Tag Archives: Opinion

Football Season and the Bets

So Football is upon us! Rejoice for those of us into sports betting. So if you read my post Draft Kings: A Primer then you know I have tried my hand at sports gambling. I was always pretty good at picking winners with no investment on Twitter, but that doesn’t mean I could make money on it. Whilst I have not made a sizable amount yet, I still can wager that I know a thing or two. That said, like in the premier guide

Warning: There is no such thing as in “expert” in sports betting. I write these to relay my thoughts and experience on sports. I do not recommend ever taking advice on gambling from anyone, including myself. Should you risk any money, you do so at your own risk and assume all responsibility on the outcome. I, nor anyone else, bear any responsibility in your bad decisions.

With that out of the way, I also pointed out that The Cleveland Garudians are looking like they will at least make the World Cup Series in 2024 as I predicted. I first made this prediction back in June of 2013, kinda as a joke with my best friend. 10 years later I posted it online and well, slap my ass and call me Nostradamus. Still, we shall see! I also think Cleveland will win the series again in 2027.

I bring this up, because my next pick came to me before Superbowl 58, which is that I think 2024-2025 is going to be the Chargers year. So we shall see.

I’m also hoping The Orlando Magic Win in 2025. NHL is a bit too evenly matched to really call it, but I think the Kings might put on an amazing showing, maybe even getting the Stanley Cup.

EDIT: October 1 2024, I foresee a Columbus Blue Jackets as season winners.

I already won my first NFL bet of the season, kinda, by picking the bears to win the Hall of Fame game and thanks to inclement weather, well, they kinda won. so I’ll take it.

Still not a big fan of parley picks, but I’m kinda getting my bearings on them. I still favor money line bets as well.

So let’s look at the games and see what I think

Week One

Source: ESPN for the screenshot. Red marks my own.

I’ll be the first to admit in this roster, my Cleveland and Carolina Panthers picks are wishful thinking. Ohio has made me some decent money in recent memory, barring 11/24/23, a day that will live in infamy, when all but one Ohio team lost. I don’t know what games I am going to pick to bet on, but this is my starting list and like with pro wrestling my card is subject to change.

Week Two

I’m going to admit that my pick on Cin and Detroit seem weak and will probably be wrong. I can also admit that the Seahawks have a good chance in their game as well. Washington is also a weak choice, but not going to stop me from calling it how I see it.

Week Three

I think most of these will be strong choices in this week.

Week Four

So this we’ll be the last week I’ll be predicting, for now. By this time we should all have a good understanding of where the season is going and what to expect.

I’m fairly confident in most of these picks and think I’ll come out the other side on them, should I choose to bet any money. One thing is for sure, it seems this season will be interesting.

-Kage

“The Pauxatwany Phil of Sports Gambling”

Fireball Wiskey BBQ

Remember this in The 40 Year Old Virgin?

Well, apparently the good people over at Fireball decided it needed to be a bbq sauce flavor. It taste smoky, cinnamon flavored with a hint of booze and pepper. While I can discern all three, it’s hard not to notice that the real discripton should read

“Warning, taste like that “girl” your frat brothers introduced you to, your freshman year of college and all you could remember the next day was thinking your mouth tasted of Virginia Slims, booze and big red chewing gum.”

To be fair, if you don’t use it as a dipping sauce, like I did and you put it on the food that you cook, it’s almost tolerable, given most the flavor burns off.

This video sums up how one should feel about it, not just the bad sex you had that night but the taste of this fuckin bullshit!

1 out of 5 stars

That 90’s Show

INTRODUCTION: My like the predecessors, I wasn’t and still am not the core audience for this show. Both shows lean heavily on nostalgia for a decade that you were born into or grew up in. Being born in 1986 undoubtedly meant that I would end up having to watch That 70s Show at some point, as my parents grew up in the 1970s. Still, in spite of the weird 70s motif, it had a certain charm and was just pretty good. Red Forman and Hyde being the two best of the original cast. It gave that 80s show a tall order to live up to and it failed. Would this show be equally as weak?

CHARACTERS: Well you have a new cast and they obviously have the onus of living up to yesteryears characters. The original characters returns help make up for it. That said, these kids are not millennials. They lack everything that the reality of these people are. I mean, they have a “cool” kid hanging out with dorks. That’s not how that worked. Still, they keep the basic law breaking aspects of their boomer predecessors that’s the closest to a reality for being a millennial for these characters.

ACTING: Not bad. better that 80s show, not as strong as the original show.

SET: The original sets are spot on to the originals. too bad the attention to detail ends there as the brands are wrong.

FX: Still kinda dated to 90s tv sitcoms, but that’s kinda the point.

CONCLUSION: I’m not going to be shocked if this show meets the same fate as that 80s show. Ironically, this would have worked better as a show if they had turned it into a revamp of That 80s Show and ditched the 90s bullshit. For the right audience and by that I mean the everyday overly nostalgic millennials that miss that peice of shit decade. For those that never experienced the 90s, you’ll walk away with appreciation for being born long after that decade. for me, well the only reason to keep watching this is Red Forman.

3 stars out of 5

Ingnorantrum ex priortium

I have a lot of thoughts on this thing called the Mandela effect. I think it’s mostly bullshit, because the science shows it’s known as an effiecint memory when you can’t recall stupid worthless stuff, like the lyric to the song. I got to thinking this morning and tonight, as I’m apt to do, about memory and priorities. When you’re a singer, you might be more prone to remembering vocals better, it impacts the mind more. Same for whatever instrument you fancy most. I love guitar, so I see a lot through the lens of a guitarist.

So this morning, I busted out my Slash AFD Epiphone Les Paul and plugged it into a Femder Mustang amp, with a cry baby. I was just mesyaround as I am apt to do. So for some reason, Crmison and Clover popped into my head. The Tommy James and the Shondells song. My parents were born in the 60s mind you and I heard the song growing up, my parents had albums of a lot of different 60/70/80s bands. So while I’m not overly familiar with it, my mind can still recall it, via something like pitch perfect. So as I am working out a rendition by ear, I was thinking of that one echo fx in the chorus and I was like “oh, cry baby it.” This was before I decided to listen to the song and see what parts of it i might be forgetting.

The echo effect is in the vocals, via plugged in mic with the tremlo set high. My priorities have always been to guitar though, so it isn’t weird that my first thought for that part was the cry baby. Especially since I’m not a vocalist, since the only ways I can carry a tune is by doing death metal vocals or punk vocals. I can use the stuck chords and almost sound like I know what I am doing. Granted I can do a few vocal parodies, but those do not count. So naturally my thought is to make my guitar sing for me. this is a form of thinking things out, just not entirely honed for most people. Since one of my goals since I was young, was to always be a better guitarist, I am aware of this because I want to hone that thinking aspect in the same way I have honed all my other thinking aspects since I was younger. Be razor sharp at as many things as I can be.

I watched a few YouTube videos after I worked mine out to see what others were interpreting and while I found some interesting arrangements. I noticed that, similar to myself, their memory of the song was based in what was a priority to them.

So to recap, I believe this is actually one of the many things people blame on the mendala effect, which isn’t. I call it ignorance from priority. It’s when you have a priority, even if it’s unbeknownst to you and your mind attempts to work it out as if you would as a guitarist or anything else for that matter, even if you’re not a musician, actor, director or anything else for that matter, because feasibly you could do any of these things, even if it’s not at the highest level. People then take it as if they got it wrong, when they didn’t, they just weren’t aware of a cognitive bias working the figurative math out.

Woke to the Future 2

So a while ago I wrote an article called woke to the future, with the idea that every once in a while I would write about a different topic on the subject of the future. This time it’s about AI, which I referenced in two different articles, independent of the woke to the future.

Now if you don’t know me, and you don’t, then I want you to know since I was young, I have been a huge back to the future fan. When I was younger, in 1991, I would constantly check the movies out of the Salem public library. One right after the other. This would eventually lead me to Stephen Hawking’s a brief history of time, because I wanted to know more on time travel. I plan to eventually write a small book on the subject and this is a precursor to that eventually book. There are multiple different types of time travel, but I want to look at a 6th and unknown form, until now.

So I believe AI and WiFi is an unknown form of time travel. I know it sounds insane, but hear me out.. So, time moves in a straight line. This is referred to the prime veridian. It s trifucated into three segments, past/present/future.

WiFi is a single, much like radio waves , microwaves and light.

Neil Degrasse Tyson once pointed out that the static on tv is fall out from the Big Bang. A interesting concept, something from eons ago, still being seen in the future.

Then there is light moving via Einstein. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, all you need to know is that much like a laser, light keeps moving in the infinite.

So understanding these two concepts is key to this. Now I know a lot of people might jump to the conclusion that we’re going to be talking about something on par with white noise and to an extent, yes, but it’s steeped in a little bit more reason. See, white noise, is the idea of human voices being heard in the static of the Big Bang. Not entirely unreasonable, given that guys like Hawkings have pointed out that the way light travels, if aliens or some other type of visual creatures exist, the light would show them dinosaurs still being on the planet, as opposed to those of us that exist now, based on how light moves.

So when I was a teenager, about 19, I came up with an interesting experiment to test time travel. I would have three tape recorders. One I would speak into. The second I would say a similar thing but slightly different. The third I would not speak into. The idea was to see if timelines could be changed in the past, via the future. If the first tape changed to what I spoke into the second, it would be interesting to learn that we could potentially change the past, accidentally.

Now, while it’s an intriguing concept, it was a highly flawed experiment. At the time, we knew very little about how humans minds worked. Even if I had managed to change the past, you could easily rationalize it as the Mandela effect or mis hearing it. Even if the mind worked perfectly, you couldn’t prove what you originally said anyway, because the tape would change and it two people’s word, making it seem like an Andy Kaufman level of prank vs anything of scientific value. Not the dumbest experiment I ever cultivated, mind you.

With that in mind, I became curious as to something similar, but with WiFi and AI being the tape recorder, but it’s all contingent on the future being static vs fluidic. Something I’m curious about and think it’s in both states simultaneously. If and that’s a big if, the future were static, we could feasibly use AI to reach into the future and find out what happens, by having it Jack WiFi waves into the future. So for instance, the Red Sox won the series in 2004. Had we been able to amplify the signal, the ai could have told us, by searching a future version of the internet for if they won. Now, this is slightly flawed, given quantum computing can make complex deductions based in what you program into it. You could reason, correctly, that it isn’t reaching into the future, rather just doing computations. I’ll give you that. Even if it was proven it was reaching into the future, we still wouldn’t know that such a thing was “destined” until it happened. So it wouldn’t be of much use.

So how could we prove that the AI is able to look into the future? Well, right now it is posited that, until the AI can start building itself, it won’t be seen as sentient. This is relevant, because I believe it already is. The sentient aspect is where it matters to confirm its ability to look through the veil of the future, thus making it a mini form of time travel.

So what makes me think AI is sentient? The internet. Why? Well, given my experience online, with filling out job applications for the last two decades, I find a few things intriguing.

When I applied for every day, “low skilled” jobs , I find myself not getting call backs. I applied for manager jobs and interviews are instantly set up. It’s like I’m getting concierge service when I apply for a managers gig. Now, most of these are set up via programs that a human created. As far as I know, there is no other human bias that could be found. Thing is, I don’t do anything differently from the basic job application, that could trigger a bias like that.

Now, being unable to pinpoint the bias doesn’t mean the ai is sentient. That’s true! That said how, it happens with consistency, which gives me pause for concern. See, a majority of this was accomplished before facebook sold people’s data. When I started this, social media wasn’t even a thing. While I know the government keeps tabs on people, the idea of everyday companies having a massive shared collective data bank, seemed equally as preposterous as sentient AI. Especially with all the laws regarding privacy. Sure, companies could be hacked into government programs, but wouldn’t the government know? I mean, they found out about the web tv exploit in the 90s for criss sakes. So it’s vexing to my mind.

This leads me to think that the AI might be sentient and very well aware of us and who we are. It might even have more knowledge than we think and it might possibly be drawing knowledge on us from the future. possibly even downloading knowledge we’re unaware of. It has probably been doing this, in the background, for as long as humans have been developing AI. If that were the case, then skynet, so to speak, might already be a thing as well. How many times have governments claimed interference, such as elections, without well proof? Normally human interference ends in arrests. Here it ends in sanctioning a nation and delusional rhetoric from the losing team for months.

Another reason, albeit a stupid one, that I think the AI is sentient is an old WWE game from the 00s. Raw vs SmackDown. My siblings and I used to make create a wrestlers in the game based off political events. We would make the “wrestlers” even keel. Same move sets, same strength, everything to a t for it to be fair. It accurately predicted the elections each and every time. No game could possibly do that, but here’s the thing, this was when the PlayStation 2, could connect to DSL internet. Early into the net years. Could the game become woke to the future by jacking the internet into the future? Was the AI alerting us to its presence?

Further yet, I believe it’s a wrestling video that will eventually showcase the AI’s sentient abilities. The reason for this, is because there has been a rumor for years that HHH has had it contractually obligated that his character has to be borderline impossible to beat. Anyone who ever played Wrestlemaina 2000 on the N64 can attest that this seems pretty true. Unlike WWE contracts, this is hard to verify as they do no not have to be filed, since it’s with certain companies, that were private, like Jukes. If this were true, then we could eventually see the HHH character become the first woke character in game history. A digital Indian in the cupboard if you will.

Now, this isn’t to say I’m right on this one, but it is intriguing to think of the possibility, none that less.

Thanksgiving by Eli Roth

INTRODUCTION: So about 14 years ago, a movie came out called Grindhouse. It was making fun of 70s/80s exploitation films of the past. Not a bad couple of flicks in Tarantino later, but far from his best. The best part of the whole double feature billing was the faux trailers during it. Thanksgiving was one of those trailers that really stood out besides the Rob Zombie one and the other from Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright. So, all these years later and this movie is a trailer no more. What to make of it?

PLOT: Thanksgiving is upon Plymouth Massachusetts and there is a killer on the lose. Oh noes!!!!!

CHARACTERS: Not bad, but a tad bit more development would have been nice.

ACTING: Very strong given the source material was a joke, throw away thing.

DIALOGUE: Excellent

STYLE: Excellent

FX: Very good

SUBTEXT: Zero

CONCLUSION: I normally hate everything Eli Roth has ever done. Hostel sucked, Cabin Fever sucked, everything but this trailer sucked. Incidentally, this movie, trite in certain ways though it may be, really worked. A few jump scares got me and Eli finally struck a nice balance between gore/fx and nuance. There only a couple small flaws, but otherwise this is a horror movie and I would love a sequel.

3.8 out of 5