i write because the the alternative forms of my obsessive insanity are either too destructive or decidedly less sexy.
gamblingguide
Every other game in the casino is a math problem you’re on the wrong side of. The house has an edge, you grind against that edge, and the only question is how fast your bankroll erodes. Poker inverts this completely. The house doesn’t play. The house takes a
gamblingguide
The roulette wheel is the most photogenic object in any casino. The spin, the bounce, the ball settling into a numbered pocket while a crowd leans forward; it’s cinematic in a way that card games and dice rolls can never quite manage. Directors know this. Every gambling movie eventually
gamblingguide
The most exclusive rooms in every casino on earth are reserved for a game that requires exactly zero skill. Not reduced skill. Not simplified skill. Zero. You place a bet, cards get dealt according to fixed rules, and someone wins. The player makes no decisions after the chips go down.
gamblingguide
Fourteen people crowded around a table the size of a bathtub, screaming at dice. A felt layout covered in numbers, arrows, circles, and terminology that looks like it was designed by someone who wanted to make sure no newcomer ever felt welcome. A stick person pushing dice around with a
gamblingguide
Somewhere around midnight in every casino in America, a man with a $15 bet and a 16 against a dealer’s 7 stares at his cards, takes a long breath, and waves his hand to stand. He feels good about the decision. He didn’t bust. He played it safe.
gamblingguide
A couple sits down at a roulette table in the Bellagio with $500. They’re celebrating an anniversary. She picks 17 because it was their wedding date; he puts $50 on black because he saw it in a movie once. The wheel spins. The ball bounces. They lose $100 in
gamblingguide
Every casino on the planet runs on a single insight: people are bad at math when their emotions are involved. The lights, the sounds, the free drinks, the near-misses that feel like almost-wins; all of it exists to keep the prediction engine in your skull running on vibes instead of
diagnosisindustrialcomplex
You have been through the machine. Maybe a psychiatrist gave you the label in a fifteen-minute appointment. Maybe a therapist worked with you for months before suggesting it. Maybe you diagnosed yourself after reading enough and recognizing enough and deciding that the pattern fit. However it arrived, you now carry
diagnosisindustrialcomplex
In 2013, two weeks before the American Psychiatric Association published DSM-5, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health did something extraordinary. Thomas Insel published a blog post announcing that the NIMH would be “re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.” The largest funder of mental health research in
diagnosisindustrialcomplex
Somewhere in America right now, a hiring manager is looking at a candidate’s Myers-Briggs results and making a decision about fit. In the same building, someone is making fun of a coworker for checking their horoscope. The hiring manager believes they are being data-driven. The horoscope reader knows they
diagnosisindustrialcomplex
For most of the twentieth century, autism was a tragedy. It was a thing that happened to families, a developmental catastrophe, a life sentence spoken in clinical monotone across a desk. The child was broken. The parents were heartbroken. The system existed to minimize the damage and, if possible, make
diagnosisindustrialcomplex
Thomas Szasz published The Myth of Mental Illness in 1961 and the psychiatric establishment has been furious about it ever since. His central claim was blunt to the point of provocation: mental illness is not illness. There is no lesion, no pathogen, no broken bone. What psychiatry calls disease is