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To all GME holders: Shut up and listen
This text was originally posted in Mauerstrassenwetten by u/knutolee. I thought his message was so powerful that I asked him for permission to translate, post (can share chat with Mod if required or check directly with him) and fuck his wife (ok didn’t ask for permission) after and he agreed to all most of this wholeheartedly – like a true Autist. I am trying to catch the message – so don’t expect a word by word translation as you can never catch the greatness of the text in it’s entirety and I got to translate it in a way that even a US degenerate can follow it. As usual no financial advice, I more or less just copied the text because I liked the text and I like the share. In general I have likely lost more than I won and the stock market is a mystery in itself to me. So make your own due dilligence and don’t trust financial advice of others (the argument for that you can read to a certain extent below). Autists, Degenerates, Idiocracy of the World – let me get this straight! In the coming days I don’t wanna see all this whining and bitching on this sub and espescially in the daily GME threads anymore. On every fucking corner of this sub I smell doubt, you read messages the likes of „this is over“, „we missed the squeeze“, „I am going to loose it all“, „entered at 320$ - I am doomed“. What the fuck is wrong with you retards, did you fucking wanker your wifes boyfriend dick all night and lost your mind over the effort to do so? I think I got to get this accross the Buddy Stephens way to get you down to fucking earth and get your attitude right. 1) You come to a sub calledwallstreetbetsand yolo your hard earned money in $GME You realize what you are doing here - you true fuck - dont you? This is a community of full blown first class true tits up degenerates which take pleasure in posting losses accumulating into the millions every fucking month and you are putting your money into a BET – yes my dear it is written out in the name of this very fucking sub Wallstreet-B-E-T-S!!! – and follow DD posted by people with names like „SHOW_ME_YOUR_ANAL_TITS“? You realize this is not a fucking Disney ferry „One-Wish-comes-true“ show and we see all day long gain porn and loss porn is something which doesn’t exist in this world? This is a band of true autists which occupied an absolute niche when it comes down to trading (and we even don’t trade stocks normally!). This is the place where one wants to enjoy the sado-masochistic part of the retarded capitalistic system we are living in. Yes we have some (maybe a lot) DD diamonds in this sub which by the way are now impossible to find because you degenerate fucks spam the entire system to the moon but no sane long-term investor would consider to invest into any of these investments – this is about „get rich or die trying!“. This is not investing! 2) Yeah but I saw Reddit in the news and all that stuff about GME and it was going through the roof becasue there is going to be short squeeze and on top of it the hedge funds fucked up, hihihi If this entire thing was a safe bet why exactly would not the fucking entire world jump on this train? (and even you might get this image from all this „Saudi Arabia calling, China calling, Africa calling posts – but please they invest into BABA, Aramco or I don’t know what’s the hot shit in Lagos stock exchange right now – could be though the next big thing – got to see if I can find a DD on this). So why is this not happening? Because it is a fucking BET – the stock market is a fucking Casino and the major difference between investing and us is that they are always just bet on black or red, while we always go for the magical zero. It is totally unclear whether all of us going to show up at Miami Beach with our Porsche Cayenne or Tesla Model S and hit on the girls (or boys) on the beach! The reasons are layed out to you every fucking day with yet another quality DD that most of us simply dont understand! And yes our chances to already sit on the fucking moon slurping our Pinha Coladas would be certainly higher if everything was going the way we believe the system should be working but even the last person who joined this sub by now should realize – you are potentially fucking with the system itself (by the way something this sub never intentionally wanted and you shouldn’t do if you like the system). 3) Hey but when is the squeeze of the squoze going to happen? 😓 So there is this story going through the media and from Florida to Colorado everybody remotely degenerate is yoloing money into GME. It’s a fucking global movement now (or not – could be also the same 50.000 degenerates cheering up themselves the entire time which would much better fit this place) and according to the DD we just need to have 🙌💎and the shorts a bleeding their panties, their balls feel squozen (and not in a good way) and they are completely in defensive mode. What do you think what people who are responsible for Multi-billion $$$ HF are going to do? How do you think you become a person who is responsible for such an operation? Do you think these guys have served as altar boys or girls in church (no offense if so)? What is wrong with you? Seriously! Do you think if they get some headwind they are going to say: Oh boy – we got defeated and going to realize a multi-fucking-billion-to-the-moon loss? OF COURSE FUCKING NOT!THEY WILL GET EVERY FUCKING BAZOOKA, TANK, ROCKET or INTER-STELLAR DEFENSE SYSTEM IN PLACE TO BRING THIS TO AN END! Influence the market participants (speculation), Short-Laddar attacks (I to this very day haven’t understand the concept or how this works – speculation), demotivational tactics (speculation) and to whomever picks it up – desinformation (well not quite speculation but it could also be that media is just retarded as fuck to get the most simple facts straight). So what would you do with a potential group of 5mn small-size investors – shall we do a collective effort to think about it? Ah fuck it! It is to fucking obvious – you would dry this out through time, divide their interests and drive away their attention. Because let’s be fucking honest – most of you entered this thinking you would hold this wonderful stock for a couple of days (and to be honest in this respect the community how it existed 10 days ago was much more true to itself - no whining just sayin)! Gotcha! Who can tell me who fucked each other two weeks ago in People magazin or on Twitter? Nobody – I even don’t remember shit about this very forum before GME (ok I remember u/variation-separate but that is another story). And all their tactics are completely understandable because there is a fucking huge amount of tendies to be made and they are not that different from us (my fear). 4) That does not give you the fucking right to whine and bitch all the time in the daily threads (and it is not happening already its going to be) and fucking ruin the party Deal with it – we just got to wait how this thing plays out. That’s it. If we are right – this will play out positively in one or another way (huge tendies or SEC investigating). Let them continue shorting the stock or whatever. If you believe you want to buy more stock – do your DD and do it. When this got picked up a long time ago by people they thought – hmmmm makes sense – I am going to get me one of these tickets to the moon. There was if at all a very little interest to squoze the balls of any HF and it was certainly not the main motivation of this sub. I said it above: Get rich or die tryin! Since last Thursday the whole thing became political and it looks like rules were changed in our disfavour and yeah we can not go back in time but we got to deal with it and the circumstances. [Left out this part as it promotes holding and buying which I don’t want to in the sense that everybody needs to make his own fucking decision but I am going to fucking hold] but WE NEED TO REGAIN OUR POSITIVE SPIRIT which was an essential part of this sub and GME for most part in January (and of course in general before) – no matter how fucked up things looked (individually as there is not such a thing as collective alignment to buy options or stocks on this forum). We will see how the numbers are play out and who provided the adequate picture. In our reality GME is going to the moon and the 🚀 is fueled. Period. We are just prevented from starting because of the windy conditions out there. So please – no post without 🙌💎🙌💎🙌💎🚀🚀🚀 and if you want to fukn leave the party – leave – but let us continue this party, because we are going to the fkn moon. This is the way and I fkn love GME and if this means I need to hold onto this beauty for another 25 years I am going to do it. P.S.: One thing dear to my heart - in the past there has been huge donations made by this community to people living with autism. As we use their names every fkn day I would really like to see some of your degenerates not to forget about this cause because we owe them and as much as I like the billboards I’d rather see every $$$ go into charities rather then telling the world about us – I think everybody out there knows by now that we exist and that we have 🙌💎 Edit: Nobody asked for it but 35@231,69 and thanks for the awards which should go to u/knutolee - so you can simply award his original post referenced. More importantly he expressed to me that he is very happy with the translation which is almost as important as the message itself. Edit 2: Please pay attention to AMA Marc Cuban - https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/lawubt/hey_everyone_its_mark_cuban_jumping_on_to_do_an/ - there is I think some quite enlighting answers in a very easy to understand language. Edit 3: Bought 5@103 Edit 4: Heading for dinner. Crazy times. Will check later and decide whether to buy more tickets or not. But maybe good advice for some others to make a break. Chillax :) Edit 5: Read that RH has opened up GME again. For whatever it's worth 🚀 Edit 6: Thanks again for all the Awards and stuff. I can only reload in the morning. Was fun and maybe I am going to translate more in the future - if mods would consider to give me a copy cat 😺 flair it would be the icing on the cake. Edit 7: Obligatory salute to the one and only DFV and his 💎 balls. This guy will go all the way to the 🚀 with us.
What's up dingleberry danglers! It's ya boy, Agent00Funk, here to welcome you back to another edition of the TendieDome! That's right, its time for another wall of text for your literary entertainment, definitely not for your financial advice. By popular request, I even figured out how to add pictures. Keanu help us. If you're as illiterate as a Mississippi high school drop-out, go ahead and skip to the bottom for the TL;DR and my positions. I don't wanna hear no bitching about your lack of attention span, alright, because I will call you a slack-jawed cousin-fucker. Bet. So staple your eye shades open, Clockwork Orange style, and get ready to be blown away by how one of America's worst companies is gonna make you tendies. Those of you that have been following my DDs know that I'm not about rocket ships, I'm not gonna send you to the moon or Mars (but Uranus is in the cards). No, no, no, my sweet little summer autists, my plays are are all about steady accumulation of tendies. The goal? Acquire enough tendies so you can buy a first class ticket on whatever rocket a superior autist says is launching. Most of my plays are LONG term HOLDs, today's is a slight exception as we're looking for a Q3 or Q4 pay out. Maybe one day I'll grace you with my casino plays, but before I do that, we gotta make sure you're bringing enough dough to the paste-eating competition. And I sure as shit don't want y'all dick whistlers to blame me when the casino play doesn't pan out, so we're sticking with safe territory for now. Alright, now that I've masturbated enough and have that post-nut clarity to tell you why you should be putting money in CMCSA. That's right you little chode yodlers, muthafucking Comcast. Lots of you are probably already their customer, and have evolved to instantly wanna shit on Comcast. I don't blame you, they seriously suck, bunch of fucking assholes. But you know what sucky fucky assholes do? Make stacks on stacks on stacks. They're fucking you, AND taking your money. These guys have prostitution really figured out....you don't even know that you their ho. So, let's channel our inner Charlie, and do some Pepe Silivia deep dive due diligence. That's right, it's not just a DD like your wife's bra, we're going for the DDDD! This is us rn. Would you take financial advice from this guy? So, CMCSA....where do even start? The highway-robbery pricing (tendies)? The understaffed and overworked employees (tendies)? The geographical monopolies they hold? (tendies). The reliance on dumbfuck Boomers as a customer base (I wanna hear the choir sing it with me now:...tendies)? No, no, no....you may be retarded, but you know when you're getting fucked, and you know you pay for getting fucked anyway, just like everyone else (tendies). fr fr CMCSA basically makes money in two ways: 1.) fucking you. 2.) fucking others. But wait! There's more! They have even more ways of taking money from you and everybody else, and if your goldfish attention span can handle it, you'll see what I'm talking about. Oh and charts. I do have charts. Fuck, me and Billie Eyelash have been spending so much time in the Crayon Room together, those charts have so many colors, most of them green. Before I bust out these fucking rainbow crayons, let's cover some ground facts. For the Europoors among us, you may be shocked to find out that most Americans have NO CHOICE in who their ISP is. I know, cue the Sarah McLachlan and charity pitch, it's fucking pathetic. Free markets, my ass. But you know what that means? Tendies. That's right, Comcast has the most little fiefdoms of all the ISPs in the land. Only $T can compete, but here's the kicker: people have been ditching $T for CMCSA. Why? Because $T offers DSL in a gigabit world, that's locked inside because of a pandemic, re-discovering what made cyber sex so awkward over AIM, but now with cameras! (All the real Gs were around for that A/S/L/ convo, shit was Catfish City). So, while all you fuckwads are going to work in your Superman pajamas on Zoom, more people signed up for that sweet, sweet broadband., so they too could go to work in their Cookie Monster pajamas. (Mine are camouflaged, my co-workers don't even know I'm there, they just see square burger patties getting flipped on the griddle and are like "woooooooooooooaaah") I know you bell-end ringers don't read, but you can read a little more about subscriber increases here: (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/28/comcast-cmcsa-q4-2020-earnings.html) Did you notice that link? CNBC? Reputable shit, right? I know some of you motherfuckers pay CMCSA like $200/month just to watch that shit, along with 400 other channels of garbage. That's right Europoors, CMCSA isn't just an ISP with a monopoly, it's a cable TV provider with a monopoly (tendies). And you know what else? They own CNBC. Fuck, they own ALL of NBC. Now, I know, some of you more erudite ballsack gargglers already know this, but let's let the retards catch up. Because, guess what you molasses racers, CMCSA also owns Universal Studios. For the nerds in the front row, shut the fuck up, we already know you're smart. Are you seeing this shit? Like, seriously, are you piecing this shit together? CMCSA owns the pipes, CMCSA owns the shit in them, large swatches of America have no choice except CMCSA, and more people need those shitty ass pipes, because it's way fucking better than the old ass copper $T is selling. "Alright," you say, "CMCSA would've been a good pandemic play, what's the bull case looking forward?" Well tug my dick and call me Rick, that's why we're here. I can already tell this is going become a damn book of retardation, so I'm going to add some chapters. TV Subscriptions. We've got the finest stock art, just for you This is the weakest part of CMCSA, everyone is cutting the cord, they're sticking to streaming, but if you check that link above, you'll see that they actually managed to add over 400k new subscribers. Sure, some of that can be attributed to people being bored as fuck at home during the pandemic and figuring they'll get 400 channels of dog vomit to help ease their soul-crushing ennui. There aren't a lot of reasons to expect these growth figures to continue, except one, which I will get to in a bit, but I do think they'll be a bit sticky. Why? Fucking Boomers man. Boomers have this very strange addiction to channel surfing. I don't get it. They just sit there and flip through 400 channels at 10 channels/second for hours on hours on hours. They aren't even watching anything, just surfing. Don't believe me? Go ask a Boomer near you how much time they spend channel surfing and why they won't give it up. They love complaining about it too: "all these fucking channels, and nothing to watch." If you point out that they could just STREAM something they want to watch, they just go right back to surfing, because they don't actually know what they want to watch. TV may be going the way of the dinosaur, but there are still lots of dinosaurs surfing channels for now, hell, they even picked up more. How? Is it all just bored people signing up for TV during the pandemic? Maybe, but I've got another theory about geography! Internet Subscriptions Yup. So, even though people may be cutting the cord, they can't do that without internet, and...well....yeah, CMCSA may see declines from TV subscriptions, but definitely not internet subscriptions, not this year anyway. Again, I refer to the earnings report to show you jello heads the subscription numbers. I'm not going to belabor this point much, surely you know people need broadband, and CMCSA is the only game in town in many places. Geographic Monopolies in Growth Markets Awwww yiiissss gimme Park Place If you've been reading along thus far, congratulations, you'll remember that we talked about the little fiefdom monopolies these guys have across the country. So, where are those fiefdoms located? Right here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_communities_served_by_Comcast Now, I won't bust out the charts for population growth in all of these, because there is a fuck ton, but even just looking at Alabama (Roll Tide), you see that 80% of their markets in that state are growth markets, and only 1 is showing population decline.... and they're only in 6 markets there! Now, they don't hold 80% of growth markets in every state, but they hold a lot. This means that as these cities attract more people and grow, those poor saps will have no choice but to sign up for CMCSA if they want TV and/or internet. Yes, goons and goblins, CMCSA doesn't just have a captive audience, it has a captive audience in places where the audience is growing. Do I really need to spell out how these equates to tendies? Want to know something even better? Biden's infrastructure plan includes heaps of money for increasing broadband access to underserved and rural communities, communities that will then become part of CMCSA's growing fiefdoms. Streaming Trying to catch my shows fresh from the stream with my bare hands CMCSA has also launched its own streaming service, Peacock, and if you look at the CNBC link, you can see subscriber numbers for that as well. Seeing the writing on the wall, CMCSA has gotten in on making money from cord-cutters. Again, CMCSA owns the entire NBC and Universal Studios catalog, but it really doesn't matter because just like a bunch of people signed up for Disney+ just to watch The Mandalorian, a bunch of people have and will sign up for Peacock just to watch The Office. And yeah, it fucking sucks that before you could have Hulu and Netflix and not need any more streaming services, that they are Balkanizing the streaming space just like they did with cable, and now you need like 20 different apps, but go look at the Universal/NBC catalog and tell me that you wouldn't pay $5/month for access to it if you couldn't get it anywhere else. I mean shit. WWE is exclusive to Peacock...do I need to say more? Do you smell-l-l-l-l-l what The Funk is cooking? Theme Parks and the Recovery Who else re-installing RCT2? Here's a kick in the pants that you didn't expect. Universal studios. That's right, these motherfuckers got their own janky-ass wannabe Disney World. Hell, if anyone ever does open a Jurassic Park, it'll be CMCSA because they've got the rights to it and know how to run a theme park. How much do they add? About $6 billion/year (pre 2020). How much did they make in 2020? $1.8 billion. There's $4 billion set to come back into the pot. But wait, there's more! They're going to open their largest park ever this year, been building it since 2016, and the opening has been confirmed despite the Rona. Where? In Beijing, so you know the place is gonna be huge and full. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Studios_Beijing So as the vaccine gets out there, the world returns to "normal" and people go spend absurd amounts of money to slide across bits of metal, not only will missing revenue return, but CMCSA is ready to make the pot bigger. When is it opening? May. This is important because we're not looking for a pay-out until after the park has opened. If you feel more retarded after having read this far, imagine how retarded I am for having written all that linguistic linguini. So, now that we know what the bull case for CMCSA is, let's bust out those crayons and look at some charts to get the full confirmation-bias effect and look at possible entry and exit points. CRAYON ROOM TIME! I don't know if this will be mo bigga when you fumble fucks look at it, I'm too retarded to figure out formatting. I really don't know fuck about shit when it comes to numbers, but I do know the lines look pretty. So, let's run this down real fast. This is a weekly chart going back to 2018. I wanted to go that far back to show you two things. 1.) CMCSA recovered from a dip in 2018 much like it has from the COVID dip, and is on pace to match or exceed it's growth average since 2018. 2.) Annual dividend increases of around 10%. Looking at the chart, there is no reason not to expect the same announcement towards the end of the year, and in fact the next quarterly dividend has already received the increase. I've got a few other lines in there, but what I want to point out is how much the price rises above the moving price average, weather measured as a simple moving price average or within Bollinger Bands. Dips below the average tend to recover and be above the average again within 2-3 weeks. Crayons are awesome. I should invest in Crayola. Now let's look a little at demand. Again, this is a weekly chart, but this time we're mostly going to be focusing on the right side of the chart. The top chart is a Stochastic Full measurement, the two horizontal blue lines represent oversold (top) and overbought (bottom). Generally speaking, if a stock is oversold, the price goes down, people buy, and the price goes up, leading to a position of it being overbought where people sell for profit, price goes down, and rinse and repeat. The squiggly lines are the two measurements of where the stock is in relation to being oversold or overbought. So what is it showing us? That the stock was recently oversold, and is heading towards being overbought. Best time to get in would've been 2 weeks ago, but try posting a DD on WSB back then that wasn't about the holy trinity cult. So what does this mean? Well, buying now could lead to a little rise followed by a little dip as it fluctuates between oversold and overbought. The second graphs is the MACD (Moving Average Convergence Divergence) this chart essentially measures sentiment, if it's up, it's bullish, if it's down, its bearish. I know some of you eggheads will correct me with finer points, but I don't have time to write a textbook that I'm incapable of understanding. As you can see, it has leveled off, which makes me believe it will dip, this also corresponds to it's movements in the Stochastic measurements. So don't buy at open, watch it for a bit, it might dip. The third graph...I have no fucking clue y'all. It had the word "projection" in it, and the line is pointing up, and that was good enough for me. Timing and Prices If you can get in for under $50, do it. I'm not sure if it will dip that low again soon, but it's within possibility. Calls aren't terribly priced, they're not the value they were 2 weeks ago when I first wanted to write this, but they're still a good value, especially for July and beyond, which is the timeframe we're looking at for an exit. Or not. I mean, you could sit on this shit forever and not really have to worry, which is another thing I like about it. But I have calls for July and October and may even pick up the 2022 LEAPs. We're looking for two events to provide a nice pop for our exits; the new park opening and Q3 earnings report that should include initial earnings from the parks, both new and re-opened. We want to see if the customers are going back to the parks, and returning that missing money into the pot, and we want to see how growth of broadband customers has increased. But again, don't sweat too much about timing and prices, this thing just keeps marching upwards. Positions CMCSA Shares CMCSA 16 July $50c CMCSA 15 Oct $52.5c Tl;dr CMCSA. No rockets, but good value. 7/10 Would buy again. DISCLAIMER: I don't know what I'm doing, you listen to me at your own peril, please leave me alone SEC.
OBLIGATORY FILLER MATERIAL – Giving thanks edition: Kickin’ around Caracas, Pt. 5
Continuing… (It's Part 6 in the saga, I fucked up. Sorry.) So, after a few re-fueling and impromptu cigar-purchasing stops in South and Central America, we wheel up to the deserted jetway at LAX. “Thought we were going to Elmendorf?” I asked. “This isn’t it?” the pilot replied, feigning worry. “No.”, I replied, “Looks like California. Fruits and nuts. All around. What’s going on? One minute we’re off to Texas, then Cali, then Texas again, now we end up here at the California airport of the iconic tower.” “Yeah, it’s confusing enough haulin’ civilians around. But when we get a call from Virginia, we tend to comply without any questions,” the pilot explains. “Aw, shit!”, I sort of exclaim, “Rack and Ruin called?” “Yeah”, the pilot replies, “Figures you’d know these guys. They said they were closer to LAX rather than Texas and had us divert here. In fact, you look over there, see that dark blue Chevy? That’s them; and evidently, your ride.” I tipped the airman from earlier a couple of cigars as he helped me with my gear off the plane and into the trunk of Rack and Ruin’s plain-Jane blue late modeled Chevy. Had to move the Sidewinder Missiles off to one side, though. “Most honorable Agents Lack and Luin!” I quipped in my faux-racist greeting. “What the hell, guys? I’ve got to get to Japan and get some newly rigidified digits.” “Let’s see your hand”, Agent Rack asks. “Nasty.” “Yeah”, I sigh “And with the medicos in South America and their penchant for plaster, I don’t so much have a left hand as more of an ankylosaur tail.” “Or Thagomizer”, Agent Ruin tittered. “Anyone gives you grief, and one upside the head should set them right. Or dead.” “You’re a riot, Ruin.” I replied, “But not entirely incorrect.” We all agreed that I really didn’t need any extra accouterments to make myself look more dangerous. I mean with my severe haircut, stern beard clip, and perpetual ‘Go fuck yourself’ scowl. “Yeah”, I replied, stroking the aforementioned beard, “I just can’t get that. I’m such a people person.” After Agents Rack and Ruin finished drying their eyes from laughing what I thought was en extremis, we finally got down to business. “So, what’s the skinny, guys”, I asked. “New marching orders?” “No. Not as such”, Agent Ruin said, still sniggering over my ‘people person’ comment. I see we’re moving. Agent Rack is just driving casually, like Chewbacca when they were waiting to see if the Empire went for that expensive Bothan code. “Then, what?” I asked, getting a slight bit piqued. “Well”, Agent Ruin noted, “When you went to South America, you took some of your artillery collection with, correct?” “You know I did. You even made some snide comments about my personal choice of sidearms and their ‘excessive’ calibers, if memory serves”, I reiterated. “And if you are proceeding normally, as you always do, they’re all nestled in the trunk of this very car. All cleaned, quiet, unloaded, and smelling sweetly of Hoppe’s Number 9 and WD 40, correct?” Rack inquired. “Yes?” I cautiously venture. “Well, ya’ big dummy, do you think they’re going to let you saunter into Tokyo armed like the Third Fleet?” Agent Ruin chuckled. “Um…well…I do have a Diplomatic Passport.” I ventured. “That’s not going to work this time.”, Agent Ruin said, shaking his head. “They’re tighter than Dick’s Hatband about sidearms. Want to bring in your Rigby SXS .500 Nitro Express double rifle? Not a problem. Sidearms, especially in your alien hunting calibers, nope.” Well, that’s just….*dandy!”, I reply, semi-put out. “Now what the hell am I going to do?” “Ever think that’s why Ruin and I are here, now?”, Rack asks. “And here I thought it was just so you could bask in the warm glow of my fucking wonderful personality. Or that you actually cared about me as a real goddamn human”, I joshed. “Ummm…yeah”, Rack replies, “There’s no way we can answer that without going on some Deadpool list. “ I agreed. “OK, here’s the deal: you get your sidearms, ammunition, speed loaders, brass knuckles, Asp, laser range finders, Sap, Zeiss scopes, Kukri, Wisconsin Cheese Whittler, Buck folding skinner, Marine K-Bar, those two ultra-illegal Cheburkov Cobra titanium switchblades...” “Three. Olga the KGB lady sent me one for Geologist’s Day.” “Ahem. Those threeultra-illegal Cheburkov switchblades, that Wyoming Speedholer, your MASER Time-Distance Computer, garrote, pocket rail gun and whatever else lethal you carry and deposit it in the iron box in the trunk. We’ll ensure that it’s delivered to Esme post-haste. And by post-haste I mean one of our guys will deliver it personally.” “Well…I suppose”, I conceded, “But best send someone who’s been to the house recently. I don’t know how much bigger Khan has grown since I left on this little fantasy trip. Wouldn’t want a star on the wall in Langley for someone eaten by a mastiff. Want to see a picture….Oh, bother. That’s right. My phone’s at the bottom of fucking Lake Maracaibo.” “Good point”, Ruin interjects, “Guess we’ll do a little road trip and deliver it ourselves. Best call Esme and let her know what’s going on.” “I have no objections to your proposals. Please give Esme this when you see her. I had some luck in the Calaveras Casino and if I don’t send her some mad money. Ouch. She’ll never forgive me for not taking her along to Japan.” I asked. “But I thought Esme hated Japan? Too crowded and too ‘fussy’, I believe was her estimation.” Ruin asked. “Yes, but once she saw the Ginza, all bets were off. Shopping the likes of which even Allah himself hasn’t seen.” I replied, slowly shaking my head. “I see”, Ruin said, “Well, since you’re off to Sapporo, perhaps you can do a recon for Esme on the shopping there.” “Not bad. Not bad at all.”, I smiled, “Now I know why I let you guys hang around with me.” So, as advertised, I am now standing on the tarmac at LAX, basically feeling naked. “Can’t I keep just one switchblade?” I moaned to Agent Rack. “Go ahead, if you’re really keen on donating it to Japanese customs”, he replied. “Fuckbuckets.” I groused. “There, there now. That’s the usual Dr. Rocknocker of which we’re all so fond.” Agent Ruin chuckled. “Remember, you do have that wallet-sized credit card gizmo from the Company. So you’re not entirely ‘naked’. Think of it as an emergency breechcloth.” He smiled. “I’d like a larger model if you don’t mind. It’s chilly out here.” I joshed. After Agents Rack and Ruin stripped me metaphorically naked as they de-weaponized me, they handed me a Business Class ticket to Tokyo, and a pass to the Japan Airlines Hospitality Suite and Lounge. “So sorry you guys can’t hang around and have a few farewell snorts”, I chided, “But you’ve got a bit of a drive, so best be off before the weather turns to shit.” “Who says we’re driving?” Agent Rack asked as he hooked a thumb over his shoulder at the ready and waiting C-130 cargo plane currently taxiing slowly in our direction. “Well, in that case”, I smiled even more broadly, “Let’s invite the flight crew to join us. That’ll make the flight home all that much more interesting.” After near tear-jerking farewell sentimentalities, i.e., “Piss on you”, “Get stuffed” and “Take a fuckin’ hike”; Agents Rack and Ruin, my weapons and the Agency’s plain-Jane Blue Chevy were all nestled snugger than buggers in ruggers in the belly of the thundering C-130. Now truly on my own, I trudge the hundred thousand or so centisteps to my departure terminal, make a quick recon that my flight’s still slated to go in a generally westward direction, and hightail it to the nearest courtesy desk to ask for a motorized cart to take me and my remaining luggage to the JAL Hospitality Suite. Hey. I’m old, infirm, and currently among the walking wounded. Anyone that disagrees risks an Ankylosaur tail club swat or Thagomizer to the skull. Finally ensconced in the JAL Hospitality Suite, Polo Lounge of course; I was drinking Tokyo Teas (3 oz. vodka, 2 oz. gin, 2 oz. rum, 1 oz. triple sec, 1 oz. Midori, good splash of lime juice, a slight splash of 7-Up (diet, of course), over ice with a lime wheel) with Pabst Blue Ribbon Extra 1844 chasers and Hangar One’s “Fog Point” vodka on the side, hiding from the brutish realities of this foul year of two thousand and twenty-something, Common Era… I’ve already called Esme and we’ve had a good, long chat. She still managed to give me her shopping list for whenever I find myself bored on the Ginza. She’ll be shocked when she learns that I’m not going to be in Tokyo long, but have 1st class tickets on the Bullet Train to Sapporo. Still, I’ll probably find myself in Pole Town or the Stellar Place there, trading piles of US greenbacks for locally produced Japanese curios and clothing. I can hardly wait. I order another round of drinks, as the wonderful attendants in the Hospitality Suite were bored out of their skulls because of the COVID-induced drop-in customers flying anywhere that requires a hospitality room stay, and I was virtually the only one around. They tried their level best to outdo each other when it comes to Japanese efficiency and friendliness. After a couple of hours, they ask if I would like something from the grill, as the day chef had “the COVID” and the night chef just arrived. A quick perusal of the menu and I chose a 28-ounce dry-aged Porterhouse and another round of drinks. I usually don’t like to eat too much before I fly, but JAL tells me the flight is going to be virtually empty, something like <121 pax, all told, so restroom availability shouldn’t be too much of a concern. Plus, who am I to say no to a free, blue 28-ounce dry-aged Porterhouse? There was a bit of difficulty conveying to the chef through the intermediaries of the hospitality just how I wanted my steak. “Blue,” I said. “Brue?” was the reply. “Rare. Very, very rare.” I continued. Look of total bewilderment. I drag out my Personal Language Pro, speak “Steak, very, very rate” into the infernal gizmo, and hand the contraption to the attendant. “珍しい、非常に珍しいステーキ?”[ Mezurashī, hijō ni mezurashī sutēki?] “Raw! Nama!” I say, louder than need be. They toddle off to find the chef. “How is it sir, that you would like your steak cooked?” he asks. “Very rare. Just a minute or two per side. Inside still cold.” I instructed. All I got for the trouble was a puzzled smile. “Give me the language gizmo…” I type in a few words… “お尻を洗い、角をノックオフして、ここから出してください” [O shiri o arai,-kaku o nokkuofu shite, koko kara dashite kudasai.] “Wash its ass, knock its horns off, and walk it out here.” “OH!” as the lightbulb pops. “Rare. Got it! Excellent!” the chef laughs and zips back to the kitchen. Like I always say, I’m nothing if not the international ambassador of amity and goodwill. “Crack tubes!” Dinner was fantastic. I do wish I could have somehow mailed the Porterhouse bone back home for Khan. After that hambone incident, he might even taste it. Finally on the plane, in an almost empty Business Class, the flight captain informs us that we’re headed to Haneda Airport Tokyo and anyone not headed in that direction better ‘haul ass off’ the flight or forever hold their peace. Late-night international flights tend to be a bit more wooly than your average Chicago to Omaha gig. Especially when the flight’s damn near empty and we have the next 12 hours or so to be best friends. We taxi, turn and head into the wind. I’m doctoring up a couple of dossiers and keeping my personal cabin attendant, Luna since there were two of us in Business and two business flight attendants, busy with her trying to play ‘Stump the Geologist’. “I’ll bet you never had this before.” She beamed and handed me a tumbler of very dangerous-looking brown liquor. I cautiously sniff, take a modest gulp, swirl and glug the rest down. “Ohishi Single Sherry Cask”, I say with a muffled belch. “Light. Fruity. An Englishman’s drink.” “Oh. You knew. Let me try again.” She smiles beatifically. “I have no objections to your proposal.” I smile as nicely as this crotchety old Komodo Dragon could. She returns with another flagon of spirits; it smells of obsidian, leather, and earth. I just had some of this back in LAX. I take a snort, smile, and shotgun the rest. “Hibiki Japanese Harmony…lovely stuff.” I smile. “A little light for my jaded palate, but I’d never turn it down if it were free.” “Oh, you win again. Wait. One more.” She smiles and skitters off to the galley. She returns with another soupçon of some more dangerous brown liquor. “Here, try this. It will make you very popular at social gatherings”. She smiles. Sniff. “Splendid.” Snort. Swirl. Smile. Shotgun. “Kanosuke New Born, if I’m not mistaken.” I smile back. “Very nice. I really do like this one.” “You too good at this. One more!” she stands and stomps off defiantly. She returns in a trice and hands me the glass. “Hmm…brown. Light notes of earth, leather, dating your daughter, and Kentucky… “Beam Suntory, right?” “You know them all!” she says, feigning irritation. “And I thank you. Those were all excellent. Now, anything in the dangerous clear liquor category? I asked. Luna smiled as I palmed off a 20k yen tip. “Oh, no sir. Wait until we land.” She demurred, referring to the gratuity; which is know is not de rigueur in the Orient, but she didn’t seem to mind. “Just in case we never make it to Tokyo”, I laughed, unknowingly presciently. We both chuckled about that last line as she tried out various sakes and shōchūs and an actual Japanese ‘White Liquor’ (ホワイトリカー), which were all excellent as was the company. I tell her that I need to get some work done and could she bring me a tall Rocknocker. After explain the origins and construction of the eponymous drink, she brings me one that must tip the scales at 1 or so liters. She settles down to an empty seat and I get after the work that I need to finish before we land. I’m about ½ way through my drink when it felt as if the plane hit a brick wall. She quivered and quaked and clutched at herself while I made some comments about the pilot’s mental health. We dropped like a paralyzed falcon, then just as suddenly, felt like it was an express elevator to Angel’s 11. The plane bucked and shimmied, wickedly. Then we slam-danced right and fell a few more stories. It was like we were in a Mixmaster and the owner was trying out every speed. The emergency lights in the 777-300ER popped on, and the fasten seat belt sign barked loudly so even sleeping travelers could enjoy the show. Rinse. Spin. Shudder. Repeat. Finally, the ride smooths out and we hear the captain on the blower. “This is your captain speaking…ah, we seem to have hit some uncharted turbulence back there.” “Thanks, Captain Obvious”, I muttered. “Everything’s A-OK. “ he reports. “That’s good”, I note. “But…” “There’s always the but…” I groan. “…we have a couple of warning lights for which we can’t quite account. So to just be safe and certain, we’re going to divert to Hawaii, get a clean bill of health and resume this flight once we make sure everything here is hunky-dory.” There were scattered groans and applause. Add them together and divide by two and the average response on the flight was “Meh. Whatever.” Except for the other guy in Business, with whom I hadn’t shared two words. He began to absolutely lose his shit. “Oh, man! We’re so screwed! Mechanical malfunction? What does that mean?” he positively fizzed with fear. The flight attendants tried to calm him down, to no avail. They basically gave up and said they’d report his misgivings to the Captain. I motioned over to my personal flight attendant, Luna, and asked if I could be of service. “Oh, Doctor Rock”, she smiled at me, “If you could speak with him. You are so calm, and he is…” “Losing his bloody mind”, I chuckled as I finished her sentence for her. “Of course, I’ll take a stab at it.” So, I grab my drink and ease over to my Business Class partner and introduce myself. “Hey, pal. How’s it going? I’m Dr. Rock, gentleman, scholar, and connoisseur of cigars and things alcoholic. You doing OK?” He looks at me with an ashen face and his eyes the size of bloodshot dinner plates. “Yeah. I’m Todd Schotts. I’m flying to Japan for business.” He mumbles “No surprise there,” I reply calmly and take a slug of my drink. “But now we’re all going to die. The plane is busted and we’ll crash…” he started off again. “So, Todd is it? Good. You drink?” I asked. “Yeah?”, he stammered back. I asked Luna to make us a fresh batch of my eponymous cocktails. “OK, Todd, listen up”, I began after the drinks were served, “I have flown literally millions of miles over the last 4 decades. On Aeroflot when it was still the USSR. On TACA (Take A Chance Airways), on Chalk’s in the Caribbean, on Bob’s Verrifast Plane Company in Rhodesia, on regional carriers that don’t even exist anymore. All over the world. Had some bad experiences flying, and me ol’ mugger, this ain’t one of them. This is nothing more than the glitch for this mission.” I chuckled lightly and complimented Luna on a fantastic drink. “Yeah…yeah…yeah…but we have to land and check out some lights…” Todd squealed. “Well now, Todd. It would be rather difficult to do any external assessment while in flight, don’t you agree?” I asked. “But we’re diverting. We have to land and that adds more risk. We’re going to crash and die!” he was coming more and more unglued. “I will bet you every cent you have on your person and home bank accounts that that will not happen”, I chuckled. That took him by surprise. At least it shut him up for a while. “Look, Todd. This is Boeing’s latest model. They have the most incredible safety record. And if a little clear air turbulence were to be knocking planes out of the sky, don’t you think we’d hear about it as the press went berserk?” I asked. “But they don’t know what the lights mean! What if one of the engines’s out? How far can we fly on one engine?” Todd stuttered. Having my fill of a supposedly grown man with inane childlike fears, I calmly replied, “All the way to the crash site.” He went white. “...hope we hit something hard. I don’t want to limp away from this.” He went limp. Then I went to my seat and motioned for Luna to prepare a reload. Of course, 45 minutes later, we land without incident at Daniel K. Inouye International Airport, Honolulu Hawaii. We were told to just wait around until they figure out what the problem if any, was. They had officials waiting at the end of the jetway to check our COVID status and passports before they let us loose in the terminal. I asked Luna if she knew this airport. She noted that she did. “Is there a JAL hospitality room here at this airport? I asked. “Yes, Doctor. It’s the Sakura Lounge. It is located on the third level above The Local, Terminal 2.” She replied. “Please notify whoever needs to know that that’s where I’ll be for the duration”, I smiled and handed her my business card. “See you soon, I hope.” “Oh, Dr. Rock”, she replied, “I am sure it is nothing much. We’ll be back in the air within mere hours.” “Well then”, I smiled, “Guess I’d better get ready to hoof it to the lounge.” “Oh, Doctor Rock”, she smiled, “No rush. I will call for you a courtesy cart. You are injured, you are Business, you are priority.” “I love that Asian efficiency.” I smiled back and toddled down the jetway. At the terminus of the jetway, I show my COVID-clear papers, dates and times of my Anti-Virus vaccine administrations, the letter from Virginia clearing me of all detention, and my red Russian diplomatic passport. While in the cart, whizzing our way to the JAL lounge, the driver said “Man! You must be some kind of VIP. You were through that welcoming committee in less than two minutes!” “Me? Nah!”, I chuckled, “Just an old phart of a geologist that they didn’t want to mess with. Not on such a bright, sunny day as this.” “I see you’re not wearing a mask.” The driver quipped. “Very observant. There are reasons for that.” I replied. He careens around a corner and if this were a normal pre-Covid day, I’m certain we’d have killed hundreds. However, the airport, as I’ve come to grow accustomed to, was virtually deserted. “Yeah? Like what?” he asks. “Well, Scooter, 1. I have an active and hardworking immune system that I let off the chain every once in a while for exercise. Got to let it know what it’s up against, right? 2. I’ve had all my shots and some that were experimental. They seem to have worked. And 3. I find it difficult to drink and smoke cigars while wearing a mask. However, if you’d prefer, I will mask up. No problem, though it still is optional.” “Nah, man”, he said, “I was just wondering if you were one of those religious idiots or conspiracy nuts.” Nope”, I smiled back, “Just another geologist out in the world plying his trade for cash. Y’know, whorin’ around for money.” He laughs aloud as we skid to a stop right in front of Lounge. I slip the guy a $20 and ask if he’d listen for the JAL flight I was just on. If we’re going on ahead today, I’d need him to scoot by and putt-putt me back to the plane. He laughs and pockets the $20 as quick as a mink ruts. “No worries. I’ll just hang around this area. I hear anything about the flight, I’ll come and let you know.” He grins. “Good man”, I say, as I hand him my card. “I’m Dr. Rocknocker. Call me Rock”. “And I’m Kapula Mano, call me Kap” he replies. “Good man”, I say again, “Hope to see you in a while.” He grins, floors his electric cart, and peels out at speeds approaching 4.5 MPH. I wander into the lounge, show my credentials, and am escorted to a post up on Mahogany Ridge. The bar is very quiet. Besides the bartender, I can’t see anyone else in the darkened and Smooth Jazz-infused drinking emporium. I order a local drink, a Mai Tai, just for the experience and something a bit different. It’s served in a goldfish bowl on a stem, bedecked with a slice of lime, a sprig of mint, a stick of sugar cane, a polychromatic orchid, and the obligate paper umbrella. “Ah. Mai Tai. I will enjoy it.” I said to no one in particular. One was enough, and I decided to go back to the old standard. Once I explained to the bartender what that was, he made them heroic and enthusiastically. I’m reading up on a random dossier, making notes in a new file, and puffing away on a Fuentes Onyx double Maduro Churchill cigar. I hear a slight cough coming from my right, and this here lovely lady, she sat to my immediate starboard and looked at me semi-quizzically. Not in the mood for shenanigans of any stripe, I give her the obligate Baja Canada nod and tilt of the drink. I return to my dossiers and continue to read and take notes. “Excuse me!” I hear. Fearing the worst, either the woman is Karen-oid anti-smoking or a religious fruit-and-nutburger, I slowly turn to face her and reply, somewhat glacially, I have to admit. “What?” “That cigar…” “Here we go…” I mutter, eyes rolling northward. “Smells exquisite. Could you tell me the brand? My husband would enjoy some like that.” She notes. Instantly my demeanor switches 1800. “Yes, ma’am. It’s an Arturo Fuentes Onyx. Churchill size, or 60 ring x 7” length, double Maduro. Here, take one for your husband. I have an ample supply.” I smile. “Oh, no. I couldn’t. Could I?” she asks. “Please. I insist.” I smile the best I could given the circumstances. “Thank you. You’re too kind…umm…Mr….?” “Doctor. Doctor Rocknocker. World traveler, oilman, and international ambassador of amity, good drinks, and fine cigars. Call me Rock” I said. “Oh! A Doctor?” she brightens. “Yes, of Petroleum Geology and Engineering. Not medicine.” I chuckle. She chuckles back. “And I am Hella Aaberg”, as she offers her hand for a quick shake. “Interesting name, Hella. Scandinavian or Old German heritage?” I ask. “On my father’s side. He’s Finnish.” She replies. “But I’ll wager your mother is not Scandinavian, correct?” I ask. “She was from Truk, an island…” “In the South Pacific, Micronesia. Was she from Weno city?” I asked. “Why yes. How could you possibly know that?” she asked. “Oh, I’ve been there. Great diving amongst the WWII wrecks. I think it’s actually called ‘Chuuk Lagoon’ or something like that now.” I said. “That’s right! Amazing. Where else have you been?” she asked. “Anywhere there’s oil, strife, booze, cigars, heavy explosives and typically long distances from whatever most normal people call civilization,” I replied with a chuckle. Suddenly, I hear a voice booming out behind me. “Why don’t you save that rapier-like wit for those musky-fuckers back home, Rocko?” My expression changes. My eyes pop fully wide open. “Hella?” I asked. “Yes?” “May I ask you a favor?” “You can ask…” “Thank you. Now, looking over my shoulder, is there a hulking goon of a person, thin up top, paunchy halfway down with the most ridiculously tiny sized shoes you’ve ever seen for a so-called grown man?” I ask. “Yes. Yes, there is.” She replies. “I thought so. Many thanks.” I spin and launch off my barstool and grab Toivo by the hand. He hadn’t seen my left-hand Thagomizer yet. “Toivo! You old sumbitch. What the flying fennec fox fuck are you, of all people, doing in Hawaii?” I laughed. “Just keeping an eye on you, Rock!” he laughed equally as loud. “No, fucking-A, seriously. What the actual fuck? What are you doing in this actual nice place?” I asked. “Just headed to Tokyo to conduct a bit of service company business. I walked into the lounge and smelled a foul cigar. I figured it can’t be the venerable Dr. Rocknocker. He’s back at some school up north terrorizing geology and engineering grads and undergrads.” Toivo laughed. “But there I was. Surprise!”, I laughed and pumped his hand. “What the fuck, Rock. Now what did you do?” he asks, referring to my Ankylosaur tail club left hand. “Ah, fuck. Long story. Oh, pardon me. Toivo, this is Hella. We were just talking about the South Seas Islands.” I said. “Planning on running off together?” Toivo laughs, to the amusement of neither party. “Oh, and this idiot is Toivo, a man with a congenital foot-in-mouth disorder. He’s mostly harmless.” I noted to Hella. Greetings were shared all around. Hella made some small excuses and said she needed to depart. I gave her another cigar for her husband, shook her hand, and wished her well. “Here’s my business card. If your husband has any questions, have him drop me a line.” I noted. Hella smiled beautifully. She said she would. Then she thanked me shook our hands, and like that, there she was, gone. “Well Toivo, you old bastard. Don't just stand there in the doorway like some lonesome goddamn mouse shit sheepherder, get your ass over here and have a drink.” I motioned over to my perch on Mahogany Ridge. “Don’t mind if I do”, he says as he deftly winds his way to a seat to my left, snagging a cigar out of my pocket on the way over. “You might want these”, I say in an exasperated tone, and hand him my gold Dunhill Hobnail lighter and V-cutter gizmo. He cuts and fires up his heater. “What you drinkin’, Rock”, he asks. “Anything with alcohol, as usual. You know that Toiv.” I reply. “No. I mean right now.” He clarifies. “Well, I had a Mai Tai. Very nice if you like fruity, flowery drinks. It’s the locals’ favorite.” I reply. “Sounds good. I’ll have several. And you?” Toivo asks. “My usual. The bartender is already apprised of the situation.” I reply. Toivo smiles the smile of one knowing his sobriety is going to be taken out for a swim. Hell, taken out and tossed into the deep end. Toivo and I sit there, swapping lies, smoking cigars and sipping at our toddies. Hell, Toivo was slurping them like a sump-pump during an extra-wet summer. We chattered about family, work, whether or not Tokyo was going to host the Olympics or if the COVID-boogie man scared everyone off. Toivo, always one afflicted with TB (“Tiny Bladder”) got up to go to the loo for the third time that hour. He left his pocket organizer on the bar and I swear on a stack of Origins of Species, I didn’t touch it. I reached over to his vacated seat to retrieve my cigar lighter when I looked down and saw in his organizer a tab that reads “Rack & Ruin”. “Oh. No. Fucking. Way.” I recoiled as I’d just reached out and petted a 6-foot hungover scorpion. “One of my best friends? Secretly allied with the Agency? No. Not possible.” I drained my drink and called for another. “No. No. No. It can’t be. No. No fucking way…” as doubt began to dissolve when I thought back to all those times I had just ‘run into’ Toivo. “But he’s oil patch as well. That could be chalked up to coincidence.” I ruminated quizzically in my brain. I quickly reflected back on J.M. Darhower: “Yes, you see, there’s no such thing as coincidence. There are no accidents in life. Everything that happens is the result of a calculated move that leads us to where we are.” She may be the author of the execrable New Adult Sempre series, which Esme likes and I loathe, but she might just be right on this occasion. Toivo return, lighter in the bladder and good sense. He never even noticed he’d left his organizer out in broad bar light for all to see. “So, Toivo, when’s your flight?” I ask. “Oh, man. Was I lucky. The JAL flight to Tokyo from Los Angeles had mechanical trouble and had to divert here. I got a ticket on the plane for that flight, when it continues. “You mean ‘if it continues’,” I replied. “Yeah. Yeah. That’s what I meant. Hey! Was that your flight?” he asks innocently. He’s really innocent of fieldcraft. I decide to have some fun at my old friend’s expense. “Yep. Hit some CAT (Clear Air Turbulence) and the JAL pilots reported some lighting problem. No apparent ruin to any of the systems. They relay racked their brains to figure it out, but they couldn’t that’s why I here.” I said, waiting for the words to swim upstream in Toivo’s coconut and make some sort of connection. “Yeah. Double lucky. No problem with the plane and I get to go to Japan early.” Toivo crookedly grins. “So, no trouble with the plane? Then why haven’t I heard that the flight’s going to resume?” I asked as I pushed a fresh, seriously strong drink to Toivo. “Oh, must have heard it in the john.” Toivo countered and tried to cover his tracks by taking a huge gulp of his drink and damn near dying coughing. I pound on Toivo’s back. “Heimlich time?” I ask. Toivo signals ‘no’. “Jesus Christ, Rock. What was that?” he asks. “Just my usual”, I innocently replied. “Holy fuck. No wonder you have the reputation of…” Toivo realizes too late that he’s said too much. “Yeah. They can rack you out. Really ruin a person if they’re not careful.” I reply icily. “Why, Rock. Whatever do you mean?” Toivo slurred as he realized he’s been caught out. “The jig is up, you turncoat. You know Agents Rack and Ruin from the agency. Right? You keeping tabs on me for them? You Quisling! You Benedict Arnold!” I almost was on the verge of losing my cool. “It was nothing. They approached me years ago as I kept being mentioned in your reports. They asked me for some information. One thing leads to another…” Toivo was ready for an Ankylosaur tail club swat to the bean. “Oh, put your fucking hands down, you asshole.” I smiled and chuckled. “You’re not mad?” Toivo slurred badly. I had the bartender make him another special drink. “No, Toivo. Not mad. Just disappointed.” I said, smiling like a Komodo Dragon just finishing up a fortnight-old wildebeest. Toivo sat there and puzzled and puzzled until his puzzler was sore. “You’re not going to kill me or anything rude like that?” Toivo asked, half-assedly trying to inject humor into the proceedings. “Nah. The paperwork’s too ridiculous for me to do another liberation. But, Jesus Fucking Christwagons, Toivo; you could have mentioned it to me. Fuck, I thought we were friends to the end?” I said, dejectedly. I was really getting through to Toivo. I could tell he was loaded; feeling like shit and massively deplorable. Great fieldcraft, indeed. I told him things “are what they are” and that I won’t blow his cover nor his honorarium. He began to feel better. I often wonder if he was serious about the sanctioning thing. Then I delivered the strategic missile strike. “Just remember, Toivo. I wrote your dossier for the Company…” He swivels to look at me. “And one for the KGB. Olga says ‘howdy’.” I grin evilly. Toivo short-circuited at that. Russia is his company’s bread and butter. Now he has the KGB as well as his best buddy looking over his shoulder at every move. I bought him a few more drinks and continued to needle him about his ’leading a double life’. He was well and truly fuckered when the electric tap-tap driver from before came looking for me to whisk me back to the plane. Seems it was simply some knocked-out wires on the plane, or slammed bulbs that were generating a false positive, indicating something other than the system that alerts one to something haywire went haywire. Toivo was pretty much down for the count. I got him sober enough to hand them his ticket and ensure that he was really supposed to be on this flight. Thing was; h e was in Economy, and I was, as always, in Business. I spoke to Luna, and the plane was going to be even less crowded than previously because some folks could or wouldn’t wait, or didn’t want to go on with the rest of the trip on a ‘damaged’ aircraft, or were just stupid and superstitious. “Luna, could I pay for the difference between Business and Economy for my less than 100% conscious friend here? He’s had a rough day.” I asked. “Dr. Rock. Just put him into Business. No one will be the wiser. Luna says so.” As she gave us a grand smile. “Luna, I owe you. Thanks so much.” I said. “Now get on board. Your friend looks like he needs all the downtime he can get.” “Yes, ma’am!” I said and saluted here be best I could which dragging a schnozzled Toivo down the jetway. I dumped Toivo in a window seat well away from my seat. I know Toivo. He snores like a semi-load of live hogs rocketing downhill locking up the brakes at 88 MPH. Surprise! There was no one else in Business. Luna looked at me, at Toivo, and gave me a thumbs up. Whatever I can write to further her career at JAL, she’ll have it before I deplane. We finally get everyone settled, and with Captain Kangaroo at the helm, we bounced gracelessly off the tarmac, into the warm, tropical Hawaiian air, finally headed for the Land of the Rising Sun. Toivo was snoring like a chainsaw hitting rusty nails as I worked on the various letters, communiques, and dossiers which needed updating before we reached touchdown. I gave Luna a thick letter with instructions not to open it until we were on the ground and Toivo and I were well off and away into the terminal. We left Hawaii at 1300 hours, so we should arrive at Tokyo Nareda around 4:00 pm, the previous day. I was so bereft of time and time zones, I couldn’t figure out what time it really was, as judged by my biometric rhythms, so I asked Luna for a stiff drink as I was kicking off my boots and going to attempt to get some kip. She brought me another liter or so eponymous drink. I was sawing logs by the time I slurped the last swig of that nifty drink. Suddenly, or later, I have no idea really, some loudmouth drunk asshole from way-the-fuck-back in economy-land toward the ass end of the plane staggered into Business demanding free drinks. Luna was nothing but civil, and asked him to both shut up and return to his seat. His air cabin hostess, or whatever the fuck they’re calling them these days, will attend to his needs. “Naw they won’t! They want me to pay for more drinks! I’m broke but I demand more booze! You fucking owe me.” railed the asshole. “I sat at the bar in Hawaii for four hours. Them fuckers charged me an arm and a leg!” “No, they don’t owe you shit”, I said in a voice that unmistakably loud and clear. “Fuck you, old man! You stay the fuck out of this!” he bellowed. “Shut up or I’ll do ya’!” “’Old man’? ‘Do me’? Excuse me. Luna, may I have a word alone with this individual?” I asked sweetly. Luna shook her head in the affirmative, and I stood up to confront this flagrant asshole. “Now look, Scooter. You have gone way, way over the fucking line. You are loud. You are abusive. You are obnoxious. And you stink. Plus you insulted a person who is just barely containing his righteous wrath right now. So, I’m giving you one and one only chance to shut up, sit back down before your body spontaneously develops all sort of bruises, contusions, broken bones, and unconsciousness.” I said calmly, evenly, and threateningly. “What da’ fuck you think you’re going to do…old man?” he screeched, trying to inflate himself into full mammalian threat posture, all 5’ 9” of it. He didn’t notice Toivo walking up quietly behind him, as Toivo was returning from the head, quiet as a moose. “Well, Scooter, I am an Air Marshall. Duly appointed, fully trained, and properly pissed off. Right now, I can arrest you, physically detain you, turn this flight around and take you to the Hawaiian police, at your cost for the inconvenience of the entire flight. Or I could arrest you, physically detain you, and turn you over to the Japanese authorities when we land. It’s really your choice. Choose wisely.” To be continued…⇝
[Let's Build] Attractions in a demon pleasure palace that aren't sexual
My players are going to be visiting the palace of a demon lord of pleasure who's more CN than CE. I want to show that despite his title, he represents all forms of pleasure and good feelings, not just sex. Also space in his realm doesn't work the same way as it does in the mortal plane. He essentially has an infinite amount of space to work with and can customize it as he pleases, so there are no size constraints.
A casino to feel the thrill of gambling.
A dining hall with an endless buffet that visitors are allowed to eat as much as they wish.
An idyllic beach with perfectly white sand to relax or play on.
An arena where gladiators brawl it out against each other. The point of it isn't to kill each other as much as make the battles look stunning to the audience.
A hotel with the most comfortable beds possible. Here anyone with enough money can enjoy a good rest after all the excitement.
A beautiful and well tended garden filled with aromatic flowers and sweet fruits.
A vineyard where exquisitely-aged wine can be produced just by pressing the grapes. (u/_SovietMudkip_)
A petting zoo full of the babies of dangerous creatures. (u/_SovietMudkip_)
An opulent concert hall where the best musicians of the realms perform (u/_SovietMudkip_)
A small, cozy looking wooden library, with a cushioned bay window where rain gently scatters against the glass and a cup of some hot liquid gently rising with steam. (u/QuietOracle)
An owl-bear hugging zoo. Go to sleep in the embrace of their soft down. (u/QuietOracle)
The room of sensory experiences. The room itself is fairly plain, with the main feature being long tables running the length of the room. On closer inspection there are fist-sized carved holes, each one holding a small round crystal... (u/QuietOracle)
A room with dozens of sacks filled with beans, lentils and grains where visitors can put their hands in and let the contents run through their fingers. (u/_WhiteCubeCat_)
A hag (or any other long nailed creature) giving visitors a scalp massage. (u/_WhiteCubeCat_)
A museum of little-known or long-forgotten art pieces, sculptures, and history. (u/MoonlightMancer)
A festival full of colors, music, and drinks. Everyone seems to love you, and you can’t stop laughing. (u/MoonlightMancer)
A hallway of endless doors. In each room is someone you know, complimenting you endlessly, sharing every positive, even begrudgingly jealous thought they ever had about you. (u/MoonlightMancer)
A hot spring/spa, with fluffy towels, those showers that are like rain with perfect water pressure, mud baths, and refreshing food and drink. (u/lionesslindsey)
A room full of people that constantly give you validation and laugh at all your jokes. (u/CountryJeff)
Never-ending line of gold chalices, crystal vases, silver artwork, and other valuables. (u/PutridMeatPuppet)
People who are “better” than you are marched in a stripped of their superior qualities. Beautiful people are disfigured and turned ugly. Wealthy powerful people are ruined and made to beg you for pennies. (u/PutridMeatPuppet)
Mass groups of people enter the room and tell you how they admire you and how wonderful you are. They stroke your ego and inflate your pride. (u/PutridMeatPuppet)
Servants do everything for you. Feed you, give you drinks, wash you, wipe your arse, etc. (u/PutridMeatPuppet)
You are given a wickedly barbed leather whip. A slave creature is bound to a post and you can whip this creature to inflict your wrath upon them as much as you desire. If the poor soul dies, another is brought in to replace them. (u/PutridMeatPuppet)
'Knight for a day'. The full experience; lance, shiny outfit, a squire, a trusty stead, a dragon and a princess/prince to rescue. (u/mr_earthman)
The magical equivalent of a holo deck (u/cyber-viper)
Wide, flat plain with the fastest vehicles in the multiverse (a good place to use the Avernus vehicles) (u/Clickclacktheblueguy)
A selection of cities and villages for you to destroy with war machines or your own magic. (u/Clickclacktheblueguy)
A collection of wand that allow you to test out powerful magic. (u/Clickclacktheblueguy)
A magical version of a movie theatre, allowing you to watch all manner of stories, true and legendary. (u/Clickclacktheblueguy)
A moderately large pool where small battleships with tiny animated crewmen can be deployed in teams to shell and board each other for the audience's amusement. Honored guests can put their strategic abilities to a test against other players by directly giving orders to their ships, and in certain hours guests may even swim in the pool to live out the power fantasy of being a sea monster. (u/VIixIXine)
A colorizer-device that transforms any clothes/armoweapons/other gear to any desired hue you wish (as long as it doesn’t affect the workings of the gear) (u/PaigeOrion)
A grand screen, showing a nearly infinite number of (screen)plays from all space and time, including the show with the disgraced human paladin delivering a green baby gnome back to his home land through incredible odds. (u/PaigeOrion)
A tiara that allows you to experience the sensory experience of a black cat as long as you wear it and close your eyes. (u/PaigeOrion)
A plethora of small, multicolored blocks that will magically interlock with one another to render almost any architectural structure imaginable. (But don’t step on them barefoot!) (u/PaigeOrion)
A band of musicians who are the perfect musical backup for any performances. Alone, they are more low key, but no less skilled, playing haunting melodies of unknown origin. (u/PaigeOrion)
A massive walk-in closet where you can try in any clothes in any fashion you like. (u/Tezla44)
A "schadenfreude" theatre, with shows that rely on slapstick and cringe comedy. (u/Martinus_XIV)
A room designed to give you closure. When you enter this room, someone you loved and lost is there, sitting in a couch. The room feels vaguely familiar, but you can't place why. If Detect Magic is used, the room is full of magic (divination, transmutation, illusion) but the person seems like a normal person. You can chat with them for as long as you like. They behave just as you remember them, with the good and the bad. (u/ohsurenerd)
A theatre performing the most magnificent tragedies. When you watch the performance, you find yourself completely enraptured: you cheer when things go right, scream when something terrifying happens, and moan and weep at the inevitable horrible ending. When you leave, it feels like removing a backpack full of lead that you'd been carrying for so long you'd forgotten it was there. (u/ohsurenerd)
A room where there's a button, there's someone outside and it explains that if you enter there's a 50/50 chance of you dying or not, the room won't actually kill you and it's there just to make you feel the pleasure of near death experience. (u/SupremeGodDictator)
A massage parlor with the universes best staff pampering your every need as you receive the most relaxing massage of your life whether it be scalp, back, foot, full body, etc. Has the worlds fluffiest towels and robes to luxuriate in while you wait or if you simply want to sit in a comfy chair and enjoy your ache free muscles. (u/Blue_Mando)
An arena where you and your opponents heal near instantly, and you can fight endlessly (u/ellen-the-educator)
A reenactment of your greatest failures in life, but this time they turn into your greatest achievements. (u/CountryJeff)
A room with the world's finest works of art.... and a myriad of implements you can use to destroy them. (u/redrosebeetle)
A torture chamber with mages on hand to create illusions of the people you wish to torture. Or increasingly realistic versions of them, depending on the level of magic you wish to implement. (u/redrosebeetle)
A room full of gold and jewels you can roll around in, ala Scrooge McDuck. But woe betide anyone who tries to take a souvenir.... (u/redrosebeetle)
As you're walking through the gardens, a person comes up to you. They introduce themselves as an adventurer who's also here on a quest. They seem to be the same class as you, and they're incredibly attractive-- almost exactly your type. You immediately click and end up spending the day together, talking about everything and anything. You tell them things you've never told anyone else before. They understand everything you tell them, almost innately, but they're still impressed by your feats and your stories. The two of you find an empty bedroom and close the door behind you. It's perfect in its imperfections. In the morning they're gone. No matter where you look, you can't find them. (u/ohsurenerd)
A room lined with shelves and shelves of bottles and vials containing a crimson liquid flowing slowly (like a syrup), all with small labels on them. As you inspect the labels, you realize they've all got names on them: famous adventurers, kings and queens, great sages. If you drink one, you experience a selection of their memories as they experienced them: battles won, discoveries made, historical alliances and friendships being forged or broken... (u/ohsurenerd)
A room that turns anyone that enters it into a child. It is full of every toy imaginable (u/arual_x)
A tour of a chocolate factory. Kobolds work there, and the owner, who gives the tour, is a Metallic Dragon in Humanoid form. (u/arual_x)
A fortune teller who has a Deck of Many Things with only the good cards. If you in any way offend them, they will sleight of hand vs perception check slip you a bad card instead. (u/arual_x)
An island theme park of reanimated dinosaurs. The owner is a level 20 Necromancer called Hamm Johnand. (u/arual_x)
A Virtual Reality style game that allows you to battle horrible monsters over and over again without risk of injury physical. But still allows you to gain XP... (u/arual_x)
A perfect expanse of thick snowy ground. There is constantly a snowball fight going on. (u/arual_x)
A giant room full of mattresses where everyone immediately gets a wonderful massage. (u/Revanclaw-and-memes)
A room full of gold and exquisite things, from beautiful furniture to magic weapons (u/Revanclaw-and-memes)
A seemingly endless room where adventurers can drink a potion to grow wings and flit about to their hearts' delight (u/iriedashur)
An ordinary classroom containing the adventurer's childhood friends, enemies, and their most hated teacher. Upon entering the room, the adventurer discovers that they are invisible, and free to pull pranks as they wish (u/iriedashur)
A brightly colored room piled high with wrapped gifts, large and small, for the adventurers to open endlessly (u/iriedashur)
A purple and black dragon named Ace who cooks you garlic bread and cake. (u/sanorace)
A magic pair of goggles/glasses that simulate any “What if” question you pose to them. (u/lewiscann)
A magical weather room where you can ask for any weather for your pleasure (I love listening to rain) (u/lewiscann)
A room full of lounges with a floating slow burning piece of wood that warms the whole area, the piece of wood is so large you can see the flame spread through this piece of wood forever (u/lewiscann)
A room where you can bite your fingernails and they grow back instantly ( so you can bite them some more )(u/razenastie)
A room with incredibly weakened versions of powerful monsters. (u/Your_InsideMan)
A vast room on wooden sculptures, oil, and torches. (u/Your_InsideMan)
A booth that will remake your face whilst in the palace (ostensibly to make you more beautiful but it could be used for anything) (u/Paralytica)
A magic chair that gives really good back massages (u/TenNinetythree)
A playground where the slides and carousels are for adults (u/TenNinetythree)
A room where you become a giant and can destroy cities and fortresses kaiju style. (u/Paralytica)
Drug Olympics. A room with every drug imaginable to try. Leaving the room cleanses you of their effects. (u/Skitsafrit)
No Pauses. A room that has the effect of making all conversations flow perfectly. No silence stretches too long, no one mishears you, and every topic segways perfectly into the next. (u/Skitsafrit)
Deprivation Room. The room is so absolutely featureless and quiet, that you can meditate magnitudes better here than anywhere else. (u/Skitsafrit)
A games room where you play against your perfect match (u/Nesurame)
Similar to the previous, a games room where you're matched against nothing but weaker opponents (u/Nesurame)
A heist simulator where you always get away with the big diamond, chest, etc (thrill of theft) (u/reallyenjoyscarbs)
A sauna room with a central pillar. Inside the pillar is a chamber containing a magic stone which can detect the exact temperature preferences of those inside, and making each person feel said preference. (u/TgagHammerstrike)
An oval-shaped room with countless glass lotion bottles, with each smelling better than the last. If you look for a specific scent (no matter how rare), you'll certainly find it with the help of a goblin near the back of the room. (u/TgagHammerstrike)
A room that consists of A bunch of mortals so utterly jaded from years of plesure seeking that they need the hardest of drugs and the wildest of sensations to feel anything,with lesser demons feeding on their pursuit of euphoria. Think the emperors children from warhammer 40k. (u/TgagHammerstrike)
A buffet of the lids of yogurt/pudding cups to lick. (u/Hunter37594)
An olfactory room that reads your memories and replicates smells that remind you of your most joyous moments. (u/lecorbusianus)
A wildlife reserve for Druids to find new and exotic wild shapes. (u/lecorbusianus)
A room with musical instruments that you're able to master immediately. (u/lecorbusianus)
A cooking class taught by a master chef that always seems to have enough time to guide you one-on-one. (u/lecorbusianus)
An enchanter who allows you to relieve the best moments of your life over and over again. (u/lecorbusianus)
An illusionary room that brings up past experiences and let’s you make different choices to fix mistakes or win arguments. (u/The_Rhibo)
A murder simulator to allow an individual to live out the fantasy of killing that special someone. (u/Brann_The_Kid)
A library full of blackmail and secret knowledge regarding historical and political figures. A conniving, plotting character’s dream! (u/MoonlightMancer)
A room with a creature in a dark robe sitting at a table covered in maps and dice. He helps you play a strange game where you and your party make up characters that go on adventures while the robed creature acts as all of the other characters and determines new events. (u/Clickclacktheblueguy)
Gotta Collect 'Em All: Hype Decks and Popular Playing Card Series When you're into cardistry, you'll know a thing or two about playing cards. They are, after all, the tools of the trade. And you'll quickly discover that there's a lot of different custom decks out there, many of which are great for card flourishing. A vast amount of cards that have already been produced, and there's steady flow of new cards that are being released on an ongoing basis. Arguably the most popular playing cards beloved by cardists and collectors alike are what some refer to as "hype decks". These are decks that have effectively become a brand of their own by virtue of their sheer popularity. In the last few years alone there are several "brands" that have generated a huge wave of momentum. Almost every new release is quickly sold out, and previous releases don't take long to fetch high prices in the secondary market, as buyers scramble to "collect 'em all". In this article we'll introduce you to some of the more popular series of this sort, which are beloved by both cardists and by playing card collectors. FONTAINES The Fontaine brand is one of the biggest and most recognizable brands in the world of playing cards today, especially in cardistry circles. When you first see a Fontaine deck of cards you might wonder why. After all, what is there to get excited about card backs which have a lower-case "f" put together in a simple and minimalist design, and card faces that are mostly standard? The reason for the success of this brand is the man behind it, Zach Mueller. Zach began making a name for himself with his creative cardistry videos, some of which went viral on youtube. Inspired by the iconic Jerry's Nugget casino deck which appears later on this list, around 2013 Zach whipped up a simple design of his own, printed the deck, and began using it in his cardistry videos. It wasn't even originally conceived as deck that would be published more widely, nor was including it in his cardistry videos originally intended as a marketing gimmick. But the popularity of his videos did have the result of producing a demand for decks like the one Zach was using. When he tried his hand at crowdfunding one, it became an instant success. Zach built on this success with further releases of the same design but in different colours, and later expanded his Fontaine brand to include clothing and other merchandise. Today the Fontaine company has a significant number of releases every year, and they are typically so much in demand that each sells out in minutes. While many of the initial decks didn't evidence much variety aside from recolouring the back design, in recent times we have witnessed some more innovation, such as collaborations with other artists, and a UV black-light edition. https://preview.redd.it/bk51kexhhcg61.jpg?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7ad5a040ac2cd67d9644f02041f3937ba2e28642 ORBITS The Orbit decks come from magician Chris "Orbit" Brown, with involvement from designer Daniel Schneider. The Orbit series is extremely popular with card flourishers, and it's not surprising why. The circle design on the card backs makes it ideal for cardistry. The first version of the deck was blue, had a print run of only 2500, and only managed to hit its Kickstarter target on the final day when it was put up for crowdfunding in 2015. In contrast, today collectors can't get enough of them! The fourth edition alone had a print run of ten times that amount, and the first few versions of the deck will now cost a pretty penny on the secondary market - if you can find them. Common to most of the decks in the series is of course the signature circle look of the card backs. But there's also the regular presence of light-hearted jokers, mini-astronauts, and even tiny orbitting rockets on the card backs, all of which capture something of the galactic and space theme, and add elements of warm humor. There have been minor tweaks to the design to ensure that each deck is not just a simple recolouring of the previous version. The V7 deck is noteworthy for its retro pink and blue colours, and for including a tribute to the failed mission of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, and has the added bonus of being a very cleverly marked deck. The face cards of the Orbit decks mostly feature a style borrowed from the classic Arrco decks, which gives them a slightly different feel from your typical Bicycle deck, while ensuring that they still have a very familiar, recognizable, and practical look. Some of the decks feature even members of the Orbit crew as the court card characters. It is certainly a successful formula, and these are versatile playing cards that are both novel and familiar enough to make them suit a variety of purposes, from card flourishing to card magic. As with most other entries on this list, the success of the series has generated an increased demand for the first decks in the series, which are not easy to get hold of. https://preview.redd.it/0lakhcmihcg61.jpg?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=424b4fba74ee4be5d763fb2439b270df0d319019 JERRY'S NUGGET The history of the Jerry's Nugget decks is a fascinating one, and it even includes a great detective story. The short version is that these striking red and blue decks were first printed in the early 1970s for Jerry's Nugget Casino in Las Vegas. They ended up in storage instead of being used at the casino, and eventually made their way to the gift shop, where they were sold for a dollar or two each. At this point they were discovered by some big name cardists, who began popularizing them via their videos, and spoke highly of their handling qualities, which were the result of printing methods that couldn't be replicated with modern methods. The demand for them grew, but by this time they were sold out. With a limited supply and increased demand, they slowly became a holy grail for collectors, prices typically reaching $500 per deck on the market. Around 2019 Lee Asher became involved with a project to reprint the cards, to make them readily available again, and put them in the hands of a new generations of cardists and collectors. A deal was brokered between Expert Playing Card Company and Jerry's Nugget Casino, and with the help of an incredibly successful Kickstarter project that fetched nearly half a million dollars, a new edition of Jerry's Nugget decks hit the market. The new decks are almost like the original, but consist of a Modern Feel version printed by USPCC and a Vintage Feel version printed by EPCC. The scene was ripe for capitalizing on the popularity of these classic decks, and so the deck was subsequently reprinted in colours like Teal, Coral, Black, Steel Grey, Yellow, Orange, Green, and purple. There are also some limited editions like Pink, and there are even special limited editions with gilding. Many card flourishers love the minimalist look of this series, the famous name and iconic look, and the variety of different colours make them ideal for collectors. https://preview.redd.it/kuxzzlgjhcg61.jpg?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8356844549aedec90eda4b447063afc00faf88f5 CHERRY CASINO The Jerry's Nugget decks aren't the only decks that capitalize on the public interest in old-time casinos. This is also the concept that lies at the heart of the Cherry Casino decks, which is a series of playing cards produced under the Pure Imagination label. Pure Imagination Projects was founded in 2013 by Derek McKee, and the first Cherry Casino deck was produced around 2015 in a bright aqua colour. The idea was to draw on the image of an old time casino, hence the classic cherry artwork familiar from slot machines, an iconic symbol of gambling. Several versions then followed in successive years, as the Cherry Casino decks slowly grew in popularity One of the drawcards of this series is the bold metallic ink used on the cardbacks for most of these decks, which instantly sets them apart from your average deck. One of my personal favourite colours in this series is the Tahoe Blue, which is inspired by one of the clearest and deepest lakes in the United States, Lake Tahoe. The use of metallic ink on card backs creates a gorgeous and inviting pearlescent blue that is hard to get enough of. The Cherry Casino decks are also very versatile and practical, and the relatively standard card faces makes them ideal for card magic or for playing card games. Yet the striking card backs also makes them very appealing for cardists and collectors. This creates the ideal combination of something striking and something simple, which is the greatest strength of the Cherry Casino series. The vibrant and eye-catching colours, set them apart from the competition, and give them the magnetic quality that collectors look for, while they remain functional and suitable for a variety of uses. The first decks in the series are especially prized by collectors, since they are long out of print, and entered the market long before anybody realized how successful this series would become over time. https://preview.redd.it/uvqcml7khcg61.jpg?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2ef474b844f7af286d7d3c3bf3fb5a9f67bead9e VIRTUOSO Virtuoso, commonly called The Virts, is a group of Singaporean cardists, originally founded by Huron Low and Kevin Ho. Other team members joined them over time, and they began releasing cardistry videos on their youtube channel. Around 2012 one of their cardistry videos went viral and was eventually featured on the Discovery Channel, which only increased the growing interest in their work, especially their creative card flourishing videos. It was also around this time that The Virts came up with the idea of designing a deck of card that was specifically geared towards cardistry. They used a design that was strongly geometric in flavour, and where even the court cards and number cards were optimized for card flourishing, to enhance the visual aesthetic of cards in motion. Today it's quite common for a deck to be optimized for cardistry, and there's a ready market waiting to buy decks like this. But at the time this was a groundbreaking idea, and even somewhat of a financially risky one. But card flourishers welcomed the very first Virtuoso deck with open arms, and the deck proved to be more successful than ever imagined. Since the release of their first deck, The Virts have continued to release follow-up decks on a somewhat regular basis. Typically each new release is accompanied by a flashy video that showcases the amazing cardistry of The Virts themselves, which is cleverly accentuated by their cardistry-friendly cards. Their signature geometric design is common to all of the decks released so far, and the eye-catching colours and consistently handling qualioty ensure that card flourishers love it. Recent times have seen the rate of their releases slow down, but news in 2020 about their latest deck - which is scheduled to come out in 2021 - generated a new wave of excitement. Loyalty to the Virtuoso brand and decks is evidenced by the fact that many people were ready to pre-order the new deck sight unseen. https://preview.redd.it/48zmr2okhcg61.jpg?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=cd5fcc61431a3e2764fd95bb5dba12a79658817d ORGANIC PLAYING CARDS One of the more fun entries in this list are the food-inspired decks created by Organic Playing Cards (OPC). This brand is originally the brainchild of Cameron Toner and Nathan Lex, who started OPC while they were in college, combining Cameron's love for card magic and Nathan's love for cardistry. The company has since evolved, and others have come on board as they grew. Their original goal was simply to produce a fun deck of banana-themed cards, now known as Peelers V1. Since then they've gone on to produce a cornucopia of fruit-inspired novelty decks. The concept of what you can expect from an OPC deck is a simple one. Typically it's a deck that features two pieces of fruit on the card backs, some humorous changes to the court cards that incorporate that fruit, an adjusted colour scheme, and a fun take on the tuck box. For example, the Squeezers V1, V2, and V3 decks are orange, lemon, and grape-fruit themed retrospectively, and the tuck boxes are designed to look like juice boxes, complete with an ingredient list. The Snackers decks are themed on strawberries and blackberries, and come in a resealable package typical of a bag of candies, and even include an artificially added scent that smells like the fruit. The latest additions to this popular series have included an avocado themed deck (Avocardos), and in somewhat of a departure from the usual fruit theme and look, a corn-themed harvest deck (Shuckers). So they are exploring new directions, but they haven't run out of fruit just yet, and I look forward to see what they come up with next. https://preview.redd.it/56o6yqelhcg61.jpg?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6b9aec71b43d043c10980cee343e3bf3e8ffed30 WHAT TO BUY AND HOW MUCH TO PAY? Buying and pricing In the end, you should buy what you like, not what other people tell you to like. But how much do these decks typically cost? Latest releases typically sell at retail price, and don't cost a fortune. Although in some cases, especially with in-demand brands like Fontaines, you have to be right at your computer when a new deck is released, and be among the first set of buyers who are fortunate enough process a purchase in the few minutes before they are sold out. Otherwise you'll have to rely on resellers, some of which can have inflated prices. Older decks for virtually all of these series, however, tend to command much higher prices. This is simply a matter of supply and demand: as the number of collectors grows, more and more people want them, while the supply is limited, because the original decks are long out of print and out of stock at retailers. You'll have to rely on the secondary market to try to source these, and expect to dig deeper in your wallet if you want to get first and second edition decks of many of the above series. Investing and re-selling When collectors see some of these decks selling for over $100 on the secondary market, it can be tempting to think that it's a good idea to buy a stash of decks in the hope that you'll hit a jackpot with a brick of decsk that will be worth a bundle down the line. The reality is that this is hard to predict. When most of these decks were first released, nobody knew that they would become big hits over time. It's only as a series or brand generates momentum and establishes a loyal following, that the prices of the original editions start to rise. For example, I have a Peelers V1 deck, and these are now worth up to US$150 today. At the time I picked it up, it was just a novelty deck from an unknown brand, and I used it as an everyday deck for card games and card magic. Who was to know the success that OPC would later become? Meanwhile I've just been using it casually for card games! Much the same is true for the very first Fontaines deck, which costs a fortune now, but at the time was really just an ordinary deck. The playing card market is fickle and future hits are almost impossible to predict. If you want to earn money, rather than gambling on playing cards, you're better off spending your time working for money at your regular day job. Other popular series Are there other series besides the ones covered above? For sure. Daniel Schneider's series of Black Roses deck also has its passionate collectors, as do the Golden Nugget decks, the Gemini Casino decks, and the NOC decks. The Planets series by Vanda was also popular for some time, but with the release of all the planets this is obviously now complete. There are also people who collect anything produced by a particular brand, such as Anyone Playing Cards. Perhaps even that new release you're thinking of purchasing will become the start of a successful new series or brand - you can never really tell! https://preview.redd.it/ppwyhb5mhcg61.jpg?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=75a4ee69f8af72d0c022c24d50e3581b80066959 HAS THE INDUSTRY JUMPED THE SHARK? More and more, faster and faster In the first few years of the boom in the playing card market that was created by the arrival of crowdfunding around 2009, new releases were typically produced either as a mass market deck, or as a numbered limited edition. That seems to have changed in the last few years, and the number of permutations for a particular deck seems to be more than ever before. First of all we get recoloured versions of the same deck, multiple times over. Then in addition we get a numbered deck, and a gilded deck... and multiple combinations of all of these. It starts to become impossibles for collectors to get a complete collection. In addition, in some cases, a very limited edition of a popular series is produced at a high price tag, like the $75 Cherry Casino House Decks, putting it out of the reach of most collectors, except those with very deep pockets. In other cases, companies are releasing decks in different colours so fast (here's looking at you, Jerry's Nuggets), that collectors can hardly keep up. The inevitable question arises whether some of these developments are unhealthy. How much is too much? All this understandably makes some collectors begin to feel a little jaded, and wonder if some of these series have jumped the shark. Are some creators starting to take the mickey out of collectors, knowing that they will want to "collect 'em all", even if they have to spend ridiculous amounts to do so? Is this capitalism gone mad, and are producers becoming too motivated by trying to make big bucks? If this trend continues, it can start to feel like price-gouging and greed, and creators run the risk of sucking the joy out of collecting, and losing their customers. All this means that producers have to be careful in the decisions they make about what they release, and not simply be motivated by making money. Collect 'em all? But there's a lesson in this too. It doesn't make sense to mindlessly collect every single thing. But if you do think carefully about what you want to collect, it can be a lot of fun to collect series like the ones covered here. By all means collect 'em! But maybe just not all of them. At least, not all the time. https://preview.redd.it/c50y53umhcg61.jpg?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3f00f71fa02141ee251913695a2cc7fba823a260 Author's note: I first published this article at PlayingCardDeckshere.
Is the Crying of Lot 49 Partially about Disneyland?
Ok, so, I was recently rereading The Crying of Lot 49 last night, specifically Chapter 3, and I do feel I have a strange hypothesis about sections of that chapter that may be a complete projection, but the more that I look into the content of the sections I will parse out in particular, and the more research that I do, the more evidence seems to fall in place that sort of freaks me out and confirms my theory. Being freaks yourselves, I thought this would be the place for me to project my world, so to speak, and see if what I’m seeing is in any way based in reality or if I’m instead way off base. My hypothesis is that Chapter 3 of The Crying of Lot 49, and specifically the Lake Inverity/Bone charcoal/Tony JaguaFangoso Lagoon section might be subtextually about Disneyland. I have struggled to find much about these particular sections of this chapter related to Disney. I own J. Kerry Grant’s A Companion to Lot 49, have scoured the Pynchon Wiki, read the reddit post discussion for Chapter 3 of this book, and tried Googling as much about it as I could, and I haven’t found anything to suggest Disneyland, so this is either a relatively new idea or one that is inaccurate as hell. Oh, boy! To begin, I will say, I am fascinated and obsessed with Disneyland and Disney World which is maybe why I found some of the information I found within Lot 49 to begin with. One could say I have a perverse fascination with the 2 theme parks which has led me to all manner of revelations. In the same way that Pynchon, being from what I can tell, a heretical Catholic, has a perverse fascination with the sacred through the filter of the profane, I am somehow deeply attracted to and obsessed with all things Disney even though I think they are essentially a fascist, culturally banal, destructive force. Similar to how I believe Oedipa may have with Disneyland in the novel, I “fell in love with it (41).” What can I say? The first half of Chapter 3 which I will focus on, involves Oedipa’s continued revelations. She gets her first peek at WASTE, the Tristero, the posthorn, and the Boeing-esque Yoyodyne is introduced. The plot of the novel really starts to thicken, or to put it a different way, the tapestry, the maaswork, really starts to come together, narrative threads criss-crossing every which way in all directions at once. A resource that was helpful for much of my understanding of this chapter and even just in how I read much of Lot 49 in general is Charles Hollander’s article on the novel: “Pynchon, JFK, and the CIA.” I’ll post it below. https://www.vheissu.net/articles/hollander_49.php Chapter 3, according to Hollander, is where some of the first hints of JFK’s assasination are placed. According to Hollander, this chapter uses allusion, parody, analogy, and enthymeme to encode its secret message about the JFK assassination. Mike Faloppian’s Peter Pinguid Society’s Dallas chapter certainly suggests this. I mention this, partially, to say that, in a way, I could maybe call what I’m trying to figure out here “Pynchon, Disney, and the CIA,” since in many ways what I’m wrestling with is what I perceive to be many hidden references to Disney's shaddy dealings throughout 40s and 50s Californian history. Disney World, in particular, does have a direct history of involvement with the CIA with regard to how it acquired its real estate holdings, for example, which interestingly enough is what a chunk of this chapter is about when it comes to its references to Inverarity (not Disney World, but real estate holdings in general, Inverarity's more specifically). The first section of the chapter that gave me some strange vibes regarding Disneyland was the section where Metzger, Oedipa, and the Paranoids go to Fangoso Lagoon, “one of Inverarity’s last big projects (40).” I will quote some of these sections below where these vibes first made themselves known. “Somewhere beyond the battering, urged sweep of three-bedroom houses rushing by their thousands across the dark beige hills, somehow implicit in an arrogance or bite to the smog the more inland somnolence of San Narciso did lack, lurked the sea, the unimaginable Pacific, the one to which all surfers, beach pads, sewage disposal schemes, tourist incursions, sunned homosexuality, chartered fishing are irrelevant, the hole left by the moon’s tearing-free and monument to her exile; you could not hear or smell this but it was there, something tidel began to reach feelers in past eyes and eardrums, perhaps to arouse fractions of brain current your most gossamer microelectrode is yet too gross for finding (40-41).” This first quote stood out to me because it reminded me of the printed circuit Oedipa sees in Chapter 2. At the beginning of Chapter 2, Oedpia looks out at the landscape and sees it as deeply controlled, planned, almost machine-like or circuit-like. I don’t think this is a wildly different passage from that one. It, like the previous seciton forces the reader to ask the question: how did America come to be how it is now? This is an important question Lot 49 is always forcing its reader to ask. How did the deep conservatism or fascism creep in? Would the answer not be the subject of this book? Communication systems. What company is in charge of some of the most monopolized forms of our communication systems to this day? Disney, of course! Is this an accident? Was it planned? The malignant, magic forces referenced in Chapter 1 may have made it so, may have “urged [the] sweep of three-bedroom houses rushing by their thousands across the dark beige hills (40).” Surely the Walt Disney Company has done as much as any to reinforce suburban 3-bedroom forms of existence that have had a stranglehold on our cultural existence for so many years, than just about any, right? But this was just where I started to get the first inkling of vibes about Disneyland. To continue with another quote: “They came in among earth-moving machines, a total absence of trees, the usual hieratic geometry, and eventually, shimmying for the sand roads, down in a helix to a sculpted body of water named Lake Inverarity. Out in it, on a round island of fill among blue wavelets, squatted the social hall, a chunky ogived and verdigrised, Art Nouveau reconstruction of some European pleasure-casino. Oedpia fell in love with it (41).” This is where my paranoia really got going. Much of the description of the passage above does not sound like a man-made lake or lagoon. Far from it. Lake Inverarity is described as “a round island of fill,” that contains a “social hall,” and as a “Art Nouveau reconstruction of some European pleasure-casino.” That sounds much more like Disneyland than just a man-made lake created by a real-estate developer? Also with Oedpia being a consistent parody of housewives in suburban America, it would make sense that she would fall in love with Lake Inverarity if it is, in fact, Disneyland. Plus, there might be another hint in the name Lake Inverarity itself, since it is the only holding named after Inverarity specifically, just as Disneyland is named after Disney himself. I don’t believe that Inverarity is a direct analogy for Disney specifically, but I do believe he is instead an analogy for any of the unseen hyper-capitalist forces that have come to dominate our culture, Disney clearly being one example. And just a side note before I continue with some of my evidence. It would make complete sense, this being a novel about Southern California, its real-estate development, and history, that Pynchon would eventually have to get to Disneyland. It is a property in Southern California, that especially between 1955 and 1965 had to have HUGE influence. How could he not incorporate it even if it was only referred to passively or encoded into the references of the text (much in the same way Hollander argues that Pynchon does the same for JFK’s assassination). There is another passage that REALLY got me convinced about my above theory, the section where Manny DiPresso is discussing the bone charcoal “used in the R&D phase of the filter program. Back around the early 50’s.” Here it is: “Presently the bodies sank and stayed where they were till the early ‘50s, when Tony Jaguar, who’d been a corporal in an Italian outfit attached to the German force at Lago diPieta and knew about what was at the bottom, decided among some colleagues to see what he could salvage. All they managed to come up with was bones. Out of some murky train of reasoning, which may have included the observed fact that American tourists beginning then to be plentiful, would pay good dollars for almost anything; and stories about Forest Lawn and the American cult of the dead; possibly some dim hope that Senator McCarthy, and others of his persuasion, in those days having achieved a certain ascendancy over the rich cretini from across the sea, would somehow refocus attention on the fallen of WWII, especially ones whose corpses had never been found; out of such labyrinth of assumed motives, Tony Jaguar decided he could surely unload his harvest of bones on some American someplace through his contacts in the “family,” known these days as Costa Nostra. He was right. An import-export firm bought the bones, sold them to a fertilizer enterprise, which may have used one or two femurs for laboratory tests but eventually decided to phase entirely into menhaden instead and transferred the remaining several tons to a holding company, which stored them in a warehouse outside of Fort Wayne, Indiana, for maybe a year before Beaconsfield got interest (47).” When I read “which may have included the observed fact that American tourists beginning then to be plentiful, would pay good dollars for almost anything,” I could not think of anything but Disneyland. In his historiographic metafictions, Pynchon often superimposes historical realities onto present ones in order to make political, social, and religious commentary that would otherwise be inexpressible. An easy example is the fact that Gravity’s Rainbow is a novel about 1960’s America set in Britain during World War II. In the above passage, if Pynchon is superimposing the strange, seemingly random history of “an Italian outfit attached to the German force at Lago diPieta.” and is using this as an analogy, to project a world that speaks to his present day, I don’t know how Pynchon couldn’t be referring to Disneyland. The novel is set in Southern California, the place where Pynchon lived in 1965. Wouldn’t Disneyland, the rise of tourism, how that was changing the landscape of America and hijacking the “family,” its communication systems, propaganda, and culture, wouldn't all that have been on his mind? I have a few more quotes and then a possibly even more major revelation before I feel I can finally feel I’ve made my point. Later on in the Lagoon, the Paranoids start smoking pot, and the following happens: “[B]y holding up the glowing roaches of their cigarettes like a flipcard section at a football game, to spell out alternative S’s and O’s, attracted the attention of the Fangoso Lagoons Security Force, a garrison against the night made up of one-time cowboy actors and L.A. motorcycle cops (49).” I believe this “one-time cowboy actor” reference to be a reference to Ronald Regan, a fixture of southern California and one-time cowboy actor, and yet another thread in the patchwork connections to Disney. On October 24, 1947, Walt Disney and Ronald Regan both testified against communism, naming particular individuals they found nefarious communists within the film industry (another communication industry, one could say) before the House of Un-American Activities Committee. Which got me thinking, with all the mob references in the above section about Lago diPeta and the bones, was Disney ever involved with the mafia or mob, with “Costa Nostra?” I didn’t find much, but I did find something extremely interesting, which also led to one final even more strange realization. Read the link below, it lays out the story of Willie Bioff, a mobster who attempted to but failed to help break up Disney’s Union Strike in the 1940’s. https://babbittblog.com/2016/10/09/disney-and-the-mob-willie-bioff/ This may seem unrelated to Pynchon’s “parable of power,” but earlier in the chapter when Mike Fillopian is discussing Russia and America, clearly also, yet again using a historical detail as a historiographic metafiction, superimposing a historical reality onto a present one, in this case, that of the cold war, when Fillopian mentions “After the confrontation, appalled at what had to be some military alliance between Russia...and a Union that paid lip service to abolition while it kept its own industrial laborers in a kind of wage-slavery (36),” its fairly clear which side of the picket-isle Pynchon would have been during an animator strike of Disney in the 1940s, or any strike for better treatment, for that matter. In Lot 49, Pynchon has written a "parable of power" about the various ways the circuit board of American life has reinforced the indentured servitude of supposed abolitionists, which in our modern world, could easily be a stand in for the structures of neo-liberalism. And nothing on this earth is more an example of banal neoliberal capitalism than Disneyland, nothing (except for maybe Epcot, of course). This is a lot of information, and I may not have done a very good job of connecting it all or being as explicit as I could have at explaining how specific references hint at Disney throughout the chapter, and this has already become too long, HOWEVER, I have one final piece of information that blows my DAMN MIND that is likely coincidental, but which I still could not believe I found. Inspired by the book and wanting to find more connections in the tapestry, I started doing research into Disney’s involvement with the FBI and found some public records about his direct involvement with them on the FBI's website. Walt Disney was a SAC (Special Agent in Charge) for the FBI, according to these documents, for a period of time, interestingly enough, in the late 50s. There are literal letters to Disney from J. Edgar Hoover himself to Disney in these documents. I’ll post them below along with a number of other links that discuss Disney’s connection to the FBI, the last one being particularly fascinating in its connections to the novel. https://vault.fbi.gov/walter-elias-disney/walter-elias-disney-part-01-of-03/view http://www.schaakstukkenmuseum.nl/?p=2195&lang=en http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20Files/F%20Disk/FBI/FBI%20Press%20Use%20Of/Item%2009.pdf https://www.mouseplanet.com/8987/The_Mickey_Mouse_Club_FBIs_Most_Wanted I very much suggest looking at the Mouse Planet link above. If you have read The Crying of Lot 49 and know who Baby Igor and Metzger is, I VERY MUCH SUGGEST IT. Upon reading this and looking at all the other material, I discovered that there was a child-star, mentioned specifically in these documents, that was to be the child used in a set of documentaries Disney was to make as propaganda films for the FBI specifically, promoting them to the public in 1958. This child’s name was Dirk Metzger. I shit you not. His name was METZGER and he was a child star whose father was in the military. READ THE ARTICLE. His daddy, his doggy, and HIM! And guess what, look at what his profession became after being a child actor in these films? Guess it was: he became a lawyer!!! Baby Igor himself! In the flesh!? Look at the article. It’s all there. I can’t fucking believe it!? Now, I admit, this is all probably just a coincidence. Being 14 in 1958 would put Metzger at being only 21 or so in 1965 when the Crying of Lot 49 came out, so it is unlikely that this is exactly what I think it is, a direct, real, historical correlation, but who knows? Pynchon lived in California at the time. Who knows whom or what he may have come across... Maybe I’m seeing things that aren’t there. Maybe Disneyland is nowhere to be found in the California of The Crying of Lot 49. Maybe this is all, as Hilarius would say, a Rorsoch blot. Maybe I’m simply hallucinating. I will say though, either way, I do think the political exigence of The Crying of Lot 49 has done its work on me. Even if this is only an ink blot, a world I’m projecting rather than one that is actually there, I have certainly done more thinking about Disney, its union-busting, suburban-infused. McCarthy-ian underbelly than I have, maybe ever, and that power, and Pynchon's parable of power he wrote in reaction to it, is something that is very much alive and with us today, it is a power that is still creating indentured servitude and whose malignant, “formless magic” is igniting all around us. Hopefully I, like Oedpia, have gotten a little closer to understanding how it works and counting its line of force. Maybe, “If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?”
Ramtidings, dear friends! It is I, your dutiful lord and master, the eternal GM. My sabbatical proved most fruitful, having figured out some depth mechanics for 3 dimensional combat in my pet project, Blood & Thunder, a maritime piracy RPG that has been both a joy and a nerve-wracking nightmare to create. If you want to see what's going on with that, you can swing by patreon.com/BlackFlagPrintingPress to take a look or support my endeavors. But I digress, because I did not come here today to talk about Blood & Thunder, no. I came here with something else in mind, good friends, for while I have been writing my bread and butter, you have gone without your beard and butter, and this is unacceptable! And so, I have trawled the depths of my memory to bring you yet another TAAAAAALE FROM THE TABLETOP, lovingly subtitled A Prologue Into Poverty. Life is not an easy thing. There was a time when life was very difficult for me. I had far less than most, and I went without frequently, my entire life loaded into a backpack of bare necessities. Joys were few and times were hard, but I made the best of it. I traveled the countryside, mostly alone, making friends where I could amongst the other forgotten souls who haunt the streets of the United States. I met a good number of people, many of them listless drifters in their own right, who became fast friends. We would hang out for a time, but like all drifters, we would eventually part ways, called to different places to do different things. I had just come from North Carolina. I had been in Asheville, playing bluegrass to make money with friends who eventually proved dishonest, and so I parted ways with them. While in Asheville, I had met a girl, also on the road like myself, and I developed a massive crush on her. Fortune would have it that our time together was short lived, as she disappeared on a freighter down the train tracks, and I layed curled up in a bush sick as a dog for the next 3 days. You can't get a ride from a freighter with 8 people without getting pulled off by johnny law. Our group had fractured, and myself and one other soul continued on our own, until we parted ways in Atlanta. Now, on my own, clueless and green, I wandered aimlessly, until a friend of mine at the time reached out to me by way of the internet. He had work for me, back in California, if I could just make it there. What's 3000 miles? I've got this. I walked out of Atlanta, hitched a series of rides to Arkansas, and then caught a freighter myself, all the way back to the west coast while UP did the driving. I laid on the back of that train for 3 days until I finally ran out of water and decided to get off. I was in Los Angeles. After a bit of panhandling, I got a bus into the central valley, and my friend came and scooped me up. I worked on my friends farm for a bit, building green houses and stacking money until the time came for me to once again depart. During that time, my crush from North Carolina had found me on Facebook. We got to talking. She told me she had gone back home to Wisconsin and was working in some greasy spoon trying to save up money to afford a bus. She'd been back for awhile now, but wasn't making any headway. Her vices were getting the best of her, and she couldn't seem to get ahead. I told her she needed to knock that shit off and clean up her act. After a long enough time talking, however, things started to get flirty and dirty. I wanted to see her, and it's actually amazing what a guy will do for love. You're how far away? Piece of cake. Hold my beer. With the work season coming to a close, I took my pay and my leave of my old friend, and he dropped me off in Modesto at the Greyhound. On the way out, he loaded me up with gifts for my travels - a new backpack, socks, a sleeping bag, some snacks for the ride... and naturally, he gave me a gift that I always treasure. He gave me a set of RPG dice. I gave my boy a hug, wished him well in his endeavors, and promised I'd be back in the fall to help him with the harvest and gathering firewood. So I went on my merry way. I absolutely despise Greyhounds. Have you ever been on one? It's miserable. There's no room to stretch out unless you sit in the back, right by the toilet. Some asshole is always blaring garbage mumble rap on his phone all day long. It doesn't matter who you are - at the end of the trip you exude the pungent aroma of a neckbeard. This didn't bother me too much - personal hygiene suffers when you have no way to bathe regularly, so I was used to being dirty, and my friends from the road were usually very dirty people in their own right at the time, so I could handle a certain degree of grossness... within limits. I did shower at my friend's farm before I boarded that bus, though, and was feeling rather spiffy - clean body, clean clothes. Life was good and I was on my way to see my woman. I did my best to zone out. I tried to sleep as much as I could and ignore the general atmosphere of the bus, but that was no longer an option after a layover in Las Vegas. We boarded the bus once more after an almost 24 hour delay on our schedules, and finally got moving again. I sat in the back near the toilet, as I was no stranger to this game and wanted that bench seat, and foul smells at the time didn't bother me much... or so I thought. With the bus filling up and the seats reducing to slim pickings, it dawned on me that my coveted back seat bench was going to get shared. Then, I saw him... the Busbeard. I'm usually a pretty nice person, but I did not want my coveted backseat benchseat getting taken up, let alone by this massive lardass that now lumbered towards me. I did everything in my power to seem as big and hostile as I could. This was all in vain, however, as some people cannot read social cues. I stared at him, dripping hostility, mentally repeating sit somewhere else like it was a Zen mantra. However, nobody wanted him to sit by them either, and so, he made his way, closer and closer, as he asked people if seats were taken until he got to me at the back. He shifted to sit into the seat, angling his ass in the general direction of my face. The smell of soggy feces-laden underwear wafted up as he slid his bulk onto the bench. Did I mention that personal hygiene suffers on a greyhound bus ride, especially when you've been riding for days? I've taken my fair share of Greyhounds, and it's unlikely that this new arrival had been riding for awhile. He was eastbound, like the rest of us, and we were in Las Vegas. His point of origin was... not very far east. I had only been on the bus for approximately a day so far, minus the extended layover time of course, so I was getting a ittle sweaty myself, but this guy smelled as if he not only lived on this bus, but was born in the blue poop goop of the latrine. It was a question worthy of debate as to whether this man had actually employed the use of a speed stick in his life. His patchy jowels jiggled at me as he said, hi. I responded with a gruff and monotone hello, and then turned my attentions to the window, watching the bus depot workers loading up suitcases beneath. My fate was sealed. This man was to be my travel companion all the way to Denver. I decided then that maybe it would be best to ignore him. I plugged in my phone, booted up an emulator I had downloaded, and started to play some Pokemon to whittle away the hours. It didn't take long, however, before I could feel his olfactory looming become physical looming as he examined the screen upon which I played from over my shoulder. Busbeard: Pokemon? I fucking love Pokemon! I didn't know you could play it on a phone. How are you doing that? His heavy respirations were like an infusion of green spearmint and halitosis. GM: Emulators. I went back to my game, trying to angle myself away from him in such a way that he couldn't lean over my shoulder and watch me as I trained my team, but I was effectively sandwiched between him and the wall, forced to sit straight as he leaned over and watched me play. I debated then, what I ought to do. Playing Pokemon would make the time fly, but I would be crushed between the window and a sweaty fat man. Not playing Pokemon would save me the physical agony of being squished, but I would be painfully bored for seemingly endless miles, and he may use it as an opportunity to interact further. A decision needed to be made. I shut the emulator off and put away my phone, turning my attention back out the window as the bus pulled out of the Las Vegas terminal and began down the freeway. It was not long after we had pulled out of the station, however, when that wheezing, rasping voice chirped up again. Busbeard: So where are you going? I ignored him, focusing on the casinos towering in the distance of the skyline, pretending as if I hadn't heard the question, or as if it weren't addressed at me. With insistance, he repeated his question at my turned back again, searching for a response within my stony exterior. I mumbled, the Midwest, and he questioningly grunted, and asked me to repeat myself. I guess we're doing this. GM: I'm going to the Midwest. Busbeard: Where in the Midwest? GM: Wisconsin. Busbeard: I've never been to Wisconsin before, but I know they got really good cheese! Hyuk hyuk... Is that why you're going there? Judging by his smell, he must have been an excessively avid connosieur of fine Wisconsinite cheese. However, cheese was the last thing on my mind at the time.I was enamored with my lady love. GM: I'm going to see an old friend. Busbeard: Oh, that's cool... who is it? The odds of this man knowing the person who I was on my way to visit were astronomically low. Your odds of getting struck by lightning, winning the lottery, and becoming president in the same day were probably higher than this cretin knowing the one specific person whom I was going to go visit in some backwater Wisconsin town. Still, I humored him, and in the same flat voice, answered his question, and told him I was on my way to see my sweetheart. This caught Busbeard's attention. For a grown man in his mid 30s, he let out a loud "oooooooo" like a middle schooler would when he finds out his friend has a crush. I contemplated execution methods and the subjective severity of their barbarism as he excitedly asked me where she was from. GM: Wisconsin. Busbeard: Yeah... but, where in Wiconsin? GM: Fuck off, dude. I'm not going to tell you the town where she lives. Busbeard: Heh! I'd be terrified of telling a superior male like me where my girlfriend lives, too. A little kid like you wouldn't stand a chance next to a man like me. Her panties would hit the floor from one whiff of my pheromones. It happens all the time, bro, I swear. I could have any woman on this bus. They just can't resist me. They can sense my manhood, I know it. I shouldn't stir the pot. All common sense tells me that I should just stop myself while I'm ahead, but sometimes... sometimes I just can't help myself. I've always been a pretty reserved and self-contained person for the most part, and I just want to be left alone 90% of the time to do my thing. Apparently, that's a lot to ask, because every now and then, somebody comes and invades my personal space with their protruding belly, bad breath, and self-aggrandizement, and then I find it really hard to resist my inclination to fuck with them. I know, I know, it's wrong of me to do that, but I'm human, damnit, and something good was cooking in the kitchen. What's the harm in dipping a spoon into this self-important concoction of body odor and bravado? GM: Any woman, huh? Tell ya what, Busbeard, I just got paid, and you seem really confident in the power of your, ahhhhh, pheromones, so... how about a wager. I laid out the terms of my devil's bargain. With a wager of 100 dollars, I would pick a lady on the bus at the next break. Busbeard would then have to seduce her. He MUST "present" his pheromones to her, naturally. If he recovered her phone number, or anything in excess thereof, like a kiss or a consensual toilet stall consummation, it would suffice to meet my criteria and loose my grasp from the freshly printed Franklin in my wallet. He agreed enthusiastically to my terms, insisting I was going to loose and he was going to get his dick sucked in a Greyhound portajohn "blumpkin style". We rode along in silence for the next hour or so. The sun was high in the sky when we made our next stop at some gas station in Utah, and everyone filed off the bus to stretch their legs and get their snacks. I wandered around, huffing down my smoke, chatting it up with people and making friends, seeing just who they were, asking them questions - where they were going, who they were going there with. I got to talking with one guy and his girlfriend. The guy, who we will call Sarge, was built like a brick shithouse and was a former infantry man who served 2 tours of duty in the middle east. He was traveling with his wife, a young and pretty little thing who we will call Alexandra. They were on their way back to the east coast to stay with family. Alexandra's mom was getting old and had asked them to move in to help take care of her. They were on their way out there to steward her aging mother's estate. I remarked that that was awfully kind of them, and sincerely wished them the best on taking care of Alexandra's aging mom. I told them a little bit about myself, as well... that I was effectively living on the road, playing life by ear, and on the way to see a loved one of mine for a bit before the wind blew me somewhere else. Eventually, the bus driver gave everyone a 5 minute warning before departure, and we all filed on board. I moved back to my seat and waited for Busbeard to arrive. He came back, cradling piles of gas station sandwiches, bags of chips, and a couple of sodas in his massive paws. He sat down beside me with a loud "oof" and offered me a drink, saying that it's the least he could do before he took my money. I took that beverage. It was both cold and delicious. GM: Well, Busbeard, I've done my rounds, and I've come to a decision. Busbeard: Who is it? She better be hot. I swear to God, if you make me waste my time on some dried up roastie, I'm gonna be so fucking pissed at you dude. GM: Why would I do that dude? Naturally, I only want the best for you. No, she's very pretty. You see that girl over there, in the aisle seat? That's the one. Make your move whenever you're ready. I pointed out Alexandra to him. I already knew this was going to end very poorly. There was no way in Hell that Alexandra would express any interest in this disgusting lardass whatsoever when she had a stable and solid man like Sarge, and Sarge wasn't about to take guff from anyone. Add on to it that Sarge was easily the size of, if not bigger than, the prodigious Busbeard himself. Sarge was also trained to kill and hardened by years of combat in the graveyard of empires. I can fight - I've fought a lot - and I would not want to square up against him under any circumstances. Busbeard was going to get the snot beat out of him and pay me 100 dollars for that privilege. The bus took off and I listened to the disgusting sounds of Busbeard inhaling the equivalent of 5 pounds of gas station food. I was only halfway through my soda, when Busbeard emitted a satisfied belch that rumbled the seats, and the feeding frenzy had ended in an effervesence of curdling bile and preservatives just as fast as it had begun. He then started to pump himself up for the task at hand. He started to sweat with excitement and latent cardiac arrest as he prepared his pheromonal aura about himself, and then with a gruff, alright, let's do this, he stood up from his seat and waddled down the aisle, his greasy belly bumping into everybody who had chosen an aisle seat. He approached Alexandra. They were near the front end of the bus, and so I couldn't hear a word that they were saying. I watched Busbeard as he extended an arm and held on to the overhead luggage rack, exposing the damp miasma of corn-syrup infused armpit sweat to his unsuspecting victim. His pheromones were beginning to work their magic over the unsuspecting Alexandra who would soon be enraptured by its juicy spell. I waited, leaning forward intently, when a loud shout broke the silence. Sarge: BACK THE FUCK UP. Alexandra started to shout, too, yelling "get the fuck away from me!" The driver turned back and yelled for everyone to sit down and shut the hell up or he would pull the bus over. Sarge: Please do! I'm gonna beat this fucking lardass into the pavement! Saying shit like that to my wife? Who the fuck do you think you are? The bus driver repeated his warning, and Busbeard began to shout his protests, insisting upon his innocence. Busbeard: B-but, I was put up to it! It was that guy, in the back seat! He said--- He pointed back at me. I yelled back, I don't fucking know that guy. The bus driver meant his threat, and pulled the bus over. We were on a long and empty stretch on the I-15 somewhere in rural Utah. The last town I had seen was about 20 miles back. It was late spring, and it was getting hot outside that afternoon. The bus driver got out of his seat, walked up to Busbeard, and told him to get the Hell off of his bus. Busbeard kept protesting, when Sarge moved past his wife, and started forcing Busbeard towards the front door. I've heard the threat of getting kicked off maybe a thousand times on a Greyhound, but I had never seen it play out before. Busbeard was thrown off the bus. Sarge did not join him outside and pummel him into the asphalt, regrettably, as I would have loved to have watched it. Busbeard kept pleading with the bus driver as the driver shut the door on him, sealing him out on the shoulder of a lonely stretch of highway. I breathed a sigh of relief, and stretched out my legs. It was another 15 miles before we saw signs of civilization. A part of me felt bad for Busbeard, but the other part of me said, "if I can walk 20 miles in a day with 60 lbs of shit on my back, he can do an unencumbered 15 and be fine." The ride continued on in sweet, reclined silence for me until we reached Denver, werein there was another changeover, and this bus was much, much more desolate. The rest of the Greyhound voyage passed without incident, and I spent my time flirting with my lady love and training some Pokemons. At long last, I finally arrived in Wisconsin. She came to pick me up at the bus station, and when we approached each other, we made out like long lost lovers for a good 5 minutes before we finally caught our breath enough to say hello. I got in her car, and spent maybe a week or so with her, before it was time to take my leave. I couldn't live there forever, and so, as fast as I had drifted into her life, once again, it was time for me to disappear. We said goodbye, and she dropped me off at a lonely interstate overpass on the edge of town. I put my thumb out to catch a ride to Anywhere But Here USA. I planned my next move, and I figured that there were some friends of hers and mine that lived not too far away in the Dakotas, and maybe I would pay them a visit next. I was in the neighborhood, and figured that I might as well say hello. I reached out to them online, and then made my way west again. They were excited for me to come see them. It was only a day into the voyage when I received a message from Janet. It said, "wait for me, I'm catching up." She had packed her backpack again, and was coming after me, hot on my tail. I told her we could meet up at our mutual friend's house. I dialed ahead to our friends, who we shall call Sarah and Queenie. Sarah used to travel together with Janet for many months before she stabilized, and then settled down. Queenie was one of my friends from North Carolina. He was a loveable chucklefuck of a drifter, missing a few teeth, wore a skirt, and spoke in the most haggard voice you could imagine. Still... he insisted on being called Queenie. He had settled down with Sarah after they hooked up, and they were living at Sarah's house. He was on thin ice there, however, and she was threatening to kick him out. I arrived at Sarah's and Queenie's, and spent the next few days waiting for Janet to come up on my heels. During that time, Queenie and I played a lot of Magic (he had just gotten into it), and I remembered the dice that my friend in California had given me that were laying unusued in my backpack. I asked him if he had ever played tabletop RPG's before, to which he answered no. I told him that, maybe next time I see him and I'm in a better spot, we could run a game. Eventually Janet caught up, and we prepared to leave Sarah's for good towards our own new horizons. Queenie, however, had finally broken through the thin ice upon which he skated, and was getting thrown out. On the day of our departure, we asked him if he wanted to join us in our travels so he wouldn't have to go it alone. Thus we began from Sarah's house out into the unknown once again, a cheerful trio, and true to my word, I began to teach not only Queenie, but Janet as well, the joys of tabletop RPGs. As I'm sure you can surmise, dear friends, that this is not the end of our story, but only the beginning of another chapter. Is Busbeard still alive? What does the future hold for Ramtide's love life? How do a gaggle of vagabond drifters play tabetop games without a table? Some of these questions will be answered, my dear friends, in our next installment of TAAAAAALES FROM THE TABLETOP. A shoutout to my lovely patrons, Tatoferret and Sillibits. You guys are wonderful. Thank you for believing in the dream.
These are the statistical top 500 movies of all time, according to 23 different websites
Hey everyone, great to be back again. Some of you might remember a similar title from a post I made back in April, where I made a list of the top 250 movies with 13 sources, or a preview of this list I made last month. I want to emphasize that this is NOT an official ranking nor my personal ranking; it is just a statistical and, personally, interesting look at 500 amazing movies. These rankings reflect the opinions of thousands of critics and millions of people around the world. And I am glad that this list is able to cover a wide range of genres, decades, and countries. So before I get bombarded with "Why isn't X on here?" or "How is X above Y?" comments, I wanted to clear that up. I sourced my data from Sight & Sound (both critic and director lists), TSPDT, iCheckMovies, 11 domestic websites (Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, IMDb, Letterboxd, TMDb, Trakt, Blu-Ray, MovieLens, RateYourMusic, Criticker, and Critics Choice), and 9 international audience sites (FilmAffinity, Douban, Naver, MUBI, Filmweb, Kinopoisk, CSFD, Moviemeter, and Senscritique). This balance of domestic/international ratings made the list more well-rounded and internationally representative (sites from Spain, China, Korea, Poland, Russia, Czech Republic, Netherlands, and France). As for my algorithm, I weighted websites according to both their Alexa ranking and their number of votes compared to other sites. For example, since The Godfather has hundreds of thousands of votes on Letterboxd but only a couple thousand on Metacritic, Letterboxd would be weighted more heavily. After obtaining the weighted averages, I then added the movie's iCheckMovies' favs/checks ratio and TSPDT ranking, if applicable. Regarding TSPDT, I included the top 2000 movies; as an example of my calculations, Rear Window's ranking of #41 would add (2000-41)/2000=0.9795 points to its weighted average. I removed movies that had <7-8K votes on IMDb, as these mostly had low ratings and numbers of votes across different sites as well. For both Sight & Sound lists, I added between 0.5 and 1 point to a movie's score based on its ranking, which I thought was an adequate reflection of how difficult it is to be included on these lists. As examples, a #21 movie would have 0.9 points added while a #63 would have 0.69 points. So without further ado, the statistical top 500 movies ever made. I separated the scores into overall, critics, domestic, and international columns to make comparisons easier. This list on Letterboxd.
Ranking
Title
Overall Score
Critics
Domestic
International
Year
Director
1
The Godfather
93.89
97.73
90.50
89.36
1972
Francis Ford Coppola
2
The Godfather: Part II
91.93
93.30
89.04
88.06
1974
Francis Ford Coppola
3
Seven Samurai
91.05
97.38
87.63
85.90
1954
Akira Kurosawa
4
12 Angry Men
90.45
95.45
88.74
88.62
1957
Sidney Lumet
5
City Lights
89.94
96.75
85.67
85.93
1931
Charlie Chaplin
6
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
89.45
91.20
87.81
86.59
1966
Sergio Leone
7
The Shawshank Redemption
89.41
82.95
89.49
89.18
1994
Frank Darabont
8
Psycho
89.29
95.23
85.70
85.01
1960
Alfred Hitchcock
9
Modern Times
89.28
95.55
85.21
85.37
1936
Charlie Chaplin
10
Schindler's List
89.08
93.80
87.22
87.29
1993
Steven Spielberg
11
Pulp Fiction
88.85
92.60
87.69
86.42
1994
Quentin Tarantino
12
Rear Window
88.63
97.65
85.40
83.33
1954
Alfred Hitchcock
13
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
88.55
87.38
86.28
86.97
1975
Miloš Forman
14
Apocalypse Now
88.54
93.85
85.24
83.48
1979
Francis Ford Coppola
15
Tokyo Story
88.49
98.30
85.16
83.76
1953
Yasujirō Ozu
16
Spirited Away
88.34
93.78
86.80
85.91
2001
Hayao Miyazaki
17
GoodFellas
88.03
91.48
87.00
84.03
1990
Martin Scorsese
18
Vertigo
88.02
95.60
84.05
82.76
1958
Alfred Hitchcock
19
Singin' in the Rain
88.01
97.65
83.95
83.13
1952
Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen
20
Sunset Boulevard
88.00
95.45
85.44
84.22
1950
Billy Wilder
21
Citizen Kane
87.83
99.03
83.06
82.22
1941
Orson Welles
22
Harakiri
87.79
85.83
88.00
86.29
1962
Masaki Kobayashi
23
Rashomon
87.74
96.55
83.52
82.73
1950
Akira Kurosawa
24
Once Upon a Time in the West
87.71
86.65
85.48
84.62
1968
Sergio Leone
25
Fanny and Alexander
87.54
97.30
83.15
83.00
1982
Ingmar Bergman
26
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
87.40
92.59
86.06
85.38
2003
Peter Jackson
27
Andrei Rublev
87.39
91.90
83.80
83.94
1966
Andrei Tarkovsky
28
The Passion of Joan of Arc
87.39
94.65
83.88
83.57
1928
Carl Theodor Dreyer
29
Sherlock Jr.
87.36
96.45
83.64
85.60
1924
Buster Keaton
30
Bicycle Thieves
87.35
94.70
83.91
83.46
1948
Vittorio De Sica
31
Casablanca
87.35
98.00
85.25
82.62
1942
Michael Curtiz
32
Some Like It Hot
87.28
95.30
82.11
83.73
1959
Billy Wilder
33
Persona
87.22
88.20
84.28
83.07
1966
Ingmar Bergman
34
Children of Paradise
87.21
95.33
84.81
83.27
1945
Marcel Carné
35
Taxi Driver
87.14
93.88
83.60
82.06
1976
Martin Scorsese
36
The Dark Knight
87.08
88.81
86.96
84.80
2008
Christopher Nolan
37
Metropolis
87.03
96.00
82.92
84.01
1927
Fritz Lang
38
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
87.02
93.95
82.23
84.02
1927
F. W. Murnau
39
Stalker
87.02
92.30
83.86
83.29
1979
Andrei Tarkovsky
40
Pather Panchali
86.96
94.35
84.40
82.80
1955
Satyajit Ray
41
Lawrence of Arabia
86.95
97.65
83.76
81.49
1962
David Lean
42
M
86.91
96.20
84.34
82.92
1931
Fritz Lang
43
Ordet
86.82
98.10
83.08
82.55
1955
Carl Theodor Dreyer
44
It's a Wonderful Life
86.77
90.45
85.17
84.90
1946
Frank Capra
45
Satantango
86.76
90.45
84.58
84.21
1994
Béla Tarr
46
Parasite
86.72
96.34
86.55
83.15
2019
Bong Joon-ho
47
The 400 Blows
86.70
96.70
83.14
82.60
1959
François Truffaut
48
Ikiru
86.56
93.80
85.48
84.29
1952
Akira Kurosawa
49
Mirror
86.50
95.60
82.75
82.34
1975
Andrei Tarkovsky
50
Come and See
86.50
90.50
85.22
83.13
1985
Elem Klimov
51
The Apartment
86.48
92.00
84.09
82.99
1960
Billy Wilder
52
The General
86.45
91.45
82.59
83.87
1926
Buster Keaton, Clyde Bruckman
53
Grave of the Fireflies
86.43
95.13
85.85
82.97
1988
Isao Takahata
54
Le Trou
86.41
89.95
85.46
85.14
1960
Jacques Becker
55
The Battle of Algiers
86.37
95.40
82.64
81.24
1966
Gillo Pontecorvo
56
A Man Escaped
86.34
96.50
83.67
82.03
1956
Robert Bresson
57
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
86.34
95.85
84.37
83.03
1964
Stanley Kubrick
58
Paths of Glory
86.25
92.30
84.97
84.48
1957
Stanley Kubrick
59
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
86.24
88.75
85.61
84.31
2001
Peter Jackson
60
All About Eve
86.23
96.95
83.69
83.20
1950
Joseph L. Mankiewicz
61
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
86.21
86.93
87.05
83.29
1980
Irvin Kershner
62
High and Low
86.16
86.55
86.08
84.26
1963
Akira Kurosawa
63
The Great Dictator
86.15
91.10
84.25
85.03
1940
Charlie Chaplin
64
The Silence of the Lambs
86.12
88.68
85.29
84.17
1991
Jonathan Demme
65
2001: A Space Odyssey
86.06
88.35
82.93
81.54
1968
Stanley Kubrick
66
North by Northwest
86.03
96.38
83.17
81.74
1959
Alfred Hitchcock
67
Double Indemnity
85.91
94.38
83.84
83.12
1944
Billy Wilder
68
Ugetsu
85.91
97.25
82.69
81.91
1953
Kenji Mizoguchi
69
Woman in the Dunes
85.91
93.95
84.71
83.77
1964
Hiroshi Teshigahara
70
Sansho the Bailiff
85.88
95.50
84.24
82.21
1954
Kenji Mizoguchi
71
Once Upon a Time in America
85.87
86.10
83.84
85.53
1984
Sergio Leone
72
City of God
85.86
84.08
86.39
84.00
2002
Fernando Meirelles, Kátia Lund
73
Late Spring
85.81
94.75
83.74
82.27
1949
Yasujirō Ozu
74
Barry Lyndon
85.80
87.95
82.44
82.30
1975
Stanley Kubrick
75
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
85.78
88.78
85.00
84.29
2002
Peter Jackson
76
Raging Bull
85.77
90.48
82.01
81.80
1980
Martin Scorsese
77
Chinatown
85.72
94.08
83.32
80.69
1974
Roman Polanski
78
Alien
85.69
91.73
84.76
82.62
1979
Ridley Scott
79
Ran
85.68
94.70
83.93
82.52
1985
Akira Kurosawa
80
The Seventh Seal
85.67
92.10
83.52
82.13
1957
Ingmar Bergman
81
The Kid
85.61
92.85
82.91
84.94
1921
Charlie Chaplin
82
Wild Strawberries
85.51
90.05
83.38
82.24
1957
Ingmar Bergman
83
A Brighter Summer Day
85.50
93.38
84.07
81.01
1991
Edward Yang
84
8½
85.48
91.20
82.59
81.09
1963
Federico Fellini
85
The Pianist
85.38
88.69
83.31
84.80
2002
Roman Polanski
86
The World of Apu
85.38
93.20
84.38
83.09
1959
Satyajit Ray
87
La Dolce Vita
85.37
94.38
81.40
80.48
1960
Federico Fellini
88
Star Wars
85.33
90.03
85.22
81.92
1977
George Lucas
89
The Best of Youth
85.31
88.78
85.31
83.64
2003
Marco Tullio Giordana
90
The Gold Rush
85.29
94.55
81.93
83.59
1925
Charlie Chaplin
91
The Third Man
85.26
96.50
82.91
80.21
1949
Carol Reed
92
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
85.20
96.68
82.77
81.81
1948
John Huston
93
I Am Cuba
85.18
93.60
82.00
83.44
1964
Mikhail Kalatozov
94
The Lives of Others
85.14
89.03
84.12
82.73
2006
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
95
Witness for the Prosecution
85.13
92.65
83.67
84.99
1957
Billy Wilder
96
Touch of Evil
85.11
95.70
81.36
79.65
1958
Orson Welles
97
WALL-E
85.10
92.09
82.82
82.64
2008
Andrew Stanton
98
Scenes from a Marriage
85.02
86.85
84.80
83.06
1974
Ingmar Bergman
99
To Be or Not to Be
84.99
89.58
82.52
83.39
1942
Ernst Lubitsch
100
A Separation
84.92
94.24
83.34
80.90
2011
Asghar Farhadi
101
The Night of the Hunter
84.91
96.93
81.17
79.06
1955
Charles Laughton
102
Three Colors: Red
84.87
96.78
83.32
80.78
1994
Krzysztof Kieślowski
103
Yojimbo
84.87
91.55
83.85
82.99
1961
Akira Kurosawa
104
Back to the Future
84.85
89.38
84.47
81.94
1985
Robert Zemeckis
105
My Neighbor Totoro
84.84
87.53
83.44
83.17
1988
Hayao Miyazaki
106
In the Mood for Love
84.84
83.87
82.55
81.20
2000
Wong Kar-wai
107
Princess Mononoke
84.83
81.18
85.02
84.24
1999
Hayao Miyazaki
108
Saving Private Ryan
84.82
90.35
83.94
82.50
1998
Steven Spielberg
109
Cinema Paradiso
84.78
82.30
84.73
83.43
1988
Giuseppe Tornatore
110
La Jetée
84.75
89.25
83.27
81.80
1962
Chris Marker
111
The Wages of Fear
84.71
94.60
82.99
82.80
1953
Henri-Georges Clouzot
112
Das Boot
84.68
90.13
83.62
82.71
1981
Wolfgang Petersen
113
Fight Club
84.65
71.18
86.39
84.95
1999
David Fincher
114
Nights of Cabiria
84.64
92.25
82.72
83.13
1957
Federico Fellini
115
La Strada
84.61
92.60
80.79
82.78
1954
Federico Fellini
116
Amadeus
84.53
89.55
82.88
82.59
1984
Miloš Forman
117
Forrest Gump
84.50
76.90
83.06
86.12
1994
Robert Zemeckis
118
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
84.49
90.41
85.03
81.69
2018
Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman, Bob Persichetti
119
The Lion King
84.45
88.28
77.22
84.09
1994
Rob Minkoff, Roger Allers
120
Inception
84.43
82.07
84.18
84.17
2010
Christopher Nolan
121
Whiplash
84.42
89.53
84.87
81.96
2014
Damien Chazelle
122
The Shop Around the Corner
84.40
94.43
80.85
82.37
1940
Ernst Lubitsch
123
Rififi
84.38
92.00
83.03
81.58
1955
Jules Dassin
124
Umberto D.
84.38
92.63
82.20
81.75
1952
Vittorio De Sica
125
Army of Shadows
84.37
95.30
82.98
80.50
1969
Jean-Pierre Melville
126
Blade Runner
84.34
85.85
82.57
80.29
1982
Ridley Scott
127
Samurai Rebellion
84.33
89.05
82.85
83.84
1967
Masaki Kobayashi
128
Close-Up
84.31
85.70
81.99
80.69
1990
Abbas Kiarostami
129
The Circus
84.29
90.35
81.69
83.14
1928
Charlie Chaplin
130
Raiders of the Lost Ark
84.19
89.33
84.31
80.57
1981
Steven Spielberg
131
Grand Illusion
84.18
95.35
81.85
79.78
1937
Jean Renoir
132
A Clockwork Orange
84.18
82.78
82.37
82.51
1971
Stanley Kubrick
133
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
84.07
89.37
83.36
80.57
2004
Michel Gondry
134
A Woman Under the Influence
84.01
87.40
82.51
80.40
1974
John Cassavetes
135
The Cranes Are Flying
84.00
89.30
82.76
82.40
1957
Mikhail Kalatozov
136
Yi Yi
83.91
91.25
82.48
79.64
2000
Edward Yang
137
To Kill a Mockingbird
83.91
89.13
81.98
82.20
1962
Robert Mulligan
138
The Matrix
83.90
77.78
84.54
83.06
1999
Wachowski Sisters
139
The Sting
83.90
85.73
82.71
83.36
1973
George Roy Hill
140
The Mother and the Whore
83.87
94.55
81.24
79.82
1973
Jean Eustache
141
Se7en
83.86
72.15
84.91
84.48
1995
David Fincher
142
Early Summer
83.85
94.45
82.19
82.01
1951
Yasujirō Ozu
143
Werckmeister Harmonies
83.80
91.73
80.89
81.93
2000
Béla Tarr, Ágnes Hranitzky
144
Coco
83.80
86.21
82.73
83.66
2017
Adrian Molina, Lee Unkrich
145
Toy Story
83.76
95.03
82.30
80.15
1995
John Lasseter
146
It Happened One Night
83.76
90.83
81.46
81.76
1934
Frank Capra
147
Reservoir Dogs
83.74
84.68
83.12
81.99
1992
Quentin Tarantino
148
Unforgiven
83.73
88.55
82.24
81.59
1992
Clint Eastwood
149
The Deer Hunter
83.73
87.68
80.57
82.06
1978
Michael Cimino
150
The Young and the Damned
83.72
87.10
82.58
80.82
1950
Luis Buñuel
151
The Best Years of Our Lives
83.68
92.63
81.19
81.20
1946
William Wyler
152
The Leopard
83.66
97.30
79.56
79.57
1963
Luchino Visconti
153
Time of the Gypsies
83.65
86.05
83.31
82.29
1988
Emir Kusturica
154
Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
83.61
96.70
80.51
79.97
1974
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
155
Raise the Red Lantern
83.57
90.25
82.37
81.81
1991
Zhang Yimou
156
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
83.57
82.00
84.11
81.83
1991
James Cameron
157
The Shining
83.55
75.35
84.08
81.80
1980
Stanley Kubrick
158
Viridiana
83.54
92.95
80.68
80.81
1961
Luis Buñuel
159
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
83.52
93.59
83.08
80.02
2019
Céline Sciamma
160
Greed
83.51
97.05
80.65
80.64
1924
Erich von Stroheim
161
Gone with the Wind
83.48
92.90
80.01
81.68
1939
Victor Fleming
162
There Will Be Blood
83.48
89.65
81.91
79.02
2007
Paul Thomas Anderson
163
L.A. Confidential
83.46
91.63
82.08
80.81
1997
Curtis Hanson
164
Paris, Texas
83.46
83.95
82.89
81.66
1984
Wim Wenders
165
Throne of Blood
83.45
91.30
82.18
81.49
1957
Akira Kurosawa
166
Toy Story 3
83.43
93.55
81.61
80.32
2010
Lee Unkrich
167
Memento
83.43
85.20
83.78
80.76
2000
Christopher Nolan
168
On the Waterfront
83.37
93.00
82.23
79.52
1954
Elia Kazan
169
Trip to the Moon
83.37
94.70
79.96
82.83
1902
Georges Méliès
170
The Rules of the Game
83.33
96.55
80.45
78.02
1939
Jean Renoir
171
Red Beard
83.32
74.15
83.41
83.27
1965
Akira Kurosawa
172
The Grapes of Wrath
83.32
95.45
80.42
80.34
1940
John Ford
173
Au Hasard Balthazar
83.29
98.08
77.93
77.54
1966
Robert Bresson
174
Autumn Sonata
83.29
84.85
83.09
82.66
1978
Ingmar Bergman
175
Annie Hall
83.28
93.18
80.58
80.58
1977
Woody Allen
176
The Conformist
83.27
96.68
79.92
78.58
1970
Bernardo Bertolucci
177
Rocco and His Brothers
83.24
84.73
81.95
81.68
1960
Luchino Visconti
178
Dersu Uzala
83.23
74.75
82.35
83.37
1975
Akira Kurosawa
179
Cool Hand Luke
83.21
93.05
82.22
79.83
1967
Stuart Rosenberg
180
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
83.18
91.98
82.96
79.30
1975
Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones
181
Le Samouraï
83.18
92.35
82.45
79.40
1967
Jean-Pierre Melville
182
Aliens
83.18
88.73
83.29
79.61
1986
James Cameron
183
PlayTime
83.16
93.50
80.22
78.80
1967
Jacques Tati
184
The Bridge on the River Kwai
83.14
90.58
81.93
80.24
1957
David Lean
185
The Red Shoes
83.13
93.15
82.82
79.96
1948
Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
186
American Beauty
83.10
87.15
81.93
81.13
1999
Sam Mendes
187
To Live
83.10
84.00
82.16
82.46
1994
Zhang Yimou
188
Battleship Potemkin
83.10
95.85
77.81
80.41
1925
Sergei Eisenstein
189
Day of Wrath
83.09
93.40
81.07
81.29
1943
Carl Theodor Dreyer
190
All Quiet on the Western Front
83.07
92.85
80.05
81.48
1930
Lewis Milestone
191
It's Such a Beautiful Day
83.07
91.25
83.62
79.77
2012
Don Hertzfeldt
192
Full Metal Jacket
83.06
81.53
82.21
82.54
1987
Stanley Kubrick
193
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
83.05
96.40
79.84
81.83
1920
Robert Wiene
194
Kes
83.03
97.80
79.59
80.55
1969
Ken Loach
195
The Usual Suspects
83.02
80.23
84.08
81.48
1995
Bryan Singer
196
The Cameraman
83.00
93.90
80.77
81.57
1928
Edward Segdwick, Buster Keaton
197
Aparajito
83.00
90.90
81.81
81.20
1956
Satyajit Ray
198
The Elephant Man
83.00
83.00
82.10
81.87
1980
David Lynch
199
Rebecca
82.98
90.08
81.08
80.93
1940
Alfred Hitchcock
200
Make Way for Tomorrow
82.97
95.80
81.72
80.14
1937
Leo McCarey
201
The Great Escape
82.97
87.68
82.29
80.66
1963
John Sturges
202
Your Name
82.97
84.55
84.07
81.29
2016
Makoto Shinkai
203
Limelight
82.92
88.00
79.85
83.02
1952
Charlie Chaplin
204
Breathless
82.92
91.95
78.88
79.10
1960
Jean-Luc Godard
205
Underground
82.91
80.75
81.26
82.64
1995
Emir Kusturica
206
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
82.88
91.90
81.08
79.53
1962
John Ford
207
Aguirre: The Wrath of God
82.87
94.55
80.46
78.62
1972
Werner Herzog
208
Oldboy
82.86
78.98
84.00
81.27
2003
Park Chan-wook
209
Up
82.84
90.28
81.32
80.86
2009
Pete Docter
210
Anatomy of a Murder
82.84
94.00
80.57
80.02
1959
Otto Preminger
211
The Wild Bunch
82.84
90.35
79.45
80.12
1969
Sam Peckinpah
212
The Hunt
82.75
82.08
82.79
82.62
2012
Thomas Vinterberg
213
Il Sorpasso
82.74
95.75
82.84
79.57
1962
Dino Risi
214
The Last Laugh
82.74
95.25
79.47
81.61
1924
F. W. Murnau
215
A Streetcar Named Desire
82.73
94.60
79.89
80.26
1951
Elia Kazan
216
Life Is Beautiful
82.73
68.45
83.60
85.57
1997
Roberto Benigni
217
A Short Film About Love
82.71
87.10
81.90
81.89
1988
Krzysztof Kieślowski
218
The Shop on Main Street
82.71
94.45
82.15
80.43
1965
Ján Kadár, Elmar Klos
219
Rio Bravo
82.71
92.10
80.46
79.80
1959
Howard Hawks
220
Roman Holiday
82.70
84.55
80.74
82.42
1953
William Wyler
221
Ivan's Childhood
82.69
94.80
81.25
80.37
1962
Andrei Tarkovsky
222
The Exterminating Angel
82.68
91.10
81.66
80.17
1962
Luis Buñuel
223
Trainspotting
82.68
85.20
81.57
81.21
1996
Danny Boyle
224
The Last Picture Show
82.67
94.15
79.90
79.56
1971
Peter Bogdanovich
225
The Truman Show
82.64
89.63
79.70
82.15
1998
Peter Weir
226
Memories of Murder
82.64
82.88
82.68
80.94
2003
Bong Joon-ho
227
Faust
82.62
89.70
80.23
81.94
1926
F. W. Murnau
228
Sans Soleil
82.62
83.90
79.45
80.51
1983
Chris Marker
229
Song of the Sea
82.57
87.63
80.59
82.23
2014
Tomm Moore
230
Léon: The Professional
82.55
67.38
84.05
84.07
1994
Luc Besson
231
Fargo
82.54
87.45
82.36
79.19
1996
Coen Brothers
232
Solaris
82.54
89.95
80.91
79.69
1972
Andrei Tarkovsky
233
Sweet Smell of Success
82.52
96.53
80.81
77.62
1957
Alexander Mackendrick
234
For a Few Dollars More
82.52
79.28
82.38
83.15
1965
Sergio Leone
235
White Heat
82.51
90.65
80.77
81.24
1949
Raoul Walsh
236
Brief Encounter
82.50
88.35
80.81
81.03
1945
David Lean
237
Wings of Desire
82.49
85.70
81.30
80.42
1987
Wim Wenders
238
Diabolique
82.47
90.70
81.27
80.73
1955
Henri-Georges Clouzot
239
An Autumn Afternoon
82.45
91.95
81.68
79.85
1962
Yasujirō Ozu
240
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya
82.44
90.63
81.16
80.43
2013
Isao Takahata
241
Amarcord
82.41
85.95
79.26
80.73
1973
Federico Fellini
242
Heat
82.40
79.08
82.03
81.73
1995
Michael Mann
243
L'Atalante
82.40
95.60
78.32
78.10
1934
Jean Vigo
244
Django Unchained
82.39
83.44
82.23
81.94
2012
Quentin Tarantino
245
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels
82.38
95.50
78.73
79.69
1975
Chantal Akerman
246
Kind Hearts and Coronets
82.38
95.60
80.80
79.72
1949
Robert Hamer
247
Dog Day Afternoon
82.37
88.40
81.11
79.80
1975
Sidney Lumet
248
Forbidden Games
82.37
93.75
80.36
80.99
1952
René Clément
249
The Crowd
82.35
93.35
79.21
81.23
1928
King Vidor
250
Notorious
82.35
96.78
79.96
78.21
1946
Alfred Hitchcock
251
Mary and Max
82.35
88.05
80.95
82.42
2009
Adam Elliot
252
Persepolis
82.34
88.95
80.09
80.77
2007
Marjane Satrapi, Vincent Paronnaud
253
Howl's Moving Castle
82.33
78.71
82.63
83.10
2004
Hayao Miyazaki
254
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
82.33
85.10
81.54
82.03
1984
Hayao Miyazaki
255
Safety Last!
82.33
92.25
80.95
81.10
1923
Fred C. Newmeyer, Sam Taylor
256
Rosemary's Baby
82.32
94.78
79.99
78.69
1968
Roman Polanski
257
L'Avventura
82.32
92.10
79.08
78.03
1960
Michelangelo Antonioni
258
The Searchers
82.32
93.90
78.16
76.66
1956
John Ford
259
La Haine
82.30
90.60
82.38
79.56
1995
Mathieu Kassovitz
260
Three Colors: Blue
82.30
88.28
81.55
79.23
1993
Krzysztof Kieślowski
261
Chungking Express
82.30
79.95
82.29
80.73
1994
Wong Kar-wai
262
Inside Out
82.29
93.66
80.27
79.85
2015
Pete Docter
263
Where is the Friend's Home?
82.28
89.25
81.22
80.21
1987
Abbas Kiarostami
264
Cries and Whispers
82.27
85.45
81.02
80.80
1972
Ingmar Bergman
265
Napoleon
82.22
93.25
81.89
78.99
1927
Abel Gance
266
Paper Moon
82.19
83.08
81.37
81.29
1973
Peter Bogdanovich
267
The Spirit of the Beehive
82.17
89.83
79.31
78.91
1973
Víctor Erice
268
A Special Day
82.16
90.20
81.11
81.25
1977
Ettore Scola
269
Nostalghia
82.15
83.00
80.91
81.23
1983
Andrei Tarkovsky
270
Network
82.13
85.45
82.36
79.08
1976
Sidney Lumet
271
L'Eclisse
82.11
84.70
79.78
78.81
1962
Michelangelo Antonioni
272
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
82.09
80.83
81.78
81.15
1939
Frank Capra
273
Sanjuro
82.09
91.90
81.67
80.85
1962
Akira Kurosawa
274
Badlands
82.06
93.38
79.77
77.21
1973
Terrence Malick
275
Vivre Sa Vie
82.06
85.20
80.12
79.83
1962
Jean-Luc Godard
276
Nobody Knows
82.06
87.18
81.12
81.15
2004
Hirokazu Koreeda
277
No Country for Old Men
82.05
90.68
80.56
78.47
2007
Coen Brothers
278
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring
82.05
86.05
80.76
80.62
2003
Kim Ki-duk
279
La Notte
82.04
78.35
81.45
81.11
1961
Michelangelo Antonioni
280
The Celebration
82.04
84.23
81.34
80.08
1998
Thomas Vinterberg
281
In the Name of the Father
82.04
84.90
81.14
81.85
1993
Jim Sheridan
282
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
82.02
89.55
80.18
81.56
1932
Mervyn LeRoy
283
Shoplifters
82.01
92.39
80.60
79.31
2018
Hirokazu Koreeda
284
Finding Nemo
82.01
92.60
80.13
78.76
2003
Andrew Stanton, Lee Unkrich
285
Z
81.98
87.55
82.21
79.59
1969
Costa-Gavras
286
The Phantom Carriage
81.96
95.00
80.01
80.32
1921
Victor Sjöström
287
Manhattan
81.95
86.23
80.50
79.81
1979
Woody Allen
288
Rome, Open City
81.94
95.40
80.45
79.27
1945
Robert Rossellini
289
Children of Heaven
81.93
80.15
81.24
82.01
1997
Majid Majidi
290
The Green Mile
81.92
71.93
82.95
84.38
1999
Frank Darabont
291
The Iron Giant
81.91
86.61
80.88
79.95
1999
Brad Bird
292
The Sacrifice
81.90
80.30
80.47
81.37
1986
Andrei Tarkovsky
293
The Philadelphia Story
81.90
94.95
79.79
77.86
1940
George Cukor
294
The Twilight Samurai
81.90
86.10
81.07
81.13
2002
Yôji Yamada
295
Before Sunset
81.88
87.79
81.42
78.41
2004
Richard Linklater
296
Before Sunrise
81.86
84.40
82.24
79.44
1995
Richard Linklater
297
Castle in the Sky
81.85
81.63
81.49
82.06
1986
Hayao Miyazaki
298
The Departed
81.84
86.92
82.82
79.04
2006
Martin Scorsese
299
Brazil
81.83
90.23
80.61
78.37
1985
Terry Gilliam
300
Incendies
81.81
83.85
81.88
80.74
2011
Denis Villenueve
301
The Maltese Falcon
81.81
95.65
80.24
77.28
1941
John Huston
302
The Wizard of Oz
81.77
98.03
79.38
77.17
1939
Victor Fleming
303
Le Cercle Rouge
81.76
90.03
80.81
78.54
1970
Jean-Pierre Melville
304
Monsieur Verdoux
81.76
89.80
78.55
81.34
1947
Charlie Chaplin
305
The Return
81.72
84.85
80.02
80.96
2003
Andrey Zvyagintsev
306
Secrets & Lies
81.71
90.73
80.29
78.66
1996
Mike Leigh
307
The Hidden Fortress
81.70
91.25
80.79
80.72
1958
Akira Kurosawa
308
Pan's Labyrinth
81.69
92.59
81.60
76.08
2006
Guillermo del Toro
309
Amélie
81.69
79.64
81.96
80.27
2004
Jean-Pierre Jeunet
310
Ben-Hur
81.67
86.93
79.86
80.22
1959
William Wyler
311
Fitzcarraldo
81.67
75.80
81.06
81.21
1982
Werner Herzog
312
American History X
81.63
70.13
83.58
83.00
1998
Tony Kaye
313
Ace in the Hole
81.62
79.10
80.88
81.36
1951
Billy Wilder
314
Capernaum
81.62
81.83
80.52
82.18
2018
Nadine Labaki
315
Still Walking
81.61
90.30
80.92
79.48
2008
Hirokazu Koreeda
316
All About My Mother
81.61
88.77
79.56
78.80
1999
Pedro Almodóvar
317
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
81.60
92.28
78.82
78.83
1972
Luis Buñuel
318
Platoon
81.60
88.70
79.52
80.45
1986
Oliver Stone
319
Farewell My Concubine
81.60
80.50
80.49
81.04
1993
Chen Kaige
320
Letter from an Unknown Woman
81.59
93.10
79.84
79.31
1948
Max Ophüls
321
The Grand Budapest Hotel
81.58
87.64
80.72
79.19
2014
Wes Anderson
322
The Virgin Spring
81.58
82.45
80.70
80.66
1960
Ingmar Bergman
323
The Red Balloon
81.57
90.20
79.93
80.30
1956
Albert Lamorisse
324
Stagecoach
81.57
94.58
77.69
78.94
1939
John Ford
325
Mulholland Drive
81.56
80.61
79.60
77.87
2001
David Lynch
326
A Matter of Life and Death
81.49
92.60
81.91
76.27
1946
Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
327
High Noon
81.48
90.58
79.27
78.94
1952
Fred Zinnemann
328
Orpheus
81.48
96.20
79.88
78.90
1950
Jean Cocteau
329
Life of Brian
81.47
82.98
80.78
79.81
1979
Terry Jones
330
Casino
81.46
74.23
81.54
81.75
1995
Martin Scorsese
331
Kagemusha
81.44
82.93
80.01
80.43
1980
Akira Kurosawa
332
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
81.43
76.08
80.53
81.85
1969
George Roy Hill
333
In a Lonely Place
81.43
92.45
80.42
78.77
1950
Nicholas Ray
334
Scarface
81.43
71.30
81.97
82.18
1983
Brian De Palma
335
A Short Film About Killing
81.42
87.35
79.89
80.38
1988
Krzysztof Kieślowski
336
Beauty and the Beast
81.41
92.05
79.28
78.32
1946
Jean Cocteau
337
The Hustler
81.39
92.45
80.43
78.97
1961
Robert Rossen
338
Cléo from 5 to 7
81.38
91.65
80.03
79.11
1962
Agnès Varda
339
Fireworks
81.37
90.15
80.01
79.63
1997
Takeshi Kitano
340
Room
81.36
88.41
80.43
79.48
2015
Lenny Abrahamson
341
Mad Max: Fury Road
81.35
90.39
79.76
77.80
2015
George Miller
342
Steamboat Bill, Jr.
81.32
95.75
79.30
79.23
1928
Charles Reisner, Buster Keaton
343
Judgment at Nuremberg
81.31
71.58
82.24
83.03
1961
Stanley Kramer
344
The Straight Story
81.30
87.15
79.64
79.88
1999
David Lynch
345
Meshes of the Afternoon
81.29
96.25
77.91
79.99
1943
Maya Deren, Alexandr Hackenschmied
346
Alice in the Cities
81.28
86.70
79.60
80.20
1974
Wim Wenders
347
Akira
81.28
80.90
81.12
79.98
1988
Katsuhiro Otomo
348
Good Will Hunting
81.27
79.38
81.97
81.05
1997
Gus Van Sant
349
The Miracle Worker
81.25
85.15
78.88
81.55
1962
Arthur Penn
350
Talk to Her
81.25
87.48
79.33
78.71
2002
Pedro Almodóvar
351
The Graduate
81.24
85.58
78.91
79.97
1967
Mike Nichols
352
Beauty and the Beast
81.22
92.28
79.20
78.77
1991
Gary Trousdale, Kirk Wise
353
The Heiress
81.19
94.45
80.20
79.76
1949
William Wyler
354
Fantasia
81.18
93.03
76.76
79.95
1940
Samuel Armstrong, James Algar
355
Au Revoir les Enfants
81.18
94.25
80.14
78.92
1987
Louis Malle
356
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
81.18
88.62
79.36
79.90
2017
Martin McDonagh
357
Inglourious Basterds
81.17
79.05
81.06
80.51
2009
Quentin Tarantino
358
Elevator to the Gallows
81.16
90.45
79.31
78.56
1958
Louis Malle
359
Gladiator
81.16
75.39
81.69
81.52
2000
Ridley Scott
360
Through a Glass Darkly
81.15
93.60
81.11
78.86
1961
Ingmar Bergman
361
Million Dollar Baby
81.15
87.41
77.43
80.72
2004
Clint Eastwood
362
Days of Heaven
81.15
90.75
80.19
77.08
1978
Terrence Malick
363
Do the Right Thing
81.15
90.78
80.26
77.04
1989
Spike Lee
364
Out of the Past
81.14
91.40
80.73
77.92
1947
Jacques Tourneur
365
Strangers on a Train
81.11
93.30
80.01
78.68
1951
Alfred Hitchcock
366
Blue Velvet
81.11
83.48
78.98
77.09
1986
David Lynch
367
That Obscure Object of Desire
81.09
89.40
79.59
78.11
1977
Luis Buñuel
368
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
81.08
80.23
80.74
80.75
1962
Robert Aldrich
369
My Night at Maud's
81.07
88.15
79.51
79.42
1969
Éric Rohmer
370
The Earrings of Madame de…
81.07
92.15
80.36
77.05
1953
Max Ophüls
371
The Conversation
81.04
89.23
80.03
77.44
1974
Francis Ford Coppola
372
The Killing
81.03
91.50
79.51
79.21
1956
Stanley Kubrick
373
The Servant
81.03
87.83
79.45
78.57
1963
Joseph Losey
374
The Intouchables
81.03
67.15
82.13
84.70
2011
Olivier Nakache, Éric Toledano
375
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
81.01
94.15
81.57
75.44
1943
Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
376
Jaws
81.01
90.98
79.91
75.70
1975
Steven Spielberg
377
Winter Light
81.01
73.55
81.51
79.95
1963
Ingmar Bergman
378
Love Exposure
81.01
80.88
82.23
79.55
2008
Sion Sono
379
Hiroshima Mon Amour
81.00
92.95
80.13
77.99
1959
Alain Resnais
380
Day for Night
80.98
92.55
80.21
78.27
1973
François Truffaut
381
Ratatouille
80.97
92.73
78.72
78.68
2007
Brad Bird
382
Ghost in the Shell
80.97
81.43
79.98
81.15
1995
Mamoru Oshii
383
Germany Year Zero
80.95
92.00
77.80
80.03
1948
Roberto Rossellini
384
Spotlight
80.93
93.00
79.75
77.55
2015
Tom McCarthy
385
Die Hard
80.93
79.58
81.11
79.43
1988
John McTiernan
386
Laura
80.93
93.80
79.70
78.47
1944
Otto Preminger
387
Sleuth
80.93
89.95
79.16
80.87
1972
Joseph L. Mankiewicz
388
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
80.92
88.64
79.69
77.84
2007
Julian Schnabel
389
The Handmaiden
80.92
85.99
82.55
77.41
2016
Park Chan-wook
390
Stand by Me
80.90
80.20
81.28
79.54
1986
Rob Reiner
391
Wolf Children
80.90
80.15
80.40
81.27
2012
Mamoru Hosoda
392
Marriage Story
80.88
92.86
79.40
77.75
2019
Noam Baumbach
393
Shoeshine
80.87
93.75
79.02
79.38
1946
Vittorio De Sica
394
Freaks
80.85
84.70
77.66
80.31
1932
Tod Browning
395
Nosferatu
80.85
93.75
78.29
79.14
1922
F. W. Murnau
396
Dial M for Murder
80.84
77.60
81.17
81.31
1954
Alfred Hitchcock
397
Amour
80.81
90.90
77.74
78.19
2012
Michael Haneke
398
12 Years a Slave
80.80
94.00
79.74
76.94
2013
Steve McQueen
399
The Nightmare Before Christmas
80.77
85.38
79.26
79.69
1993
Henry Selick
400
Cabaret
80.77
84.68
77.34
80.69
1972
Bob Fosse
401
Central Station
80.77
83.28
80.91
78.52
1998
Walter Salles
402
Landscape in the Mist
80.74
71.35
80.76
80.28
1988
Theo Angelopoulos
403
1917
80.73
84.37
80.65
79.33
2019
Sam Mendes
404
Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages
80.71
93.98
75.69
78.01
1916
D. W. Griffith
405
Call Me by Your Name
80.71
91.25
79.43
77.87
2017
Luca Guadagnino
406
Midnight Cowboy
80.71
82.98
79.10
79.50
1969
John Schlesinger
407
Shadow of a Doubt
80.70
94.38
79.31
76.04
1943
Alfred Hitchcock
408
Interstellar
80.70
74.16
81.30
82.25
2014
Christopher Nolan
409
Hannah and Her Sisters
80.69
88.95
79.15
77.98
1986
Woody Allen
410
Monsters, Inc.
80.68
85.29
79.37
80.08
2001
Pete Docter, David Silverman
411
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
80.65
85.85
79.40
79.38
1933
Fritz Lang
412
Downfall
80.64
83.53
81.54
78.55
2004
Oliver Hirschbiegel
413
Being There
80.64
87.30
79.42
78.06
1979
Hal Ashby
414
The Killer
80.63
92.60
79.27
78.66
1989
John Woo
415
My Left Foot: The Story of Christy Brown
80.63
93.23
78.13
79.15
1989
Jim Sheridan
416
Jean de Florette
80.60
88.40
80.18
79.69
1986
Claude Berri
417
The Big Lebowski
80.57
74.80
82.28
78.57
1998
Coen Brothers
418
The King's Speech
80.57
90.86
78.50
78.59
2010
Tom Hooper
419
Whisper of the Heart
80.55
79.98
80.80
80.31
1995
Yoshifumi Kondō
420
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
80.54
93.08
77.22
77.82
1982
Steven Spielberg
421
Infernal Affairs
80.54
79.83
79.92
80.22
2002
Andrew Lau, Alan Mak
422
The Prestige
80.54
72.22
82.71
81.38
2006
Christopher Nolan
423
Our Hospitality
80.54
92.85
77.72
79.58
1923
Buster Keaton, John G. Blystone
424
Zootopia
80.53
85.22
78.84
80.18
2016
Byron Howard, Rich Moore
425
Toy Story 2
80.49
92.59
78.51
77.05
1999
John Lasseter, Ash Brannon, Lee Unkrich
426
Klaus
80.48
75.00
81.07
81.41
2019
Sergio Pablos
427
The Big Sleep
80.45
92.10
79.74
77.58
1946
Howard Hawks
428
Ford v Ferrari
80.45
83.94
79.37
80.01
2019
James Mangold
429
Dead Poets Society
80.44
78.70
79.43
80.75
1989
Peter Weir
430
The Terminator
80.43
89.08
78.26
78.13
1984
James Cameron
431
Naked
80.43
84.48
80.39
77.34
1993
Mike Leigh
432
Dangal
80.41
83.00
79.68
80.56
2016
Nitesh Tiwari
433
Kwaidan
80.40
81.80
79.75
79.42
1964
Masaki Kobayashi
434
The Man Who Would Be King
80.40
90.55
78.24
77.79
1975
John Huston
435
Wild Tales
80.38
82.57
80.48
79.22
2014
Damián Szifron
436
Groundhog Day
80.38
80.08
79.31
79.35
1993
Harold Ramis
437
Catch Me If You Can
80.38
83.44
78.74
80.57
2002
Steven Spielberg
438
I Vitelloni
80.36
90.28
77.64
78.06
1953
Federico Fellini
439
The Big Heat
80.35
92.90
79.27
77.87
1953
Fritz Lang
440
The Double Life of Véronique
80.35
82.63
80.19
77.87
1991
Krzysztof Kieślowski
441
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
80.35
82.58
80.19
78.43
1966
Mike Nichols
442
Requiem for a Dream
80.33
71.39
81.39
80.93
2000
Darren Aronofsky
443
Rope
80.33
79.20
80.31
79.30
1948
Alfred Hitchcock
444
Love and Death
80.33
89.83
77.55
78.50
1975
Woody Allen
445
The Remains of the Day
80.29
86.88
78.75
78.80
1993
James Ivory
446
Jules and Jim
80.28
93.70
78.30
77.94
1962
François Truffaut
447
The Gospel According to Matthew
80.28
88.30
76.50
78.52
1964
Pier Paolo Pasolini
448
How to Train Your Dragon
80.27
81.97
79.45
80.24
2010
Chris Sanders, Dean DeBlois
449
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
80.27
88.50
78.81
78.53
2011
David Yates
450
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
80.26
87.05
79.46
79.79
1958
Richard Brooks
451
The French Connection
80.26
93.35
78.04
76.89
1971
William Friedkin
452
Opening Night
80.25
78.05
80.50
79.25
1977
John Cassavetes
453
Hotel Rwanda
80.24
84.54
79.34
79.40
2004
Terry George
454
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
80.22
92.51
77.76
76.22
2007
Cristian Mungiu
455
Tampopo
80.22
92.40
81.20
77.01
1985
Juzo Itami
456
Scarface
80.22
93.50
76.43
79.55
1932
Howard Hawks, Howard Hughes
457
The Face of Another
80.21
87.50
79.61
79.34
1966
Hiroshi Teshigahara
458
The Roaring Twenties
80.21
86.20
77.79
80.68
1939
Raoul Walsh
459
Pickpocket
80.20
93.80
76.41
76.47
1959
Robert Bresson
460
Kiki's Delivery Service
80.20
85.45
79.87
78.84
1989
Hayao Miyazaki
461
A Prophet
80.19
89.61
79.53
76.14
2009
Jacques Audiard
462
Zelig
80.19
90.00
76.50
80.29
1983
Woody Allen
463
Trouble in Paradise
80.18
88.20
79.35
77.62
1932
Ernst Lubitsch
464
Gran Torino
80.17
76.27
78.57
82.36
2008
Clint Eastwood
465
Last Year at Marienbad
80.16
88.25
78.29
77.37
1961
Alain Resnais
466
All the President's Men
80.15
85.95
80.48
76.46
1976
Alan J. Pakula
467
Breaking the Waves
80.15
79.85
78.46
79.55
1996
Lars von Trier
468
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
80.14
74.28
81.44
80.57
1989
Steven Spielberg
469
Divorce Italian Style
80.12
91.00
79.28
78.26
1961
Pietro Germi
470
Edward Scissorhands
80.12
78.65
78.09
80.73
1990
Tim Burton
471
The Thing
80.12
67.98
82.60
79.34
1982
John Carpenter
472
Perfect Blue
80.11
74.05
80.91
80.09
1997
Satoshi Kon
473
Down by Law
80.10
79.03
78.98
79.61
1986
Jim Jarmusch
474
Bringing Up Baby
80.10
90.75
78.25
76.45
1938
Howard Hawks
475
The Phantom of Liberty
80.09
85.10
78.89
78.66
1974
Luis Buñuel
476
Bonnie and Clyde
80.07
85.38
78.16
78.23
1967
Arthur Penn
477
The Incredibles
80.07
89.69
79.77
75.78
2004
Brad Bird
478
Rocky
80.04
79.73
79.17
79.29
1976
John G. Avildsen
479
His Girl Friday
80.03
94.15
79.24
76.72
1940
Howard Hawks
480
Mommy
80.03
80.79
80.39
79.13
2014
Xavier Dolan
481
Mon Oncle
80.03
88.00
78.03
78.76
1958
Jacques Tati
482
My Fair Lady
79.99
91.85
77.53
78.00
1964
George Cukor
483
Charade
79.98
85.55
79.37
78.72
1963
Stanley Donen
484
Stalag 17
79.95
87.13
79.62
77.79
1953
Billy Wilder
485
Boyhood
79.95
97.08
76.08
75.95
2014
Richard Linklater
486
The Secret in Their Eyes
79.95
82.49
81.27
77.67
2009
Juan José Campanella
487
Ninotchka
79.95
90.15
77.99
78.50
1939
Ernst Lubitsch
488
Pierrot le Fou
79.94
81.75
77.84
76.65
1965
Jean-Luc Godard
489
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser
79.94
89.10
78.30
78.27
1974
Werner Herzog
490
Stroszek
79.94
88.40
79.50
77.77
1977
Werner Herzog
491
A Hard Day's Night
79.93
93.73
76.82
77.08
1964
Richard Lester
492
Onibaba
79.90
74.75
79.42
79.96
1964
Kaneto Shindo
493
Repulsion
79.85
92.68
77.29
76.57
1965
Roman Polanski
494
Like Stars on Earth
79.85
80.50
79.54
79.86
2007
Aamir Khan, Amole Gupte
495
Duck Soup
79.84
92.33
79.01
74.92
1933
Leo McCarey
496
Carlito's Way
79.83
70.28
79.16
82.01
1993
Brian De Palma
497
Nashville
79.82
93.23
76.89
74.92
1975
Robert Altman
498
The Triplets of Belleville
79.82
88.97
76.57
78.66
2003
Sylvain Chomet
499
Dr. Mabuse the Gambler
79.81
85.10
76.88
79.98
1922
Fritz Lang
500
Gone Girl
79.79
83.03
79.32
78.87
2014
David Fincher
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Casinos want players to crave that smell of the good times. Yes, in casinos, we experience wins and losses. The joy of the win certainly overpowers the downer of a loss. Did you know that in casinos they put "scent" smells through the air vents to keep you in the casino longer? Plus also they offer FREE (yer right) Tea/coffee and sandwiches. They know that the... Why do hotels smell good? Hotels diffuse scent through their lobbies and common areas with air diffusers. … Usually, they also provide scented extensions to their Housekeeping managers like room sprays to make sure that the rooms have a welcoming scent as well. The simple answer is that there are metal devices the size of breadboxes attached to the ventilation systems of nearly every Strip resort. The boxes vaporize highly aromatic and shockingly ... Vegas casinos are most famous for this behavior. Vegas casinos act like primadonnas when it comes to their unique scents. It’s there because it makes them money. The Vegas casinos act like that girl in high school who gets upset when someone (another casino) copies their outfit. While the smell-memory link is such a personal one (in that a particular smell can trigger “good” memories in some but “bad” memories in others) and is therefore unpredictable, scientists have discovered some scents that almost always create feelings of well-being, and unsurprisingly, these fragrances make up the majority of the arsenal of fragrances used by casinos. Why would anything so profit-minded as a casino bother? It’s because humans are wired so that smell is a weird and powerful sense. Why do casinos smell like they do? No, not the smell of menthols, sticky drinks and desperation. That's everywhere. Rather, why does the Bellagio smell like the Bellagio and why does the Venetian ... Casinos modeled after that mold may have you betting at lightning speed, too. In one study, Griffiths found 56 volunteers to play roulette, piping in different combinations of music and lighting ...