Team has been involved in a substantial number of the digital media, sports, entertainment, leisure and gaming industries’ most significant merger and acquisition transactions, holding key positions at, and transacting with Scientific Games Corp, Inspired Gaming Group, FOX Bets, Ocean Casino Resort, Resorts International Holdings, PokerStars, DraftKings, Mohegan Sun, Caesars Entertainment Corporation, Harrah’s Entertainment, Tropicana Entertainment, Inc., TSG/Sky Betting & Gaming, Facebook, Inc, Wynn Resorts, Dubai World/MGM Resorts
Here's all the Bios. These guys are stellar! TEKK closed at $10.30 today. Still cheap!
If you don't like to read... you don't like to make money!!!!
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Matthew Davey — Chief Executive Officer and Director
Mr. Davey has over 25 years of experience within the digital media, sports, entertainment, leisure and gaming ecosystems, as well as experience in the public sector. He is an experienced public company executive officer and board member. He has served in executive management positions across the gaming technology arena. Over the course of Mr. Davey’s career, he oversaw more than ten mergers and acquisitions and over $1.2 billion in debt and equity capital raised to support the companies he has led.
Most recently, Mr. Davey was Chief Executive Officer of SG Digital, the Digital Division of Scientific Games Corp. (“Scientific Games”) (Nasdaq: SGMS). SG Digital was established following the purchase by Scientific Games of NYX Gaming Group Limited (“NYX”) (formerly TSXV: NYX), where Mr. Davey served as Chief Executive Officer and Director. The NYX acquisition provided Scientific Games with a vehicle to significantly accelerate the scale and breadth of its existing digital gaming business, including the strategic expansion into sports betting. In his capacity as Chief Executive Officer of NYX, Mr. Davey developed and implemented a corporate strategy that generated strong revenue growth. Mr. Davey shaped company strategy to focus on digital gaming supplier platforms and content that provided various gaming operators with the underlying gaming and sports betting systems for their online gaming business. In 2014, Mr. Davey oversaw the initial public offering of NYX, and his experience in the digital media, sports, entertainment, leisure and gaming industries helped NYX recognize momentum as a public company. After the public offering, from 2014 to 2018, Mr. Davey oversaw seven acquisitions which helped establish NYX as one of the fastest growing global B2B real-money digital gaming and sports betting platforms. These acquisitions included:
• OpenBet: In 2016, NYX completed the $385 million acquisition of OpenBet. This was one of the more complex and transformative acquisitions that Mr. Davey oversaw at NYX. Through securing co-investments from William Hill (LSE: WMH), Sky Betting & Gaming and The Stars Group (formerly Nasdaq: TSG, TSX: TSGI), Mr. Davey was able to get the acquisition from Vitruvian Partners completed successfully, winning the deal against much larger and well capitalized competitors. By combining two established and proven B2B betting and gaming suppliers, NYX was well positioned to provide customers with exciting player-driven solutions across all major product verticals and distribution channels. This allowed NYX to become the leading B2B omni-channel sportsbook platform in the market and the supplier to over 300 gaming operators globally with an extensive library of desktop and mobile game titles, including more than 700 on NYX platforms and more than 2,000 on the OpenBet platform.
• Cryptologic/Chartwell: In 2015, NYX completed the $119 million acquisition of Cryptologic and Chartwell. The acquisition provided NYX with more than 400 titles of additional leading gaming content, a broader customer base, and direct exposure to PokerStars and Intercasino, part of the Gamesys Group (LSE: GYS) — two of the world’s largest online casino offerings.
• OnGame: In 2014, NYX completed the distressed acquisition of OnGame, a premier poker content, platform and service provider. This acquisition provided NYX with one of the best poker products in the industry, access to several regulated jurisdictions, and a valuable talent pool that was instrumental in the growth of NYX. The addition of OnGame further established a path for NYX to continue its growth in both European and U.S. markets.
These acquisitions, together with meaningful organic growth, increased NYX’s revenue from $24 million in 2014 to $184 million annualized in 2017. During that time, Mr. Davey helped build NYX to have over 200 customers in the global gaming industry and a team of 1,000 employees. Mr. Davey’s success at NYX ultimately led to its sale to Scientific Games for $631 million in 2018.
Mr. Davey joined Next Gen Gaming, the predecessor to NYX, in 2000 as the Vice President of Technology, was appointed as Executive Director in 2003 and named Chief Executive Officer in 2005. Prior to that, he was the Senior Consultant for Access Systems, a company that specializes in the provision of back-end software for licensed online casinos. Prior to joining Access, Mr. Davey worked for the Northern Territory Government specializing in matters pertaining to the internet and e-commerce along with roles in the Department of Racing and Gaming. Mr. Davey received a Bachelor of Electrical & Electronic Engineering from Northern Territory University, Australia (also known as Charles Darwin University).
Robin Chhabra — President
Mr. Chhabra has been at the forefront of corporate acquisition activity within the digital gaming landscape for over a decade. His prior experience includes leading corporate strategy, M&A, and business development at two of the global leaders in the digital gaming industry, The Stars Group (“TSG”) and William Hill, and a leading supplier, Inspired Gaming Group (Nasdaq: INSE). Mr. Chhabra served on the Group Executive Committees of each of these companies. From 2017 to May 2020, Mr. Chhabra served as Chief Corporate Development Officer at TSG and, from 2019 to August 2020, he also served as the Chief Executive Officer of Fox Bet, a leading U.S. online gaming business which is the product of a landmark partnership between TSG and FOX Sports, a transaction which he led. During that period, Mr. Chhabra led several transactions which transformed TSG into the largest publicly listed online gambling operator in the world by both revenue and market capitalization and one of the most diversified from a product and geographic perspective with revenues of over $2.5 billion. Mr. Chhabra’s M&A experience is extensive and covers multiple global geographies across the digital gaming value chain and includes the following:
• TSG/Flutter Entertainment Merger: In 2019, Mr. Chhabra led the TSG M&A team that was responsible for TSG’s $12.2 billion merger with Flutter Entertainment (LSE: FLTR). The merger between TSG and Flutter Entertainment is the largest transaction in the digital gaming industry to date. The combination created the largest publicly listed online gaming company with approximately 13 million active customers and leading product offerings, which include sports betting, online casino, fantasy sports and poker. The combined entity includes some of the world’s most iconic digital gaming brands such as Fanduel, Fox Bet, Sky Bet, PaddyPower, Betfair, PokerStars and SportsBet. TSG/Flutter Entertainment is one of the most geographically diverse digital gaming and media companies with leading positions in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Germany and Georgia.
• TSG/Sky Betting and Gaming (“SBG”): In 2018, Mr. Chhabra led the acquisition of SBG from CVC Capital Partners and Sky plc, Europe’s largest media company, in a transaction valued at $4.7 billion. At the time of the acquisition SBG was the largest mobile gambling operator in the United Kingdom and one of the fastest growing of the major operators having doubled its online market share in three years. The acquisition of SBG provided TSG with (a) greater revenue diversification, significantly enhanced expertise and exposure to sports betting just ahead of the judicial overturn of The Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 (PASPA) by the U.S. Supreme Court, (b) a leading position within the United Kingdom, the world’s largest regulated online gaming market, (c) improved products and technology as a result of the addition of SBG’s innovative casino and sports book offerings and a portfolio of popular mobile apps, and (d) expertise in deeply integrating sports betting with leading sports media companies, positioning TSG to create more engaging content, deliver faster growth and decrease customer acquisition costs.
• William Hill (LSE: WMH): At William Hill, from 2010 to 2017, Mr. Chhabra served as Group Director of Strategy and Corporate Development where he led several transactions which contributed to William Hill’s transformation from a land-based gambling operator in the United Kingdom to a leading online-led international business. Mr. Chhabra led William Hill’s entry into the U.S. sports betting and online lottery markets with the acquisition of four businesses, including the simultaneous acquisitions of three U.S. sportsbooks, Cal Neva, American Wagering and Brandywine Bookmaking, in 2011 for an aggregate purchase price of $55 million. These businesses ultimately led William Hill to achieve a leading position in the U.S. sports betting market with a market share of 24% in 2019. Additionally, Mr. Chhabra played a key role in structuring William Hill’s successful joint venture with PlayTech Plc (LSE: PTEC) in 2008. The combined entity created one of the largest online gambling businesses in Europe at the time of its formation and led to William Hill’s buyout of Playtech’s interest for $637 million in 2013. Prior to the transaction, William Hill had struggled in its attempt to establish a strong online gaming platform and a meaningful presence outside the United Kingdom.
Mr. Chhabra has also successfully completed four transactions worth over $1.2 billion in Australia, the world’s second largest regulated online gambling market, and various partnerships in Asia. Additionally, he completed several technology and media related transactions, including William Hill’s investment in NYX, where he worked with Mr. Davey on NYX’s transformational acquisition of OpenBet.
Prior to working in the gaming sector, Mr. Chhabra was an equities analyst and a management consultant. Mr. Chhabra received a Bachelor of Science in Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Eric Matejevich — Chief Financial Officer
Mr. Matejevich is a seasoned gaming executive with extensive experience in both the online gaming and traditional casino industries. From February to August 2019, he served as Trustee and Interim-Chief Executive Officer of Ocean Casino Resort (“Ocean”) (formerly Revel Casino, which had a construction cost of $2.4 billion) in Atlantic City, where he successfully led the management team through an ownership change and operational turnaround effort. Over the course of seven months, Mr. Matejevich managed to reduce the property’s weekly cash burn of $1.5 million to an annualized cash flow run rate in excess of $20 million.
Prior to Ocean, from 2016 to 2018, Mr. Matejevich served as the Chief Financial Officer of NYX. At NYX, he focused his efforts on integrating the company’s many acquisitions and multiple debt refinancings to simplify its capital structure and provided liquidity for growth initiatives. Additionally, Mr. Matejevich was instrumental to the executive team that sold NYX to Scientific Games for $631 million.
Prior to NYX, from 2004 to 2014, Mr. Matejevich was the Chief Financial Officer of Resorts International Holdings and later, from 2011, also the Chief Operating Officer of the Atlantic Club Casino, a property under the Resorts International Holdings umbrella — a Colony Capital (NYSE: CLNY) entity. As Chief Financial Officer, he provided managerial oversight for all finance functions for a six-property casino company with annual gaming revenue exceeding $1.3 billion, 10,000 gaming positions, 7,000 hotel rooms and over 11,000 staff members during his tenure. Mr. Matejevich led the transition effort to integrate a four-casino, $1.3 billion acquisition from Harrah’s Entertainment and Caesars Entertainment (Nasdaq: CZR). As Chief Operating Officer of Atlantic Club, he lobbied for and was successful in obtaining the first internet gaming legislation passed in the United States. The Atlantic Club was the sole New Jersey casino proponent of the legislation.
Prior to serving in various gaming positions, Mr. Matejevich was a Vice President of High Yield Research for Merrill Lynch, where he managed the corporate bond research effort for the gaming and leisure sectors and marketed high yield and other debt transactions totaling $4.8 billion. Mr. Matejevich received a Bachelor of Science in Economics from The Wharton School and a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations from The College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.
Our Board of Directors
Morris Bailey — Chairman
Over the past 10 years, Mr. Bailey has been a leader in turning around Atlantic City, as well as being among the first gaming executives to embrace online gaming and sports betting in the United States. In his efforts, Mr. Bailey partnered with two of the largest digital gaming companies in the world, PokerStars, part of the Stars Group, and DraftKings (Nasdaq: DKNG). In 2010, Mr. Bailey bought Resorts Atlantic City (“Resorts”) and initiated a comprehensive renovation which allowed for the property to be rebranded and repositioned. In 2012, Mr. Bailey signed an agreement with Mohegan Sun to manage the day-to-day operations of the casino. In addition to Mohegan Sun’s operational expertise and ability to reduce costs via economies of scale, Resorts gained access to their robust customer database. Soon thereafter, Mr. Bailey and his team focused on bringing online gaming to the property. In 2015, Resorts established a platform to engage in online gaming by partnering with PokerStars, now part of the $24 billion Flutter Entertainment, PLC (LSE: FLTR), to operate an online poker room in Atlantic City. In 2018, Resorts announced deals with DraftKings and SBTech to open a sportsbook on-property and online. For 2020 year-to-date, Resorts has performed in the top quartile in internet gross gaming revenue in New Jersey. Mr. Bailey’s efforts in New Jersey helped set the framework for expansion of online sports and gaming throughout the United States.
In addition to his gaming interests, Mr. Bailey has over 50 years of experience in all facets of real estate development, asset M&A, capital markets and operations and is the founder, Chief Executive Officer and Principal of JEMB Realty, a leading real estate development, investment and management organization. Mr. Bailey has notable investment experience within the energy, finance and telecommunications sectors through investments in the Astoria Energy Plant, Basis Investment Group and Xentris Wireless.
Tony Rodio — Director Nominee
Mr. Rodio has nearly four decades of experience in the gaming industry. Most recently, Mr. Rodio served as the Chief Executive Officer and director of Caesars Entertainment Corporation (“Caesars”) (Nasdaq: CZR), one of the world’s most diversified casino-entertainment providers and the most geographically diverse U.S. casino-entertainment company, from April 2019 until its acquisition by Eldorado Resorts, Inc. in July 2020. Mr. Rodio led Caesars through its $17.3 billion merger with Eldorado Resorts, one of the largest transactions in the gaming industry to date. Additionally, Mr. Rodio was instrumental to Caesars’ expansion into the digital gaming industry and oversaw the implementation of new digital segments such as its Scientific Games powered retail sportsbook solution that now operates in various states throughout the U.S. From October 2018 to May 2019, Mr. Rodio served as Chief Executive Officer of Affinity Gaming. Prior to Affinity Gaming, he served as President, Chief Executive Officer and a director of Tropicana Entertainment, Inc. (“Tropicana”) for over seven years, where he was responsible for the operation of eight casino properties in seven different jurisdictions. During his time at Tropicana, Mr. Rodio oversaw a period of unprecedented growth at the company, improving overall financial results with net revenue that increased more than 50% driven by both operational improvements and expansion across regional markets. Mr. Rodio led major capital projects, including the complete renovation of Tropicana Atlantic City and Tropicana’s move to land-based operations in Evansville, Indiana. Each of these initiatives, among others, generated substantial value for Tropicana. Ultimately, Mr. Rodio’s efforts at Tropicana led to its sale to Eldorado Resorts in 2018 for $1.85 billion. Prior to Tropicana, Mr. Rodio held a succession of executive positions in Atlantic City for casino brands, including Trump Marina Hotel Casino, Harrah’s Entertainment (predecessor to Caesars), the Atlantic City Hilton Casino Resort and Penn National Gaming. He has also served as a director of several professional and charitable organizations, including Atlantic City Alliance, United Way of Atlantic County, the Casino Associations of New Jersey and Indiana, AtlantiCare Charitable Foundation and the Lloyd D. Levenson Institute of Gaming Hospitality & Tourism. Mr. Rodio brings extensive knowledge of and experience in the gaming industry, operational expertise, and a demonstrated ability to effectively design and implement company strategy. Mr. Rodio received a Bachelor of Science from Rider University and a Master of Business Administration from Monmouth University.
Marlon Goldstein — Director Nominee
Mr. Goldstein is a licensed attorney with nearly 20 years of experience in the gaming space. He joined The Stars Group (Nasdaq: TSG)(TSX: TSGI) in January 2014 as its Executive Vice-President, Chief Legal Officer and Secretary until his retirement from the company in July 2020 following the merger of TSG with Flutter Entertainment, PLC (LSE: FLTR). Mr. Goldstein also previously served as the Executive Vice-President, Corporate Development and General Counsel of TSG. Mr. Goldstein was also the senior TSG executive based in the United States and was one of the primary architects of TSG’s strategic vision for its U.S.-facing business. During his tenure, TSG grew from an approximately $500 million market-cap company to an approximately $7 billion market-cap company through a combination of organic growth and strategic mergers and acquisitions. Mr. Goldstein participated in numerous M&A transactions and capital markets offerings at TSG, including several transformational transactions in the digital gaming industry. Notable transactions in which Mr. Goldstein was involved include:
• TSG/Flutter Merger: In 2019, TSG merged with Flutter for a $12.2 billion transaction value, the largest transaction in the digital gaming industry to date.
• TSG/Fox Bet Partnership: In 2019, TSG entered into a partnership with FOX Sports to create FOX Bet in the U.S., a leading U.S. online gaming business. Wall Street Research estimates an approximate $1.1 billion valuation for Fox Bet post-partnership with The Stars Group.
• TSG/Sky Betting & Gaming: In 2018, TSG acquired Sky Betting & Gaming, the largest mobile gambling operator in the United Kingdom at the time, for $4.7 billion.
• TSG/CrownBet and William Hill: In 2018, TSG simultaneously acquired CrownBet and William Hill, two Australian operators, for a total of $621 million in a multi-part transaction.
• TSG/PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker: In 2014, TSG acquired The Rational Group, which operated PokerStars and Full Tilt and was the world’s largest poker business, for $4.9 billion.
Through his ability to legally structure large and complex transactions, Mr. Goldstein was integral to TSG’s vision of becoming a full-service online gaming company. Additionally, he assisted in structuring TSG’s capital markets activity, which generated liquidity for acquisitions and strengthened its balance sheet.
Prior to joining TSG, Mr. Goldstein was a principal shareholder in the corporate and securities practice at the international law firm of Greenberg Traurig P.A., where he practiced for almost 13 years. Mr. Goldstein’s practice focused on corporate and securities matters, including mergers and acquisitions, securities offerings, and financing transactions. Additionally, Mr. Goldstein was the founder and co-chair of the firm’s Gaming Practice, a multi-disciplinary team of attorneys representing owners, operators and developers of gaming facilities, manufacturers and suppliers of gaming devices, investment banks and lenders in financing transactions, and Indian tribes in the development and financing of gaming facilities.
Mr. Goldstein brings experience and insight that we believe will be valuable to a potential initial business combination target business. Mr. Goldstein received a Bachelor of Business Administration with a concentration in accounting from Emory University and a Juris Doctorate with highest honors from the University of Florida, College of Law.
Sean Ryan — Director Nominee
Mr. Ryan is a digital media and technology operator with extensive global experience in online payments, e-commerce, marketplaces, mobile ad networks, digital games, enterprise collaboration platforms, blockchain, real money gaming and online music. Since 2014, Mr. Ryan has been serving as Vice President of Business Platform Partnerships at Facebook, Inc. (“Facebook”) (Nasdaq: FB), where he leads a more than 500 person global organization that manages the Payments, Commerce, Novi/Blockhain, Workplace and Audience Network businesses. Prior to his current role, Mr. Ryan was hired in 2011 as the Director of Games Partnerships to lead and grow the global Games business at Facebook. While the Director of Games Partnerships, Mr. Ryan focused on re-shaping Facebook’s games and monetization strategies to derive more value for Facebook, its users and its partners, including the addition of a Real Money Gaming offering in regulated markets. Mr. Ryan’s team helped accelerate a major trend in engagement through cross-platform games and therefore the opportunity to increase users through establishing games on multiple platforms. Prior to joining Facebook, Mr. Ryan created the new social and mobile games division at News Corp, an American multinational mass media corporation controlled by Rupert Murdoch. While at News Corp, Mr. Ryan led the acquisition of Making Fun, a San Francisco social-game start-up, that created News Corp’s games publishing division.
Before joining News Corp., Mr. Ryan founded multiple digital businesses such as Twofish, Meez, Open Wager and SingShot Media. Mr. Ryan co-founded Twofish in 2009, a virtual goods and services platform that provided developers with data analytics and insights for individual application’s digital economies. Twofish was later sold to online payments provider Live Gamer, where Mr. Ryan served on the board of directors. From 2005 to 2008, Mr. Ryan founded and led Meez.com, a social entertainment service combining avatars, web games and virtual worlds. The white label social casino gaming company Open Wager was spun out of Meez and was later sold to VGW Holdings, Mr. Ryan also co-founded SingShot Media, an online karaoke community, which was sold to Electronic Arts (Nasdaq: EA) and merged into its Sims division.
We believe Mr. Ryan’s experience will be valuable to a potential initial business combination target and would provide an expanded perspective on the digital gaming landscape. Mr. Ryan received a Bachelor of Arts from Columbia University and a Master of Business Administration from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Tom Roche — Director Nominee
Mr. Roche has more than 40 years of experience in the gaming industry as a regulator, advisor and independent auditor. Mr. Roche joined Ernst & Young (“EY”) as a partner in 2003 and opened its Las Vegas office. He was subsequently appointed as the Office Managing Partner and Global Gaming Industry Market Leader. In 2016, Mr. Roche relocated to the EY Hong Kong office to supervise the expansion of the EY Global Gaming Industry practice in the Asia Pacific region. Mr. Roche has been integral to numerous transactions that have shaped the current gaming landscape, including:
• Wynn Resorts (Nasdaq: WYNN) initial public offering: Mr. Roche was the lead partner on Wynn Resort’s initial public offering, which raised $450 million in 2002.
• Harrah’s Entertainment/Apollo Management Group & Texas Pacific Group: Mr. Roche headed the regulatory advisory services on the buyout of Harrah’s Entertainment, the world’s largest casino company at the time, for $17.1 billion.
• Dubai World/MGM Resorts: Mr. Roche headed the regulatory and due diligence advisory services to Dubai World in its approximately $5.1 billion investment in MGM. Dubai World bought 28.4 million MGM shares, or 9.5 percent of the casino operator, for $2.4 billion. It then invested $2.7 billion to acquire a 50% stake in MGM’s CityCenter Project, a $7.4 billion 76-acre Las Vegas development of hotels, condos and retail outlets.
• MGM Growth Properties (NYSE: MGP) initial public offering: Mr. Roche provided tax and structural transaction services to MGM Resorts in the creation of MGM Growth Properties, a publicly traded REIT engaged in the acquisition, ownership and leasing of large-scale destination entertainment and leisure resorts. MGM Growth Properties raised $1.05 billion in its 2016 initial public offering.
Mr. Roche also directed EY advisory services to boards and management teams for profit improvement and technology related initiatives. In addition, Mr. Roche provided advisory support to the American Gaming Association on several research projects, including those specifically related to sports betting, the revocation of The Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 (PASPA) and anti-money laundering best practices in the gaming industry. Equally, he has assisted government agencies in numerous international locations with enhancing their regulatory approach to governing the industry especially in the online gambling sector.
Prior to joining Ernst & Young, Mr. Roche served as Deloitte’s National Gaming Industry Leader and as the co-head of Andersen’s Gaming Industry Practice in Las Vegas. In 1989, Mr. Roche was appointed by then Governor of the State of Nevada, Robert Miller, to serve as one of three members of the Nevada State Gaming Control Board for a four-year term, where he was directly responsible for the Audit and New Games Lab Divisions. As a board member, he spent a substantial amount of time assisting global jurisdiction regulators enact gaming legislation in the design of their regulatory structure. During his career, Roche has been involved in numerous public and private offerings of equity and debt securities. His background includes providing casino regulatory consulting services to casino licensees and to federal and state agencies including the National Indian Gaming Commission and the Nevada State Gaming Control Board, and industry associations such as the Nevada Resort Association and the American Gaming Association.
We believe Mr. Roche’s highly regarded reputation as a gaming auditor and advisor in the gaming industry will be valuable for us and a potential business combination target. Mr. Roche is a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and is licensed by the Nevada State Board of Accountancy and Mississippi State Board of Public Accountancy. He received his Bachelor of Science degree in Accounting from the University of Southern California.

To start, this should be a single player game. If Bethesda/Obsidian/MS can make it so I can play with 1 or 2 friends, I want that but understand it's not that simple.
So why it should be picked:
First, NY has an amazing history when it comes to Pre-Revolution, Revolution, the Civil War, and beyond. Major events like the battle at Saratoga (which is considered the turning point of the Revolution), the 1980 Miracle on Ice, and Woodstock (along with a whole lot more) all took place in upstate NY. So the rich history of the area is ripe for pro American stylizing and propaganda that gives FO it's unique take on American Atom-punk.
That along with more modern history of things like the Native Americans (The Oneidas) actually taking back their land and forming their own sovereign nation (basically they have their own gov. Pay no state taxes, and self govern with police, fire, and allow gambling which NY does not). So their modern government would not only be some great lore, but I honestly believe could be a basis for the main quest line. Things like their unique tribal leadership, philosophy, and gambling (hello 10 luck) could bring a very grey area to fallout that was kind of missed in FO3 + 4. Plus their mythology would make for a great weird scene that fallout has at least 1 of every game.
Also, for those who don't know, upstate NY is very country with major cities pocketed about. (Utica, Albany, Syracuse, etc). So if you liked NV style of wandering the wastes, or 3s style of city wandering, we've got both. Also, we've got two mountains areas, one in the Adirondacks and the Catskills are the other.
That said, one of the most important parts of fallout are the locations. Where can we go? For that I have a list:
Major locations:
Lake Placid Winter Olympics training facility - the winter olympics world be held in 2078 and if they still exist by then and to play into the game, LP could be the location of those games. Again, the miracle on ice where American Amateurs bested the Communist Russian Pros, was held there. The "Better dead than Red" sentiment would be full force. Not to mention one of a few great locations for a possible vault (80, in this case to house winter olympians). Plus, the weapons could be cool too. Hockey sticks, hockey skate blades on gloves, a goalie mask for armor, you name it.
Cooperstown Baseball HOF - Now when you think Americana, Baseball is one of your first thoughts, don't lie. Cooperstown is baseball central and very pretty. Another great place for pro-american styles and fun gear like baseball base mines, softball helmets (because fuck you "A League of Their Own" style pro-baseball league in FO sounds awesome), and of course bats and baseball grenades. Also a baseball Vault (Vault 4, 5, 7, or 9). Not my idea, but in this vault, there's 32 teams of mens and 32 teams of womens baseball (or coed teams, idk), all of whom are pro players. Vault tec test is simple, winner gets food and drinks, loser gets steroid infused food and drink (but they don't know it has steroids obviously). The idea is, test how good at baseball people can be if given monster amounts of steroids for generations. I'll make a separate post about this in detail if desired.
Canastota Boxing HOF - Another unique area for America. Canastota is pretty boring and empty, but for those of you old enough to remember Rocky when it came out, it basically revived Boxing as a major sport and also had a moment where America bested the Red Menace (Rocky IV). Maybe a spot for a vault or to learn unique unarmed moves. Pugilism Illustrated anyone?
Albany - NYs capital and an easy big city area along the Hudson. A great location for corporate greed, governmental corruption, and side quests. Can't say it'll be the focal point of the game since its very near the eastern border of it, but a good location for exploring and lore.
Buffalo/Niagara Falls - Ya ever gone over the falls in a barrel? Do ya want to? I think using Niagara Falls (which has an American and Canadian side, Canadas is the U-shaped famous one) as Fallouts first "Non-American" location would be fun. First, the falls are beautiful and are a major source of hydroelectric power. Second, in FO, America annexed canada, so it's technically still America! Third, right across the "border" are casinos! More gambling! Third and a half, it's another big city and buffalo is where the buffalo wing was invented (God bless buffalo wings). Besides the cool lore opportunity about the annexation and the city location, the falls could be a major location for the story if the main conflict was about powering the area, similar to NV.
Syracuse - NYs (literal) center city. The Salt City as it was formally known is a big city with some great old and new style. Again, not much about the city to say, but a great opportunity for corporate BS. The main attraction would be the Syracuse Dome (formerly the Carrier Dome). Due to its location and style, it's perfect as a central trading hub for the major cities and people. Think of Great Green Jewel style, people living, bars, shops, etc. BUT the really interesting part is what's right next to the Dome. SUNY ESF (Environmental Science and Forestry). This college is special because (A. I went there) it has very unique programs and with some future tech thrown in, could be a great location for a Fallout 3 Harold or NV vault 22-esq quest. The college already does experiments with major chemicals, evolution (FEV anyone?) and breeding plants for unique purposes. Again, I have a really cool idea for this area, but that can be a different post. Fun fact, ESF is actually working to bring back the North America Chestnut that went (nearly) extinct! Also, some asshole releases the fruit flies the genetics lab work with every year and it sucks.
NYC (Empire, 9/11 memorial, Statue of Liberty) - Yeah yeah, you can't have NY without the City, but frankly there's so much here to explore and deal with, I'd leave it to the pros to really do it justice.
Turning Stone Casino - Gambling, a hotel/restaurants like in NV, and a good spot for the main quest line.
Fort Stanwix - A real revolutionary war fort. HQ or major area for raiders. Safe, well protected and with plenty of history.
Fort Drum and Griffis Air Force Base: Two major bases that could be packed with guns, nukes, and power armor. Heavily guarded by turrets, robots, and security gates.
Main Quest:
Without too much detail, I figure your character will be hired to figure out the future of NY.
You'll be brought to the Turning Stone which is currently the HQ of the Oneida tribe. Your job would be to either work with the other tribes in the former Iroquois Confederation (Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, and Tuscarora [added later]). (Quick note: in my AU, some time after the bombs fell, the IC came to power because of their knowledge of living off the land and attempted to rebuild society. After some time rebuilding and establishing a post-war society, the tribes do the thing all humans do and bicker. Around 2200 the IC broke apart but the tribes retained power in their areas. They fight, trade, yadda yadda but no one is in control of everything.
Throughout your quest, it turns out that what is holding everyone back is a lack of power for things like lights and running water. Your job will be to determine where to get that power (Nuclear power plant in Oswego or the falls in Niagara?) And where to give it (one tribe? A few? Or all?). But that's not all, the tribes can't decide who should be in charge. One tribe wants to remain independent, don't help the outsiders and rebuild society in their image within NY, another wants to help others but would need to sacrifice their own people's safety and seclusion. Maybe another wants to be imperialist and expand their borders throughout America through way of force and fear while another agrees with taking land but wants it done through offers of protection for taxes. And each tribe has its own opinion on bringing the IC back together, staying separate, or taking over the tribes for themselves.
It's up to you character to decide who to help. Do you work hard to try and bring all tribes together under one banner or choose a side and execute their will as a paid mercenary/ambassador?
Other choices would be chaos by siding with raiders, or maybe a BOS path to take out all the tribes, idk, haven't thought it all out. Again, not a writer.
Mechanics:
So personally, I like the idea that if you choose to go with a single faction, there would a battle/war mechanic where you and an army (or alone if you really wanna try) take over and lay claim to areas similar to Nuka World where you fly the gangs flag. Nothing complicated, normal fallout fights, don't die and kill the leadehis troops to win.
Karma is back. You will garner good or bad rep with each tribe depending on what you do. I'd like an armor system like in NV but I can live without it.
There is an ending. Once you beat the game you can continue doing side quests for armoexperience/ammo but only for the tribes left in power. Occasional rebellions will rise up as random events that need to be put down.
Settlements are limited. Like skyrim, but a plot and build. No need to build one everywhere and you don't even need to do it if you don't want to.
Radio host? Gimme a Mr. New Vegas type guy. I don't want an eccentric 3-dog, I want a smoothed voiced person wishing me lady like luck.
Also, smarter AI.
Otherwise, typical FO mechanics. Weapons degrade, can upgrade weapons and armor, etc.
Main problems with NY:
No real borders to the south. Invisible walls would like be necessary which is stupid. Same to the East, but the Hudson could theoretically be used as a border if you put crazy strong mirelurks or something to kill the player if they tried to cross (or more invisible walls)
Don't want to disrespect the tribes. This is an issue with using each tribe as a possible faction. You're bound to piss off or disrespect one. So it'll be a task to make sure it's as limited as possible.
What to do with the city? It's a huge area that can be used for so much, but as a part of NY it's actually pretty seperated. It's a commercial hub now, but there's nothing there that would really be a reason to go down there. So do you make it one or do we just make it a glowing sea type area that's completely decimated from the bombs? That's my personal choice honestly, but it's a tough one to please as many as possible.
Conclusion: NY is rad.
I'll be taking questions as long as they do not involve Canadian trivia. Thank you.

I'm no expert by any stretch of the imagination, I'm not going to pretend that I've done my DD on this, but with COVID still being a major thorn in the United States hind end, lockdowns, struggling economy, it makes sense to me that more and more states are going to legalize online casinos for tax revenues.
Less people traveling to Vegas, human nature of loving to gamble, the house always winning, I have a gut feeling that this one could skyrocket within the next year or so.
How do you feel about investing in such a new company? I know it's a bit risky but something tells me to keep buying the dips on this one.
Disclaimer: I do already own shares of GNOG and just wanted to hear some opinions from more experienced traders regarding it.

I read so many of these stories and can relate to almost all of them. I don’t know how many can relate to me because I literally lost thousands upon thousands of dollars all within weeks. A few weeks ago I won probably $20,000 and within two weeks ive lost it all plus several more thousands. Currently, my bank account is $4000 overdrawn! I have an entire Ziploc bag full of 1099 ‘s! For those of you who don’t know what that is, it’s basically every time you win anything over $1200 you have to pay taxes on it. I live in Henderson Nevada which is right next to Las Vegas. I can literally walk to the casino from my house. Unfortunately, I’ve been gambling since I was 17 years old and I’m currently almost 55 years old! I started out gambling and my parents took me to Las Vegas when I was 17 years old. They told me is the greatest place and so much fun and they would give me money to gamble. I never got carded or anything I just got to play on my parents money. Typically, I would be the only one coming home with money at the end of each trip. My parents will often ask me for gas money to get home. It’s different when you’re not playing with your own money. Several years later after having children and getting divorced, I started playing bingo. I was living in California at the time where there wasn’t casinos nearby. I started getting hooked on bingo and then started frequenting an Indian casino within about an hours drive away. First it was bingo which I won $1200 the first time I was there. Overtime I started playing slot machines and then really got into video poker. Long story short, in 2008 I ended up moving to Las Vegas with my new husband. All of a sudden The opportunity to gamble was literally at my fingertips. I would have to spend my lunch hour from work at the casino across the street. In the evenings, my mom lives with me and is also a gambler and I would go to the casino. My husband, although when I met him didn’t really gamble much, really got into it too. Between all three of us we spend several nights a week at the casino. I am by far the heaviest better of all of us and I’ve gone from playing nickels to quarters to now dollars! At the beginning of the year I won $10,000 and one video poker hand. One night I won probably almost 20 grand just playing video poker. I’ve had stacks up on stacks of money to where I can’t even close my wallet! This was just a few weeks ago and now I don’t even have enough to cover All of the advances I’ve gotten from the casinos over the past week. I finally come to a place where I know this has to stop or I’m going to lose everything including my marriage and my gorgeous home! I have made a decision to finally get help! I really want to go to GA but right now there are no actual face-to-face meetings and I’m thinking that the virtual stuff probably wouldn’t work for me. My husband is fully aware of my struggles as well as my mother and they are both willing to help me even though they are both gamblers but not to the extent that I am. I’ve been listening to a podcast that directed me to Reddit And I’m hoping this is A form that will help me stay accountable by reading other peoples stories of gambling addiction as well as success and overcoming it. I welcome any advice anyone has to give and support because God knows I need it!

I live in Washington State and they have had commercials lately where this african american mother and her son are talking about a scratch ticket they bought recently and the son says "do you think we'll win?" and the mother says something to the effect of "we'll see, but even if we don't, we can rest easy knowing that the money we spent on the ticket will go towards important community programs."
But they probably won't win. They will most likely only get hooked on scratch tickets and ruin their lives until one of the state funded programs that is paid for by the lottery tickets reaches out to them to ask if they have a gambling addiction. It made me wonder, why doesn't the state promote the WSB form of gambling? Imagine if the automatic scratch ticket machines they have at almost every store in Washington featured a range of ETFs that all featured companies based in Washington? If they are concerned about the loss in revenue, the state could take 1% as the fund manager. But even without that extra tax boost, the money is going to help companies in the state and your likelihood of winning is much greater. If someone bought a 10 dollar scratch ticket with microsoft and amazon that was electronic and went into your "state portfolio" accessed with your SSN and a password or something, lots of people would be rich. Maybe they could make it so you can't sell until a year has passed so it could be an incentive to save as well. Doesn't that seem more admirable and effective in raising poor communities up while also benefiting the welfare of the state by promoting and aiding their local businesses?
​
Oh shit, that's kind of just muni bonds, huh? OK at first i thought (much to the chagrin of this sub) that it would be regular shares of the company you would buy. But now I realize people don't buy scratch tickets for 5% returns that they can't access for a year, they buy them to get a million dollars tomorrow. So maybe, the state machines could feature options for local companies.
Yes. options scratch tickets. That's the ticket. Let's turn this national casino game into a state run casino game. I'm declaring Enumclaw, WA as the new vegas. They already have the technology with the sports gambling machines they have in vegas, these could be the same thing with a ticket and a huge payout that you have to wait and watch for. No poker, no sports, just tendies. No puts, either. Stonks only go up. I'll see you all in Enumclaw.
​
Oh, and the hotels would love it because strike dates would be at least a couple days in the future so people would have to stay for a couple of days at least. People who are really into it might pay to stay for a whole month while their waiting for their strike date. Oh darn, this isn't a state run operation anymore, vegas is defiantly private. OK yeah, screw state revenue we don't need more of that anyway. I'm looking for investors for my private options-palooza in Enumclaw, WA. Hit me up.

Taxes in Las Vegas
Hello guys, I’m new to all this. Can someone explain please briefly how to avoid paying taxes on winnings in Las Vegas?(sport betting)
Let’s say i want to bet $3000 to win $1000 will i be asked to provide my SSN?
And what if i want to bet $20 000 should i do it in different casinos that aren’t associated with each other so they couldn’t find out who i am?
So basically what’s the threshold for all that?
I heard people just ask for chips instead of cash and then exchange them for cash in different days.
Thank you so much!!!!

Ink-Stained Wretches: The Battle for the Soul of Digital Freedom Taking Place Inside Your Printer Since its founding in the 1930s, Hewlett-Packard has been synonymous with innovation, and many's the engineer who had cause to praise its workhorse oscillators, minicomputers, servers, and PCs. But since the turn of this century, the company's changed its name to HP and its focus to sleazy ways to part unhappy printer owners from their money. Printer companies have long excelled at this dishonorable practice, but HP is truly an innovator, the industry-leading Darth Vader of sleaze, always ready to strong-arm you into a "deal" and then alter it later to tilt things even further to its advantage. The company's just beat its own record, converting its "Free ink for life" plan into a "Pay us $0.99 every month for the rest of your life or your printer stops working" plan. Plenty of businesses offer some of their products on the cheap in the hopes of stimulating sales of their higher-margin items: you've probably heard of the "razors and blades" model (falsely) attributed to Gillette, but the same goes for cheap Vegas hotel rooms and buffets that you can only reach by running a gauntlet of casino "games," and cheap cell phones that come locked into a punishing, eternally recurring monthly plan. Printers are grifter magnets, and the whole industry has been fighting a cold war with its customers since the first clever entrepreneur got the idea of refilling a cartridge and settling for mere astronomical profits, thus undercutting the manufacturers' truly galactic margins. This prompted an arms race in which the printer manufacturers devote ever more ingenuity to locking third-party refills, chips, and cartridges out of printers, despite the fact that no customer has ever asked for this. Lexmark: First-Mover Advantage But for all the dishonorable achievements of the printer industry's anti-user engineers, we mustn't forget the innovations their legal departments have pioneered in the field of ink- and toner-based bullying. First-mover advantage here goes to IBM, whose lawyers ginned up an (unsuccessful) bid to use copyright law to prevent a competitor, Static Controls, from modifying used Lexmark toner cartridges so they'd work after they were refilled. A little more than a decade after its failure to get the courts to snuff out Static Controls, Lexmark was actually sold off to Static Controls' parent company. Sadly, Lexmark's aggressive legal culture came along with its other assets, and within a year of the acquisition, Lexmark's lawyers were advancing a radical theory of patent law to fight companies that refilled its toner cartridges. HP: A Challenger Appears Lexmark's fights were over laser-printer cartridges, filled with fine carbon powder that retailed at prices that rivaled diamonds and other exotic forms that element. But laser printers are a relatively niche part of the printer market: the real volume action is in inkjet printers: dirt-cheap, semi-disposable, and sporting cartridges (half-) full of ink priced to rival vintage Veuve-Clicquot. For the inkjet industry, ink was liquid gold, and they innovated endlessly in finding ways to wring every drop of profit from it. Companies manufactured special cartridges that were only half-full for inclusion with new printers, so you'd have to quickly replace them. They designed calibration tests that used vast quantities of ink, and, despite all this calibration, never could quite seem to get a printer to register that there was still lots of ink left in the cartridge that it was inexplicably calling "empty" and refusing to draw from. But all this ingenuity was at the mercy of printer owners, who simply did not respect the printer companies' shareholders enough to voluntarily empty their bank accounts to refill their printers. Every time the printer companies found a way to charge more for less ink, their faithless customers stubbornly sought out competitors who'd patronize rival companies who'd refill or remanufacture their cartridges, or offer compatible cartridges. Security Is Job One Shutting out these rivals became job one. When your customers reject your products, you can always win their business back by depriving them of the choice to patronize a competitor. Printer cartridges soon bristled with "security chips" that use cryptographic protocols to identify and lock out refilled, third-party, and remanufactured cartridges. These chips were usually swiftly reverse-engineered or sourced out of discarded cartridges, but then the printer companies used dubious patent claims to have them confiscated by customs authorities as they entered the USA. (We’ve endorsed legislation that would end this practice.) Here again, we see the beautiful synergy of anti-user engineering and anti-competition lawyering. It's really heartwarming to see these two traditional rival camps in large companies cease hostilities and join forces. Alas, the effort that went into securing HP from its customers left precious few resources to protect HP customers from the rest of the world. In 2011, the security researcher Ang Cui presented his research on HP printer vulnerabilities, "Print Me If You Dare." Cui found that simply by hiding code inside a malicious document, he could silently update the operating system of HP printers when the document was printed. His proof-of-concept code was able to seek out and harvest Social Security and credit-card numbers; probe the local area network; and penetrate the network's firewall and allow him to freely roam it using the compromised printer as a gateway. He didn't even have to trick people into printing his gimmicked documents to take over their printers: thanks to bad defaults, he was able to find millions of HP printers exposed on the public Internet, any one of which he could have hijacked with unremovable malware merely by sending it a print-job. The security risks posed by defects in HP's engineering are serious. Criminals who hack embedded systems like printers and routers and CCTV cameras aren't content with attacking the devices' owners—they also use these devices as botnets for devastating denial of service and ransomware attacks. For HP, though, the "security update" mechanism built into its printers was a means for securing HP against its customers, not securing those customers against joining botnets or having the credit card numbers they printed stolen and sent off to criminals. In March 2016, HP inkjet owners received a "security update available" message on their printers' screens. When they tapped the button to install this update, their printers exhibited the normal security update behavior: a progress bar, a reboot, and then nothing. But this "security update" was actually a ticking bomb: a countdown timer that waited for five months before it went off in September 2016, activating a hidden feature that could detect and reject all third-party ink cartridges. HP had designed this malicious update so that infected printers would be asymptomatic for months, until after parents had bought their back-to-school supplies. The delay ensured that warnings about the "security update" came too late for HP printer owners, who had by then installed the update themselves. HP printer owners were outraged and told the company so. The company tried to weather the storm, first by telling customers that they'd never been promised their printers would work with third-party ink, then by insisting that the lockouts were to ensure printer owners didn't get "tricked" with "counterfeit" cartridges, and finally by promising that future fake security updates would be clearly labeled. HP never did disclose which printer models it attacked with its update, and a year later, they did it again, once again waiting until after the back-to-school season to stage its sneak attack, stranding cash-strapped parents with a year's worth of useless ink cartridges for their kids' school assignments. You Don't Own Anything Other printer companies have imitated HP's tactics but HP never lost its edge, finding new ways to transfer money from printer owners to its tax-free offshore accou

Hi folks. In the latest podcast episode (189) Harris made some comments about Michael Bloomberg and stop-and-frisk. Let’s first of all take a look at what Harris said:
“Let’s start with Bloomberg, because he’s someone who is getting, you know there’s at least an attempt to defenestrate him based on a few things he said as mayor which may have been politically imprudent or too candid by half, but in many respects not obviously wrong. And the arguments against him really seem to be pseudoarguments. And so, at the time of recording this this is a fairly vivid scandal or pseudoscandal in journalism now. But, the Democrats are pillorying him over remarks he made that were just unearthed from the Aspen Institute in 2015 when he was talking about stop-and-frisk. And I have the quote here, so this is Bloomberg in 2015, after he was mayor. He was I believe mayor for 11 years of New York City, and the policy for those who don’t recall it, it’s been since more or less phased out, but, the cops were stationed more in minority areas and stopping and frisking people looking for guns, mostly, and crime rates plummeted. There’s some uncertainty about the causal factor there, but it was not irrational at the time to think that stop-and-frisk was part of the policy that was succeeding in causing crime rates to plummet. Anyway, so Bloomberg said:
'95% of your murders and murder victims fit one MO. You can just take the description and Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male minorities 15-25. That is true in New York. That is true in virtually every city in America. And that’s where the real crime is. You’ve got to get the guns out of the hands of the people who are getting killed. So you want to spend the money on a lot of cops in the streets. Put those cops where the crime is. Which means minority neighborhoods.'
And then in a subsequent interview he said:
'One newspaper and one news service, they just keep saying ‘Oh it’s a disproportionate percentage of a particular ethnic group.’ That may be, but it’s not a disproportionate percentage of those who witnesses and victims describe as committing the crime. In that case, incidentally, I think we disproportionately stop whites too much, and minorities too little. It’s exactly the reverse of what they’re saying. I don’t know where they went to school, but they certainly didn’t take a math course, or a logic course.'
Alright so he’s clearly making it difficult for himself there, in hindsight, politically. But the reality is, all the data I’ve ever read about violent crime support what he’s saying here. The disproportionate number of perpetrators and the disproportionate number of victims are coming from minority communities. And what these communities suffer from is not too much policing, it’s been the wrong type of policing. There’s too much policing around petty crime, and not enough policing around solving murders, and how to get that right is a difficult question. But the people who are saying that the only way to have arrived at a stop-and-frisk policy was borne of racism, and not caring about the disparities of the way in which crime victimizes communities, that’s just clearly untrue. A completely rational and compassionate attempt to mitigate violent crime could have given you this policy. And it seems to me that the thing the Democratic party has to be able to admit at this point, in order to talk anything like sense on this topic, is that it’s a difficult social problem, that, the mayor was right in his diagnosis, that you could win money all day long in a casino that would allow you to place a bet on the age range and gender and minority identity of a perpetrator of a violent crime in New York City. You know, it’s not the ultra-Orthodox Jews who are mugging people in New York City. But that’s a politically toxic thing to make salient, and the remedy of stop-and-frisk became politically toxic, and probably wasn’t worth doing in hindsight. He could have figured that out earlier than he did, perhaps. But, the fact that he’s being castigated on the left as a racist monster, just seems to be emblematic of all of the miscalibrations in our politics on the left, that the wokeness is ensuring. And it seems, above all, a recipe for giving us four more years of Trump in the end.”
Okay, well I have some thoughts about this. Let’s break this down into what was said, and what wasn’t said.

What was said.

Firstly, Harris is generally misrepresenting the situation when he says Democrats are ‘pillorying him’ over remarks he made. If you look at the transcripts of the two recent debates, the comments aimed at Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk policy are generally not about the comments Harris quoted, but the policy itself.
From Nevada:
Sanders: ‘In order to beat Donald Trump, we’re going to need the largest voter turnout in the history of the United States. Mr. Bloomberg had policies in New York city of stop-and-frisk, which went after African American and Latino people in an outrageous way.’
Warren: ‘Democrats are not going to win if we have a nominee who has a history of hiding his tax returns, of harassing women and of supporting racist policies like redlining and stop-and-frisk.’
Biden: Well the fact of the matter is, he has not managed his city very, very well when he was there. He didn’t get a whole lot done. He has stop-and-frisk, throwing close to 5 million young black men up against a wall. And when we came along in our administration, President Obama and said, “We’re going to send in a mediator to stop it.” He said, “That’s unnecessary.”
Biden: ‘Yes. Let’s get something straight. The reason the stop and frisk change is because Barack Obama sent moderators to see what was going on. When we sent them there to say, “This practice has to stop,” the mayor thought it was a terrible idea. We send them there, a terrible idea. Let’s get the facts straight. Let’s get the order straight. And it’s not whether he apologize or not, it’s the policy. The policy was abhorrent and it was, in fact, of violation of every right people have. We are the one, our administration sent in people to monitor it. And the very time the mayor argued against that. This idea that he figured out it was a bad idea. He figured out it was a bad idea after we sent in monitors and said it must stop. Even then he continued the policy.’
Warren: ‘When the mayor says that he apologized, listen very closely to the apology. The language he used is about stop and frisk. It’s about how it turned out. Now this isn’t about how it turned out. This is about what it was designed to do to begin with. It targeted communities of color, it targeted black and brown men from the beginning. And if you want to issue a real apology, then the apology has to start with the intent of the plan as it was put together and the willful ignorance day by day by day of admitting what was happening. Even as people protested in your own street, shutting out the sounds of people telling you how your own policy was breaking their lives. You need a different apology.’
From South Carolina:
King: ‘Mayor Buttigieg, mayor to mayor, mayor to mayor, you've certainly had your issues with the black community as well. Do you think the New York City's implementation of stop and frisk was racist?’
Buttigieg: ‘Yes, in effect, it was. Because it was about profiling people based on their race. And the mayor even said that they disproportionately stopped white people too often and minorities too little. ’
O’Donnell: ‘Senator Klobuchar, was the way that the mayor implemented stop and frisk racist?’
Klobuchar: ‘Yes, and I think that what we need to do instead of just reviewing everything from the past is talk about where we're going to go forward.’
So we can see that generally, the comments being made by Democratic rivals are about the policy, how it was implemented, or how Bloomberg responded to criticism of the policy. Ditto comments made in the press:

Repeating the phrase, “We will not beat Donald Trump with,” Sanders ticked off the issues that have dogged Bloomberg for a week: a “racist” policy like stop-and-frisk that “caused communities of color to live in fear,” his past opposition to raising the minimum wage and that he “blamed the end of racist policies such as redlining for the financial crisis.”
Biden slammed Bloomberg’s record on policing in New York and other issues important to African American voters, a crucial demographic for the Democratic nomination -- and especially for Biden, who has lost black support as Bloomberg’s support among blacks has picked up.
“You take a look at the stop-and-frisk proposals. You take a look at his ideas on redlining he’s talking about. You take a look at what he’s done relative to the African American community,” Biden said. So the idea that the criticism is simply about remarks Bloomberg made is either a misrepresentation or is misleading commentary.

Secondly, ‘the arguments against him really seem to be pseudoarguments’. Which arguments? Because lots of arguments have been made about stop-and-frisk as it relates to Bloomberg, and we’ve already seen that the criticism of Bloomberg isn’t narrowly lazered in on some comments he’s made about it, but is about the policy itself as implemented and handled by Bloomberg. Without specifying the arguments that have been made, or the people who have made them, this is just a lazy and vague assertion. Nevertheless, we can actually look at some arguments against Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk policy:

• It was ruled unconstitutional in how it was being carried out, violating the Fourth Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment. I presume Harris wouldn’t consider this a ‘pseudoargument’.
  
• It has probably had lasting harmful effects:
  

evidence has emerged of the harms created by the strategy. We now know that students heavily exposed to stop-and-frisk were more likely to struggle in school, that young men were more likely to experience symptoms of anxiety and depression, that this exposure fostered cynicism in policing and government writ large, and that it made residents more likely to retreat from civic life.
In effect, Mr. Bloomberg’s policing record — one of his greatest liabilities as voters begin to appraise him at the ballot box — may have clouded the other accomplishments that form the strongest case for his bid as president, in areas like education, public health and good government.
Recent research by Mr. Bacher-Hicks and Elijah de la Campa found that black middle-school students exposed to more aggressive policing were more likely to later drop out of school and less likely to enroll in college.
The researchers looked at parts of New York that had many stops, not necessarily because those places had high crime or other correlated factors, but because they happened to be assigned a precinct commander who was more likely to advocate frequent stops. Within these neighborhoods, students may not have been stopped themselves. But they went to school in communities where this kind of policing was pervasive.
The negative effects on education appeared for girls, too, even though they were far less likely to be stopped by police than boys or young men. That implies, the researchers suggest, that something deeply embedded in the girls’ environment — like fear or distrust of authority that students learned from it — might have hindered their education. More police stops, the researchers found, were also associated with chronic absenteeism.
That study adds to other research in New York finding that black male students who were more exposed to stop-and-frisk had lower test scores. And other research using surveys about experiences with the police has found that students around the country who were arrested or stopped, or who witnessed these encounters or knew of others involved, had worse grades.
That these effects appear strongest for black students suggests that aggressive policing could worsen racial achievement gaps in school as well.
“All these kinds of disadvantages can accrue and build up,” said Aaron Gottlieb, a professor at the Jane Addams College of Social Work at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who has studied policing and student grades. “Let’s say a police stop reduces the likelihood that you go to college. That’s going to impact your earnings in the long run.”
Other research shows that negative interactions with the police can shape how residents think about government and civic institutions, and even democracy more broadly.
“It teaches something really important — and something really negative — about what agents of the state and bureaucracies are supposed to be doing in your community, what role they play, what their character is,” said Amy Lerman, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley.
She and Vesla Weaver, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, have found that even minor encounters with police can reduce the likelihood of voting, a pattern other research of stop-and-frisk in New York has documented as well. Ms. Lerman and Ms. Weaver have shown that aggressive stop-and-frisk tactics can even have a chilling effect on whether residents use a service like 3-1-1 to report issues that have nothing to do with crime at all.

Is this a pseudoargument?

• As a general widespread and crude policy, in how it was carried out, it may not have provided much, if any, benefit in crime reduction. That is, the benefits may have actually come from more focused or justifiable policing efforts:

Data suggests that the vast majority of street stops made by the police in New York at the height of stop-and-frisk weren’t particularly helpful in fighting crime: Few led to arrests or uncovered weapons. But research has found that a small subset of stops, those based on specific suspicions by officers and not general sweeps or racial profiling, do appear to have helped reduce crime.

From the study itself:

Impact zones were significantly associated with reductions in total reported crimes, assaults, burglaries, drug violations, misdemeanor crimes, felony property crimes, robberies, and felony violent crimes. Impact zones were significantly associated with increases in total reported arrests, arrests for burglary, arrests for weapons, arrests for misdemeanor crimes, and arrests for property felony crimes. Impact zones were also significantly associated with increases in investigative stops for suspected crimes, but only the increase in stops made based on probable cause indicators of criminal behaviors were associated with crime reductions. The largest increase in investigative stops in impact zones was based on indicators of suspicious behavior that had no measurable effect on crime. The findings suggest that saturating high crime blocks with police helped reduce crime in New York City, but that the bulk of the investigative stops did not play an important role in the crime reductions. The findings indicate that crime reduction can be achieved with more focused investigative stops.

Is this a pseudoargument?
Thirdly: ‘There’s some uncertainty about the causal factor there, but it was not irrational at the time to think that stop-and-frisk was part of the policy that was succeeding in causing crime rates to plummet.’
While it’s not possible for me to say whether it was rational or irrational at the time to think that stop-and-frisk played some role in crime reduction, even at the time, going back to at least 1999 (predating Bloomberg’s first mayoral term), the City had been aware that stop-and-frisk involved widespread constitutional violations:

[The City has] received both actual and constructive notice since at least 1999 of widespread Fourth Amendment violations occurring as a result of the NYPD’s stop and frisk practices. Despite this notice, they deliberately maintained and even escalated policies and practices that predictably resulted in even more widespread Fourth Amendment violations. . . . The NYPD has repeatedly turned a blind eye to clear evidence of unconstitutional stops and frisks.”

Which would not seem to be a great thing for a Presidential candidate to have aggressively expanded and vigorously defended over many years, when there was awareness of widespread constitutional violations at the time.
Fourthly: ‘A completely rational and compassionate attempt to mitigate violent crime could have given you this policy.’ If such a policy were rooted in rationality and compassion, would there not have been consideration for the known widespread constitutional violations and the fact that the vast majority of those being stopped were innocent people having negative experiences with law enforcement? In addition to which, when the New York City Council passed bills which provided oversight of the stop-and-frisk policy, including an independent monitor of the police department, Bloomberg vetoed them both! Surely someone being motivated by rationality and compassion would not object to oversight of their practices?
Fifth: ‘And it seems to me that the thing the Democratic party has to be able to admit at this point, in order to talk anything like sense on this topic, is that it’s a difficult social problem, that, the mayor was right in his diagnosis, that you could win money all day long in a casino that would allow you to place a bet on the age range and gender and minority identity of a perpetrator of a violent crime in New York City. You know, it’s not the ultra-Orthodox Jews who are mugging people in New York City. But that’s a politically toxic thing to make salient…’
So Harris says that this is a politically toxic thing to make salient, but for some reason the Democratic party are supposed to say ‘Well, Bloomberg was right that it’s mostly young black or Latino people committing violent crimes, in fact you could win money all day long betting in a casino on this very proposition!’ and this is…supposed to help them in the election? This sounds utterly ridiculous and a surefire way to alienate and anger voters and depress voter turnout.
Lastly: ‘the remedy of stop-and-frisk…probably wasn’t worth doing in hindsight’. Is this all Harris can say in assessing the policy, it probably wasn’t worth doing in hindsight? No mention of its being unconstitutional in practice, of widespread constitutional violations being known since at least 1999, of the majority of those stopped being innocent people, of various harmful effects it could have caused and which may still be ongoing? This statement is so devoid of awareness or familiarity with the details that it just comes across as either callous or oblivious.

What wasn’t said.

• Repeating myself, but: the practice was found to be unconstitutional. This is a major thing to omit from a discussion of stop-and-frisk under Bloomberg.
  
• When saying the practice was ‘more or less phased out’, this omits the fact that it was massively amplified under Bloomberg, and that when Bloomberg says he cut the practice back by 95% this is based on cherry picking by comparing against a high figure from his expanded usage; when he left office there was still a net increase in reported stops compared to when he first took office.
  

Anyway, I have to say that, when considering both what Harris did and didn’t say about stop-and-frisk, I didn’t find him to be making much sense on this topic. What are your thoughts?

After the EA made that "suprise mechanics" comment the discussion around lootboxes started again and people who are supposed to be consumer advocates are still bringing up the usual irrelevant points surrounding the issue. I am not saying it is always out of malice but we should be careful. Some simple basic points should be made and should never be walked back on, gambling is :
EDIT: Following text has nothing to do with legalities. I am not here for the legality of the issue. The way the laws are made and the way the world works should be proof enough that laws are not perfect. I couldn't care less about how some bald fucks in their 70s defined gambling a hundred years ago. We wouldn't be having any lootbox discussion in the first place if the law and lawmakers were doing their job correctly. Proceed with a grain of salt.

1. The REWARD: There is a chance at winning anything worth something.
   
2. The PRICE: Sacrificing another something with direct or indirect monetary value (you can spend money, crystals, you can give your lunch)
   

Before going in further: THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DIGITAL PRODUCTS AND PHYSICAL ONES.

THE REWARD:

If something is worth something then it qualifies as a reward. This can be a digital item, can be a tour around the world with a yacht, can be a meeting with Justin Bieber, can be the right to exchange your 3rd day ticket to Endgame's after-credit version with a 1st day ticket. That last one is important because this is really relevant to the usual stupid "BUT KINDER SURPRISE" argument.
The value here is not the movie ticket it is the privilege of being able to see it Day 1 despite buying a ticket for 2 days later. If the day1 ticket is more valuable then day2 ticket then a lootbox containing tickets with different dates will be gambling. So how do we know the items inside these lootboxes in the games are of different value. GAMES ADMIT IT THEMSELVES. An EPIC skin and a LEGENDARY skin is not the same value. A battle-scarred gun skin is different then a Factory New gun skin. Ok when you open a lootbox in CSGO you will always get a weapon skin. Therefore you are not gambling for a weapon skin you are gambling for a GOOD(valuable) weapon skin. If the cheapest skin in that lootbox is worth $0.1 and another one is worth $400 then you are gambling for the $399.99 difference between them. If that Overwatch box has a retarded 50 Credit worth kill quipp and a 3000 credit worth Genji skin then you are gambling for the difference between these items. There are also points to be made about the perceived value of these items but we don't even have to go there yet. For some reason game devs got cocky and they themselves made the quality tiers stick out.
This point also ties in well with the "YOU ALWAYS GET SOMETHING" argument too. No need to go into detail about how fucking stupid that one also is.

THE PRICE:

No one is stupid enough to bring up the crystals, platinium, Cod coins, BP etc. Fortunately that argument has been resolved long ago. This part is helpful to dismantle the stupid "BUT BORDERLANDS/DIABLO HAS RNG LOOT" argument. You cannot spend money to try your luck again in loot based games. If Overwatch did NOT allow lootboxes to be bought with real money then it would not be gambling it would just be a surprise mechanic.

Stupid Arguments

• Kinder Surprise:

The reward part is where the Kinder argument falls apart. The toys inside the Kinder chocolates are all worth the same. I see some people claiming that Kinder eggs are not gambling because you always get the chocolate and that money is chocolate money etc etc. You are ALL WRONG and you are not helping. Blizzard is doing something like that in China to outsmart the gambling regulations by selling the lootboxes bundled with 50 Credits. If they claim that the price is for the small amount of credits then lootboxes are no longer gambling like that? How fucking stupid is that?

• You can sell the items, you don't own the items etc. :

Depending on how you look at it, this argument can be made to support the idea that it is INDEED GAMBLING as well as IT ISN'T GAMBLING. That's how bad of an argument it is. What the fuck you can do with the outcome is irrelevant to the process of gambling. Do not bring this topic up and dismantle it as swiftly as you can whenever you see it.

• Cosmetic-only, game is free2play, developers need money

Financials of a business or the nature of the rewards are irrelevant to the gambling process. It is not gambling because "drinks are free in this casino"... Stupid.

• Magic and Pokemon

Also gambling. No need to argue. If you want the game to have variety then make it balanced instead of forcing people to use shitty cards because they spent their life savings on stupid magic packs and these shitty ones are all the cards they have. That's not gameplay variety. Same point stands for Heartstone etc. too. IRRELEVANT.

• You can buy them outright too, Steam community market exists

Another irrelevant point. The process of gambling is still there.

I WANT TO GAMBLE

This is the only relevant argument. Here is the answer. Gambling is strictly regulated and for good reason. It is not outright illegal (not universally at least) and you can go gamble legally right now. I am not calling for loot-box ban, neither should anyone. However LOOTBOXES ARE GAMBLING AND SHOULD BE TREATED AS SUCH. They need to be regulated. When you open a Rocket League crate it says 15% for the rare items. How can I be sure that IT REALLY IS 15%. Shitty crane machines in arcades are being investigated routinely why not video game lootboxes? Plus, you have to pay your taxes. By operating online casinos but not paying gambling taxes these companies EA, Activision, Valve, Blizzard, Psyonix, Ubisoft etc. are all committing crime by tax evasion. That poor legally operating casino owner at Vegas is not an idiot he is paying his taxes.

Final words, this issue can only be solved after we start focusing on the relevant parts and stay true to the nature of the topic. It is important to weed out irrelevant and malicious talking points.

This past decade has proved to be a pivotal one for both advocates of Gun Control as well as advocates of Gun Rights. Throughout the 2010s, we have seen several horrific mass shootings, along with increasingly-polarizing debates, protests, not to mention new laws on the state and federal level in favor of both gun control and gun rights.
The most recent phenomenon occurring in the State of Virginia. State Democrats, hot off the heels of winning control of both legislative houses as well as the Governor's Mansion have proposed, and are currently voting on numerous gun control laws, some of which have generated enormous controversy as well as a large gun rights rally which (thankfully) came and went peacefully, with only a single arrest reported for an unrelated violation of a long-standing ban on wearing masks in public.
Some states, such as Virginia, Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Vermont and Colorado, as well as long-time gun control havens California and New York have been, and are currently in the process of debating and passing various new gun control laws. Laws such as a ban on the purchase and possession of magazines holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition, even if you legally possessed them prior to the law taking effect (otherwise known as "Grandfathering"). Other proposed laws include a newer, harsher, state-level version of the now-expired Federal Assault Weapons Ban, "Red Flag" laws, background checks on the sale of ammunition, increased taxes on firearms and ammunition, limits on the amount of firearms an individual can buy at once, waiting periods and more.
Other states, such as Texas, Idaho, Oklahoma and others have gone in the other direction, passing laws such as nixing the requirement for a permit to carry a firearm concealed or openly, commonly known as "Constitutional Carry". Some states such as Virginia and California are seeing numerous counties declare themselves "2nd Amendment Sanctuaries", where local and state law enforcement officials have vowed not to enforce any new gun control laws, even if ordered to by the Governor. A lawmaker in Virginia has threatened the deployment of the National Guard in order to enforce new laws (even though only the Governor, as well as the President has that authority, but I digress).
In the courts, various gun control laws on the state and federal level have been challenged with mixed results. Some laws, such as magazine bans and Assault Weapons Bans have, for the most part, survived lawsuits by various gun rights organizations. However, there is at least one case before the United States Supreme Court out of the State of New York concerning a now-repealed regulation prohibiting the transportation of legally-owned handguns outside city limits which has implications for other gun control cases in the legal pipeline all over the country. There are also several other 2nd Amendment cases currently on hold before the High Court. Could this case possibly become Heller II and open the door towards striking down a multitude of gun laws on the state and federal level?
As far as the 2020 Democratic Primaries go, guns have been mentioned off and on, most notably by now-former presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke who was quoted at a primary debate as saying "Hell yes, we're going to take your AR-15 and AK-47". Many believe that this comment is what sunk not only his presidential campaign, but also his political career in Texas, perhaps nationwide. Some believe that these comments will also weigh down the eventual Democratic nominee's chances at winning the election based upon winning certain swing states, several of which tend to support gun rights.
President Trump's record on guns has been mixed. On one hand, he repealed (with Congress's help) a Social Security Administration regulation which would've banned firearms ownership by anyone taking social security checks if he/she met certain criteria, such as having a "representative payee" or being otherwise unable to manage their finances. He has been appointing (and the GOP-controlled Senate has confirmed) many federal judges as well as 2 Supreme Court Justices, most of whom hold pro-gun views, which is likely to shape their opinions on various upcoming gun law challenges working their way through multiple circuit and district courts around the country.
On the other hand, he has, through Executive Order, banned "Bump Stocks" a device which has been attributed to the high amount of fatalities and injuries inflicted upon concert-goers in Las Vegas from a casino resort across the street on October 1st, 2017. He has also said to "...Take the guns first, due process second" with regards to taking away guns from potential mass shooters and criminals, a statement which drew the ire of gun rights groups as well as fellow Republicans.
1. Where do you see the gun issue going in 2020 and beyond?
2. How important will it be?
3. Which side will ultimately win out?
4. Will there be any new legislation on the federal level, or will this issue be tackled almost exclusively at the state level?
5. What will the new legal and political landscape surrounding guns look like as firearms technology evolves and 3-D printed firearms become more common, more well-built and harder to track?

Reno casino gaming win/revenue only drop 6.8% compared to 51% drop in Vegas.
​
Any ideas why we are doing much better than Vegas in June?
​
Casinos report 21% drop in “Gaming Win” for the fiscal year
https://www.kolotv.com/2020/07/29/casinos-report-21-drop-in-gaming-win-for-the-fiscal-yea
RENO, Nev. (KOLO) - Nevada casinos reported a “Gaming Win” of $566,806,791 for June 2020. The win is down 45.55 percent from June of 2019, but the largest decreases were seen in the Clark County casinos.
​
Area June 2020 June 2019 % Change
Statewide $566,806,791 $1,040,978,076 -45.55%
Clark County $441,041,951 $906,679,758 -51.36%
Washoe County $65,039,703 $69,814,217 -6.84%
South Lake Tahoe $13,080,609 $16,461,499 -20.54%
Carson Valley Area $9,234,538 $9,397,270 -1.73%
Elko County $24,745,871 $25,282,415 -2.12%
Other $13,664,119 $13,342,919 2.42%
The Las Vegas Strip saw the largest decrease, down 61.36%. Countywide, Clark County saw a 51.36% decrease in its gaming win the loss of tourism due to COVID-19.
​
Washoe County casinos saw a drop in the gaming win of just 6.84%.
​
Nevada’s fiscal year runs from July through June. For the 2019-2020 Fiscal year, Nevada’s total gaming win dropped by 21.67%.
​
The Nevada casinos were allowed to reopen in mid-May.
​
For the month of July 2020, the state collected $344,027 in percentage fees, based on taxable casino revenues generated in June of 2020. That amount represents a 99.39% decrease from July 2019′s tax collections.

Hi all :) In these posts I’ll be sharing some of the fun bits of dialogues from the Swimsuit Swordsmasters summer event. They are mostly short and fun exchanges between the characters that you can enjoy reading along with the summaries of the chapters that you can find down here.
Here are the summaries of the Las Vegas summer event from last year, done by various good souls. With the exception of the translations by pplovesk and shinyklefkey , most of these were summarized by Itqan Madani on their Facebook. They used to be posted on reddit by kakarot12310 but since the posts have been removed for some reason I'll link directly to Itqan Madani instead.
Main chapter summary part 1
Main chapter summary part 2
Main chapter summary part 3
Main chapter summary part 4
Main chapter summary part 5
Main chapter summary part 6
Main chapter summary part 7
Main chapter summary part 8
Main chapter summary part 9, and part 10. Alternative summary with additional tidbits by pplovesk.
Main chapter summary part 11 alternative summary with additional translation of the final boss’ dialogues and fun tidbits by pplovesk.
Extra: Drive in Las Vegas
Extra: Fun Jet Tennen Rishin-ryū
Extra: Losers’ Lullaby
Extra: Gambling Saint
Extra: Playing With The Weather (featuring QSH and Iskandar) by shinyklefkey.

Part 1 here.

Part 2 here.

Cirque du Requin

The cute little play that goes in the beginning of Cirque du Requin:
Mephi: In Patchwork London, what unfolds before us is the story of three happy little girls. Now then, I wonder I wonder. What clutches of evil await these little ones? What is this that they deeply wish for? We hope you’d enjoy yourself until the very end!
Mephi: Oh yeah I forgot. This goes without saying but no recording allowed okay? (he then screams “there are no dreams” but I don’t really get what the hell that’s about)

Rhyme: Let’s step, let’s kick, and dance away! (errr, kick-step dance?) No matter how you do it, you’ll end up in the pot all the same!
Lily: Mister Dolphin, oh Mister Dolphin, what did you see that made you bounce? What did you see that made you howl? I don’t understand a word you’re saying!
Reese: (queck queck!)
Rhyme: Does everyone bring chocolate with you? Mine and yours and Mister Dolphin’s, we have in total 3 pieces! Now let’s go on a picnic, all the way to the moon!

Uncle Napnap: Wow wow, hold up there you two. No matter how you think about it, walking from here all the way to the moon is no easy journey! If you give me a piece of choc, I’ll take you to the end of the moon, so how about it?
The girls: Please take us, pretty please! Please take us to the moon right away!
Uncle Napnap: Then off you two go, quick, get inside my cannon! It’ll be a hell of a show, kaboom!, just like that! Now, let’s go! ARC DE TRIOMPHE DE L’ETOILE! (fwoosh~!)

Rhyme: Huh? I wonder if this is really the moon? Aren’t there supposed to be rabbits on the moon! There are no rabbits here, as the matter of fact there is not a single chicken feather to be found!
Ishtar: Myyyy, my my my. What a shame, what a shame! Because this is actually Venus. Looks like you girls got your cannon trajectory all wrong! I get a lot of stray kids like you around here, so I give you my dearest welcome! Of course, I welcome you, as an addition to my labor force!
Lily: No way!
Ishtar: Hehehe, you’re not going to the moon or anywhere else. You’re going to slave away here forever!
Automata: Labor, labor, labor is fun, and labor is happiness. You’ll find your happiness in absolutely nothing but labor.

Rhyme: This is bad, this is really bad! We have been doing nothing but harsh labor all this time! But we have no cannons here, and dumb dumb Napnap is not with us anymore! Have we no ways left to go to the moon?
Ibachin: Wut wut, wut’s all the fuzz. You want to me to take you to the moon to play there, is that it? If you gimme a piece of choc, I’ll send you flying to the moon with double the fanfare!
Lily: Then I’ll give you my chocolate! Please take us to the moon safe and sound!
Ibachin: Worry not, worry not. Om nom nom. (TRANSFORM!) So yummy! Now get ready, for the great firework of Mount Ooe shall blast you off to the moon! Let’s go! ENCOMIUM MORIAE! (boom!)

Rhyme: We made it! My my, I wonder if this is the moon?
Artemis: Yep yep. You got that right. An oh-so-much-fun dreamy lunar world is waiting for you up ahead! But do you bring chocolate with you? If you have only one piece, I cannot allow more than a single person to enter the lunar world, you know?
Rhyme: My, I can’t believe this! I have no choco left!
Lily: Then it cannot be helped. Please let Rhyme in. I will stay here. Nursery, enjoy the lunar world okay?
Rhyme: My my, how could I do such a thing! If Jeanne won’t go then I’ll stay with her too. We’ll return to the pot together!
Reese: …
Lily: Mister Dolphin? Why are you holding up the chocolate?
Reese: (bites!)
The girls: Ah! The piece is broken up!
Orion: Hmm hmm hmph! Not bad, Dolphin! Now the chocolate has been broken up into two pieces. Now there is no problem right, Artemis?
Artemis: Yep yep, things are peachy now. Let’s take them to the lunar world.
Rhyme: Thank you, thank you so much Mister Dolphin!
Reese: (happy noises)

Rhyme: This picnic is so much fun! But I wonder if there is something missing?
Lily: You too Nursery? I also think we’re missing somebody!
Rhyme: That’s right, it’s that girl! This won’t do, we must return to the pot at once!
Lily: You’re right. If we want to play in the lunar world, we can always bring chocolate with us and return tomorrow!
Rhyme: Let’s bring a whole lot! For dumb dumb Napnap, for meanie Ishtar, for chomp chomp Ibachin, and of course for Mister Dolphin too! Let’s have a picnic with everybody!

Jack: Daddy, daddy! Please listen to our request!
Sanson: Oh dear, what could it be my little angels?
The girls: We want to be taken to the moon! So give us lots and lots of chocolate, pretty please!

Sieg: Let’s register first. Oh, you there, got a moment?
Marie: Welcome to Cirque du requin! Oh my, oh my oh my. You guys are here to have a Swimsuit Swordsmaster duel right?
Gudao: yep.
Hokusai replies with her usual MUST BECOME BEST MIZUGI KENGOU stuff.
Marie: Actually, you need the Challenge Letter first... but well, a mock fight is fine too! Since there haven’t been a lot of challengers lately, Jeanne has been lonely. But please wait a lil bit. If the little guy is hungry, it could get messy!
Everybody at the same time: The little guy? Gudao: Who??
Marie: well, since Jeanne has been strict on him, I think it’ll be fine!
(In Jeanne’s room)
Jeanne: giggles there there, good boy. Looks like another challenger has come. Let’s do our best!
(Outside) Marie: Jeanne! Is now a good time?
Jeanne: Coming Marie! What’s the matter?
Marie: You got a challenger, I brought em to your room! How’s his tummy?
Jeanne: He ate a whole lot earlier so I think he’s peppy!
Hoku: I dunno what they’re on about but I’m getting strange chills, maybe this is a bad idea. N-No, if I get cold feet here how can I ever call myself an Edokko! Hereeee I Co-
(Door opens) Jeanne: Morning!
An actual, floating shark: Playtime.
Hoku: -mee.......
(Everybody freezes for 5 seconds)
Gudao: RETREEAAAAAT!!!
Jeanne: Welcome to Cirque du Requ- hu-huh?
Marie: Jeanne, everybody ran.
Jeanne: No way... why do all my challengers run back as soon as they arrive here!
Marie: Maybe it’s the little guy, no...?
Jeanne: Whatchu mean, he’s cute as a button no? My Reese XP.
Reese XP (an actual, floating shark): Playtime.
Marie: Yeah, I think he’s super cute too! (Srsly Marie??) You agree Deon?
Deon: I stand by my right to give no comments, Your Highness!
Jeanne & Marie: Eeeeh~
Deon: Why are you two tilting your heads at me!
Oh, so Jeanne continues to hypnotize people into her slav- siblings it seems. And still with her fists.
Jeanne: Jeez. What’s with the sour face. You’ll make your sister sad okay? ...that’s right. I’m not a holy woman here.
Melt: My. Then what could you be?
Jeanne: Yep, I’m Gudao-kun’s... BIG SIS!
Melt: I see, big sis. ...biggu sissu? Errr... what are you talking about. You’re a Heroic Spirit right? A Servant right? Not someone from Japan right?
Sieg: What’s wrong Master. Your face is pale...
Gudao: I HAVE A FEELING THAT PERSON WAS MY BIG SIS! (Yep it’s a continuation of that Summer 3 node where Jeanne hypnotized Jalter and Lily into her slav- siblings. WITH HER FISTS)
Musashi: Huh, big sis. Hoku: Uh huh, big sis.
Everybody: BUT WHY DOU
Jeanne: Jeez, you sis is sadface desu. I never thought my brother’d be my opponent! But unfortunately, there is no way out of this. You will learn that lil brothers can never win against big sisters, with that body of yours errrrrrrr I mean with my gentle teachings!
Okkie: I think I just heard her true intention in full open just now! We’re in deep shit, she’s the same type as MechaEli-chan! 😭
Convo with Orion:

Artemis: Oh, you plan to challenge Jeanne, right?

Orion: Be careful. With Jeanne, and also with that shark. (sobs) Even though that chick looks to be perfectly within my strike zone… it’s like, my head keeps flashing warnings like “no touchy, that chick is totally bad news”… Just like the first time I met Artemis! Just like the first time I met Artemis! No shit, my brain actually repeated twice like that, purely for emphasis.

Sieg: I see now. However, mind if I have a question, Lord Orion?

Orion: wut?

Sieg: Why did that warning let Lord Artemis pass the radar?

Artemis: D A R-L I N G ?

Orion: EEKKK! Man it’s been a while since the last time we had this kinda conversation!

Artemis: Yeah we haven’t been doing our comedy routine in a while. THEN HOW ABOUT I LET YOU HAVE A TASTE OF MY “LUNATIC BEAM” RIGHT NOW?

Orion: That’s your biggest gun ain’t it! E M P L E H!!! (he’s then promptly squeezed into silence)

Also, in the end of the node when Gudao is about to snap back into his ANE trance, Melt whips him out of it with a move called “Comfy Mystic Sword Gisele.” Aww, even when she’s being sadistic she still goes gentle on us, what a sweetie.

You are about to ask Kintoki to help level-upping Public Decency Raikou’s motherhood when a monster suddenly shows up on the street; looks like Tamamo’s glamor has leaked out too much, so somehow a magical beast has turned into an enemy.

Kinbro: No way around this, we’ll just have to talk after I’m done teaching this guy how to behave! Hmm? Waita minute. Isn’t this pattern where we’re supposed to do “that?” This is our chance to say that line, ain’t it!

Gudao: Excuse me!

Kinbro: Hey, don’t you bastards dare start fighting before we do this, okay!

Monsters: (actually play along and nod)

Kinbro: Alright! Here we goooooo!

Gudao: But we were just in the middle of talking!

EVERYBODY ELSE: SUDDENLY, IT’S WYVERNS! HECK YEAH!

Hoku: …what black magic is this?

Musashi: I have absolutely no clue either, but it’s like some kinda token word that feels good when you say it!

(then you fight a Hawaiian chicken that is named “Wyvern?”)

Kintoki’s reaction to our plan with Raikou:
Kinbro: That’s a dangerous gamble you’re making, Master. Right now general Raikou’s power is that of a Public Decency Chairwoman. If you up her motherhood attribute, she might just go back to being a Zerk. But as a Berserker, she’ll definitely say things like “it’s absurd to let my son (read: Master) do something like fighting a shark!” and turn this summer break into a mountain of homework.
Tamamo: What, are you still in elementary school or something? >_>
How Tamamo goes about pushing Raikou’s button:

Raikou: …I see. You’re telling me you want to defeat the Swimsuit Swordsmaster Servants.

Kinbro: Exactly, General Raikou.

Raikou: I do wish to assist you very much… but to begin with, the fact that this Swimsuit Swordsmaster tournament exists, itself is indecent. All of you, be good children and stay where you are. As one who upholds public decency, I shall put an end to everything by myself.

Kinbro: Nah nah nah. Then it would be pointless. It won’t mean a damn if Master himself doesn’t participate properly in the tourney, you see?

Raikou: But… (poor woman, worrying about her son gawking at swimsuits 😭)
Tamamo: Now now. Master, won’t you just let Raikou-san handle everything for us?

Raikou: Whu- Ah, you’re… Tamamo no Mae! Among the list of indecent Servants, you’re the biggest offender…!

Tamamo: You got that right. With that said, we’ll leave eeeeeeeverything to you okay, Raikou-san? Meanwhile, me and Master will enjoy our vacation to our hearts’ content! Hurry hurry Master. First, let’s us take a dip in the pool. After swimming, we’ll rub sun oil for each other, massage each other, clean ears for each other… (no shit I would clean Tamamo’s ears, those fluffs look too damn soft!)

Raikou: HOLD IT RIGHT THERE CRIMINAL SCUM!! D-Do you think I would allow such things! Banned! Each and every one of them is banned!

Tamamo: Huh~ But you see~ If Raikou-san can allow yourself to get so worked up, why can’t you cut Master some slack too?
Raikou: That’s…! But, uh, I mean… umm… (sobs ༼ಢ_ಢ༽)
Gudao: (Kinbro...! / Should we really be bullying her like this…!?)

Kinbro: (This might be mean-spirited, but at times like this, you must bring out your inner oni, Master!)

Tamamo: C’mon c’mon. Won’t you spend your summer days indulging in oozing sweetness with this onee-san? <3

Kinbro: (You’re something, Fox… no matter how you look at this, it’s a deadly honeytrap, but deep within your eyes there ain’t a speck of a smile… Is this the real nature of a courtesan?... no wait, Fox did claim that she had nothing to do with courtesan stuff…) (yes this is a reference to Daji)

Then after the plan has succeeded…

Hoku: Yep. I’m still an amateur but I have faced some real deals. I’m getting better at this swordsman business.

Raikou: That’s wonderful. However… from examining the battle just now, there is still redundancy in your swordplay. On the way to the hotel, I’ll teach you a couple of tricks on how to deal with onis and ogres.
Tamamo: Wow there I’m catching bad vibes so this is where Tamamo-chan will be showing herself out! (whispers closely) If you do need a breather, you can come to my room at any time <3 Well, see ya!

Mashu: Senpai senpai… just what kind of things did Tamamo-san just say to you? Ah, you turned your face away! Senpaaai, senpaaaaaaai!

Since Mephis thinks it’s a waste to just let a ridiculous duel like us trying to fight back brainwashing big sis, he comes up with an equally wacky storyline for us to act as a play while actually dueling. So this is it.

Mephi: Tonight, our story is a tall tale of swindlers. It’s about the amusing life of a man who proclaims to have severed the Italian peninsula and attached it to Greece… Now then, please enjoy!

Roma: …Oh? I see.
Gudao: Though it may sound very painful, this is totally the will of God.
Roma: Very well. No matter the place, no matter if it’s in Greece, Roma is Roma. I too am Roma. Severing the peninsula too, is Roma.

Hector: Wut, the Italian peninsula is coming over to play? I mean, whatever floats your boat, man. Ah, but what will we do about the taxes? They’ll probably make us pay won’t they.

Citizen A: Hey folks have you heard! Looks like they’re gonna chopped off our entire peninsula and attach it to Greece!
B: Now ain’t that something! If we become Italian, we’ll get to climb Mount Olympus!
A: Kudos! Kudos! Kudos to the folks who are chopping off our peninsula!

Hoku: Yep we’re totally doing it! The king has given us a go. Now all we have to do is to lop this peninsula’s head clean off! I can’t wait, I just can’t wait. This is exactly why I love scams and swindles!
Jeanne: Wow there, I won’t let you have you way, my lil brother! If you cut off this peninsula, there will be a giant boot floating over the Mediterranean Sea. I won’t allow you to make a boot island appear out of nowhere! As your big sis I must put a stop to your scheme no matter what, as a your big sis I repeat! Hey, don’t you two agree!?
Lily: Yeah! Only bad people do scams and swindles. Even Bunyan knows that if you lie, your nose will grow!
Jalter: tbh I’d rather be on that side. Welp, at the moment I’m here tho. So be a good boy and obey your sisters!
Gudao: (I knew it, these two are brainwashed too…!)
Actually, there are a couple of funny parallels between the “Family Flag” node in Summer 3 and this part of Summer 4. FYI the thing with Jeanne brainwashing people into her slaves siblings has been going on since Summer 3, with Jeanne trying to claim Gudao as the newest member of the “Jeanne siblings” while Jalter and Lily tried to stop her delusion from going out of hands (spoiler: they failed).

Summer 3:

Jalter: Listen here, “Master-chan.” When it has come to this, you must toughen your heart and firmly reject her rambling. If you don’t you’re just allowing her to come up with some crazier delusions!
Lily: Oh no, even the me who should be clean and proper has gone kooky under Luluhawa heat… I knew it, winter! Winter has got to be the best! Please come early, winter!
Jeanne: What should I do, my lil brother. I didn’t think they would catch on so slowly. There is no helping it, I guess I’ll just have to resort to persuasion (read: my fist).

Jeanne: MODE CHANGE!
(she changes into her dolphin coach swimsuit and Reese also appropriately appears. It still floats in the air, of course.)
Lily: Yay, it’s Mister Dolphin! How do you do, Mister Dolphin!
Reese: (shows a jaw full of teeth)
Lily: It’s scary when the mouth opens!
Jalter: What are you doing there Lily! This whackjob is planning to brainwash us with her fist! Fight her now or else Master will become our little brother!
(after the fight)
Jalter: (dejected) You’re my brother.
Lily: Yay! Even though I’m the youngest child I got a little brother now!
(...and the morning after)
Jalter: Wait, now I remember! You’re not my little brother, right!?
Lily: Yeah, Master is my older brother!
Gudao: (The brainwashing effect still hasn’t cleared…)

Summer 4:

Jeanne: Grrr…! It’s not over yet! Go, Reese XP!
Reese XP: ME – WANT – PLAY.
Lily: To be honest, even if it’s my ally I’m still scared…
Jalter: I’m more scared of a crazy big sister tho.
(...and after the fight)
Jeanne: What a… humiliating defeat…! I am... not… your big sister…!
Gudao: Of course you’re not my big sister!
Jalter: Ah… now that you remind me! This woman is not my big sister!
Lily: I knew it… the summer heat is making us hallucinating…!
Jeanne: Ugh… I can’t believe that… that you’re not my blood-related little brother…!
Gudao: She’s still not giving up!
And that's all I wanna do for this event. There is a bit during Casino Camelot where Fergus is so horny but the girls ignore him to sail their yuri ship so he’s like “a Medjed is fine too” but it’s not as ridiculous as the previous casinos so I’ll pass on translating any more.
Anniversary and Summer 2020 are coming and I have no quartz left, truly the worst roastbelt _:(´ཀ`」 ∠):

Gambling games and India:

Games of chance have always attracted passionate players and the appeal of Lady Luck never seemed to dwindle. They have thrived for thousands of years, even before written history and up to modern times when we can indulge in gambling on our electronic devices without even having to walk to the nearest casino establishment. Games have changed and flourished, but the passion for playing remained the same. India is a country that boasts a rich history when it comes to gambling and still nurtures a strong passion for it in various forms and guises. That said, it’s well worth taking a glance at the origins of casino games and how and where it all began.
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Gambling stories of ancient India
The Ramayana (one of two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India) cites certain forms of games of chance believed to date back as far as 7300 BC. It describes gambling boards, believed by some to be the game of chess, as well as gambling with dice. The popular saying ‘to lose one’s shirt’, meaning to lose money, originated in ancient India. The old Sanskrit texts compare trees that have been stripped of their fruit to defeated gamblers who lost their clothes and ornaments in a wager.
While the Ramayana casually mentions gambling and does not condone it in any sense of the word, the second epic (the Mahabharata) tells a different story. The main antagonist, Shakuni, arranges a dice game against king Yudhishthira whom he cheated out of all his wealth and kingdom. When another antagonist, Duryodhana, insisted that there was no place for two crown princes in the kingdom, another dice game was arranged which ended in the exile of the royal family.
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First Gambling Devices
Buddhist texts mention Indians gambling with nuts as dice as early as 300 BC. Apart from being fond of dice, Indians developed a taste for gambling on animals. At first, ram and cockfights were all the rage which was followed by the more sophisticated horse racing later. What is interesting is that while Europeans are generally given credit for developing certain games of chance, most of the earlier versions of gambling devices had Indian symbols on them.
Further Progress
The 15th century witnessed the rise of legal gambling houses all across India. They were heavily regulated to make sure the games were fair and square so that the players would willingly submit their dues to the king. This was the beginning of the first gambling tax.
When the British introduced cricket to India in the 18th century, Indians fell completely in love with the game. Cricket paved the way for sports betting which flourished in the country until the British took over and passed the Gambling Act in 1867 which outlawed all games of chance. Although they couldn’t abolish the games which still went on in secret, India never looked favorably on gambling again.
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Present-day Gambling
The perspective of the Indian government on gambling is that it is the temptation that lures players to bet beyond their means, ruining their lives and their families. India’s 29 states and seven Union territories have the authority to decide whether to legalize gambling or not. Each state has a different legislative council and even though most of them do not support it, they do allow some forms of it, such as betting on horse races and the lottery. Since gambling restrictions are still in effect to a large extent, many have turned to online options and can choose from some of the best online casinos for India to scratch that itch. Almost 40% of internet users in the country have admitted to spending some of their time playing online casino games with no particular intention of earning large sums of money, but just to have fun and pass the time.
The history of India, which is almost 4000 years long, is brimming with amusing anecdotes of gamblers winning and losing in their favorite games. However, the future might not have as much room for such stories, since the gambling ban is still in effect. The Indian government still doesn’t trust its people to use their own judgment and roll the dice deciding their own fate. If the rules should ever change, the casino industry will be able to boost the Indian economy to a great extent. The people will enjoy their games while the country reaps the benefits. Some would say, a win-win situation.

CASINO GAMES:

There are a number of different online casino sites open for Indians to play on in 2020. With enticing welcome bonuses, a huge library of games including live casino games, more players are signing up now than ever!
However, many online casinos go beyond just a website and offer dedicated mobile apps that allow you to enjoy all features of the online casinos on the go! Check out the best online casino websites for India in 2020!
#1 – LeoVegas’ App
LeoVegas is one of the biggest online casinos in the world and contains a huge number of casino games. You can play Blackjack, Roulette, Slots, live casino games, and more on the online casino.
The LeoVegas app allows you to access more than 1,000 casino games offered by the online casino. Both Android and iOS users are covered as there are dedicated apps for both the operating systems. The user interface is designed to provide a simple and enjoyable experience for all players.
#2 – Betway’s App
Betway is one of the biggest names in the world of online casinos and betting. The site not only offers a huge collection of games in its full-fledged online casino but also offers really great odds on sporting events around the world with a great welcome bonus for new players.
The Betway app allows you to stay in touch with your adventurous self on the go and gives you access to all the games provided on the online casino. Some of the features that make the app great are its small size and classification system that lets you seamlessly switch from its three modes – Betway Casino, Beway Vegas, and Betway Live Casino.
#3 – Casumo’s App
Casumo is a modern online casino with a focus on providing a clean and enjoyable user interface to its players. In terms of game selection, Casumo does pretty well too, and provides tons of different online casino games for you to enjoy.
In keeping up with the philosophy of offering its players one of the best online casino experiences, Casumo also has a dedicated app that can be used to play all the different games offered on the site. Some of the key features of the app include a personal dashboard, automatic notifications, and easy depositing and withdrawal functions right from the app itself!
#4 – Dafabet’s App
Dafabet is one of Asia’s largest online casino and sportsbook. With sponsorships with reputed teams like Celtic FC and Fulham FC, Dafabet is a legit operator that provides an excellent casino and betting experience to players all over Asia including India.
Along with offering an awesome website that is completely responsive, Dafabet also has dedicated apps for both Android and iOS users that allow you to stay in the middle of the action always. The apps have an extremely user-friendly interface and are updated regularly to ensure the app is always fresh and secure!
Online casino apps are changing the game!
Online casinos are rising in popularity in India and since they are regulated by worldwide licenses like MGA, they’re transparent, fair, and legal! A common misconception for online casinos and their bonuses is that they need to be claimed on the website. In almost all cases, it’s possible to download the app from App Store or Google Play, sign up, and grab the welcome bonus straight from the app.
Get in touch with the speculative side of your personality with these amazing online casino apps today!
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I need some help answering some questions about my winnings in las vegas and how to report them to the IRS.

Going through old issues of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter and posting highlights in my own words. For anyone interested, I highly recommend signing up for the actual site at f4wonline and checking out the full archives.
PREVIOUS YEARS ARCHIVE:
1991 • 1992 • 1993 • 1994 • 1995 • 1996 • 1997 • 1998 • 1999

1-3-2000	1-10-2000	1-17-2000	1-24-2000
1-31-2000	2-7-2000	2-14-2000	2-21-2000
2-28-2000	3-6-2000	3-13-2000	3-20-2000
3-27-2000	4-3-2000	4-10-2000	4-17-2000
4-24-2000	5-1-2000	5-8-2000	5-15-2000
5-22-2000	5-29-2000	6-5-2000	6-12-2000
6-19-2000	6-26-2000	7-3-2000	7-10-2000
7-17-2000	7-24-2000	7-31-2000	8-7-2000
8-14-2000	8-21-2000	8-28-2000	9-4-2000
9-11-2000	9-18-2000

• The Delaware Supreme Court ruled against the USA Network in their appeal to prevent WWF from accepting the Viacom deal. The decision makes it official that WWF is moving to TNN next week and ends the 17-year WWF/USA relationship. The appeal process has been lingering for over a month and because of it, USA, Viacom, WWF and ECW were all pretty much paralyzed and waiting to see how things turn out. But now that it's all finalized, ECW's final TNN show will air on 9/22 and the first Raw on TNN will air on 9/25. It doesn't give Viacom much of an opportunity to promote the move. They had set aside $7 million to promote Raw's TNN debut but because of the lingering court proceedings, they kept having to delay it and now there's almost no time. On Raw's final show on USA, Jim Ross mentioned repeatedly that this was the last episode on the network and plugged the move to TNN (and hyping that Austin will be there live). But that's pretty much it so far. During the next few days, you can expect Viacom to bombard all media outlets with as much promotion as they can cram into the short amount of time, but it's going to be impossible to promote it as much as they'd hoped to. And considering they're moving from the #1 rated network to the #15 rated network, they need all the promotion they can get.
  
• Needless to say, this all gives WCW a golden opportunity to put their best foot forward for Nitro on 9/25 and hopefully gain some much-needed ground (in case you're want spoilers for next week, Russo uses this opportunity to make himself the WCW champion). In the short run, Raw's ratings will almost certainly fall, but in the long-run, being with Viacom is going to be hugely beneficial to WWF. As for ECW, this opens the door for them to continue negotiations with USA. They desperately need a TV deal, on a strong network, and most importantly, they need outside financial support if they are going to survive. Having a TV deal is useless if you can't afford the production costs. As mentioned last week, ECW missed payroll and has had to cancel several house shows due to the financial crunch they're under.
  
• Also this week, TNN announced that it's renaming itself The National Network (instead of The Nashville Network) and will be moving its base of operations from Nashville to New York. They're planning to debut a new logo and target their programming to a more diverse audience. Dave recaps the history of WWF on the USA Network, dating back to 1982 when they aired monthly WWF MSG shows. Then WWF got a weekly show called All-American Wrestling on the network in 1983, which then became Prime Time Wrestling and Tuesday Night Titans, the creation of Raw in 1993, the Monday night wars, and now to this.
  
• There was a frightening moment at WCW's Fall Brawl PPV with Paul Orndorff suffering a stinger that left him motionless in the ring. The good news is that it was only temporary paralysis. He was treated and released from the hospital that same night. It was reminiscent of the injuries suffered by Droz and Buff Bagwell in recent years, but fortunately for Orndorff, it didn't end up being as bad. There was immediate suspicion that the whole thing was a work, which Dave thinks is a pretty sad reflection of WCW these days. When Orndorff went down, everyone else in the match basically panicked and continued working the match on the other side of the ring, taking bumps that kept jarring the ring, all while the EMTs and trainer were trying to tend to Orndorff. Finally, almost 2 minutes after he collapsed, referee Charles Robinson finally took charge and ordered the match stopped. The match was scheduled to go several more minutes and run-ins were scheduled, but it all got scrapped when Robinson ended it. The injury happened when Orndorff tried to piledrive Mark Jindrak but Jindrak didn't go up correctly for the move. Orndorff had to deadweight lift him and when he did so, his hamstring went out. He completed the piledriver but landed awkwardly, causing something with his neck and spine to jam up and that was it. Dave talks about Orndorff's health problems over the year, specifically his arm injury that caused his right arm to atrophy severely and never recover. He retired twice before due to health issues (87 and 94) only to return both times when he probably shouldn't have. (This was his final match for 17 years. But it looks like he came out of retirement last year and worked a 6-man tag match at an indie show in Canada. But otherwise, this Fall Brawl match was the end of the road for Orndorff).
  

WATCH: Paul Orndorff injury at Fall Brawl 2000

• This whole thing brings up questions about Nitro this week, which has a match scheduled between Booker T and Vince Russo. Just a few weeks ago, Russo suffered a concussion during an angle and has been dealing with headaches and such ever since, and it's probably not a good idea for him to be in the ring. They could probably work around it, but Dave thinks it's bad enough to have untrained people in there doing moves anyway, much less ones who are already injured. Dave notes the recent example of Kurt Angle wrestling on Smackdown 2 days after getting severely concussed at Summerslam, which he never should have done and led to him getting another concussion because you're always more susceptible to further concussions during the period after suffering one. Russo has openly claimed to have had 3 concussions in the last year and has only worked about 6 matches. If that's true, he probably shouldn't be in there taking bumps again. But maybe they'll book something safe that doesn't require it. Either way, Dave is just concerned about the overall safety of all these guys.
  
• Oh yeah, other notes from Fall Brawl: crowd was 8,600 although only about half of that (4,311) was paid, the rest were freebies. Dave notes all the excitement people in WCW had last week when the Nitro rating was higher than usual, and points out how it obviously didn't mean dick when it comes to ticket sales. TV ratings are nice but it's a vanity metric. The real numbers that matter are the ones that make money. Ticket sales and PPV buys. And, well, those are still horrible. There was a guy in the crowd facing the hard cam who was seen constantly throughout the show wearing a Destroyer mask. Destroyer was a famous wrestler back in 60s and 70s who wore a red and white mask. Anyway....turns out that was the real Destroyer (real name Dick Beyer), just sitting in the crowd at a WCW PPV at 70 years old, still doing his old gimmick. Kevin Nash cut a promo earlier on the pre-show claiming he was hungover from hanging out at the bar last night and essentially telegraphing that he was going to lose his match (he did). Right after the Orndorff match, Shane Douglas cut a pre-match promo saying Kidman would be joining Paul Orndorff at the hospital. Even his partner Torrie Wilson seemed to drop her TV smile and give him a "what an asshole" look for that one. The scaffold for the scaffold match was way wider than any other ones before and the area underneath was padded and safe, but Torrie still seemed legitimately terrified up there. After Madusa took a bump off the scaffold (which the crowd booed because it was clearly gimmicked for safety), the announcers also tried to compare her injuries to Orndorff's injury earlier in the night. Dave is just disgusted. Torrie never took a bump off the scaffold, which was the original plan but she refused, and good for her Dave says. It would have meant nothing for the match anyway. Negative 1 star. They did a segment with David Flair beating up a mailman in his yard and Dave says the whole segment was actually hilarious and more interestingly, it was all David Flair's idea. ICP did commentary on Vampiro's match again, which once again was funny. Mike Awesome came out with former child actor Gary Coleman. There's been a lot of news stories lately about Coleman working as a security guard for $6 an hour these days, so at least WCW probably didn't have to spend a lot to get him. Naturally, he got involved in the match and it was hilarious because he knew he was going to take a guitar shot from Jarrett. So he had a hat on with a towel folded up in it to cushion the blow. But during the chaos, his hat got knocked off. So just before the guitar shot, he picked up his hat, calmly put the towel back in, put it back on, and took the hit. Goldberg vs. Scott Steiner was a shockingly good match and Dave gives it 4.25 stars. And of course, Booker T won the title from Nash in the main event.
  

WATCH: Fall Brawl 2000 highlights

• We get the usual long obituary for Professor Toru Tanaka, one of the biggest heels of the 60s and 70s, who died at age 70 in California. Dave recaps his career and of course, he was a Hawaiian who got booked as a typical salt throwing Japanese heel. Worked for WWWF feuding with Sammartino, won titles in all the territories, etc. He also tells an interesting story from 1977 when Pat Patterson returned to the San Francisco territory after being gone for 8 months and was supposed to face Mr. Fuji in a show that ended up drawing 12,000 people. But Fuji had a falling out with promoter Roy Shire and left the territory 2 weeks before the match. So Shire brought in Tanaka and put him under a mask and tried to pass him off as the real Fuji. The crowd didn't buy it and the media got ahold of the story and started claiming fraud and the athletic commission got involved. Shire nearly lost his promoter's license but he claimed he didn't know and thought it was the real Fuji under the mask. Tanaka and Shire were both fined but the commission seemed to buy the story (others backed it up to protect Shire) and let them off with just the fine. The real Fuji caught all the heat and was legitimately banned by the commission for life from wrestling in California, but that was overturned in 1984.
  
• The current plan for AJPW's Triple Crown title is to hold a tournament soon, which is expected to be won by Toshiaki Kawada, who will then defend the title against NJPW champion Sasaki in a title vs. title match at the Jan. 4th Tokyo Dome show. And the plan from there is for Kawada to get the surprising win, since most people don't expect NJPW to book their champion to lose to AJPW's champion. But the way Riki Choshu (NJPW booker) sees it, AJPW is pretty much doomed and he's not too concerned about them as competition anymore, and he's well aware that this inter-promotional feud is the only thing keeping AJPW alive right now. But there's still money in an AJPW/NJPW feud and they want to prolong it, so Kawada will have to win. The idea is to keep Kawada strong because NJPW loves the gimmick of a strongly booked outsider coming in and shaking things up. In the past, that person has been Naoya Ogawa but Choshu is tired of the headache that comes with dealing with Antonio Inoki and Ogawa because Inoki is intent on making Ogawa an unbeatable superman and NJPW can never get him to put anyone over. Choshu is pretty much trying to do anything he can to get Inoki's influence as far away from the company as possible. So the idea is to keep Kawada strong and milk this angle for all it's worth.
  
• New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman officially signed into law the bill to regulate so-called "extreme wrestling." The bill bans children under 18 from attending extreme wrestling shows. It also adds an athletic commission tax to promotions running extreme shows, mandates an ambulance and 2 doctors must be on hand at every event, and even though it's a state law, the city officials where the show is to be held must specifically give permission for the event. This bill doesn't affect ECW, which was categorized as one of the 3 major companies which are exempt from the law. The bill is a not-so-subtle effort to drive Jersey All Pro Wrestling and Combat Zone Wrestling specifically out of the state, JAPW in particular. They're planning to still run shows but will be forced to get rid of bladejobs, no more light tubes or thumb tacks or barbed wire, etc. JAPW owner Frank Iadeavia has said they are considering legal action. But at this point, if they want to continue to run shows as they have, they're going to be forced to leave the state of New Jersey to do so.
  
• Raw did well in the ratings again, facing stiff competition from the Olympics and Monday Night Football. But they had one segment that was a major bomb. Mick Foley came out, cutting a promo once again trying to get George W. Bush and Al Gore to appear on Smackdown for a debate. The segment was right before the main event and caused a full 700,000 homes to change the channel, which is an unheard of drop for a Raw episode. That led to the Rock/Undertaker main event that followed to be the lowest rated Raw main event of the year.
  
• The Wrestling Observer Hotline has been officially killed off. 1-900 hotline numbers have been dying anyway and the numbers were down and Dave says more importantly, he needed to stop because he's so busy with the newsletter and the Eyada online radio show and wants to concentrate fully on those and the daily hotline stuff took up too much time.
  
• Motoko Baba threatened a lawsuit against Nippon TV over their decision to drop AJPW and start airing NOAH instead, and due to the lawsuit, NOAH currently isn't airing on NTV, which is a major blow for the fledgling new company. In the meantime, Misawa has started negotiations with TV Tokyo, which is another one of the major networks in Japan.
  
• Former WWF and ECW wrestler Nicole Bass made headlines after being arrested in New York after getting into an argument with someone on a street corner. It turned into a fight and when the police tried to break it up, she allegedly bit one of the cops. Bass was one of several people arrested.
  
• Notes from OVW: Jim Ross did announcing on some of the shows there this week, because he was down there scouting talent. Shelton Benjamin is showing a lot of promise and Jim Cornette says Benjamin is progressing even faster than Kurt Angle and believes he's guaranteed to be a big star. Brock Lesnar still hasn't debuted on TV there yet but Bob Orton's son Randy Orton recently did. They're also strongly pushing Leviathan (real name Dave Bautista) and Jim Cornette predicts he will headline Wrestlemania within the next 5 years. (yup, exactly 5 years later in fact)
  
• Ed Farhat, better known as The Sheik, is said to be in very grave condition. He's down to 150 pounds and can only communicate through blinking his eyes or lightly squeezing if you hold his hand (he ended up living another 2+ years after this. His Wikipedia page says he was working with a biographer and did extensive interviews before he died, with plans to have a book on his life released. But it says the interviews "provided a highly explosive look" into the business and as a result, the interviews and draft of the book were sealed at the time of his death and to this day it's never been released. Interesting. When I originally wrote this up a few months ago, I tweeted Dave about this and he responded saying he didn't know anything about it either. I'd love to find out more.)
  
• The latest revival of Stampede Wrestling is in bad shape. They have no more shows scheduled and have only done 10 shows in the last few months. Their TV show has been airing old tapes rather than new episodes lately.
  
• Ken Shamrock broke his silence on his recent PRIDE loss to Kazuyuki Fujita. Shamrock pretty much blamed himself and admitted he wasn't in proper shape to fight and said things happened which contributed to him not having time to train properly (he doesn't go into detail but I think Dave mentioned something in an earlier Observer but I can't find it right now. But I think Shamrock was going through some personal shit around this time. Something like a divorce or a custody battle or something. That doesn't get mentioned here, it's just something I vaguely remember reading awhile back, I might be wrong).
  
• Nobuhiko Takada has announced he's going to face Igor Vovchanchyn at next month's PRIDE show and that if he doesn't win, he'll retire. Takada had a reputation as a shoot fighter from his years as the founder and star of UWFi, which was a worked shoot promotion. But then he started doing real shoots and it's been bad news ever since, including 2 high profile losses to Rickson Gracie. He's had a couple of wins, but they were worked matches. His real MMA fights have all been losses and Dave says the real fighters in PRIDE have pretty much no respect for Takada as an actual fighter. He doesn't like Takada's chances next month (indeed, Takada gets punched into submission in the 2nd round. But he still didn't retire).
  
• Notes from Nitro: the building was mostly full, with not that many freebies. But only because it was a small arena that only holds about 5,000 people. It was also in Canada and the crowd was pretty much only there to see Lance Storm (who ended up jobbing to Jim Duggan in an undercard match) and Bret Hart (who wasn't there at all). They hated Goldberg with a passion, probably due to the Hart stuff, and booed him mercilessly.
  
• On his personal website, Mark Madden apologized to Lou Thesz for his comment on Nitro last week where he joked that Lou Thesz beats up women. Madden said he was only joking and that he has a ton of respect for Thesz.
  
• Pamela Paulshock apparently injured her ankle doing an angle on Thunder last week. Dave thinks it's bad enough when they have untrained wrestlers in there getting hurt, but now untrained ring announcers are getting hurt too.
  
• WCW is pitching an angle for Vampiro to team with singer Billy Idol in a feud against Mike Awesome and David Cassidy, of Partridge Family fame (Never happened but.....yeah. That was a thing evidently).
  
• Dave only has a couple of thoughts on this week's Thunder: he begs someone in WCW to PLEASE send Major Gunns to get acting lessons. He also wants someone to save Mike Awesome from a gimmick worse than the Red Rooster. And finally, I guess there's been a lot of commercials for the new Meet The Parents movie and Dave thinks it looks funny.
  
• Various WCW notes: DDP is likely being brought back soon, though Kimberly won't be. Nitro Girl Spice was released. She was being groomed to co-host WCW's Saturday morning show, but then the show got canned and they didn't have anything else for her. And after being world champion for a couple of months, WCW has finally decided to start making some Booker T merch. Seems like a good idea to finally get around to. The Harris Twins taped segments for both the Maury Povich and Jenny Jones shows, no word on what they are or when they'll air. Goldberg will be on an episode of The Daily Show this week. Gene Okerlund is expected to be given a grumpy old man gimmick where he swears a lot.
  
• Next month might be a surprisingly good month for WCW ticket wise. They have shows in Australia that are expected to do big numbers because Australia is so starved for wrestling that even WCW can do big business there. And they have a PPV in Las Vegas which will do good because the casinos are buying up a lot of tickets to give away.
  
• Kevin Nash and Scott Steiner are reportedly being total team players right now, because there's concern that a regime change could come at any time (a lot of people are pushing for Johnny Ace to replace Vince Russo) and they're basically being on their best behavior until they see who their next new boss might be. The only person right now who's really stirring up shit is Goldberg, who is said to be openly pissed about pretty much everything and isn't shy about expressing it (yeah, even Goldberg has since admitted that he was frustrated and probably wasn't very pleasant to be around back then).
  
• Scott Hall is expected to return to Nitro next week. Brad Siegel reportedly gave up on fighting with Nash about it and is willing to bring Hall back. Siegel and Hall spoke last week and Hall was basically told this is his last chance and if he fucks up one time, he's gone for good. Of course, Scott Steiner has been told that a dozen times in the past, so you know how that goes (Hall doesn't end up coming back. Not sure if it fell through or Dave got bad info or what, but it never happens).
  
• They held a Miss WCW Pageant in Las Vegas last week with Carrot Top as one of the judges and of course there was a bikini contest. Nitro Girl Chae ended up winning over Torrie Wilson, Major Gunns, Baby, Chiquita, Midajah and Stacy Keibler. Pamela Paulshock was supposed to be in it but no-showed due to her ankle injury (there's some good catty drama coming out of this in the next week or two).
  
• So the deal with Konnan is....pretty messed up, actually. He had tricep surgery a few months ago and has no business back in the ring yet. But WCW cut his paycheck in half so....he came back and he's wrestling. But here's the problem. The doctors still haven't given him a medical release yet because, well, they're doctors and he's still fucked up. They're like, "Dude...no." Anyway, because he doesn't have his medical release, WCW is still only giving him half his pay. But they're still allowing him to wrestle. He's hoping to get a medical release this week so he can start getting full checks again. Dave just thinks this whole policy is so screwed up on so many ways.
  
• Disqo Inferno has been bringing out some plastic duck to the ring called the Disqo Duck. (I should stop for a second and explain something for the younger readers. R&B singer Sisqo had a HUGE hit called "Thong Song" around this time and WCW, in their infinite wisdom, capitalized by changing the spelling of Disco to Disqo.) Anyway, the duck is fucking stupid and apparently at Nitro this week, Konnan literally handcuffed himself to the duck backstage to try and keep Disqo Inferno from taking it out to the ring. Someone had to try to save him from himself.
  
• Jeremy Borash will be doing announcing at this week's Thunder tapings. Dave says there's a lot of heat here because Borash is close to Vince Russo, so he's getting a lot of chances to do things like commentary even though he hasn't really earned it yet and hasn't shown any real aptitude for it. Dave says if Borash ends up replacing one of the main announcers on Nitro, there'll probably be a meltdown.
  
• Steve Austin and Debra got married last week in Las Vegas (fun fact: same wedding chapel Triple H and a drugged out Stephanie McMahon got married in. Funner fact: also the same wedding chapel I got married in).
  
• The plan for Sunday Night Heat, now that it's moving to MTV, is for it to be more of a humor and skit type show, with a lot of Tom Green-style humor (oh man, 2000 was such a weird time). They want to bring in musical guests and celebrities for it and will do a lot of the stuff from the WWF New York restaurant as well as at MTV's Times Square headquarters.
  
• Notes from Raw: a lot of the show was built around trying to seemingly bury Kurt Angle, by turning him into a goofy heel character and implying that he's gay. They showed a lot of footage of him crying at the Olympics and had Triple H make fun of him and all that stuff. Dave thinks it's a pretty weird thing to do one week before the biggest match of Angle's career (he's got a No DQ match with Triple H at next week's PPV) and sure didn't do him any favors for people taking him seriously. Hugh Hefner was on to plug Chyna's upcoming Playboy appearance and Dave thinks it's nice that Playboy and WWF could come together again in the interest of making money after all the nasty legal issues they had with the Sable fallout. And finally, Steve Regal debuted.
  
• Since we were talking about WCW's injury policy, Dave decides to let us know what WWF's policy is. A WWF wrestler that is out with an injury receives their downside guarantee. WWF contracts give you a guarantee (say, $300,000 per year for example) but you can make a lot more money on the road because everyone gets a cut of house show gates and PPV revenue and whatnot. So if you're injured and not on the road, you won't get all that extra money, but you still make the $300,000 guarantee. Of course, that leads to the same incentive for guys to sometimes come back before they're ready, because they're losing money by being at home, but from everyone who talks to Dave, there's not nearly as much pressure from the WWF to hurry up and come back as there is in WCW.
  
• Various WWF notes: Big Boss Man will be out for a few weeks after having his knee scoped. Grand Master Sexay needed 14 stitches in his ear after getting legit cut from the belt shot on Raw. Tori should be back in Oct. or early November after shoulder surgery. Billy Gunn should be back in a few weeks. Road Dogg's wife had surgery for a collapsed lung so he's out tending to her. Davey Boy Smith was in a motorcycle accident last week and Dave says if you know how many times Smith has been in and out of the hospital this year, it would scare you to death.
  
• Four different wrestling promotions have videos in the Billboard Top 20 charts....and none of them are WCW. Of course, WWF is all over the charts with their various releases taking up 12 of the 20 spots. ECW has videos at #5 and #7. XPW, which currently isn't running new shows and doesn't even have a building to run shows in right now, has videos at #12 and #19. And Insane Clown Posse's JCW promotion has a video at #13. All that, but no WCW.
  
• Kurt Angle and Taka Michinoku worked a UPW show in California along with a few other WWF developmental signees who started out at the UPW school (I decided to look it up and see who else of note worked that show: Franie Kazarian, Simon Dean, Rocky Romero, Mike Knox, Vic Grimes, Christopher Daniels, Samoa Joe, and John Cena were all on the card. 2000/2001-era UPW had a ton of future stars come through the doors).
  
• One of the XFL teams is already moving before it even starts. The San Jose Demons have now been renamed the San Francisco Demons and will be playing in San Fran after negotiations with Spartan Stadium in San Jose fell apart. Dave thinks it might be a bad move. San Jose is a wealthier community with a large population and their hockey and soccer franchises do huge business. San Francisco already has a major team in every sport and he doesn't know if a B-level football team is going to draw as well there as it would have in San Jose. He also notes that in the spring, the weather is a lot warmer in San Jose at night than it is in San Francisco, and California isn't exactly the type of place where people want to sit out in the cold weather at night and watch football games. This isn't Green Bay or Chicago where freezing to death for football is almost a tradition (the cities are, like, an hour apart so I can't imagine the weather is that much different? Although I guess San Francisco is right there on the bay so maybe wind? I dunno. Anyone from the area care to chime in?)
  
• A New York newspaper reported that Vince McMahon tried to stop VH1 from airing an episode of "The List" because the show featured appearances by Kevin Nash, Booker T, Scott Steiner, Sting, and other WCW stars. VH1 is owned by Viacom, which now owns 3% of WWF's stock and McMahon decided to try to throw his weight around and get the episode canned. Didn't work and it actually was one of the highest rated episodes of the show ever. But he did succeed in getting VH1 to agree to not air reruns of that episode. A WWF spokesman responded to the story, saying, "It is highly unlikely that took place. It's not something we would do." But of course, you'll note that they didn't outright deny it and the idea that Vince McMahon wouldn't do something like that is laughable since he has a long history of doing exactly that sort of thing.
  
• The Slam! Wrestling website wrote an article criticizing the WWF policy of not allowing wrestlers to do interviews with other websites without company approval because they see all other websites as competition to their own WWF.com site. The article noted they had an interview with Gerald Brisco awhile back and Brisco told them he could talk freely about his pre-WWF years but if it has to do with WWF, he'd have to clear it with the office. Jim Ross responded on his WWF website column, saying not a single interview request has come across their desk from any other wrestling websites. Dave talks about when the policy was put in place and says WWF told him he could still get anyone he wanted to interview on the Observer website, but he would need to go through the office first. Since that time, Dave says he's talked to wrestlers who agreed to appear, but when he tried to get it cleared by the office, it stalled and has been pending approval ever since with no answer sooooooo......
  
• WWF is wanting Big Show to drop down to 400 pounds. At his heaviest in WCW he was 505 and currently weighs a legit 480.
  
• Someone writes in with a conspiracy theory. He thinks Shane McMahon's death-defying fall from the TitanTron at Summerslam was done to prove a point given the upcoming Owen Hart wrongful death lawsuit, with the idea being that the WWF side can point to it as an example that, "See! Even Vince McMahon's son is sometimes asked to perform stunts like this and they're usually done safely." Dave responds, saying that normally he'd think that's reading too much into things. But the day after Summerslam, several people in WWF as well as a couple of legal experts he talked to all had basically the same theory and said they wouldn't be surprised if it gets brought up in the trial. But time will tell, Dave says.
  
• Dave Lagana writes in, talking his experience working on "Friends" and talking about how most TV shows are written by writing teams and how stories are crafted in TV writing rooms and so on and so forth. Basically, it leads to the one big question every writer, booker, and performer should ask themselves: how will the audience react to the long-term story? Not how loud the momentary pop is or how much you were able to swerve the audience with a surprise that doesn't make any sense, etc. The point he's trying to make is that Vince Russo is doing literally everything wrong and he has no idea how to write television. He's also pretty fed up with Russo's constant everything-is-a-shoot booking, where they openly acknowledge scripts and bookers and shit in every segment. He's not the only one.
  
• Lots of letters talking about what a total trainwreck WCW is. Russo isn't the only problem. From management to marketing, the ball is being dropped everywhere. None of the stories are coherent. Characters change gimmicks or go from face to heel from week-to-week with no explanation, fans have no idea what's happening. Wrestlers themselves are out of control backstage. Merchandising is dead. Basically, the ship is sinking and the worst part is that nobody seems to care. Everyone is just drilling more holes in the ship. Even when they luck into something that works, they always manage to fuck it up immediately. So there's all that. But also, a lot of piling on Russo from a lot of people who think he's killing the company.
  

MONDAY: Raw debuts on TNN, Steve Austin returns, ECW not yet cancelled on TNN after all, WWF Unforgiven fallout, and more...