2017 Feb 12 | couples poker, SoCal Crush



Pretty sunrise by a railroad track.



A giant machine pumping water out of the flooded fields.



The rain is nice but it's a bit too much; I don't think the farmer will be getting into this field for a while.



A bird in the water.



Fluffy cloud.



A tall multi-layered one.



Three like pancakes.



Green field and hills.



The car doesn't stay very clean driving on smaller roads after all this rain.



That's a lot of mud and dirt.



It even covers the back camera so I can't use it to back up.



Neat covered strawberries.



The wheels on this woman's cart locked up and she stopped in the doorway and waited for help. It's not like a car, lady; you can drag it out of the way and let the rest of us by.



New look of my favorite cleaner.



Very bright sunrise.



Driving to LA and the sky is starting to light up.



Pretty sunset.



The cop was swerving back and forth to slow down traffic.



We got fairly backed up and then he let us all go.



Playing a couples poker tournament in LA.



Ogii's turn to play, mine turn for a break. You and your teammate would share a stack of chips and every 30 minutes or so you'd switch.



Nice house.



Lots of good food, including chicken...



... rice...



... and salad.



It went pretty fast.



And of course pizza.



Dessert.



Some people who got knocked out of the tournament early playing Pot-Limit Omaha. Except they weren't really playing; they didn't put any money in and gave everyone back their chips after each hand. They were having more fun doing this than playing for money. The woman right in front of me had a monster starting hand here; AAKK.



Back to the tournament and Kat with a tough decision.



Ogii with the helpful shoulder massage.



We made the final six players but were pretty short stacked. First I folded for a bluff that lost half of our chips and then Ogii shoved all-in with 33. A good move, but she got called by AK which hit a K to knock us out.



That's fine, though, because onto our next party: SoCal Crush. We got there a bit later because of the poker tournament, which worked out great because there was no line when we arrived.



A big heart people were taking pictures in front of.



Us with our outfits.



Some vendors outside.



Lots of lasers inside.



And a few people up on shoulders.



Our outfits when it was dim.



And dark.



What you saw through Ogii's diffraction-prism glasses.



Green lasers.



And white.



Being back from the crowds a bit gave you more room to dance around.



There were people spinning colorful ropes back here.



Another guy.



And another.



Hands and phones in the air.



There's some sort of giant flag up there.



My favorite totem was the Super Mario star on the right.



And the guy on the left had my favorite outfit.



It really lit up in the dark, too.



Triangles of green.



Wait a second, how are we supposed to get out?



People parked on both sides of us.



It happened to this entire row. Definitely not cool.



We went and got the parking people and told them about it. We only needed to move one of the cars about a foot to squeeze out, so a couple of them bounced one over.



And we just made it out without any scratches.



Raver license plate.



I went to the old office in LA and somebody had broken in through a skinny window up top that didn't have bars on it and stole all of the Rayban frames.



A lamborghini at the downtown car wash.



The IKEA in Burbank was closed as they were opening a new much-bigger one a few miles away.



Chevy's is right across from the old one and the servers were all overly-nice to us; I wonder if it's because they lost a lot of business from IKEA moving.



Here's the new IKEA.



A Hollywood license plate.



99,999 miles on the Prius.



And 100,000. Ogii was driving and refused to go 100mph, so I had to settle for 100km/h instead.



A tree brought down by the rains.



You can look up the incomes of all state employees. The nurses at the prisons make around $50 per hour, plus they also get great benefits. That's pretty amazing.



For some reason, all optometrists are subcontracted out through other vendors. This was the only optometrist listing for the state, although I'm guessing that's not full-time.



One of the nurses said she wanted to be a dentist instead. They make a ton of money.



Almost as much as the physicians, in fact.



According to this report, dentist is the best medical job.



Optometrist is 9th.



Physician is 14th. Looking at the average incomes, it seems you make about 30% more working for the prisons than for the average private job.



Plus, you can work overtime and make even more. This nurse made $23,000 just in overtime in 2013.



Porygon and Muk are the only two Pokemon in North America I don't have yet. While you can only find Porygon, if you get 50 candy, you can evolve Grimer into Muk, and I got lucky enough to find a Grimer long ago, so I've been slowly walking him to build up candy.



Here we go.



And now I have Muk.



Only Porygon is left. Although considering I haven't found him and how rare he is, I don't think I'm going to even try to get him.



That's weird; all of these blue Pokestops have pink confetti around them. That means a player put a lure on them, which makes more Pokemon show up. But people haven't done that much since months ago when the game was new.



Also, there are a ton of pink Pokemon showing up. Ah, I bet the company made a new event for Valentine's Day.



Yep.



And, even though he's not completely pink, Porygon is also much easier to find during the event. That's cool, because he's the only Pokemon in North America I haven't caught yet now that I just evolved Muk, and normally he's very hard to find.



This guy online has already caught a ton of them. I'd be happy with just one.



People said there are a lot of Porygons around Chinatown in LA. Ooh, there's one on the tracker. You can tell I haven't caught one yet because it's just a shadow, not a picture.



There he is. The problem is there are so many Pokestops in LA that I couldn't figure out where he was. Also, I only had a few hours to walk around, so I never found one, and when I'm back in Greenfield, there won't be the concentration of them that there is in LA Chinatown. Quite disappointing.



Cheaters can play from a computer and fake their GPS coordinates to move anywhere in the world in the game without ever leaving their desk. It's becoming a huge problem because it's very easy for them to take over a gym from anywhere and catch all of the really strong Pokemon whereas non-cheating players have to physically walk around, giving cheaters a huge advantage. This is probably the saddest example of that to me. These were two gyms at the Coca-Cola bottling plants, which were always held by the red team to go along with Coke. However, now they're both blue.



I'm guessing the gyms were taken over by cheaters.



It could just be normal players, and maybe the red players aren't into the game as much any more, but cheaters are very likely.



The weakest Pokemon in this gym is still stronger than almost any of my Pokemon.



The event announcements in-game always show up a later, which is annoying.



They also rebalanced the eggs so now mostly rarer and better Pokemon come from 10k eggs and a lot of the more common Pokemon that used to come from 10k eggs are now in 5k or 2k. That's nice for players because they'll get more excited about hatching a 10k egg as they're more likely to get something really good.



Now that I have Muk, time to walking something else to get candy to evolve it. I think I'll go with Seel...



... because he evolves into Dewgong, which can be really good at killing Dragonite. I'm at 43 candy, so I need 7 more.



Well this is weird; the tracker is saying there's a Seel here. Normally they only show up around water and this is all land.



But yep, one is there. You get 3 candy for catching one, so that helps out a lot.



Only one more candy to to.