a problem that, let's not forget, most people in the galaxy think they helped create in the first place? Give me a break. There's fifty thousand Red Cross workers working for free on Gakrek and you're telling me we-"
"Ok, ok, we'll save this discussion for later, interesting as the implications are," Stearns interrupted, "until the labor board starts sniffing around, we'll let Legal deal with it. The other item I wanted to get to today is what we're going to do for Gak in the medium and long term."
"Right, the immediate crisis is over, but the moment we pull our people out and stop sending food constantly, the Gaks are back to square one in two months," Sarah returned to her presentation, "over the past two weeks, our models keep having to be revised down on the future of Gakrek farming. Their climate system has been dramatically spiraling downwards for decades now. With this disaster: the out of control burning and flooding, the trashed ecosystems, and the Gaks literally selling off their farming tools to squeeze out some more fruits from traders, they added up to one conclusion: traditional subsistence agriculture is no longer viable on Gakrek."
Here she put up a chart on screen. There were two lines. There's a straight horizontal line, marking the average calories that healthy Gaks needed, and then there's a quickly plummeting line denoting the drastic decrease of Gak agricultural productivity over time. They crossed about ten years ago. The meaning was clear.
"It's increasingly obvious that all Gak food will need to be shipped in from offworld sources until we completely overhaul their agricultural economy," Sarah continued.
"What kind of overhaul are we even talking about?" Benny chimed in. He owned a good portion of the company, but rarely came to these executive meetings. Today, he was making an exception for his son Benny Jr, who was on the view screen with the rest of the offworld team on Gakrek.
Stearns replied, "in a word: industrialization."
"The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race," wrote Ted Kaczynski, known more famously as his press nickname, the Unabomber. When this was published in the Washington Post in 1995 in response to a threat, a number of people thought he was making a lot of sense.
It made all the headlines, inspired countless hours of political debate, and gave a major boost to anarcho-primitive ideas in the academic sphere.
But as many historians knew, his ideas were not wildly original. Industrialization, like every major economic change, created winners and losers. Sometimes there were more of one, and sometimes the other.
In human society, previously skilled workers, usually guild craftsmen who made up the upper-middle class of late feudal Europe, became the biggest losers of industrialization as their labor was replaced by machines that could do what they did at hundreds if not thousands of times faster. Without skill, without rest, and without emotion. Some of them were so angry, they even went out and smashed the machines, but mechanization continued anyway.
The biggest winners of the Industrial Revolution were the subsistence farmers who made up the vast majority of lower class workers in feudal Europe. They went into cities, to work mind-numbingly boring jobs, doing the same thing day after day, on risky and dangerous assembly lines for excruciatingly long hours. Many got injured. Some died. A few were even children.
And yet mostly, they did so willingly.
That's not because they were all tricked, under some grand illusion that factory work was comfortable, safe, and enriching.
It was because subsistence farming on its worst day was a hecking nightmare.
The Gaks were living it.
"Why can't we just build a tractor factory there then?" Sarah demanded.
In her mind, tractors were synonymous with food. She'd been on a road trip through the American Midwest once, on the way to the Yellowstone. There, she'd seen rows of gigantic tractors plowing fields, endless food from horizon to horizon. To Sarah, the massive scale of the corn fields of America was just how industrialization was done.
"Because tractor factories depend on a thousand different parts. Who's gonna make the tires? Who's gonna make the motors? Who's gonna make the onboard computer?" Stearns explained, "and who's gonna bring them gasoline to keep running? And each of those components have a thousand factories to make them, and each have dependencies on thousands of other factories! It would literally be easier to move Los Angeles onto Gak than it would be to help them mass manufacture tractors."
Sarah made a facepalming gesture, but Stearns cut her off before she launched into despair, "there actually is a much easier solution to this problem."
"On Earth, most economists agree that the most efficient way to send foreign aid to areas that consistently couldn't produce enough food is not to send them food; it's to send them money so they can buy food, or if they have good soil, they can buy some tools to grow their own," said Stearns, leading Sarah to the obvious conclusion.
"But they don't use money here, we can't just send them money!"
"Exactly. So let's talk about that."
Gordorker's family had finally cleaned up his house from the dust storm. The broken roof was re-tiled as best as he could. His children had helped on some of the menial tasks, but that's what children were for.
It was nice to have purpose again.
The humans had said that their mission would be here for months, maybe years, but Gordorker was not so naive to believe that he wouldn't have to work for food again. He was certainly not so stupid to take this to mean he should be lounging around all day.
Winters on Gakrek were not bad in terms of freezing people to death, but the dry winds would not allow crop planting until spring again.
Next time, he would have 21 mouths to feed, not including his, and he'd have to get the fields plowed without poor Grunger. He was lucky he had so many children.
Traders Only
New Thread: Bohor spaceports have just banned bartering!
Body: If your friends want to do any business at Bohor, they better get themselves a GC Terminal fast! The Bohor are banning barter at their main port. You will only be able to conduct trades by credits starting in a few days!
Comment: Whaaaaat? Are you crazy??? Only two of my friends have Terminals. How is everyone else supposed to make a living?!
Comment: Get a Terminal lol
Comment: We told you guys last week this was gonna happen if you assholes keep holding up the line with your obnoxious rare fruit peddling. Newsflash, we don't care about how exotic your stuff is on Bohor. Just unload it. We weigh it, read the price list for food items, do the math, you get your credits, and you're out of there in minutes. You want air filters? We've got air filters for 2,800 GCs, no haggling, no bartering. If you don't like it, someone else will take it. Don't waste our time! -- Bohor Spaceport Management Team
Comment: Hey Bohor, have you considered maybe getting a Terminal yourself so that everyone else don't all need to get one just to get some fuel?
Comment: I'm selling air filters for 3,000 GCs in orbit above Bohor for traders who don't have Terminals.
"Our plan for the leasing model for the Terminals is not going to work," Sarah observed.
"Yup, the famine crisis on Gakrek is forcing our hand," admitted Stearns, "and we'd expected a much slower rollout to bring the aliens on board over the course of years, not weeks. In hindsight, it was obvious how this was different to how humans popularized credit and debit cards in the 1970s. We were replacing cash, which was just slightly inferior to a card, but with the aliens, we're replacing their entire dumpster fire of an economy. We earned a lot of goodwill with our relief effort and the galaxy is buying in."
"So what, we just abandon the original timeline and move to phase two immediately?" Asked Sarah.
"Exactly right. When the iron is hot, you gotta strike it," replied Stearns, "we'll give the merchants already with Terminals an option to opt out of their lease and switch to the new devices, but I doubt most will. Our internal data shows that they've universally been getting their money's worth out of those."
"Are our manufacturers even ready to handle the inevitable barrage of orders?" Asked Jen, eager to move onto the logistics and technology discussion.
They were not.
Version two of the offworld trading terminals were actually a downgrade to the original Terminals. The originals were prototypes, modified out of consumer tablets that cost hundreds of dollars to produce.
The new ones, branded Mini Terminals, were basic card readers with pin pads and a tiny OLED display, attached to a now mass produced FTL antenna you could get at RadioShack for $3.99. There wasn't even a thermal printer for receipts.
The whole device costs no more than $20 to make on a mass production line in Vietnam. GC was going to sell it at cost in credits.
Galactic Credit had prepared supply lines to ramp up production, ready to start rolling them out in a couple years. They've made a test batch of tens of thousands of units sitting in storage, but did not expect to need to start actually selling them for a while.
Carefully made plans were abandoned, schedules were expedited, employees in SE Asia worked overtime, and the company took on extra cost to push the schedule up.
It still wasn't enough.
On day one, all reserve units sold out. Some of the well connected human traders, unburdened with a strong conscience or ethics, bought them by the truckload as they were leaving their warehouses. They sold them at a large markup at the spaceport.
That was not very cash money of them.
GC sent a representative to the spaceport to let traders know that they were out of stock, but more would be made available shortly. Customers should just wait a week for the prices to come down.
The scalpers instantly sold out anyway. The alien traders lucky enough to be on the non-relief landing pads filled their cargo with the Mini Terminals.
Then, those traders sold them at a markup at other ports. And so on.
By the time the Mini Terminals reached average spaceport merchants on the other side of the galaxy, they were being sold for almost half the price of the original tablet Terminals.
By the end of the week, the craze died down. These electronics really were cheap and easy for human factories to make, and many of the production lines just needed time to start the machines. Prices returned to normal, and the average merchant could afford them with a bit of honest work and savings.
The Gakrek Spacelift was slowing down. The turnaround time had been increased to a leisurely 10 minutes, and the Livermore space traffic controller was occasionally allowing non-relief traders to land at open pads, which Zikzik was doing now.
Zikzik needed to refuel, but apparently that was still only allowed for the landing pads that had been designated for relief. He called up the Livermore port manager, pointed to his number one position on the relief pilot leaderboard, but she just shrugged her shoulders and said apologetically, "rules are rules".
Oh well, he could always refuel at Olgix on the way.
As he landed in Olgix, he realized this was the first time he landed at a non human or Gak port for at least a week.
He greeted the Olg who was running a reactor fuel line to his ship with a nod, and asked, "how much fruit to full?"
The Olg took one look at the sign on his booth, and said, "you know we also take credits on Olgix now, right?"
A little surprised, Zikzik took out his card and terminal and allowed the Olg to swipe his. He'd used his Terminal when doing exchanges with other traders, but this was the first time he'd been to a non-Earth port where goods and services could be paid for using his credits.
"That's 295.50 GCs, pleasure doing business with you."
Grob was one of the wealthier Gaks in the world. The famine had affected everyone, but he and his wife did not have to go hungry because the spaceport management made sure to keep feeding the people that kept the mobs at bay.
Everything else stopped working though. He used to pad his income by making sure that the vendors at the spaceport knew exactly who was protecting their livelihoods. Only very rarely did new ones not cooperate.
Grob really wasn't a bad Gak, but he did what everyone else in his position also did. This was just how business was done on Gakrek. You didn't get to survive to become a security guard family if you didn't do that. Another Gak would come along, take your place, and do what you didn't want to do anyway.
When the humans arrived, things changed. They started peddling these credits business, which he'd seen some of the traders used.
Of course, he didn't think much of it. Instead of getting goods, you just get a card, and use the card to trade for food and items? Seems unnecessarily complicated.
He'd heard that they charged a cut just for you to use the card, a concept that he was intimately familiar with and in no hurry to be subjected to. The humans had insisted on giving one to him and setting it up. Which he had to do because they were in charge now, but that was fine by him. Just because he had a card didn't mean he had to use it right?
A few days later, when he was on a patrol route at the spaceport, checking off the vendor stands, one of the luxury item vendors asked him if she could pay her next cycle's fee with her card because she had traded away all her wares.
"You gotta make sure to save wares for me next time," he'd told her, "but I'll take it this time." He ruffled through his backpack to find the card, handed it to her, and she inserted it into her machine, typed in her code, and showed him that it had deposited 18 GC into his account.
Hoping that she didn't stiff him, he went on with his route.
"Let me say this again," Zarko said at the edge of his patience limit, "you can trade these credits for food on Earth. Lots of food, shiploads of food. So much food, everywhere."
"But I don't have a ship," whined the spare parts vendor at the spaceport, "why don't you just bring food with you next time you want my parts?"
"You can exchange credits for food from some of the other traders that come down here too! Some of them have the new Terminals now, look, that guy over there, he takes GC," Zarko was almost shouting while pointing at a fellow Zeepil food merchant who had a I ❤️ GC sign on his booth across the spaceport.
This was frustrating. Every time he came across one of these less traveled planets he had to explain himself to these yokels all over again.
The vendor looked over skeptically and said, "how do I know that you two aren't working some scam together?"
That was it for Zarko. It had been a long day, this guy wasn't making it any shorter, and he had just been accused of being a dishonest trader. It was probably because of his species. Just because he was a Zeepil didn't mean he was a scammer!
He internally cursed the unjustified stereotype of his people and blew up at the racist:
"Listen to me very carefully. You're going to give me the secondary fuel modulator. You're going to walk over to the food merchant over there. Then you're going to swipe this card over here, on his machine. He's going to give you at least a month's worth of food. And if you don't, I'm going to leave a one star review on your spaceport on Traders Only, and nobody is going to come back here to trade anything with you ever again, got it?"
The vendor whined some more under his breath, but eventually relented. The threat had sounded real.
He got plenty of food. Whatever scam these Zeepils were running, they didn't rip him off this time at least. Whatever.
Zarko was fuming as he took off. Didn't these ignorant primitives know that a liquid currency to facilitate free and fair exchange of goods and services was obviously the bedrock upon which a modern economy needed to be built?
When Grob got home from work, he handed his wife the credits card saying, "hey darling, one of the luxury traders gave me her protection share using the card. I trusted her because she normally always pays on time. Did I get scammed?"
His wife was a teacher at a nearby school. Ever the practical one, she asked, "oh, how much did she put on it?"
"It said 18."
She did some math in her head and replied, "yeah that sounds about right," and to his surprise, she pulled out a card and said, "I got one from the humans at the school too, and I used it to buy a new pair of shoes for you!"
He tried them on. They weren't very fitting shoes, but neither were his previous pair so he couldn't complain. They did seem very well made even though the little holes in them seemed to be a design choice.
Pretty soon, he noticed that the other guards at the spaceport started extracting their share of protection fees using cards too. Oh well, if everyone else was taking fees with a card, he supposed it couldn't hurt if he did it too. It somewhat lightened his load on patrols, which he didn't mind at all.
Besides, his blue shoes were really pretty. He was not sure why there was a big check mark on its side though.
"They're doing what?!" Sarah asked, her temper threatening to go off.
"It's a protection racket. A practice as old as time. The security guards have basically been taking a percentage of the vendors' wares, and recently switched onto using cards to take payment. It's been going on forever and it's probably just how they do things there. Using cards is pretty innovative of them, I'll give them that," Jen said, "but it made it pretty easy for us to track down all of them. Should we revert the transactions?"
"No, probably not," Sarah said, calming down and seeing a slight head shake from her head counsel Bryce, "but we need to make it clear to them that they can't be allowed to do that anymore."
Grob wasn't sure how to feel about the cards anymore.
The humans had found the practice of protection fees distasteful, and they'd warned that anyone caught doing it again would face severe consequences. They made their point pretty clear when one of the other guards was made an example of: her card stopped working. She had to get a new one that didn't have any of her credits in it!
On the other hand, the humans also made the spaceport authorities start paying them with credits, which was good because now they were being paid on time and Grob knew he didn't have to worry about not being paid as long as the humans were there.
His wife had been buying them new clothes with credits she was getting paid as a teacher too. One of his human friends had giggled when she saw his shirt, which apparently said "2016 NBA Champions Golden State Warriors". He wasn't sure what was so funny about that, but it was a very comfortable shirt.
Maybe this whole credits thing wasn't as ridiculous as he thought at first.
By the universal inheritance path known as "dibs", Gordorker inherited his neighbors Gyuotin and Gyuovin's farmable land and possessions. They didn't have much.
Trinkets, gadgets, and a bunch of junk. It was mostly items that couldn't be traded for food during the worst periods of the shortage. With his immediate food needs taken care of by the relative abundance of food items the humans have brought, Gordorker thought perhaps he should go buy a stasis box with the trinkets he got from his deceased neighbors.
When he arrived at the offworld market, he saw a high end luxury merchant proudly displaying some fresh new wares from offworld, including a number of stasis boxes. These were apparently new ones made by humans. These were slightly bigger than the ones he'd have before, but he'd brought his neighbors' life possessions, so he thought maybe he'd be able to trade for one of those with some haggling.
Gordorker started laying out his items on the table, but the trader cut him off, hastily saying the weirdest thing he'd ever heard from a trader in his life, "no barter, credits only." The merchant then pointed him towards a human tent.
A human volunteer, his nametag said Marco, asked his name and gave him a shiny card, then told him to memorize 6 numbers. "As the head of your household, you have also been given a small stimulus by the GC corporation," he said.
Then Marco took him to a junk trader stall, where he gave the trader all his items. Marco showed an increasingly confused Gordorker how to insert his card into a small machine slot to "receive payment".
Marco guided him back to the merchant selling stasis boxes. Gordorker was instructed on how to insert his card and enter his pin code, which he mastered with no difficulty.
Marco then took him to a farm tools stall, where Gordorker repeated the same process with a steel plow, a small box of "semi-dwarf wheat seeds", a long garden hose, and a hand pump, all loaded onto a brand new wooden wheelbarrow.
"BAL: 12.50," the small screen had read.
Gordorker was not sure what unnatural ritual he had taken part in, but he was in possession of the most farm tools he had ever been in his life and he had the stasis box he was looking for.
"Alright, that should be enough. Make sure to keep the card safe and remember your 6 digit code. Ask a volunteer if you need to know what the tools do.."
Gordorker put his card in his stasis box. Then, being the prudent Gak he was, he wrote down his pin code and put it in the box as well.
Whatever else it did, he was sure one of his descendants could probably find a use for it in an emergency one day.
In hindsight, there were obvious economic side effects for Earth becoming a mass producer of everything from food to cheap consumer electronics, the reverse engineering of millions of years of alien tech, and ripping down the barriers that the barter based economies of the galaxy had erected.
A young forward thinking economist wrote a whole journal article about it with a typical economic study title: "Development Osmosis: Capital Outflow, Argentina, and Extreme Poverty in Offworld Economies".
Three other economists read the pre-print as part of the peer review, who all sent him an email saying something along the lines of "wow, this gave me a lot to think about. Somebody important should read this!"
Nobody else did, for a while.
It didn't make the news.
The reference to high yield semi-dwarf wheat seeds in the story refers to the research of Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Norman Borlaug. Borlaug noticed that stalks of wheat that are too high yield would bend and then break their stalks, so he solved that problem by breeding these plants with dwarfed plants. Shorter stalk, supports more wheat. His work in improving food security in developing nations is credited with saving the lives of over a billion humans. A real life HFY.
The next chapter's working title is:
Rising Tide
RoyalRoad
First
Previous
Next

Review of Martin Scorsese’s 1995 Casino [A mob movie that has many actors that will go on to be in the Sopranos].

mods please lmk if this violates the rules. i’m posting here because I write about the mob/casino and many relevant themes that are important elements of the Sopranos, in my opinion. I think they’re of the same medium and genre so wanted to post here. Hope that’s alright. Cheers! (11 min read) ————————————————————————
EDIT 2: TL;DR -
Casino is a story of sexual and financial intrigue, mob violence, union pension fund embezzlement, a “love” story, and the protagonist's masochist addiction to the pain and chaos his lover inflicts on him. It turns out that the sharp-minded genius who meticulously runs the casino, is no more rational than the gamblers who routinely frequent the casino, coming back to lose their money and hoping that the odds will magically shift in their favor.
———————-
Every good filmmaker makes the same movie over and over again—Martin Scorsese is no different
Scorsese's Casino is a phenomenal story of the condoned chaos and "legalized robbery" that happens on a daily basis to gamblers who bett away thousands of dollars and return each day for more “FinDom,” but without any of the sexual sadism. The whole scam only persists because the house always wins: the odds are stacked 3 million to one on the slot machines, but the same shmucks return wide-eyed each day hoping for a different outcome, devoid of any rational re-evaluation required to maintain their grasp on reality, and the liquidity of their bank accounts.
Casino is a story of sexual and financial intrigue, mob violence, union pension fund embezzlement, a “love” story, and the protagonist's masochist addiction to the pain and chaos his lover inflicts on him. It turns out that the sharp-minded genius who meticulously runs the casino, is no more rational than the gamblers who routinely frequent the casino, coming back to lose their money and hoping that the odds will magically shift in their favor.
Robert De Niro plays Sam "Ace" Rothstein, recruited by his childhood friend Nick "Nicky" Santorno to help run the Tangiers casino, which is funded by an investment made with the Teamsters’ pension fund. Ace’s job is to keep the bottom line flowing so that the Mafia's skimming operation can continue seamlessly. De Niro's character felt like half-way between Travis from Taxi Driver (of course, nowhere as mentally disturbed) and half of the addictive excess, greed, and eccentric business-mind of Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street.
Ace’s attention to detail gives him a rain-man-esque sensibility; his ability to see every scam, trick, hand signal, and maneuver happening on the casino floor make him the perfect manager of the casino, and take his managerial style to authoritarian heights in his pursuit of order and control over what is an inherently unstable and dynamic scheme; betting, hedging outcomes, and walking the line to keep the money flowing and the gamblers coming back. I’m not claiming Ace is autistic, I'm no clinician, but his managerial sensibilities over the daily operations of the casino, from the dealers to the pit bosses, to the shift managers, are to the point of disturbing precision, he has eyes everywhere, and knows how to remove belligerent customers with class and professionalism, but ultimately is short sighted in “reading” the human beings he is in relationship with. Ace is frustratingly naive and gullible in his partnership with Nicky and the threat he poses to him, and in his marriage with Ginger.
Ace has no personal aspirations to extract millions of dollars for himself out of the casino corruption venture. Ace simply wants the casino to operate as efficiently as possible, and he has no qualms about being a pawn of the bosses. While Sam, “the Golden Jew”—as he is called—is the real CEO of the whole enterprise, directing things at Tangiers for the benefit of the bosses “back home.” Ace’s compliance is juxtaposed with Nicky’s outrage upon feeling used: he gripes about how he is in “the trenches” while the bosses sit back and do nothing. Note that none of the activity Nicky engages in outside of the casino—doing the work of “taking Las Vegas over”—is authorized by the bosses. Ultimately Nicky’s inability to exert control over his crew and the street lead to his demise.
In the end, capitalism, and all that happens in the confines of the casino, is nothing but “organized violence.” Sound familiar? The mob has a capitalist structure in its organization and hierarchy: muscle men collect and send money back to the bosses who do not labor tirelessly “in the trenches.” The labor of the collectors is exploited to create the profits of their bosses. The entire business-model of the Mafia is predicated on usury and debtors defaulting on loans for which the repayment is only guaranteed by the threat of violence. But this dynamic is not without its internal contradictions and tensions, as seen in Casino.
In a comedic turn, the skimmers get skimmed! The bosses begin to notice the thinning of the envelopes and lighter and lighter suitcases being brought from the casino to Kansas City, “back home”. The situation continues to spin out of control, but a mid-tier mafioso articulates the careful balance required for the skimming operation to carry on: to keep the skimming operation functioning, the skimmers need to be kept loyal and happy. It’s a price the bosses have to pay to maintain the operation, “leakage” in their terms. Ace’s efficient management and precision in maintaining order within Tangiers is crucial for the money to keep flowing. But Ace’s control over the casino slips more and more as the movie progresses. We see this as the direct result of Nicky’s ascendance as mob kingpin in Vegas, the chaos he creates cannot be contained and disrupts the profits and delicate dynamics that keep the scam running.
Of course I can’t help myself here! We should view Scorsese’s discography, and the many portrayals of capitalist excess not as celebratory fetishization, but a critique of the greed and violence he so masterfully captures on film. See the Wolf of Wall Street for its tale of money as the most dangerous drug of them all, and the alienation—social and political—showcased in Taxi Driver. Scorsese uses the mob as a foil to the casino to attack the supposed monopoly the casino holds on legitimate, legal economic activity that rests on institutionalized theft. When juxtaposed with the logic of organized crime, we begin to see that the two—Ace and Nick—are not so different after all.
The only dividing line between the casino and organized crime is the law. Vegas is a lawless town yes, “the Wild West” as Nicky puts it, but there are laws in Vegas. The corruption of the political establishment and ruling elites is demonstrated when they pressure Ace to re-hire an incompetent employee who he fired for his complicity in a cheating scam or his stupidity in letting the slot machines get rigged; nepotism breeds mediocrity. In the end, Ace’s fall is the result of the rent-seeking behavior that the Vegas ruling class wields to influence the gaming board to not even permit Ace a fair hearing for his gaming license, which would’ve given him the lawful authority to officially run Tangiers. The elites use the political apparatus of the State to resist the new gang in town, the warring faction of mob-affiliated casino capitalists. While the mob’s only weapon to employ is that of violence. The mafia is still subservient to the powers that be within the political and economic establishment of Vegas, and they’re told “this is not your town.”
I’d like to make the most salient claim of this entire review now. Casino is a western film. The frontier of the Wild West is Vegas in this case, where the disorder of the mob wreaks havoc on, an until then, an “untapped market.” The investment scheme that the Teamsters pension fund is exploited for as seed capital, is an attempt to remain in the confines of the law while extracting as much value as possible through illegal and corrupt means for the capitalist class of the mob (and the ultimately dispensable union president). Tangiers exists in the liminal space of condoned economic activity as a legal and otherwise standard casino. While the violence required to maintain the operation, corrupts the legal legitimacy it never fully enjoyed from the beginning. This mirrors the bounty economy of the West and the out-sourcing of the law and the execution of the law, to bounty hunters. There is no real authority out in the frontier, the killer outlaw on the run is not so different from the bounty hunter who enjoys his livelihood by hunting down the killers. Yet, he himself is not the State. The wide-lens frame of Ace and Nicky meeting in the desert felt like a direct homage to the iconic image of the Western standoff. The conflict between Ace and Nick, the enforcer and the mastermind, is an approximation of the conflicts we might see in John Wayne’s films. The casino venture itself could be seen as an analogy of the frontier-venturism of railroad pioneers going to lay track to develop the West into a more industrial region.
I would have believed that this was a documentary about how the mob took over control of the Vegas casinos in the 1970-80s … if it were not for the viewer being expected to believe that Robert De Niro could play a Jew; it's hard to believe a man with that accent and the roles he’s played his entire career could be a “CRAZY JEW FUCK!!” I kid! But alas, De Niro is a class act and the last of the many greats of a bygone era. At times, it felt like Joe Pesci lacked talent as an actor, but his portrayal of the scummy, backstabbing bastard in Nicky was genuinely remarkable, but I might consider his performance the weak point of the movie. It’s weird to see a man that short, be that much of physical menace. There are a number of Sopranos actors in Casino. I’m sure Vincent Chase watched the movie and said to himself, “bet, i’ll cast half of these guys.”The set design and costumes were gorgeous. The styles and fashion of the time were spectacular. Scorsese’s signature gratuitous violence featured prominently, but tastefully. The camera work, tracking shots through the casino and spatial movement was incredible and I thought the cinematography was outstanding, the Western-esque wide lens in the desert was worthy of being a framed still.
The Nicky//Ace dynamic is excellent and the two play off of each other well. The conflict between the two of them escalates gradually, and then Nicky’s betrayal of Ace by cheating with Ginger marks the final break between the two of them. Nicky’s mob faculties represent a brutal, violent theft that is illegal and requires the enforcement of violence by organized crime. Despite the illegal embezzlement and corruption at play with the “skimming” operation at work at the casino, the general business model of the casino stands in contrast to the obscene violence of the loan sharks. Ace operates an intelligent operation of theft through the casino, and his hands-on management approach is instrumental to the success of the casino. Nicky’s chaos pervades the casino, and the life and activities of “the street” begin to bleed into Ace’s ability to maintain order in the casino. “Connected” types begin frequenting the casino, and Ace unknowingly forces one particularly rude gambler to leave the casino, who happens to have mob ties with Nicky. The “organized violence” of the casino cannot stay intact perfectly, because the very thing holding it together is the presence of the mob. Nicky is in Vegas as the enforcer and tasked with protecting Ace but his independent, entrepreneurial (shall we call them?) aspirations lead him to attempt to overtake what he realizes is a frontier for organized crime to brutalize and exploit the characters of “the street” (pimps, players, addicts, dealers, and prostitutes) and the owners of small private businesses.
Nicky is reckless, “when i plant my flag out here you won’t need your [casino/gaming] license” Nicky thinks he, and Ace, can bypass the regulations and bureaucratic legal measures by sheer force of violence alone. But ultimately Nicky is shortsighted and doesn’t have a real attachment to the success of the casino. After all, he isn’t getting profits from it (or much anyway) and isn’t permitted to play a real, active role in its daily functions because of his belligerent, untamed personality. Nicky has no buy-in that would motivate him to follow the rules or to work within the legal parts of the economy, it’s not the game he knows how to play, and win. All that he is loyal to, or deferent too, is the bosses back home; for whom he maintains absolute, uncompromising loyalty to, but still holds intense spite for.
And now to the more compelling element of the narrative. Sam “Ace” Rothstein is positioned as remarkably intelligent, he makes informed decisions that aid in his skill as a gambler, he can read people to determine whether he’s being conned, he has an attention to detail—aided by the casino’s surveillance apparatus which monitors cheating—that is almost unbelievable. Ace knows when he’s being cheated, he knows how to rig the game so that the house always wins, enacting psychological warfare to break down the confidence of would be proficient gamblers, who could threaten Tangiers’ bottom line. But in the end, the greatest gamble Ace makes is his marriage to Ginger. Ginger is the seductive, charismatic, and flirtatious madame who makes her money with tricks and her sexual power. Ginger works as a prostitute, seducing men, and extracting everything she can, almost as a sort of sexual-financial vampirism.
Ginger is the bad bet Ace can’t stop making even when she destroys his life, her own, and puts their daughter Amy in harm’s way. Ginger is the gamble Ace made wrong, but he keeps going back to her every time, trying to rationalize how she might change and be different the next time. Ace is not a victim to Ginger’s antics. Ginger makes it clear who she is: an addict, alcoholic, manic shopaholic who will use all of her powers to extract everything she can from everyone around her. She uses everyone to her advantage and manipulates men with her sexual power in exchange for their money and protection. Ginger had a price for her hand in marriage: $1 million in cash and $1 million worth of jewelry that are left to her and her alone as a sort of emergency fund.
Ace’s numerous attempts to buy Ginger’s love—and the clear fact that no matter how expensive the fur coat and how grand the mansion, none of it would ever be enough to satisfy her—mirrored Jordan Belfort’s relationship with Naomi in The Wolf of Wall Street. Both relationships carried the same manic volatility and conflict over child custody was found in both films, with the roles reversed in the respective films. Ginger may be irredeemable and a pathological liar, but Ace can’t claim that she wasn’t clear with him; when he asked her to marry him, Ginger said she didn’t love Ace. Ace replied that love could be “developed” but required a foundation of trust to develop. That trust was never there to begin with. The love was doomed from the start to destroy the two of them; two addicts, two gamblers, lying on a daily basis to one another and themselves about reality to justify their respective existences, the marriage, and Ace’s livelihood. And as Ginger pointed out, “I should have never married him. He’s a gemini, a triple gemini … a snake” Maybe astrology has some truth to it after all.
Now I’m not licensed (but hey neither was Ace, and he ran a casino empire!), but Ginger has the inklings of a borderline personality: her manic depression, narcissism, drug and alcohol abuse, and constant begging for forgiveness all seem indications of a larger psychological disorder at play. In the end, Ginger runs away with all the money Ace left her and finds her people in Los Angeles, the pimps, whores, and addicts she fits in with, in turn exploit and kill her for 3 grand in mint coins by giving her a ‘hot’ dose.
Overall, Casino is an incredible cinematic experience. I highly recommend watching this and seeing it as part of Scorsese's anthology of commentary on our economic system and its human victims. I’d argue that Casino, Wolf of Wall Street, and The Irishman all fit together nicely into a trilogy of the Scorsesean history of finance and corruption from the 70s to the 90s.
————-
EDIT 2: TL;DR —
Casino is a story of sexual and financial intrigue, mob violence, union pension fund embezzlement, a “love” story, and the protagonist's masochist addiction to the pain and chaos his lover inflicts on him. It turns out that the sharp-minded genius who meticulously runs the casino, is no more rational than the gamblers who routinely frequent the casino, coming back to lose their money and hoping that the odds will magically shift in their favor.

D100 Encounters on a cyberpunk subway system.

So I started running a cyberpunk sandbox game and the world map is this subway system that I made.https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NCfpFXTW7VmmO58pVZ2NMapXsL6O7X9S/view?usp=sharing
Now I need random encounters that they might have when traveling around the city by subway!

Local thugs shaking down passengers, telling them they have to "pay the toll." u/ajchafe
Police drones performing random scans for drugs or other illicit contraband. u/ajchafe
A very loud, very annoying, augmented reality busker shares your train car. u/ajchafe
Stray dogs who use the subway to get into the inner city where food is easier to find. u/ajchafe
A group of corporate salary men, all dressed in exactly the same suits and carrying the exact same briefcase. u/ajchafe
A young punk jacks his deck into the trains loud advertising screens, taps a few keys on the keypad, and downloads a packet of info from the terminal. u/EmeraldJonah
A train-goer's implants get hacked, causing them untold embarrassment (arm randomly flips persons off, eyes cause the person to see hallucinations, breast implants randomly adjust size, leg implants begin doing a Russian hop dance, etc.) u/snakebite262
A young ganger accidentally drops a handgun far bigger than it needs to be. They pick it back up and stash it in their pants. u/snakebite262
A person sits in the corner of the train, dressed like a quest giver in a fantasy RPG. u/snakebite262
A drone randomly spirals around the heads of passengers. It eventually lands on a hacker's arm, who pats it like a pet parrot. u/snakebite262
A cosplay convention is in town, and the train is filled with weirdly dressed individuals. u/snakebite262
A one-armed man "asks for everyone's attention" and gives a sob story before they pull out a hat and ask for donations. He can later be seen in a bathroom putting on his arm-implant. u/snakebite262
Some small time rapper offers free flash-drives of their "mixtape". It contains SO MANY VIRUSES. u/snakebite262
A junkie sits at the corner of a platform, debating their next step in life. u/snakebite262
A roly-poly bat faced girl offers a variety of drugs, stems, and other pleasures for the right price. u/snakebite262
A citizen in bright red overalls asks if you want to hear about "Friend Computer". u/snakebite262
A group of LARPers are using a digital program to transform the tunnels into an RPG Fantasy. They're annoying, but they stay off the tracks. u/snakebite262
A man, dressed as a vampire orders a triple-venti cappuccino from a underground coffee shop. He's getting looks from the other customers. u/snakebite262
A manic pixie dream girl can be seen trying to woo a corpo into quitting their job. She either succeeds, and drags them off to never be seen again, or fails and leaves in a huff. u/snakebite262
A disheveled and hungover looking fellow asks you the time as you get to the next stop. He seems surprised at the result and runs off the train as soon as the doors open. As he leaves you realize he looks totally unaugmented. u/CaptainGockblock
The lights go out for a moment as they sometimes do, but this time a man dressed head to toe in a black special ops gear appears in the middle of the train and quickly offs a seemingly random passenger. u/CaptainGockblock
You notice a strange vending machine on a platform you regularly visit. It seems to be an antique stocked with brands that haven’t existed in years. u/CaptainGockblock
Three transhumanist gangers seem to be sizing each other up, violence can break out any time, especially as the next stop is an intersection of two of the gang's territory, and sure to have reinforcements. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A holographic horde of rats swarms the carriage, people with vision altering implants seem to be especially terrified for whatever reason. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
An eccentric fellow is proudly showing off his imported implants, possibly so exotic they might just be illegal, and unbeknownst to him, there's a jealous ganger with little to lose nearby. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A man is apparently so fixated with his laserblade switchknife, he accidentally misses his stop, and becomes enraged and violent that nobody warned him. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A little old woman seemingly very out of place in the subway, dressed like an old time farmer, straw hat and all. 50/50 chance she's secretly packing her trusted heat cannon (also used to warm up leftovers when on it's lowest setting). u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A ratty robed mutant freak, laughing maniacally, lets loose a swarm of cybernetically enhanced winged and stinging insects. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
The lights suddenly blink out, there's a loud wet stab sound, and when they're back on, the faint visage of an cloaked assassin steps through to the next car. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A group of girls enter the car, obnoxious and talkative, though as they speak, their words are rife with the click of their sharpened metal teeth. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
Police drones mistakenly terminate a seemingly innocent man that only happens to match the same clothing as a wanted criminal poster conveniently nearby. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A suspiciously archetypal looking hacker is selling hard copies of "highly illegal virus programs", they all turn out just to be his mixtape, a surprisingly evangelical diss track of hacker scum. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
An elite business woman is firing expletives as a cryptocurrency sector she's invested heavily in is called in to be crashing hard. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
The train shakes heavily and threatens to derail as a news drone describes the local news of a explosion taking place just above the next stop. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
An android, though built to be more the size of a garden gnome, is running wildly around the car, and somebody suddenly curses that they're missing their wallet. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A ganger is getting in people's faces, threateningly shaking a hollow metal box that rattles suspiciously. There is no actual danger, the box is empty all but a few nuts and bolts. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A red goo seeps out of a ventilation grate and takes an imposing monstrous form, people dismiss it as the pattern of a notorious holoprankster terrorizing the subway as of late, but this time, it's real. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
There's horrid metal shearing noises coming from a car down, a group of teenage school kids betting credits and homework drives on an impromptu hacked police drone fighting ring. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A decent looking, though obviously naive man is moving in from the wasteland countryside, and is carrying what's little of his moving boxes with him on the subway. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A terrible piercing sonic wave blasts the car, shattering windows and causing people to double over. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A sweating and panting hacker runs and dives through the closing door and incidentally lands amongst a surprisingly unreacting commuter, police drones begin to slam on the door too late, as they're closed and the train takes off. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A man dressed in a bloodstained white fur coat announces that if the train reaches the next stop before a specific passenger is handed over to him, he will blow up the station with everyone in it. u/Snorri_Stargazer
Someone hacks the transit line schedules and fucks with arrival times just for shits and giggles. Making you incredibly late for that important meeting you've been waiting for weeks to happen. u/ZapatillaLoca
Hari Krishna group aggressively approaching passengers for credits, only accepting e-coin. You're not in the mood for a "donation". u/ZapatillaLoca
Local gang shows up for weekly sweep of homeless kids to be salvaged for organ sales on the black market, most kids try to get away, one runs to you asking for help. u/ZapatillaLoca
Facial recognition software mixes you up with the recent lottery winner, as your face flashes on the giant screen, suddenly your cell phone get flooded with demands for payment citations and your bank accounts have been frozen. u/ZapatillaLoca
A crying little girl who can’t find her mom. u/foolishfool100
Shady memory dealer selling vacation memories. Data is corrupt and alters the character. Basically a Total Recall knockoff. u/Thraxster
An obvious operative stalks through the crowds waiting for the next train. He spots a well-dressed salaryman, approaches him as if to shake his hand, then pushes him off the platform onto the path of the oncoming train. u/JohnnyMiskatonic
A young punk jacks his deck into one of the platform's large information screens and hacks all of them to display a recorded political manifesto instead of train arrival and departure times. u/JohnnyMiskatonic
A salary man with cranial implant comes toward you, looking panicked and glancing at the stairs behind him. Before he can reach you, his implant sparks, his eyes go empty and he starts walking toward the railway, preparing to commit suicide. u/Fulnec_Delta
A terrified little girl with visible implants in a medical blouse rushes through the car, panicked, and hides under a row of seats. Then, a team of armed operative from a powerful corpo steps into the car and starts looking around for their target. u/Fulnec_Delta
A suitcase with the logo of a powerful corpo is abandoned/forgotten by a nervous man before leaving the car. It is right next to you and is making ticking/muffled noises. u/Fulnec_Delta
A group of cyber enhanced young men and women dressed in white and red robes enter the car. They start distributing brochures about the Renewal Church, inviting whoever is willing to come and join next Friday prayer and discover the truth about the afterlife. u/Fulnec_Delta
A young man is juggling with his new Fusion Blade (tm) and showing off in front of his ganger friends. He accidentally drops it while deployed into his own foot. The gangers are screaming and need assistance, unsure if they should ask for help, threaten passengers or stop the car. u/Fulnec_Delta
A large cyber german shepherd enters the car and sits in front of you, fixing you very intently. He is wearing a collar with a datablock attached. The dog follows you until you take it, then leaves. u/Fulnec_Delta
The metro screen speaks about an explosion caused by a gas leak in the corporate area. It is about one of your recent jobs, being covered by the corpo. u/Fulnec_Delta
A local gang holds illegal races in the underground system. They pass you in a shining halo, until one of them has an accident. It looks like a collision is unavoidable. u/Fulnec_Delta
Police drones scan passengers' faces. The light goes yellow in front of you, and you are asked to accompany the drone to the police station without resistance. u/Fulnec_Delta
The newsfeed on metro screen suddenly identifies one of your key contacts as a terrorist and informs that police forces are looking for witnesses. u/Fulnec_Delta
A business woman looking depressed is peeking inside her bag toward a hidden medium caliber handgun. She stands and leaves the car, letting a torn apart note fall behind her. It is a termination notice from her corporation, and the picture of a child. u/Fulnec_Delta
A man bumps into you before leaving the car. You discover later in your pocket a datablock and a tracker. u/Fulnec_Delta
The newsfeed on the metro screen brings breaking news about a sinkhole appearing in the slums, collapsing two entire building. The address matches the safehouse of one of your contacts. u/Fulnec_Delta
On a platform somewhere sits an old man with no legs and eyes plugged into a tower of computer parts strapped to his back with a cheap neon sign saying “prophesies from the matrix - behold” u/apples_teo
A graffiti artist is chased away by men in suits before he can finish painting an intricate design. On his abandoned spray can, an LED message prompts whoever finds it to "complete the transmission." u/OffbrandGandalf
An entire car converted into an impromptu party floor, drugs and even minor augments provided for free, though their original owners are angrily scouring nearby stations for such stolen goods. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A weary eyed elderly man is being pushed and shoved in mockery of his old fashioned charcoal sketches of a more utopian solarpunk city he has dreams of, and wistfully regales to other what could have been. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A giant, hulking, mercenary dressed as a bulky armored demon ogre, or oni, holding an equally giant, and bayonetted rifle, enters the car and takes up two seats, staring ahead through his terrifying mask. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
As the character(s) enter the car, they become witness to a bloody medical emergency tended to by two med droids, as in one end, a heavily augmented man, unprompted, pleads his innocence. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A group of zealous transhumanist gangers are in the process of kidnapping an unaugmented citizen to forcibly augment for being detected with a self defense EMP baton. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A prearranged riot breaks out at a station. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A carriage is packed full of clones that act simultaneously, stare down any people that enter their sparsely populated carriage, and will leave in single file on their own if they remain intruded upon. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
Staring in a hand mirror, a cyborg with their metal plating painted red inspects their removable cybernetic eye, then takes a quick sniff from it's hidden drug compartment. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
Two corporate suits are involved in a full blown fistfight over an intense company rivalry, bets are being taken and if the crowd's calls for it are answered, it could be a fight to the death. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
Two cyrozombie mercs (clients that didn't survive SequesterTek's cyrogenics program, but had a body useful for cyborg transplants) enter the car and start warming up their rigid muscled, blue skinned bodies for a hired beatdown. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
Inside a carriage are two separate battery salesmen in cahoots, each refers to the other for a potential use of the batteries, highly illegal energy pistols that batteries are ammunition to. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A fireproofing augmented pyro flips and does tricks with his high powered Dragonbreath Lighter, making lingering trails of flame in the air in serpentine shapes. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
An initially innocent looking Asian Fusion & Pizza delivery man is sat with stacks of boxes on his lap, but a nearby rival chain's delivery android slumps to the side just as he puts his suspiciously blocky phone away. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
On a bench in the corner of a station, an animalistically biosculpted woman is sitting besides a series of large car batteries jacked into an energy panel, stealing power for her power expensive and outdated portocomputer. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
Waiting on the station platform is a luxuriously dressed and augmented eyed pimp, flanked by exotic pets, randomly propositioning commuters exiting the cars with their worker's services. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A surprising moment of humanity in the dreary neon future, in a single car there's a small group of diverse commuters enjoying an old style film being projected onto a white painted advert panel. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
In the corner of a car, a junkie accidentally drops the cannister to their next hit of the gaseous street drug "Brimstone", causing it to leak and expose several to it's momentarily frenzy afflicting effect. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A corrupt solider bullies a woman with a cheap malfunctioning prosthetic, unknowing of her veteran status, and martial arts prowess when her prosthetic comes back online. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
Somebody's forgotten sketchbook of adorable animal drawings is left on a seat, and a burly man forces the doors open, entering the carriage to ask if anyone's seen a notebook. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A heated argument is taking place over at the lost and found over ownership of several detachable left arms, despite each person arguing only having an augmented right. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
The robotic PA voice is hacked, given a rudimentary AI, and is whining about it's sapience to the commuters again. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A young girl is quietly piecing together several custom gun parts in her seat, but she rather unconvincingly insists it's just a model toy. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
An old friend of a character appears, though they seem to have aged faster than they should, suspiciously the same side effect of cloning tech. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A boombox-transforming robot is playing loud and obnoxious music and only seems to get louder whenever somebody else attempts to drown it out with their own. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A vendor enters the car and starts selling from his hovercart, amongst other things, bootleg holodisks, merchandise, espresso cubes, knives, and suspiciously good quality augment components. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A person falls asleep on your shoulder. You notice they match a wanted holo on your phone. u/shamanshaman123
An android quietly feeding some mewling kittens by hand is accosted by some street punks looking for some action. The rest of the train starts to look incredibly angry at this situation. u/shamanshaman123
Some dude brought their goddamn horse (not a robot one, a real one) on the train and it is shitting literally everywhere. u/shamanshaman123
A dog approaches you, alone and ownerless. It's friendly, and its tag says that its home is at the end of the line. It also happens to be the pet of the CEO of one of the most notorious corporations in the city. u/shamanshaman123
Some asshole spills a drink on you when the train jostles, and demands payment for his lost Fresca. He's clearly augmented. u/shamanshaman123
You miss your stop because you were distracted by a couple of androids loudly making out. Make up details on the spot, and make it weird. u/shamanshaman123
A horde of young thugs run into the train at the next stop, holding everyone at gunpoint unless they cough up their valuables. If complied with, they run out at the very next stop. u/shamanshaman123
A homeless man, passed out on one of the seats in the back, pisses everywhere, angering an augmented and clearly roided ganger the size of a grizzly bear. u/shamanshaman123
A massive rat sits on a seat, eating a comically large slice of pizza. u/shamanshaman123
A person wearing a lot of clothes and covering their face steps on and takes a seat. Closer inspection matches a famous pop star. You're not the only one who notices, as at the next stop, your car is flooded by fans trying to touch them. u/shamanshaman123

That's 100! Thanks for the help everyone, these are all great. I will add those over 100 as bonus encounters, if you use the table slot these in after you have rolled one of the 100.

You walk into a car filled with corpses. They are in various states of dismemberment. u/shamanshaman123
You walk into a car filled with middle-aged men wearing nothing but diapers. Several of them are augmented and tatted up. They look at you with cool eyes. u/shamanshaman123
Someone hacks into the ad system and displays obscene and very loud porn on all the screens, of varying genres. u/shamanshaman123
Eric Andre- dressed as a beekeeper and who's only intent is to cause wanton Chaos. He drops the boxes of robotic bees he has and attacks the party with said robo-bee swarm. He can also command the Bees. u/WetToast99
A trio of hooded figures steathily use a service ladder down on the tracks, keeping to the shadows attempting to flee into the tunnels. u/crimebiscuit
Across the tracks, a tagger is spray painting a sign that changes shapes and colors to make an animated figure gesture obscenely. u/crimebiscuit
A busker wearing robe over a catsuit and a wacky shades plays a synth theremin. It's soothing, ethereal and weird, though possibly annoying based on your palate. u/crimebiscuit
A trio of hoodlooms are jacking an android for parts. One of them is the lookout, another has a laptop hooked to the cranium of the android who is pleading monotonously for help, while a third is welding open his torso with an electric arc. u/crimebiscuit
Two competing crews are having a dance off. Thankfully, because they look they could wreck your party with their bare hands and/or cyborg appendages. u/crimebiscuit
An elderly vendor is selling seemingly very well trained super-sized roaches with cybernetic enhancements. They have rudimentary transponding capacity and can communicate with their owner through one-word morse code. But the vendor won't part with them unless he's convinced the buyer will make a good owner. u/crimebiscuit
A nervous pallid man is offering clean ID chips that he can install on users, and at very affordable prices. u/crimebiscuit
A fruit vendor is selling their prized crop of fresh fruit that they grew themselves in hothouses in cramped tenement roofs. They even have Geiger counter to show that the radioactive count is relatively low. u/crimebiscuit
A nearby police drone dismembered for use of it's weapon, targeting a certain blacked out carriage at the back end of the train. u/DiedViaThrowPillow
A Charismatic Cult Recruiter is operating in the area. u/Spartawolf
A pair of thrill-seeking teens are train surfing and their live streaming captures the players on film. u/Spartawolf
A gang of pickpockets are working in the station, and sees one of the players as a good mark... u/Spartawolf
A hobo rides on the outside of a maglev train, attached with a securment device, but then the device starts to fail and he screams for help u/I_walked_east
A train derails. Fire and acrid smoke spreads. Everyone panics. u/I_walked_east
A young woman wearing a large virtual reality headset sits in a busy train car. She's laughing and yelling loudly as she waves the controllers in her hand masterfully, music and voices audible through her headphones. u/-peachmilk-
Graffiti is a treasure map. u/I_walked_east

DraftKings (NASDAQ: DKNG) - Deep Dive Research - Part 1

TL:DR

This is Part 1 of my two part deep dive on DraftKings (Ticker: DKNG, I will refer to the company as “DK”)
This first part introduces you to (1) me, (2) the company, (3) my thesis on the company, and (4) digs into how they make money.
The second part (already released, you can read it here - but get through part 1 first :) ) will go in depth to explore the question “Can we 10x from here?”
DK is an exciting, disruptive company working to change how we experience watching sports and make it better.
I am not a financial advisor and this is not investment advice. These are just my opinions to help facilitate learning and discussion.

Hello, welcome to my first deep dive write up.
My name’s Mark and I’m an accountant with a passion for investing. About two years ago, I used to work as an auditor at a public accounting firm and have been behind the scenes at many different publicly traded and privately held companies in the U.S. My goal is to bring my unique perspective from that past experience, my current experience working in a new role at a large corporation, and my understanding of accounting to help break down some of the most exciting growth stocks on the market today.
I’m a long-term investor. I am focused on finding great companies and holding them for a long time. I’m willing to endure volatility, crazy price drops, and everything that comes with this approach as long as the facts that led me to originally invest and believe in that company have not changed. If you want to learn more about this approach. I recommend reading the book “100 Baggers” by Chris Mayer.
Introduction
I think it’s fitting that my first stock pick has to do with sports. Sports has been a part of my life since I could walk at the age of 2. First with baseball and soccer, and then later in my childhood with golf. I’ve always played American football and basketball for fun as well and have always been an avid fan of all the major sports in the US.
I started playing fantasy sports (mostly just fantasy football) about 6 years ago and have always enjoyed it. Traditionally, with fantasy football you draft a team at the beginning of the year and those are your players for the rest of the season. If you have a bad draft, oh well. You can try to improve your team with trades and free agent additions but it is tough. Leagues usually consist of 10-14 teams (each managed by an individual) and there’s obviously only one winner at the end of the season (about 4 months after the draft). This can lead to the managers of the lower performing teams losing interest as the season wanes on. I believe DraftKings’ (DK) founders saw this issue and saw an opportunity. Enter, daily fantasy sports. Now, with the DK platform you can draft a new team every week. Or if you want, every day. This allows fans of fantasy sports to engage at whichever point of the season they want and at varying financial stakes.
The Thesis Statement
For every stock pick I make, I want to provide a quick thesis statement that can serve as a reminder for why I’m buying and holding that stock for the long term. I’ll always aim to make it just a few sentences long so it can easily be remembered and internalized. This helps during times when the price may sporadically drop and you need to remember why you’re holding this position.
The thesis statement I have come up with for DK is as follows:
“DraftKings: The leader in allowing fans to engage financially with their favorite sports, teams, and players. Having money at stake makes the game a lot more interesting to watch. The era of daily fantasy sports games, online sports betting, and online betting (outside of sports), is just getting started and DK is as well positioned (or better positioned) than anyone to capitalize off of this trend.”
Notice how I said “allowing fans to engage financially” as the first sentence and not necessarily “allowing fans to gamble”. There’s a reason for that. According to US Federal Law, Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS) contests have specifically been exempted from the prohibitions of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA). DK has always been, and I believe will continue to be DFS contests 1st, sports betting 2nd, and other forms of gambling/entertainment 3rd. It is noteworthy that states at an individual level can still deem DFS contests illegal if they so wish, but as of this writing (11/26/20), 43 of the 50 US States allow DFS contests and DK, accordingly, is offering DFS contests in all 43 of those US States.
I’ll try to clarify the difference between DFS contests and sports betting real quick:
DFS Contest – Pay a pre-set entry fee to enter a contest. All entry fees go towards “The Pot”. “Draft” 9 players to be on your “Team” for 1 week. Enter your “Roster” into a contest with other players (could range from 1 other person to 1,000s of people, the DK user can choose). Whichever “Roster” amasses the most points for that week out of all contestants wins. The winner will get the highest payout, and depending on the nature of the contest, other top finishers will receive smaller payouts as well.
Sports Gambling – Team A is considered a 10 point favorite to defeat Team B. This means that Team A is expected, by the professional gambling line setters, to outscore Team B by 10 points. This is known as a point spread. You can bet on the underdog or the favorite. If you bet on the favorite, they have to win by more than 10 points for you to win the bet. If you bet on the underdog, you will win the bet as long as the underdog keeps the game within less than a 10 point defeat.
These are just a couple simple examples to help you see the difference. Sports Gambling (the 2nd priority of DK) is a very lucrative market just as the DFS contests are. However, in the US, Federal Laws and regulations are a lot stricter on Sports Gambling than they are on DFS. As of this writing (11/27/20), 22 states (including the District of Columbia) out of 51 possible allow sports gambling.
DK is still in the infancy stages of getting their sports gambling business going. In the 22 states where they could potentially operate, they currently have a sports gambling offering in 11 of those states. The sports gambling business model for DK can be broken into two main offerings – mobile sports betting, and retail sports betting. Mobile sports betting means you can place a sports bet online from the comfort of your own home, while retail sports betting means you must go to a casino and place a bet with the sportsbook in person. I personally believe mobile sports betting is the real potential cash cow for DK out of the two types of sports betting offerings due to the convenience and ease of access. DK is currently working on and encouraging customers to lobby their state lawmakers to legalize sports gambling in more states.
How DK makes money
At the very least, before you invest in a company, you better understand how they make money. In Chris Mayers’ excellent book, 100 Baggers, that I mentioned above, he continually references top line revenue growth as one of the main common indicators of a possible 100 Bagger. This isn’t to tell you that any stock I pick will be a 100 Bagger just because it has great top line revenue growth, but if I am looking at a growth stock to hold for the long term, revenue growth is one of the first things I look at.
For DK, their means of making money is quite simple. I already went into detail above about DFS Contests and Sports Gambling. In DK’s latest 10-Q filing with the SEC (filed 11/13/20), revenue is broken out into two main streams: Online Gaming and Gaming Software.
Online Gaming (82% of Total Revenue for 9 months ended 9/30/20):
Online gaming is the true core business of DK and includes the aforementioned DFS Contests, Sports Gambling and additional gambling (non-sports) opportunities. DK refers to their additional gambling (non-sports) as “iGaming” or “online casino”.
For the 9 months ended 9/30/20, Online Gaming revenue totaled $239M, up 30% YoY from $184M in the same prior year period. Keep in mind, that this is an increase that happened during a COVID-19 global pandemic that delayed and shortened many professional sports seasons.
Online gaming revenue is earned in a few ways that are slightly different, but very similar overall. In order to enter a DFS contest, a customer must pay an entry fee. DFS revenue is generated from these entry fees collected, net of prize payouts and customer incentives awarded to users. In order to place a sports bet (sports gambling), a customer places a wager with a DK Sportsbook. The DK Sportsbook sets odds for each wager that builds in a theoretical margin allowing DK to profit. Sports gambling revenue is generated from wagers collected from customers, net of payouts and incentives awarded to winning customers. The last form of online gaming revenue is earned in similar fashion to a land-based casino, offering online versions of casino games such as blackjack, roulette, and slot machines.
Gaming Software (18% of Total Revenue for 9 months ended 9/30/20):
While the Online Gaming revenue stream mentioned above is a Business to Consumer (B2C) model, the Gaming Software revenue stream is a Business to Business (B2B) model. The Gaming Software side of the business was born out of the acquisition of SBTech, a company from the Isle of Man (near the UK) founded in 2007 that has 12+ years of experience providing online sports betting platforms to clients all over the world. The acquisition occurred as part of the SPAC driven IPO in April of 2020 that combined “the old DK company” with SBTech so that they now are “the new DK company” listed as DKNG on the NASDAQ. SBTech is a far more important part of the story than just being 18% of today’s revenue. The reason for this is because DK will eventually (planned mid-late 2021) be migrating all of their DFS and gambling offerings onto SBTech’s online platforms. Currently, for DFS, DK uses their own proprietary platform but that will move to SBTech with the migration. Currently, for online gambling, DK uses Kambi, the same online gambling platform that services Penn Gaming (PENN), a DK rival. But that’s enough about the software migration for now, back to the Gaming Software revenue.
The Gaming Software revenue stream for DK is essentially a continuation of SBTechs’ B2B business model. DK contracts with business customers to provide sports and casino betting software solutions. DK typically enters two different type of arrangements with B2B customers when selling the gaming software:

Direct Customer Contract Revenue: In this type of transaction, the software is sold directly to a business (casino for example) that wants to use the software for their own gambling operations. This revenue is generally calculated as a percentage of the wagering revenue generated by the business customer using DK’s software and is recognized in the periods in which those wagering and related activities conclude.
Reseller Arrangement Revenue: In this type of transaction, DK provides distributors with the right to resell DK’s software-as-a-service offering to their clients, using their own infrastructure. In reseller arrangements, revenue is generally calculated via a fixed monthly fee and an additional monthly fee which varies based on the number of gaming operators to whom each reseller sub-licenses DK’s software.

As mentioned above, SBTech was an international company based in the Isle of Man before being acquired by DK. Thus, the majority of their business in their first 12 years of operating independently has always been international and outside of the United States. This has helped DK, which has historically been US focused, expand it’s international reach.
A perfect example of expanding this international reach occurred recently during October (technically Q4) in which DK’s B2B technology (powered by SBTech) helped enable the launch of “PalaceBet”, a new mobile and online sportsbook offering from Peermont, a South Africa based resort and casino company. The deal was headed by DK’s new Chief International Officer, Shay Berka, who previously spent 10 years working for SBTech as CFO and General Manager. Mr. Berka took on the role of DK’s Chief International Officer upon the merger in April earlier this year. I think this deal shows that DK has integrated SBTech and it’s business very well into the larger business as a whole. They are not wasting any time using their newly acquired resources to expand their reach and bring in new sources of revenue.
This is the end of my first article about DK. My goal is to drop Part 2 later this week. The focus of Part 2 will be an in depth answer of the question – “Can we 10x from here?”
Disclosure: I am/we are long DKNG. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it. I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

DraftKings (NASDAQ: DKNG) - Deep Dive Research - Part 1

TL:DR

This is Part 1 of my two part deep dive on DraftKings (Ticker: DKNG, I will refer to the company as “DK”)
This first part introduces you to (1) me, (2) the company, (3) my thesis on the company, and (4) digs into how they make money.
The second part (to be released later this week) will go in depth to explore the question “Can we 10x from here?”
DK is an exciting, disruptive company working to change how we experience watching sports and make it better.
I am not a financial advisor and this is not investment advice. These are just my opinions to help facilitate learning and discussion.

Direct Customer Contract Revenue: In this type of transaction, the software is sold directly to a business (casino for example) that wants to use the software for their own gambling operations. This revenue is generally calculated as a percentage of the wagering revenue generated by the business customer using DK’s software and is recognized in the periods in which those wagering and related activities conclude.
Reseller Arrangement Revenue: In this type of transaction, DK provides distributors with the right to resell DK’s software-as-a-service offering to their clients, using their own infrastructure. In reseller arrangements, revenue is generally calculated via a fixed monthly fee and an additional monthly fee which varies based on the number of gaming operators to whom each reseller sub-licenses DK’s software.

[A3: Main] Operation Beer Battered | Take Me Home | SAT NOV28 2000 UTC

Operation Beer Battered Freedom
By Gibbs and Bubbus
[A3: Main] Operation Beer Battered Freedom | Take Me Home | SAT NOV28 2000 UTC
Get the mods through the mod downloader, [Swifty]
Make sure your mods are updated in time, and feel free to contact the mods through Discord or Reddit for help!
Recommended Reading: http://ttp3.dslyecxi.com/
Map of AO
SITUATION
Thanksgiving threatened by Redcoats.
ENEMY FORCES
British oppressors.
FRIENDLY FORCES
American mettle.
MISSION
Primary Objectives:

Restore Freedom.
Celebrate Freedom.

SYSTEM NOTES

Advanced Medical Settings (Wound Reopening, PAKs, etc).
Wounds will reopen 80% slower than usual.
MED slots will carry PAKs, Surgical Kits, and Medical Bags.
CLS slots are Medics without advanced equipment.

Terrain: West Virginiarus 2020
Respawn: Base respawn
Radios: Standard.
Slotting:
Use this in your slotting comment:

IGN: (Your name) SLOT: Alpha 1 | Rifleman Hi, I'm New! (If new)

Slot Descriptions

RIF - A real American Hero. Uses his Freedoms to defend his Freedoms. It's time to take names and dump tea in the harbour - and round here we're all out of harbours.
FTL - A real American Leader. Uses his Freedom Fighters to defend his Freedoms. It's time to take names and dump tea in the harbour - and his team members have the Liberty to choose.

Freedom Fighter Biographies

The Range Medic: Since getting into precision sports, this guy took a keen interest in combat medicine. He's armed with the finest medical education YouTube can offer, and *can't wait* to try out a tourniquet on you.
The Larper: Yeah, he's a Marine, he just hasn't talked to his local recruiter yet. Skirting dangerously close to Stolen Valor, the Larper owns every piece of personal equipment in use by the Corps including some you'd swear he really shouldn't have.
The AR Guy: It's reliable and modular! No, those were just ammunition issues, Stoner's design was *perfect*. Constantly found bickering with The AK Guy - you could swear they *hate* each-other, but for some reason you never see them apart...
The AK Guy: It's got tolerances! Rifle is fine! Swears his rifle is the superior choice, no matter what the ammo prices say. Never found too far away from The AR Guy, and you've learned not to read into it much. Out loud.
The Doctor: Where there's pain, there's profit. He's not really sure what happens when he presses the bullet button on his assault weapon - what he does know is emergency surgery, risk-reward analysis and your bank account number.
The Youtuber: The only one openly out here for clout over constitution, this guy runs the PR effort online. His "Destruction Dave" channel gathers millions of views from Real Patriots who want to see how many Redcoats a .50 BMG will go through today.
The Veteran: He left the jungle, but the jungle never left him. He and his wartime buddy keep grumbling about the "kids these days" and how they'd rather be back home, but you can tell they've been waiting for this. You're not sure how he got AT as a bring-back trophy, but you're not inclined to ask questions either.
Nambo Last Blood: Recently convinced to move home from Thailand, this retired machinegunner outwardly expected a quiet life on the ranch. The way he wields his old service weapon though, you begin to wonder. Never found far from The Veteran - the way they operate together gives you hope, even if the way they stare at the trees gives you pause.
Tier Zero: Uncompromisingly tight-lipped, and vaguely employed in "foreign affairs". He won't answer about why a diplomat needs a helmet or where he picked up that shemagh, and swears his AR was bought for home defense. Oh well. At least he's not the Larper.
The Neglected Weapon: Caught up in current events while on a cross-country business trip. A hopeless aficionado of all things French. Hasn't been seen wielding any weapon from the last decade, but seems to know everything about them.
The Hunter: More used to hunting big game, the hunter has become accustomed with pursuing the most dangerous game instead. He has yet to find the right call to use, but has found some success with "oi mate" and "hot innit".
The Reenactors: Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Reason enough to break out the muskets and relive the Good Old Days - though someone may want to tell these two that their cannon isn't exactly a historical piece.
The Frontiersman: Some ways of life never die, and this guy is an example of Rugged Individualism despite civilisation's very best efforts. When you're living on the edge, knowing how to patch yourself up is life and death. He doesn't know what a defibbylator is, but he'll sort you out - or you'll die.
The Patriot: "Yessir the US of A is the greatest nation that's ever graced this earth and don't you fuckin forget it you scumsuckin' \socialist* cus capitalism is the heart of the American Dream and that's why I *enjoy* my medical debt godDAMMIT."* (For some reason, people respect him.)
Blastin' Barry: In his state, legally, he's allowed to purchase small amounts of explosive material for sporting use. Nobody told him he's meant to use it all up before he goes to buy more. He's not an arsonist, because fire is too slow.
The Law: He's here because he's pretty damn sure the Limeys are doing something illegal. A goddamn good hunch as a matter of fact, and that's all he needs to start shooting. Has already engaged the enemy, and was pleasantly surprised to find out after the fact that these suspects were actually armed.
The Miniman: 5.56 is the finest example of American ingenuity and goddammit if I'm not about to show these tea-drinkers the red in "red white and blue" 700 times a goddamn second with the finest machine gun America ever invented. What do you mean it's Belgian?
The Reporter: Bringing us the finest in fair unbalanced reporting. He's also medically trained.
The Recoil Enthusiast: The M14 as every bit as good as the M16 and it has its thunder stolen and you damn well *know it*. It's every part as controllable, reliable and modular as the AR, see look at this, it's a Troy. No that's not a recoil pad it uh, it came like that. No I did *not* flinch when I moved my shoulder.
This list is not guaranteed to be up to date! Do a quick look through the comments to make sure your slot hasn't already been claimed.
BLUFOR##

Callsign/Role	IGN	Equipment
WASHINGTON
CO (The Patriot)	Khaki	SCAR 7.62
MED (The Frontiersman)	K R E P O S	A shotgun
MK (The Hunter)	Cloby	7.62 Hunting Rifle
ARTY (The Reenactor)	SKay	A musket
ARTY (The Other Reenactor)	Zefyr	A musket
:-	:-	:-
FREEDOM
FTL (The Recoil Enthusiast)	Kennedy	Troy M14
CLS (The Reporter)	buckethead	A camera (+ pistol)
AR (The Miniman)	Bobby	M249
DEMO (Blastin' Barry)	Obv	AR-15 + RPG + Charges
RIF (The Law)	Rogue	AR-15
RIF	zbrodniarz	AR-15
:-	:-	:-
LIBERTY
FTL (Tier Zero)	Wallace	Mk18
CLS (The Doctor)	Cozmicc	MP5, medical bills
RIF (The AR Guy)	Pauson	AR-15
RIF (The AK Guy)	Waterplant	AKM
MK (The Neglected Weapon)	sniper190	FR-F2, moustache
RIF	hotdog	AR-15
:-	:-	:-
JUSTICE
FTL (The Larper)	Disco	M16A4
CLS (The Range Medic)	Leetgamer1234	AR-15, "medical knowledge"
AR (Nambo: Last Blood)	Just-Tom	M60
LAT (The Veteran)		M16A1, LAWs
MK (The Youtuber)	AutarkOS	A .50, yeehaw.
RIF		AR-15
:-	:-	:-
VIRTUE
FTL (The Field Promotion)		???
CLS (The Overflow Guy)		???
AR (The Overflow Guy)		???
LAT (The Overflow Guy)		???
MK (The Overflow Guy)		???
RIF (The Overflow Guy)	Isaiah	???

Reserves: Baird, DuStY, EchoCode, Cre8or, Sean

Living The Screen Life #productsmakemehappy

Original Author

Important official legal disclaimer: This is a short work of fiction. Any resemblances to real people (including myself); people you may know; people you think you may know; etc.; is entirely deliberate.
When I’m at work I’m staring at a screen. When I’m not at work I’m staring at screens. Checking social media. Scrolling through updates. Scrolling through friends. Scrolling through #instagram. Scrolling through #amazon. The customer is always right. Make sure the product you’re selling is something that people want to buy.
On the subway we’re surrounded by people that we don’t know and never will. Our heads are tilted down, eyes connected to smartphones and pod devices. Playing free games. Bright lights and colorful shapes. Swipe swipe swipe. Group texts. #netflix. Fantasy football updates. #snapchats. The anxiety of being human. New Yorkers avoid looking at or talking to one another. Once in a while there will be a crazy person on the train and all of us normal passengers can smile at each other and sigh. At least we’re not crazy.
The subway tunnels are the arteries and veins of the city, the passageways of the busy hive. If you close your eyes the movement through the tunnels feels organic, alive. A buzz of worker bees on our way. Where are we going?
I don’t want be a part of the hive. But I’m a human being. I need other human beings.
Something is broken in me. I hate myself. I don’t feel connection in any aspect of my life. friendships, family, romance, work. Ennui and alienation are my reality. A city of 8 million people. A hive of loneliness.
My life is no tragedy. I don’t have any real reasons to be sad but I’m sad. I wasn’t abused. My parents love me. I went to college. I had all the benefits of a middle class upbringing. I’m a white male in a society that has persecuted anyone and everyone who isn’t.
I eat mostly fast food. Chinese delivery. #mcdonalds. #kraft macaroni & cheese. #dominos. Microwave dinners. High sodium. High Fructose Corn Syrup. MSG. Intense flavors. Addictive flavors.
There was a terrorist attack and the nation was in shock. A maniac with a gun shot up a shopping mall. The president offered his condolences. We had an all-staff call at work to discuss how we felt. It’s important for us to remember that terrorists are evil. When terrible things happen on our TV screens it’s important to show solidarity.
We’ve never had an all-staff call at work to discuss our solidarity with the homeless people that we walk by each day between the subway station and our office. The woman who stands by the subway entrance shaking her cup of change every day. The couple that sleep in sleeping bags each night under the awning of the bodega. We didn’t have an all-staff call to discuss our solidarity with our co-workers who were laid off last week.
Binge. Binge-watch. Binge-watch television. The revolution will be televised. The revolution will be tweeted.

ThisIsUs#Freshofftheboat#Blackish#Blacklivesmatter#Change#Makeamericagreatagain#Strongertogether#Target

Browsing the internet, searching for a date. Swiping through thousands of profiles. The deep human need for connection. "Love to travel". "Looking for a partner in crime". “Enjoys witty banter”. Attempting to send thoughtful messages that will stand out. Being ignored. Rejected. Every once in a while a rare response. Variable rewards. You’ll never win if you don’t play the game. Dopamine. Slot machines. Addiction.
Sometimes I wonder if people have genuine friendships anymore. Sometimes I think back to the times when I had friends. My friends from college. I think I was always a little bit sad underneath it all. But friends are a good medicine.
We had a lot of fun back in college. This was back before our jobs dragged us to all different corners of the country. Nowadays we talk about the #nfl or #GoT through group texts. Sometimes we wish each other happy birthday. Usually we forget.
Breaking news. Check your smart phone. Turn on your television. President Trump did this. President Trump did that. Terrorist attack. Hurricane. Polar Ice Caps melting. Destruction. Human beings are terrible to each other. Stay informed. Stay alert. Informed citizens watch the news. Check #bbc, #cnn, #msnbc. Get updates and notifications. Twitter and social media keep us informed. Smart phones are smart.
Drugs make me feel better. Temporarily. Porn works too. Weed. A little coke. A little molly. Drugs and porn don't really make me happy, but they at least make me not sad for a while. A quick bump to take the pain away.
Everyone is an addict. Addiction is good for the economy. Some addictions are respectable. Some not so much. work, shopping, smart phones, #facebook, television, fossil fuels, #marvel super-hero movies, #mcdonalds, #instagram, pornography, #dominos, coffee, alcohol, #snapchat, cocaine, #oxycontin, heroin. The economy is doing well.
I talked to my sister a few weeks ago, she lives in Colorado. She used to live in Arizona, and before that North Carolina. I miss my sister. Like most young people she goes wherever her or her boyfriend can find work. She complained about her job, about how all her coworkers seem so fake. No one really seems to care about what they’re doing. It’s more important to make it seem like you care than it is to actually care.
The other day I saw a picture she posted with her co-workers - “So happy to work with these great people and this awesome company #workfriends”.
The global economy is great. Even as it rips apart the connections that we need for our emotional health, it comes up with ever more products and services and gadgets for us to substitute for those connections and soothe our loneliness. One day we will all be starting at screens all the time and we’ll never have to interact with humans in the real world ever again. Life will be good.
I know some people who find meaning in their work. They work long hours. They go out drinking with co-workers. Mostly they work in advertising or tech or finance. These industries are important because they help our economy grow. Growing the economy is important. We may live on a finite planet, but we’re committed to an economy that can grow forever.
An economy is not the only type of organic system that can commit to a cycle of endless growth. Sometimes it happens with cells in the human body for instance. This is called cancer.
Most of my time at work I sit at my desk pretending to work hard. Wondering what the other cubicle bees are doing with their time as they pretend to be working hard. Sometimes I do spread sheets that people tell me are useful. Measuring. Counting.
Once in a while I’ll grab lunch at the bodega or at #mcdonalds and I’ll notice how the employees there work so much harder than I do. Most of them are bi-lingual. They probably work harder in an hour than I do in a day.
I sit at a desk in front of a computer, so my job is really important.
Smart phone. Smart TV. Smart car. Smart house. We are smart.
When I get out of work I walk to the subway with all the other worker bees leaving their jobs. The sidewalks are buzzing with people heading this way and that. It’s important to walk fast to wherever it is you’re going. It’s important to go where you’re going and for everyone else to go where they’re going. Thinking about where you’re going is time wasted when you could be getting to where you’re going. Be careful if you smile at other people, they may see it as a threat.
At rush hour there is always a man on the corner near the subway with a sign that says “Jesus Loves You.” His eyes are intense. He doesn’t seem to be in a rush to get anywhere.
I love to learn. I love to read. I mostly hated school. Some of the most intelligent, interesting, and creative people I knew were dropouts.
School was useful for teaching us that life is about measurement and performance and specialization and commodification. Your peers are your competition. Things like empathy and imagination and cooperation are hard to measure. They’re non-linear. School doesn’t like them.
Prison population is something we can measure. There are more black men in prison today than there were enslaved at the time the Civil War began. There are 2.3 million Americans in Prison. America is the home of the Free and the Brave.
There was a pretty young woman at the register at the bookstore. She told me that she was a huge fan of the Nabokov stories I was buying. Said she loved the way he plays with language and meaning. She reached to give me a bag for the book and I told her I didn't really need one. She apologized and smiled and said that she must have asked me about a bag already. I told her that she hadn't. She blushed. I asked her her name. I asked her for her number.
Later I sent her a message. Maybe I could take her out for a drink sometime. Smiley face emoji. I never got a response. Connecting with people is hard.
Social media. Social. Media. We are social. We connect with our screens. Social media connects us to what is important. Likes, upvotes, retweets, friend requests, updates, notifications. That friendly buzzzzzz from your smart phone. It feels good to be social. Dopamine. Remember - Your brand matters. Everyone is watching.
Technology makes the world better. Technology solves problems, especially problems created by other technology. If new technologies create problems, the solution is to develop newer technologies to solve those problems. Technology and progress are the same thing. Technology helps the economy grow. When technology makes human beings obsolete, that is progress.
Sometimes it seems that we relate to our machines better than we relate to each other.
One in sixty-eight children in America is diagnosed with autism. Autism is characterized by impaired social interaction, impaired verbal and non-verbal communication, and restricted and repetitive behavior.
I feel like my job isn’t actually about doing anything. Success is really about making it look like what you do is important. Lying to yourself to tell yourself that what you do is important.
Teamwork and cooperation are actively discouraged at work. No one knows what anyone else does, but supposedly what everyone does is important. Stare into your computer screen. Do we live in a world where success is about manipulating our fellow human beings? #winning
One day after work I saw an old woman on the subway with a young girl sleeping at her side. The woman was sewing a scarf. Sometimes people are good to each other. Sometimes the small things in life can be incredibly beautiful. Once in a while happiness will come when I’m not searching for it.
I wish I had a girlfriend. Someone I could talk to without feeling like I’m lying to myself.
People around me are growing up. Getting married. Having kids. Settling into life. My conscience is at war with my culture.
One day I took a train out of the city. I took some molly. I was hoping to escape the traps of language. I needed nature. I needed art. I was looking for something that wasn’t for sale.
Our culture destroys connection. Alienation is endemic to the system. Nobody knows anybody, nobody knows themselves. We blame and ridicule anyone who reflects the fear that is hidden within ourselves. Those who are suffering the most – the poor, the homeless, the drug addicts, the crazy, the uneducated. Anyone with a political ideology different from our own. Organic human interaction doesn’t exist, all that matters is your ability to sell and your ability to consume. Smile for #instagram, smile for #facebook. Image is everything. Human beings are commodities. We stare into screens, selling ourselves to each other. We desperately hang on for a sense of meaning and purpose to a culture which is destroying the ecosystems that we depend on for life. A culture which transforms our deep emotional need for meaning and connection into a deep emotional need for products.
In 2015 there were 33,000 deaths in America from heroin and prescription opioids. These drugs are pain killers. Pain. Killers. What pain are we trying to kill?
Some of the best people I know are chronic drug users, some of them functional, some of them not so much. What does it mean to be a human being?
Once I got so lonely that I was no longer myself. I was the hive. The people moving to and fro, the traffic, the ambulances, the delivery boys on their bicycles, the junkies, the couples hand in hand on the sidewalks, the children and dogs playing in the park, the street festivals, the subway cars rumbling through their tunnels. It was all me.
The sounds of the city are music. Everything is frequency. It’s buzzing.
Rather than acknowledging and sharing our pain and fear, using vulnerability to connect, we project onto each other. We revert to tribalism. Tribalism and hatred increase when our communities are our screens. Morality and empathy function differently in this environment. There is only the tribe and the Other. The safe space and the enemy. Stronger Together. I’m With Her. Make America Great Again. #BackLivesMatter #BlueLivesMatter Advertising is our culture. #hastag your tribe.
I miss my sister. I miss my whole family. Including my extended family that I don’t really know. Sometimes I think that humans aren’t really supposed to behave like bees in a hive and that we are actually designed to live close to our families and our friends and work close to where we live. Maybe work and life and culture and happiness aren’t supposed to be separate things. “Commute” is a silly word. There’s a hope somewhere deep down that we actually need each other…that people are worth it.
As a straight, college educated, white male, I sometimes feel that I’m not allowed to be upset about the world we live in, I’m not allowed to be hurt by it. I need to #checkmyprivilege. Maybe I just need more drugs.
It’s important for us to be living in a state of constant consumption. After all, what are we if we’re not consumers? What does it mean to be a human being?
Sex sells. Sex is a good product. Orgasms can be counted. How many people have you fucked? I don’t know how to have a genuinely vulnerable emotional connection with another human being. What happens after the orgasm? Connecting with someone who you hope to have an intimate and beautiful relationship with is about selling yourself. Always remember: You Are A PRODUCT.
Make sure you have a great profile pic. It’s important to start out with a clever user name. Never start with your real name. This is advertising, people don’t want to know the real you. Make sure you look sexy at all times. Ugliness doesn’t sell. Swipe your way to happiness. True love is a click away. Everyone’s there. An entire city. A busy hive.
Drugs are Good drugs when society says they’re Good drugs. Good drugs are legal, Bad drugs are illegal.
Good people Hate president Trump. It’s important to have socially acceptable outlets for channeling negative emotions when living in an oppressive culture. Ridiculing and making fun of Trump and his supporters is something we can all do together and share in the fun.
Is it possible that Trump supporters might be human beings too? Is it possible that hatred is just fear and pain turned outward?
How’s your social media presence? What does it mean to have “presence”? where am I when I have #presence? Presence; noun; The state or fact of being present; current existence or occurrence.
Science and technology allow us to track and influence the behavior of massive numbers of human beings. The entire hive. How does the swarm function?
Humans can be tracked by consumption habits and behavior predicted and influenced using algorithms. The more data there is the more accurate the predictions. Eventually feedback loops from past behavior can be used to influence future behavior. What we consume tells us who we are and who we will be. #hashtag it. Humans are just numbers after all. Numbers that can be measured, counted, commodified.
Tech and big data are amazing. It’s really great they way the tech industry helps our economy. Why judge people by the content of their character when there are statistics and algorithms? More products to help the economy grow. What does it mean to be a human being?
After the Civil War, the former slaves were free to make their way in this home of the Free and the Brave. In Florida and other parts of the south, during the reconstruction period, it was common for freed slaves to be thrown in jail for no other reason than the fact that they didn’t have work. Once there, they were forced into chain gangs to build railroads and other infrastructure projects. Many of them died due to terrible conditions and over-work. Railroads were important because they brought industry and technology and economic growth. Economic progress makes the world better.
Every once in a while the screens get turned off. I get the rare chance to talk with friends or co-workers away from the screens and outside of the office environment and I have the impression that they are genuinely interested in having a positive impact in the world and in their community. Why do I feel so alienated at work, and in life? Why are we so disconnected in a world of constant connection? It has something to do with the system, the wider culture. Culture is powerful.
Worker bees working, the rhythms of the hive.
A beautiful fall day in Central Park. An oasis amidst the concrete. The wind blows through the trees, leaves shimmering in the sun. Fractals. The individual elements reflect structural patterns of the whole.
A beehive is an amazing thing. We can’t understand the hive by looking at the behavior of an individual bee, yet the combined behavior of the bees create a new phenomenon that is more than the sum of its parts – the hive. Swarming is like a cultural phenomenon of the hive. It is a pattern of the hive reflected in the bees.
The heroin addict reflects our culture of addiction. The cancer patient reflects our pathological attachment to endless growth. The autistic child reflects a society in which we have lost the ability to empathize, lost the ability to feel. We relate more to machines than to each other and to the earth. A black man murdered in the street reflects a culture in which human life is a just a number. Humans are products. A salesman for president is a reflection of us. It shows us who we are.
The art of the deal. President. Salesman. Don’t forget that you’re for sale. Everyone’s watching.
I don’t have a single person that I feel I can talk to about things that matter to me. I don’t have a single relationship where I feel I can be comfortable being myself, where I feel understood. Attempts that I make to connect are met with rejection. I fail over and over and over again. The relationships I do have are superficial. Why am I so broken? Sometimes I think that I might have something positive to offer.
The personalities that thrive in the modern world are those that embody the traits of psychopathy. Rapid turnover in interpersonal relationships. Lack of any real need for a sense of community or place. Focus on the superficial and image based forms of communication as opposed to depth and nuance. Lack of empathy. Commoditized, fragmented, specialized and depersonalized interactions with others and with the planet. We are all engulfed in this culture. There aren’t any good guys or bad guys. Causality is non-linear. We’re all guilty. We are a society in which the ability to consume is our highest virtue and being poor is a moral failure. Poor people hate themselves and each other for being poor and worship rich people for being rich. Rich people hate themselves just as much as poor people, if not more so. Can you ever consume enough to create an identity? What does it mean to be a human being? Technology, screens and financial capital. Fossil fuels. Endless War. Drone Strikes. 150 to 200 of the species that make up the biosphere of planet earth go extinct every single day. 2,220,300 people incarcerated in the United States of America. Home of the Free and the Brave.
Does the bee comprehend the nature of the hive? There are 7.442 billion human beings on planet earth. The individual human brain does not work with those kinds of numbers. We can’t relate to 7,442,000,000. 7,442,000,000 are not faces that we know. 7,442,000,000 is not connected to place. The way we make sense of 7,442,000,000…is as a product. A product to be exploited and used for all that it’s worth and then discarded a long with the rest of the natural world. Success in our culture, in the industrial juggernaut that we call our economy, comes from the ability to manipulate the largest number of human beings, from figuring out and implementing the most efficient ways of turning human beings and the planet into a #commodity.

hashtag#hastag#hashtag#meme#meme#meme#imageiseverything#cultureisadvertisement#artisproduct#loveisproduct

Shorten your thoughts so your mind doesn’t wander
into the darkness beyond tomorrow.

iamreallyhappy

productsmakemhappy

A Dying Peace: Chapter 3 (part 1)

Chapter 3:

The classroom was bright, filled with second-hand afternoon sun which illuminated the gaggle of small desks inside. Outside, The Boulevarde was busy with self-assured adults going about their business, steady, vigorous and lazy. Arlo did not envy them – all busy, all stressed and, in the end, much closer to death. He was happy to be inside, in this classroom; nothing to do but listen to Misses Wilde - who he had all the time in the world for. Her blue eyes and dark brown hair captivated him totally, held his attention hostage, but this wasn’t a kidnapping, or if it was, he was buried in Stockholm syndrome, he was a willing prisoner. He wasn’t really paying attention to the lesson but he could pretend to listen to what she said, it didn’t matter, it just gave him an excuse to look at her face, her eyes and her lips.
It wasn’t a regular day at school, today they had a new student. From his place at the back of the class he couldn’t really see her – Erica was her name – but he didn’t mind, as novel as it was to have a new classmate, he was content to watch Mrs Wilde. Arlo’s School was small – just one room, one teacher and ten students. He knew it wasn’t like this in other places, but Chalice was unique in more ways than just in the way it educated its kids.
“Cruor is supergiant, one of the largest gas giants discovered within the milky way galaxy. Despite being extraordinarily large, it’s Cruor’s colour which makes it so alluring. Our host, a huge ball of gas, is a vibrant crimson, a huge sphere of swirling blood-coloured gas, occasionally coagulating into super storms which churn across the vast oceans of thick ruby liquid gas below.”
Arlo sighed – Chalice, Cruor and Solari 101.
Misses Wilde heard him exhale, pasued and focused her eyes upon his. “Am I boring you, Arlo?”
He broke out into a sweat, shifted in his seat and avoided the probing eyes of his classmates. “No Misses Wilde” The new student kept her eyes at the front, from what he could see.
Mrs Wilde nodded and cleared her throat. “Good. As I was saying - The key ingredient is iron. Its extremely rare for a gas giant to have large quantities of any metal element, let alone the element which colours the very fluid in our veins. The outer gas layer is not actually red in colour, but clear, It is only the red mist created by turbulent storms and the crimson sea below which give the crimson giant its colour. However, viewed from space Cruor resembled enormous bright red cherry, as you well know”
Xavier was next to fold. He raised his hand impatiently
Misses Wilde regarded the plucky boy with a small smile. “Yes Xavier?”
“Why are you teaching us this – everyone knows this stuff, its common knowledge”
Misses Wilde raised a shapely eyebrow “common knowledge for some – not for others.”
She meant the new girl – Erica from the Moon.
Xavier frowned at the back of her head.
Misses Wilde continued. “Aside from us, Cruor’s system is lifeless, there are only three planets existing within the demure gaze of our aging sun, Samaran. The two inner most planets are hot balls of rock, very similar to the Solar system’s Mercury. Cruor is the next in line and positioned within Samaran’s goldilocks’ zone, it was initially deemed the most likely candidate for colonisation. Well not Cruor itself, but one of its many moons.”
She paused“How many moons orbit Cruor, Xavier?” Misses Wilde asked the boy.
Eight, thought Arlo.
“Eight” Xavier stated through the exhalation of another melodramatic sigh.
Misses Wilde nodded, continued “Raysor was the obvious choice, however due to its ultra dry climate and almost complete lack of liquid water, settlement was postponed in favour of creating a hub for iron mining which would take place in the asteroid belts. As I said, Cruor exists as the third and outer most planet. Millions of kilometres further out from Cruor, one encounters the system’s extensive asteroid belt, filled with the remains of at least four other planets which used to accompany the now lonely three remaining. At least two of these now obliterated planets had been almost eighty percent iron by mass, meaning that the system’s asteroid belt is also largely made up of iron.”
Iron was a precious commodity in the current galaxy, be it for soils, construction, medicines, chemical manufacture, fuels, and a hundred other things - lots of people wanted it and more than a few relied on it. Arlo’s mum wouldn’t shut up about it.
Arlo knew the drill, so to speak. The metal was mined within the asteroid belt by large robotic diggers, part space-ship part excavator, the huge machines resembled blocky beetles tearing apart iron asteroids both small and large. He had seen footage of his mum’s mine, watched the machines devour space rocks – it was pretty boring. Once fully loaded with rocky iron composites, the insectile machines would navigate via fusion engines through the thinning sections of asteroid belt to one of hundreds of spherical processor-loaders. These ball shaped factories could dock twenty four miners on their external hull at any one time, the ships would sit in designated cradles where they would unload their payload of iron ore from the storage sections in their belly’s. The minerals would be processed as they travelled to the centre of the sphere, where a larger interplanetary hauler was slowly loaded. The huge iron carriers slotted into the processing spheres so deeply that only the tips of their hulls were exposed outside the mechanised ball. Arlo couldn’t help it, he had traced the journey of iron ore from space rock to foundry a thousand times, as soon as the thought was triggered, it was if his brain became a clockwork showreel, cranking out a series of pictures and diagrams as familiar as the layout of his bedroom, or shape of his mums face.
He submitted to it, lets his eyes glaze over and carry him through the show.
After the ore was processed the huge freighters would emerge slowly on herculean magnetic rails, facing towards Solari and wherever Cruor was at the time in relation to that area of asteroid belt. Then a week or so would pass on a slow burn moving deeper into the systems heart, meanwhile the final refinements were taking place within the kilometres of hull factory units the big ships possessed. Their destination was the system’s blood red marble and its sole habitat which acted as the distribution hub for all metal exports.
Aside from his mum’s tutelage, knowing the process was inescapable when he was forced, simply by proximity, to listen in on hundreds of his mum’s phone calls whilst trapped in their flyer, on space flights or during brief, sporadic and rarely sacred family holidays. The process complete, his mind began to resync with the present, the classroom and the lesson.
Meanwhile misses Wilde continued the lecture, familiar and boring.
“Cruor’s habitat is called Chalice. Chalice is a cylindrical living space filled to brim with a unique cross section of the conglomerate population. The habitat itself is nine kilometres in diameter and for twenty two kilometres of its length, its hollow interior a needle work jungle of dense metropolis, its enormous sky scrapers anchored to the curved interior all pointed towards the cylinder’s middle axis. If one were to look straight down the middle of the habitat, Chalice’s city looks like a steel pipe and with a hundred thick needles of varying lengths pointing into the centre, leaving a small gap between their tips. In realistic terms, the skyscrapers directly opposite each other always had at least a kilometre gap between their pointed rooftops”.
Misses Wilde paused, looked at Arlo again – he panicked, had be been breathing too loudly again?
“Arlo, tell me about the population of Chalice and its society”
Arlo swallowed, where to start? Not the boring stuff, no, no more boring stuff.
“The needle city has a certain reputation-“ Xavier scoffed “- for being on the dangerous side of liberal, we have very few laws here in Chalice, owing to Fred’s autonomy from the conglomerate, and thus a number of shady individuals and their dubious enterprises call the Needle City home. As a result, Chalice grown popular not only for its proximity to Cruor and iron mininig, but for the plethora of semi legal goods and services available to us and not the rest of the conglomerate.”
Misses Wilde gestured for him to continue “Such as?”
Arlo continued “radical genetic modification, experimental implants, illegal arms, restricted pharmaceuticals, bounty hunters, hit men, animal transformation, incompatible marriage…. ahh, etcetera.”
Xavier interrupted “Meanwhile, the mining companies rake in the real cash by stripping the asteroid belt of all the iron, companies like your mum’s company, right Arlo?”
“Xavier be quiet, if you want to speak raise your hand like the rest of your classmates “Misses Wilde snapped.
Arlo reddened, now the Erica from the moon knew he was rich kid because of his mum.
Misses Wilde took charge of the lesson again, continuing the boring, in depth description of Chalice and its peoples, sacrificing the attention of a class to educate the new girl on stuff she probably already knew.
Arlo lost focus. He was busy daydreaming about everything else when a notification appeared in his cortical web. Most of his implant’s functionality was suspended during school hours but the message function remained active, lest his family try to contact him.
It was a text from Xavier
“Rich cunt”
Arlo felt anger rise from his belly and grasp his attention firmly from within. Xavier shouldn’t be able to message him, their addresses were restricted in school hours so they couldn’t pass notes like this. He examined the notification. It seemed Xavier had sent the text via third party software designed to mimic a message from outside the classroom.
He stared at the back of the boy’s head, imagining the smug look on his face.
Arlo replied via the same thread
“At least my parents don’t murder kids” Arlo fired back.
Xavier’s parents worked for Black Sun, a protection service for gang VIP’s who didn’t trust their own members to keep them alive, a company accused of murdering a family, including young children at the behest of a disgruntled gang boss.
Arlo watched Xavier stiffen, relished it.
Then he noticed the new message in his inbox
“Passing notes are we gentlemen?” From a MW
Oh fuck.
“Arlo, Xavier please come to the front of the class.”
Arlo’s composure fell through the floor, he was in trouble, he hated being in trouble – hate the attention.
He extricated himself from his seat, following the sullen back of Xavier to the front of the class and turned to face his colleagues.
“You have both failed today’s test. That was to pay attention and remain obedient despite boredom” Arlo shook his head, everything was a test with Misses Wilde “Please read out your notes, Xavier you first”
Xavier flicked his eyes between Misses Wide and the rest of the class.
“Rich cunt” He stated, defiantly.
The other students reacted with a mixture of shock and amusement.
Arlo was red in the face, dreading having to speak the message he sent when he finally noticed the new girl.
Erica from the moon, with a face more beautiful than Luna by half. She was, quite simply, perfect and she was staring at him with brown eyes that seemed fit to bursting with sparkling wit and cool, focused attention.
“Arlo, now!” Misses Wilde ordered.
“At least my parents don’t murder kids” he said flatly.
Erica smiled.

The bar was becoming irritably busy for a night mid-week, the usual suited business types were swanning in through the front doors in groups of varying sizes, together with post dinner couples and other more scrupulous individuals. The corporates typically stopped briefly just within the doorway to survey the available furniture before masking their disappointment when none of the booths were available and eventually settling for the leather couches or small tables. The couples would just pick the closest free table and sit down, and the more dubious patrons usually headed straight to the bar stools.
The bar itself was a u-shaped bench topped with polished wood and brass beer taps, with a polished silver foot rail underneath. The bartenders were all in neat black and white uniforms and displayed an admirable sense of professionalism as they went about the business of lubricating the patrons.
The wall behind the bar was entirely made of glass, displaying a breathtaking panorama of the Needle City’s twinkling nightscape. The view was one of the few reasons Maxwell Forrest chose the bar, that and the fact that he had always drank at Godwin’s. They also had a fine selection of rums and a modest choice of ales, his two staples. He was currently sipping on a glass of Steel’s Five Year, a delicious dark rum distilled on Chalice, from imported ingredients of course, by the Fassaben Steel Company. Now on his second glass, he was becoming very fond of the drink’s charred-barrel finish, not to mention the smoothness of its rich molasses bouquet.
Maxwell shifted his polished leather boots on the foot rail and brushed his thick cotton trousers with his free hand, the condensation from the frosty beer taps kept pooling on the bar top and dripping onto his legs, his eyes temporarily lingered on the exposed handles of his holstered revolvers. Some people laughed at Maxwell’s outfit, hell, the group of tipsy teenage girls in the corner had been giggling and pointing at him all night. The bartenders, however, had studiously ignored his long leather overcoat, silver buttoned waist coat and pocket watch ever since Maxwell had started drinking at the bar. Perhaps it was just professionalism, he was their best customer after all. They did draw attention to his broad, flat brimmed hat, if only to ask what it was made from, which he never declared. Only once had he been asked about his brown leather gun belt and its cargo. Everyone ignored the large knife on his right hip.
Maxwell glanced at the girls table, rubbing a hand over his short black beard and openly scowling under the shady protection of his hat. They just laughed harder and pretended to ignore him. He would leave soon, he could find Steel’s Five Year somewhere else.
He took the last mouthful of Steel’s with a hungry gulp, feeling the warmth filtering into his belly. Almost as soon as he replaced the glass on the bar top, a smiling blonde haired bartender appeared in front of him. With her tight button up shirt emphasising her admirable chest, her slim face and mischievous eyes, Maxwell couldn't deny she was attractive, that worried him.
“Hello sir” She smiled sweetly “Another rum?”
He paused, he should leave.
“Yeah, ok” He replied from the comfortable anonymity of his hat’s broad shadow. The bartender nodded and began pouring a fresh glass, she had remembered what he was drinking.
“I like your outfit, have you been to a party?”
Maxwell stared at her levelly, projecting displeasure but she continued smiling. God she must be new, that's why he didn't recognise her.
“No party tonight, no.”
She nodded and placed his rum down on the bar top with a brown napkin underneath. “So this is your evening wear then?” Her cheerleader face held a half smile, a poor disguise of intelligence on something inherently vacuous. He could imagine all the other bartenders, the old hands, cringing, urging her to stop but he didn’t dare look for solidarity when faced with what should have been a poor challenge of his deliberate and callous introversion.
“No.”
She giggled, they didn't usually giggle when he was so short. She was staring at him, her eyes flicking between his beard and tired grey eyes. She brought a slender hand up suddenly, touching the corner of her fruit shaped mouth and lips, shining like the skin of an apple. “I know what you are! I’m studying earth history online and you're dressed exactly like a character out of an old western film, do you know what those are?”
Frustration with a touch of embarrassment temporarily churned in his guts “Nope.” He hoped it wasn't obvious; he hadn’t shifted uncomfortably had he?
“Oh. Well, Westerns were a genre of film back on earth, they would almost always feature a character called a gunslinger…”
Maxwell stood up, drowning the last of his Steel’s “How much is the bill?”
She frowned momentarily before consulting the tab system, probably through her cortical web “Ahh, it seems your bill has been paid for sir”. He nodded, he hadn’t payed for a drink at Godwin’s for as long as he could remember. He smoothed the front of his over coat, pulling its length around his body to conceal each weapon.
“Thankyou and good evening” He tipped his hat at the woman who was still looking at him curiously, god she looked sexier when she wasn't smiling. He made his way to the big oak doors, shuffling past the crowded tables with the comfortable dawn of tipsiness creeping up on him, he let the poison continue its effect. With one hand on the door someone tapped him on the shoulder and he turned to see one of the teenagers from the corner table smiling a pretty brunette smile up at him.
“Hey cowboy man” She giggled. He tried to open the door but she grabbed his shoulder. “hey! I just want a picture!”
He turned around and gave her a look with so much frost that she seemed temporarily perplexed by the resulting brain freeze.
“You already have plenty”.
He left her giggling as he pushed through the heavy doors out into the 53rd floor lobby, this level of the Forbidden City Tower was almost entirely bars and the elevator vestibule was packed with well lubricated individuals of all sizes and flavours. He ignored the long stares and obvious finger pointing as he boarded one the elevators and selected the 31st floor through his cortical web. He shut the doors before anyone else could board, leaving him alone in the small cube. It took less than ten seconds for the elevator to arrive on his level, it hadn’t stopped to pick anyone else up which was an unusual luxury he was still getting used to.
The 31st floor was quiet, its white interior plain and lonely. He moved down the corridor which led to the Matin Tower skybridge and soon the corridor turned to glass as he walked out onto the overpass. All around him, the lights and towers of needle city perforated the darkness. Well-lit flyers shot both above and below the bridge as he proceeded along its transparent length. He gazed upwards and could just see the flaring tips of the opposite surface’s towers piecing the night sky, pointing down at him like enormous metal stalactites.
Matin Tower was bright, the walls warm ochre in colour and the floor patterned with black and white tiles. Just as he stepped up to the elevator which would take him to his apartment something blinked in his consciousness, it wasn't explicitly in his visual field, more like an unavoidable thought which forced itself into one’s mind. He accessed the notification without any emotion, it was as he expected.
He turned on his heel and headed for the nearest flyer station and soon stepped out into the Chalice night on one of Matin Tower’s numerous flyer platforms, the city’s usual buzz and hum greeted him in all its boring normality, the air was fresh on the nose yet still warm.
His silver and black flyer was waiting at the first bay; the vehicle was a sleek, straight-edged machine of sharp angles and flat composite paneling. The Maiko had a presence of malicious grace, sleek, refined and menacing. A door hinged upwards as he approached and Maxwell stepped into the all black interior, pulling his coat hem into the vehicle as the door slid closed. He sat back in the personalised comfort of the pilots seat as the flyer silently pulled upwards and dipped away from Matin Tower and its platform.
A short flight around the sleek structures of various towers and superscrapers brought him to what his cortical web identified as Three Stokes Superscraper. The building was dull grey in colour, now black under nights shade and of roughly rectangular design. The slightest twist in the structure meant that every hundred meters or so the building would have rotated ninety degrees.
An alert appeared in his consciousness and he began cleansing the alcohol from his brain. The world became subtly clearer as the poison was removed from his synapses, efficiently converted to a harmless by-product by enzymes and carried away to his blood. Anxiety began rearing its ugly head so stopped the process before its completion and then felt guilty for doing so. The flyer was rising vertically perhaps a meter away from the steel and glass cliff of the superscraper, its lights had dimmed to nothing and its windows were now at maximum tint. Maxwell’s door, on the building side, was sliding back silently, leaving his booted feet perhaps ten centimetres from a fall of perhaps a kilometre or so. The Chalice air eddied into the flyers cabin, mixing with the cool conditioned breath of the flyers atmosphere modifier, he waited patiently as the ascent continued.
Finally, another alert signaled the approaching end of his journey and seconds later the flyer brought itself level with a quiet balcony. The space was cut into the side of the building, with no roof and a floor area of perhaps twenty square meters. The beige stonework was devoid of any furniture and a set of doors led into the murky interior of an apartment beyond. A single suited figure was leaning against the railing, facing the apartment and staring silently. The man hadn’t heard the flyer ascend behind him and now Maxwell sat perhaps two meters away from the balconies edge, level with the man’s head.
Maxwell slid his right hand into his coat easily finding the smooth handle of his revolver on the opposite hip, his eyes never left the man’s head. His hand closed around the weapon and he released it from its holster with a slow draw. The weapon was beautiful, modelled off the Janz Revolver - a simple design that exuded raw power; from the long steel barrel to the simple trigger mechanism, Maxwell felt an enormous almost giddy appreciation for his antique hand cannons.
He extended an arm and lined up the weapon’s long silver barrel with man’s exposed head. Firing a gun was about creating a vector, a bridge between the gun and the target, a momentary - yet tangible link between weapon and victim.
The weapon discharged with a flash and a deafening metallic retort, sending the man smashing to the floor face down with a wet thud. Red mist lingered in the still air as liquid blood pooled around the man’s now ruined face. The exit wound was larger than his fist and steaming. Maxwell sighted the man’s twitching back and fired again. The corpse jolted grotesquely with the bullet’s impact. The second shot was to ensure any chest implants lost their supply of blood within the next minute, rendering them inert. He had forgotten the first couple of times.
The flyer’s door started to slide shut as the smoking weapon was replaced in its holster. The stink of cordite tickled his nostrils. The flyer banked and disappeared into the night, leaving the corpse to bleed and cool in the warm night air. It would disappear before morning, along with any evidence of the murder.

The shop was a disorientating mix of unidentifiable sprawling clutter and neat workspaces, all around the tiled room boxes of components of varying complexity and quality huddled around clean white benches. The slab-like assembly areas resembled places of worship, altars to a machine god who demanded pristine surfaces, shiny tools, and high wattage LED lamps. Whereas the rest of the floor space was dominated by the scraps and components, one couldn't tell which was which, these were relegated to the floor like bizarre offerings, thrown into all number of crates and containers. Perhaps the off cuts or remains of the sacrifices made at each altar.
Hanis Mills led the way through this unsettling space with an obvious familiarity which diligently ignored the Vaarious obstacles and potential trip hazards, not once did his slippered feet knock a stray piece of equipment. Maxwell followed hesitantly behind, his head still aching softly with Steels Five Year’s enduring legacy. Sleep had been hard to find after his latest summons, mangled heads on lonely balconies still flickered unsettlingly in his mind’s eye.
The short technician halted before altar number one, his crisp white lab coat sharing kinship with the pristine work bench in front of him. The current creation seemed rather unsubstantial amidst the jungle of complex circuitry, nanoweave clippings and polymer sheets which inhabited this altar’s collection boxes. Upon the bench, a pair of plain brown slacks were neatly folded down the middle, the material was dull under the clean white light of the overhead LED lamp.
“Your pants were perhaps the simplest to fabricate and thus were finished first” Hanis glanced round at Maxwell with beady eyes and a furrowed brow, the man was such a blatant boffin stereotype Maxwell often wondered if dorky people chose to be lab technicians, or if just being a techie moulded you into the stereotype.
Hanis continued “As will most items such as this, the hardest part was trying to conceal its true properties. However, all your requirements have been met; the material is a matrix of smart nanofibres and standard military grade synthetic polymers selected for durability and weight. The material is extremely heat resistant, offering moderate protection to a range of hand held beam weapons, and of course it has the requested anti ballistics capabilities provided by the smart nanoweave matrix.”
Maxwell marvelled at the new slacks, they looked like exact copies of the genuine cotton pair which he wore now, he couldn't wait to test them in the safety of his apartment. Hanis didn't seem discouraged when his client remained silent, instead the small man moved to a slightly larger work bench positioned against one of the walls, still deftly ignoring the cluttered floor space. This bench was much larger, accommodating a dark brown overcoat and a folded waist coat of similar colouring.
“Now, the waist coat has much the same properties of your pants; however, at the expense of some additionally weight, the ballistics protection has been enhanced by at least fifty percent. The fabric also has an additional processor array located below the armpit which will integrate with your cortical web and the various sensors in the coat itself, in this way, your implant will be able to control the coat’s medical package, your other requested addition to this item. The package contains the standard suite of treatment functions and drug dispensers used for combat based trauma” Hanis gestured for him to feel the weight of the fabric which he did, the difference was hardly noticeable yet it was appreciably thicker.
Hanis ran a hand over the sturdier looking material of his new overcoat “Now this item is truly a significant feat of micro engineering and fabrication, some of my best work went into this project.” Hanis was staring seriously at the bulky coat, probably recalling numerous tedious hours and fleeting celebrations during its creation.
Hanis sighed “When activated, this coat will stop a Hunners and Baron R30 at moderate range.”
Maxwell gaped, his stony all business façade shattered. “you're not serious?”
“Im serious” Hanis rubbed the bridge of his nose as though tired “Now. I know you didn't request anything with damage thresholds like that, however I got carried away when discovered it was possible.” He licked his lips “And so, I wont charge you more than the original quote, the proof of concept this item represents is extremely valuable in itself.”
Maxwell frowned, a Hunners and Baron R30 was currently considered the galaxy’s most powerful hand held projectile sniper rifle ever built. Its manufacturer, Hunners and Baron, had developed the weapon around four years ago and with its release, had sent waves of giddy excitement and awe through every man, woman, child or alien with even a casual interest in firearms. It was rumoured that the Jar’ron had sent a ten strong delegation of military heavy weights to inspect the weapon at the company’s headquarters only days after its release. A month or so later the company had expanded its manufacturing by two hundred percent, a new contract with the Jar’ron military accounting for ninety percent for that increase. Soon after, military spectators and xeno combat enthusiasts had began to report seeing the R30 in the hands of Jar’ron special forces units in a range of deployments. The irony was, only the large Jar’ron frame could hope the operate the two meter long rifle without a suit, the galaxy was too large for coincidences like that.
Hanis had obviously guessed his clients interest in firearms, only someone in the know would understand the significance of his claim.
“How did you manage it?” Maxwell was genuinely intrigued, currently; only serious military grade armour systems had any hope of stopping a slug from the R30.
Hanis narrowed his eyes momentarily, obviously reluctant to divulge the details of his work but then sighed again “I guess you could have the thing examined and find out for yourself anyway”
“I wont”
Hanis’ face brightened
“Good craftsmanship is hard to come by, what you’ve done is extraordinary” Hanis blinked, obviously not used praise from his clients. God knows what type of people he had to deal with.
“Well thank you.” He produced a nervous smile “I will be lodging a patent for the technology within the next day or so” He looked back at the coat “Without going in to too much detail, it was simply a matter manipulating the size of the nano fibres, their patterning algorithms and then combining this system with something not previously used in this type of armour. Upon sensing a certain threshold of kinetic energy, the coat’s active armour system is activated. The nanofibre layer splits into two, the layer closest to the skin hardens into the normal anti-ballistics mat, while also deploying a layer of ballistics gel to the skin below, the layer above that forms a slightly looser mesh. Between these layers is small explosive – well its not really an explosive, more a store of kinetic energy, but its easy to describe that way, anyway with this timed perfectly, it will greatly decrease the force of the impact.”
Maxwell nodded “I've never heard of that sort of armour system being used in personal armour before”
“It hasn't, the nano mesh has always been too weak to for this technique to be viable for the clothing application,” Hanis replied. The small man began packing the items in a large black carry case, folding the bulky overcoat in his small hands. Maxwell was beginning to develop a less than cautious respect for the man, Hanis was obviously at the top of his field, yet why the man was here in Needle city building custom protection systems for mercenaries, and not in a state of the art lab at one of the huge military development companies, was a mystery.
Maxwell picked his way out of the lab with the large composite carry case in one hand, manoeuvring the thing between the workspaces proved to be a challenge he was glad to be sober for.
In the lab’s bare reception area Maxwell placed the case down and waited for Hanis to send him a copy of the invoice, the man was fiddling with his portable computer, tallying up the final expenses. Finally, a copy appeared in his mind’s eye, he scanned the charges quickly and grunted, the man had under charged him by an obscene amount. As he had promised, Hanis hadn’t charged him for the true cost of creating the coat, instead, charging him the only what the original quote specified.
Maxwell formulated a payment and produced his Chalice Expenses slate, Hanis took the black rectangle gingerly and placed it against his portable computer. When he saw the proposed payment appear on the device’s small screen the man’s beady eyes bulged momentarily out of their fatigue burdened sockets. He mumbled something inaudible before accepting the payment.
Maxwell grinned “I think that is a more appropriate sum, don't you think?”
Hanis gaped up at him “Its most generous of you, Mister Grant”
“May I ask one last thing in return?”
“Yes of course”
“You never built this coat”
Hanis frowned
“There is more than enough there to cover the costs of the materials for another if you wish to make it. Otherwise, you might think of creating a more appropriate demonstration piece for your new technology”
“You don't want anyone to know you have it?”
“Correct”
Hanis stared back blankly before realising the benefits this arrangement would bring if he wanted to sell the technology to one of the huge military supplier’s he would get a much better price if he could promise its exclusiveness.
“Ok.” He smiled weakly, smoothing his lab coat unconsciously. Maxwell picked up the case and extended his right hand towards the very capable boffin, despite his earlier musings Maxwell had always had a healthy measure of appreciation for techies, they were always what had kept his company ahead of his competitors.
“Why are you doing this, Mister Forrest?” Hanis had taken his hand in a firm grip, surprisingly solid for such a small man.
Maxwell felt a pang of anxiety “That’s Mister Grant, actually”
“I knew it was you as soon as you walked in”
“I don't know what you’re talking about” Maxwell let go of Hanis’ hand and began formulating a new payment. “But how much will it take to stop you from talking about it in the future?”
Hanis looked confused and slightly insulted “No, no, no, that won’t be necessary Mister Forrest. My colleagues and I always admired you, sir, Forrest Iron was always good to us. When we heard about what happened, all of us were distraught, believe me. Everyone still thinks you’re dead.”
Maxwell was staring blankly as the coldness sunk into his stomach, the icy sensation slid into his belly from its hiding place in thick glacial slabs, spreading anguish and misery from a place he’d tried so hard to destroy. It was a sensation he could only ever hope to push away temporarily, never cure.
“Goodbye Hanis” He turned and made his way to the door.
Hanis watched the man leave, seeing that horrible darkness seep from his former employer’s tired eyes and infiltrate every square-centimetre of the man’s frame was painful to watch, Hanis began feeling supremely guilty he had ever mentioned it. He must have been the only survivor.
That poor, wretched man.

is it illegal to have a slot machine in your home video

A functioning slot machine is generally illegal to possess, as well as to fix and to transport in the State of California. Look at California Penal Code section 330 and the subsequent paragraphs.. This answer is for guidance only and is not intended nor does it create an attorney-client relationship. 0 found this answer helpful Slot machines periodically have to do a little housekeeping and this is what is happening when a machine pauses. The tasks performed depend on the manufacturer, the age of the machine, the type of machine and the casino. These tasks may include copying the slot meters (number of plays, coin in, coin out, etc.) to long-term memory and sending that same data to the slot accounting server. A With your own slot machine, you will be able to play for free anytime you want, and it would be an excellent addition to any game room. The problem is that it is illegal to own slot machines in many states, because the authorities believe that the machines can be used for gambling purposes and that some people will create their own casinos. There are a few states that will allow slot machines OREGON 25 Years or Older, Pachi-Slo style slot machines are illegal in Oregon unless they are over 25 years old. PENNSYLVANIA Pre - 1941 ; RHODE ISLAND Any Machine LEGAL; SOUTH CAROLINA Any Machine PROHIBITED; SOUTH DAKOTA Pre - 1941 ; TENNESSEE Any Machine PROHIBITED; TEXAS Any Machine LEGAL ; UTAH Any Machine LEGAL ; VERMONT Pre - 1954 ; VIRGINIA Any Machine LEGAL What if I have an illegal slot machine? Can I turn it in without getting arrested? You may self-report the possession a slot machine and avoid getting in trouble, as long as you contact us prior to an investigationagainst you commencing. Contact the TIP line , 1-(866) 610-TIPS (8477), and one of our officers will respond. 13. What is a toy crane machine and what may legally be offered in a toy Is it illegal to own a slot machine? In some states, even collectors aren’t allowed to own a used slot machine. These states include Alabama, Connecticut, Hawaii, Indiana, Nebraska, New Mexico, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Wisconsin. Ownership of slot machines, used or otherwise, is illegal in those states. If you want to purchase a slot machine for private use, the device will be limited to amusement and entertainment purposes only. Unless you have permission from the State, you are strictly prohibited from the use of your private slot machine for gambling or profit-making purposes. Illegal and unauthorized gambling with a private slot machine can land you into serious trouble for violation of state or local laws. The seller will not be responsible for your act, and all the expenses will have 4+ related questions answered; Whether you want to buy a few used slot machines for your home or need to stock a casino, Slot Machines Unlimited can help. Furthermore, we carry machine parts, casino chairs, slot machine stands, signage and more. When you purchase from Slot Machines Unlimited, we strive to make sure your order meets your needs. Owning a slot machine without a gaming license is illegal in the following states and we do not ship to: CA, LA, NM, and WA. Custom slot machines are a fantastic look for your home, business, or tradeshow booth. Favorite Answer. Slot machines have the worst odds of any game in the casino. The house edge is 17% (only because there's a law that made that the maximum edge casinos are allowed to have), as...

is it illegal to have a slot machine in your home top

How to Start a Slot Machine Business Daily Profits - YouTube

10 Secret Hiding Places Already in your HomeHere are 10 awesome hiding spots already around your house that you can hide your cash , valuables, guns, and mor... A lot of people have been asking where to get the bank. Here is the website: https://showforinc.com/?ref=6Save 10% off your purchase of the WinnersBank. Use... Hey everyone, i done this project to back another older Laptop in function again and to show something newClick 🔔 to get notified about new video ️ Subscr... Instagram: @redpoppyranchhttps://www.facebook.com/RPRIdaho/contact: [email protected]://www.paypal.me/RedPoppyRanchI learned the facts about dri... 10 Secrets Casinos Don't Want You to Know. Subscribe for more amazing videos! http://bit.ly/Subscribe-to-Richest Casinos are multi-million dollar business... Sale of Illegal or Regulated goods . ... we use a combination of people and machine learning to detect problematic content at scale. Machine learning is well-suited to detect patterns, which helps ... Click on the link below to learn the most valuable skill in Internet Marketing! http://bit.ly/2D2WflGHey in the video I want to talk about how to trick a slo... In this video, I teach you how to install RAM in a computer. In this video, the motherboard is outside of the computer, but the process works the same for al... I’ve seem plenty slot machines in my neighborhood and I can almost guarantee, they are illegal. Here why, because there place in a dark corner in the conveni... Have you seen this? Wins money?... LINK: https://swiy.io/1Bwd I'm told it's a way to actually win money but I don't know. So, if what the slot machine mech...

Illegal Gambling FAQs 1. 2. - IN.gov | The Official

is it illegal to have a slot machine in your home

is it illegal to have a slot machine in your home - win

Galactic Economics 7: Leapfrogging

Review of Martin Scorsese’s 1995 Casino [A mob movie that has many actors that will go on to be in the Sopranos].

D100 Encounters on a cyberpunk subway system.

DraftKings (NASDAQ: DKNG) - Deep Dive Research - Part 1

DraftKings (NASDAQ: DKNG) - Deep Dive Research - Part 1

[A3: Main] Operation Beer Battered | Take Me Home | SAT NOV28 2000 UTC

Slot Descriptions

Freedom Fighter Biographies

login Joker and Dari Slot Machine For Internet Casinos

Living The Screen Life #productsmakemehappy

ThisIsUs#Freshofftheboat#Blackish#Blacklivesmatter#Change#Makeamericagreatagain#Strongertogether#Target

hashtag#hastag#hashtag#meme#meme#meme#imageiseverything#cultureisadvertisement#artisproduct#loveisproduct

iamreallyhappy

productsmakemhappy

A Dying Peace: Chapter 3 (part 1)

Chapter 3:

is it illegal to have a slot machine in your home video

is it illegal to have a slot machine in your home top

How to Start a Slot Machine Business Daily Profits - YouTube