A few stray thoughts: 

• By far the easiest Pynchon of the four I’ve read—this, Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Bleeding Edge (I started V. but wasn’t getting that Pynchon feeling from it, so I put it down). This and 49 seem to be the most logical starting points for new Pynchon readers—49 for its low page count, this for its easy prose.
• Despite its effectiveness as an adaptation, Paul Thomas Anderson did overlook one of the most important thematic details of the book by excising Doc’s interactions with ARPANET from his script. The film focuses more on the infiltration and subversion of leftist 60’s movements while barely looking to the future.
• Much of the Vegas trip reminded me of the end of Scorsese’s Casino (which I just rewatched): “‘You’ve seen this place. They’re desperate for somebody non-Mob to come in and spring for the renovation… It’s what they’ve got planned for the whole town, a big Disneyland imitation of itself.’” Doesn't need to be anything intentional—even from the outside, there was an obvious concerted effort to get the mob out of Vegas. Everything in this world is Disneyfied before long.
• As Pynchon details the deputized civilian squadron that conducted the raid on Chick Planet in ski masks, it's hard not to think of those David Ferrie/Guy Bannister anti-Castro training camps: "Weekend maneuvers, urban counterguerilla training."

Connections to Bleeding Edge:

• Early establishment of ARPANET as intelligence agency tool of information sharing and surveillance. The events of Bleeding Edge are the end results of this inciting event—intelligence community control of even the private sector startups and mass surveillance of private citizens leading to catastrophic ends.
• Farley’s 16mm footage of the raid on Chick Planet + Reg’s video of the Deseret rooftop stinger missile rehearsal: advances in video technology revealing otherwise unseen secrets to a larger public.
• File retrieved from ARPANET detailing the history of the Golden Fang—the boat—FKA the Preserved + Maxine’s file on Nicholas Windust’s history with unsaid intelligence agencies. Perhaps a stretch: both could be Pynchon inserting brief histories of CIA anticommunist operations throughout the years for the benefit of his readers.

This bit from Doc’s dream about the exorcism of the schooner is some of the best shit I’ve ever read (I think PTA might’ve quoted it whole-cloth):

…yet there is no avoiding time, the sea of time, the sea of memory and forgetfulness, the years of promise, gone and unrecoverable, of the land almost allowed to claim its better destiny, only to have the claim jumped by evildoers known all too well, and taken instead and held hostage to the future we must live in now forever. May we trust that this blessed ship is bound for some better shore, some undrowned Lemuria, risen and redeemed, where the American fate, mercifully, failed to transpire…