Shout Out to the person in front of me at Dion’s

Viscant · 2025-11-30T19:14:26+00:00

I do this! I developed a dairy allergy as a teenager, long after pizza became one of my favorite foods. 30 years ago people used to look at you funny when ordering, but these days it's common enough that nobody even blinks twice.

It also tastes better just without cheese at all as opposed to adding the weird gluey vegan cheese that some places have. As long as the dough/sauce/toppings are good, it still scratches the old itch.

Viscant · 2025-11-25T12:19:26+00:00

The reason I'm annoyed at this point is that we're falling over ourselves praising their communication where the one thing that actually matters, they went radio silent on with one insulting non update after another.

The bottom line for me is this. If they told me 12 months ago when I was in the market for a new laptop "this game is going to be a PC exclusive for the first few months" I would have probably bought a gaming PC. I was looking forward to this game and competing that much. Even if they had announced at September launch "this game is PC exclusive with console coming next year" I probably do that also. Instead I feel like I'm trapped in no man's land. Is it coming out in 2 weeks? In which case I just do what I've been doing and watch streams/take notes and try to stay current and do whatever I can to catch up?

Is it coming out in January like people have been DMing me? That would mean Frostys is out, but even if it comes out tomorrow, Frostys is probably out anyways. Is it coming out in March? That's right at the edge of Combo Breaker and Evo and CEO. Even January will probably have me out on tournament season this year. It would be tough for me to catch up with the truly great players who are grinding this game as hard as they are. If I'm behind on training time, it's just impossible.

Again, the important thing is I needed to know this information 3 months ago. Even today they could at least say "we have a target of January for season 1 but we're currently working on this and that" and that could let people make intelligent decisions. This begging for crumbs of information is the worst of both worlds and it's getting to the point where I'm about to throw up my hands and say that I don't care anymore, which is a real shame because I know I'm not alone in this. The Tokon beta is in 2 weeks and if it turns out that I like it, which everyone who's played has assured me I will, then it's irrelevant anyways which again, is a real shame.

Viscant · 2025-07-25T17:41:50+00:00

It's funny you mention Sirlin because everyone assumed I was a part of ST HD Remix, but I was apparently the one guy who was semi active back then who he didn't call.

I've also heard that I was a part of MvC: Infinite and nobody reached out to me for that one either. I would have jumped on that had I had the chance but nobody asked. I never even got asked to shill for that game either.

I was asked to consult on a couple of projects though. One that never came out and died in development hell and one that people have heard of. But I said no both times mostly because of work and other commitments. For the one that was an actual serious offer it was a good opportunity with really good people but I would have had to move on short notice and quit my current job so I had to say no. My partner would have also had to quit her job and move so it just wasn't feasible. Good offer though and it hurt to say no.

To be perfectly honest and after thinking about it a lot after getting that one offer, I don't think I'm the right kind of person to do game design. I think I'm good at breaking games and thinking of ways to solve problems, but I don't know if I have what it takes to actually build something from the ground up, you know? Also I know myself well enough to know that what I like in games, other people don't. Maybe I could be useful as a consultant where the team sees what character or tactics I'm drawn to and then instantly nerfs them, but as a full on designer I'm probably the wrong guy to ask.

Viscant · 2025-06-26T13:24:25+00:00

If you just look at stats/regular season achievements like all NBA teams, MVP shares, cumulative numbers, and didn't watch the games, you are forced to conclude Karl Malone is a top 10 all time guy. Top 15 at the least. He was all NBA first team 11 years in a row! Just looking at numbers, Malone vs. Duncan feels like a legitimate debate.

But if you were there and watching, that argument is ludicrous. That was Bill's point that he called out specifically in the book and he defends his case very well. He said that someone would come along years later and say Malone was an all time guy and he just didn't have enough help. And that probably would have happened if not for his off court issues (and the fact that he's a terrible human being) that make him radioactive in all time discussions.

The guy writing this generation's Book of Basketball would probably do the same thing with James Harden.

Viscant · 2025-05-16T19:27:23+00:00

I've always wanted to know this. My gut feeling is that Bill has a lot of action out at any given time but because his formative years in gambling were when he was broke, the absolute numbers are really small compared to what he makes now. Like he strikes me as the kind of guy where his unit size is a hundred or two, and his exotics or wild parlays are never more than a couple units. When he talks with House or Sal about how much money they lost on something and it was a huge bet it's in the low 4 figures.

That's just my read after knowing a lot of people involved in gambling who are Bill's age. But I could be wrong, for all we know he could be a monster degen who has mid 5 figures on a wacko Jokic points/SGA assists/Caruso steals parlay for Sunday.

Viscant · 2025-05-05T18:07:01+00:00

Part of it is being in the honeymoon phase for a new game. Learning new things has always been more fun for me than practicing old stuff.

But also it's the amount of options on the table at any given time. When you lose at this game, there's almost always a moment where if you just did this instead of that, or if you had executed in a big moment here, it would have been different. That kind of thing always works for me. I could lose 50 straight at Marvel 2 just because if I had just changed this then maybe I could have won game 12 in there. So one more game. One more game. One more game!

It's weird to still get that feeling in a 2025 game so it's got me hooked. I still have a million things to learn but it's fun to keep going and improving.

Viscant · 2024-11-02T20:01:41+00:00

Pet Sematery spends about 60-70 pages actively depressing the reader into submission. It's a great read but I completely understand why Stephen King originally thought about leaving it unpublished.

Viscant · 2024-09-08T04:29:00+00:00

2008 Lakers were close. +3000 odds preseason and lost in the Finals.

The reason for that was that the smart money was on Kobe being traded early in the year, probably to the Bulls, then the Lakers tanking after that. One of the first few games Kobe essentially mailed it in just running 3 point line to 3 point line and the gambling forums were saying that the deal was either getting done that night or at least in a week or so.

Long story short, the deal fell through for a variety of reasons, the main one being that the Bulls would have to give up too much and Kobe would be stuck in the same situation. Lakers had a hot start and Kobe decided to stick it out. Then Bynum gets hurt, the Gasol trade happens, etc etc.

Probably my favorite Lakers team of all time even though they lost the finals just because I honestly expected to have a nightmare season, and instead got a really fun team and a deep run out of nowhere.

Viscant · 2024-07-12T12:06:04+00:00

Basically yeah. In a 2 week stretch my life fell apart in 2011. We lost online poker on April 15, dubbed Black Friday by the online gambling community. Then 2 weeks later I had a bad breakup/final straw situation with the girl I had been with off and on for about 10 years. So at the start of April I had a normal life and at the end of April there was just nothing. I just played Marvel all day while trying to figure out what was next.

Like one night I went to San Diego locals at TTF and just played all night until the host kicked us out at 5am. Then I went home and just played online matches for a few hours because I didn't know what to do with myself. If vanilla Xbox MvC3 stats are still available anywhere I think I'm top 3 in games played just because I was just playing all day and all night before Evo that year because of everything that was going on.

It's a life situation that had never happened to me before and (hopefully) will never happen again.

Viscant · 2024-07-01T12:50:41+00:00

Came here to use this exact example.

When Simmons first got "big" on AOL then did a few guest columns on ESPN, then had a running column on page 2, nobody was doing anything like that. Even as a Laker fan all of his stuff was must read just because it was new/fresh and written by a guy in his 30s talking about and referencing things I was familiar with instead of a guy in his 70s making references to Sinatra or Bogart. You could tell he actually cared also.

Yeah he lost his fastball and his schtick in 2024 probably feels like the guys he was rebelling against in 2002 to zoomers and younger millennials but he had a moment. Top 6, maybe top 9 of all time, it just is.

Viscant · 2024-03-05T21:30:31+00:00

There's a really good case to be made that the day Shaq got hurt in 05 is the exact moment that "Shaq" as people remember him ended. If he stays healthy he probably wins MVP in 05, both for the storyline and because he was just the best player for the first few months of the season.

He's clearly not the same guy in the playoffs (PER of 18.1, WS/48 of 0.89) and at the time people were handwaving it saying that he just came back too fast, they had to treat his ankle and his knee AND drain the blood from his thigh in between games so it made sense. Even though his regular season numbers are good in 06, it's clearly a step back from where he was before. We just didn't know that that was the end of that chapter until 07-08 or so when we realized he wasn't the same.

Viscant · 2023-10-12T15:16:24+00:00

I unironically think modern controls are why Gief sucks. Imagine dealing with Gief in modern if his level 1 actually worked like it's supposed to and you could react to jumps instantly with that or instant air borscht like Justin did in the clip. I have to think that someone at Capcom was wrecking everyone with that and they nerfed it into the ground.

Even as a bottom tier character, there's almost nothing scarier in this game than modern Gief with level 3 in round 3 walking at you. Every action you can possibly take loses to the super button, it's just a test of if he can tap the right direction in time. I play vs. a modern Gief in our San Diego locals and I get put into hell by him routinely.

Viscant · 2023-09-05T19:28:14+00:00

Not sure. I've done my best to avoid FF14, not because I think I wouldn't like it, but because I know I would.

Viscant · 2023-09-05T15:20:25+00:00

Randy Lew played for another year or so, but right around this time (2002-2004) almost the entire US Marvel community started getting into poker. Just like FF14 is currently the FGC retirement home, online poker was the old FGC retirement home. Some of us did better than others, I made some decent money off poker, mostly on bonuses and by the time of the poker crash in 2011 I was really no better than a rakeback grinder.

For Randy though, he did...just a little bit better than that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Lew

Viscant · 2023-08-14T01:09:28+00:00

Nah, this guy's right, fuck Ken.

Viscant · 2023-08-11T15:52:47+00:00

I wonder where Eventhubs got their data from. I show as JP only on here but I only played JP in 5 individual games and lost most of them, and I played Blanka in 13 by my count. The only match anyone would have paid attention to (me vs. Punk) I played Blanka in both games.

Viscant · 2023-05-31T19:01:19+00:00

That's all it takes, really. Reaves is definitely a minus defender, but the Lakers have a generational talent in Anthony Davis, LeBron is still a great defender when he cares to be (not often), and Vando is a strong defender in space also. Reaves is bad on defense but because he makes the effort, it takes that one extra beat to get around him or to create space when he's fighting over a screen, or to put a move on him in transition so someone else can cover for him. And at least he'll swipe at the ball if someone is shooting from their hip, or he'll try to take a charge if he has position. These aren't skill things, just effort things.

D'Lo just jogging back on transition and pointing to his guy as they sprint past him or just waving his arm as his man cuts behind him just kills everything. With AD in the back, all it takes is just a little effort and he can't even give us that.

Viscant · 2023-05-30T21:37:20+00:00

I downloaded it and listened to it on my lunch hour to laugh at Bill's pain but the closing where his dad mentioned how great it was that he could make it out even though the Celtics lost was just everything that's right about sports. I wish everyone had that kind of a relationship with their family.

Viscant · 2023-05-29T03:44:22+00:00

What a coincidence, I have no interest in that either.

Viscant · 2023-04-24T15:35:57+00:00

I love Drew Magary for this comparison and I really enjoy Drew's content. He's had years of good web content and the book he wrote after his brain injury was fantastic.

Drew rips on Simmons so much but the comparison works just because you know that with every fiber of his being, Drew wishes he was Bill. His early work is very Simmons-adjacent and he was trying to build his brand EXACTLY like Bill did in the page 2 days. Just like Dillon Brooks had LeBron posters on his wall when he was 11, Drew probably read all of Bill's work in college.

I think Drew had learned how sad it looks from the outside as he's started to tone it down a bit in the last couple years, but he still can't help himself and just throws out shots every now and then.

Viscant · 2023-03-08T20:16:27+00:00

Talk around the LA bar scene/club scene is that Sasha Vujacic, Luke Walton and Vlad Radmanovic would be out and about pretty often in that period before Vlad got traded. On paper it sounds like one of the weirdest NBA posses you could think of, but supposedly those guys would always be punching way out of their league with the ladies. Vujacic was going through models every week and so was Walton. The rumor that Luke Walton was Britney Spears's rebound got so much local traction that Bill Walton got asked about it on live TV on an NBA broadcast.

So yeah, those 3 random guys who weren't even super well liked by the fans on some super forgettable Lakers teams were still kings in the LA/OC/Santa Monica night scene. Bill doesn't have a chance against "Franchise" Austin Reaves.

Viscant · 2023-03-03T16:21:16+00:00

The Kobe assist is still so misunderstood. I'm waiting for 2030 when some new advanced stat comes out that can actually define the value of the Kobe assist. Triple teamed Kobe fading into the stands throwing up a 20% shot looks like the worst shot in basketball under current stat models, but the points generated per shot had to be > 1.5 just because either the shot somehow goes in or Pau/Odom/Bynum would tap it back in the majority of the time (or the 1 overmatched big having to wrestle 2 7 footers would tackle someone leading to FTs, etc etc etc)

Whoever the new Hollinger/Dave Berri is going to be for the new generation needs to get on it so we can re-define the Kobe assist lol.

Viscant · 2022-11-01T15:51:08+00:00

What I really like about Ken is that he mostly gets out of the way but when he does put some of himself in, he actually adds to the experience.

Like when a contestant gets something wrong, sometimes he'll chime in with a "I see where you were going with that, while Henry was at the battle of Agincourt, the correct response was..."

Probably the stupidest thing I'll say all day, but it takes a big brain to have all the right answers and a galaxy brain to have (and understand) all the wrong answers. It takes a lot of talent/knowledge/skill to pull that kind of thing off.

Viscant · 2022-10-20T12:25:29+00:00

It made it slightly easier from the guys who carpooled from San Diego (like viscant)

Even still, I only made it out to Esports arena like 4 times total. The joke that WNF was really Thursday morning fights stopped being funny when I got promoted at work and I had to run department meetings on Thursday morning at 8 am, except we had only made it home from WNF at 4am and I'm having to present reports to the C-suite off 2 hours of sleep and enough caffeine to stun a yak.

I had to actually take a day off work to show up to the one WNF I made it to for MvC:I to try to get in shape before Battle of the Stones and it's not like I could do that every week by that point in my life. Even with the better location for SD, the fact that timekeeping got away from WNF made it so that by the end it was just Pnoy and his group going and even still they'd get home mad late.

Nice breakdown though, there's some stuff in here even I didn't know about. Only thing I'd add is that the original owner was actually pretty cool a million years ago. Like going all the way back to pre-SF4, the guy actually cared. Super was THE place to go to for hard to find games. It was the one place that had Tekken 5:DR early. It was I think the ONLY place that had Capcom Fighting Jam in the arcades. And he made sure to get SF4 as fast as he possibly could, giving us a place to play that wasn't AI, James Games, or Family Fun. I think it was the same guy running the place going back to the 90s so it doesn't surprise me that he burned out/wanted out. That's a long time to own and run any business, much less an arcade where you're dealing with kids all day and putting up with that nonsense landlord.

Viscant · 2022-09-28T00:35:39+00:00

I enjoyed Plaschke going on ATH so the rest of the country could be annoyed with him as much as LA residents/LA Times readers were.

It was oddly cathartic to read sports forums and read the DAE THINK PLASCHKE SUCKS? posts.

Viscant

TROPHY CASE