Catching Up with the News

Nope, nit asleep at the switch, just handling paid priorities first while traveling much of the weekend, as I've been doing most weekends of late.

The news of the online-poker indictments had me working at a rush on Friday, as I did a last second please-hold-while-I-rewite-things in my News Briefs piece for Lou over at PPN. That's normally the most fun thing that I get to write, every other week, but I have a hunch Lou had a really nasty weekend trying to pull all this stuff together in time for his latest deadline. I figured the least I could do was making sure my small part was fit to print.

Then it was traveling to Milwaukee, from whence I have just returned, though I did spend a couple of hours up there soaking up all the news stories, including a few of those crazed threads on some of the largest discussion sites. Next weekend, northern Wisconsin; the weekend after, Michigan. Maybe some time home the weekend after that?

Who knows. It's all a blur at the moment.

I did take the time after arriving back at the apartment today to try to capture my indictment thoughts in a post over at the KAP blog. In a nutshell, this has all been destined to happen some time, as my friend the fallen lawyer F Train duly notes over at his blog. And as always, Pauly has a collection of salient links on the matter.

Times of true crisis in any bubble of influence are marked by those times when every sits around to see what happens next. That's where we are right now, and things will need to shake out some before we all have an idea as to poker's new shape. Some entities will find themselves crippled in the interim; some others will become stronger.

Me, I don't know. I can see myself losing at least one of my small remaining gigs, but that is to be expected. Some of my friends will probably taste some job-loss bitterness in the near future; been there, done that, but that won't bring those peeps and comfort or money. I can tell them that time marches on and life has a way of filling the same voids it creates, but most of them are smart enough to know that already. I've got other things to do, and if that stuff runs dry, I'll try to find something else. Or I won't.

Whatevah.

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A bit of flotsam to end this one. Yes, there is more "Just Conjecturin'" coming. One little funny I've been meaning to toss in is that the commentary I receive is largely, but not universally positive.

There are always those few beings out there that don't seem to like either me or what I write. One such comment, which I won't publish but include here for its gallows humor on a weekend when we can all use a bit of even the darkest type of smile:

lol Haley, can anybody possibly be as cool as you? You are so fucking awesome. My hero. {3

Nope, no sarcasm there... much. But I do what I do because I choose to do so, and trying to be "cool" is something I gave up on decades ago. I take as the true indicator of this and other like commentors' collective worth the fact that it was signed, as always, "Anonymous". And it's of course more entertaining than the "HI I like the adult site Supper hot girls" spam. Supper indeed.

Better to have guts and be disliked by some than to be an anonymous, gutless coward, but I guess that's the internet age in a nutshell. These days society trains people to faceless cowards and hide in the shadows, and I do not accept that fate.

C'mon, life, bring it on. Deal your next hand and let's go on from there.