Category: Uncategorized

In the year 2026, everything is gambling now. I don’t just mean how there are more casinos everywhere (although there are) or how sports betting has pervaded everything (although it has), but now we have prop bets, “prediction markets” (that are basically just sports betting, but also about other things), online gambling that lets you access things like blackjack and poker on your phone, online gambling that lets you play things like high stakes plinko or bet on how high a number goes before it crashes.

And then there’s cryptocurrency, which is less a currency and more just a way to speculate on other people being hopefully dumber and/or greedier than you. Especially when you move away from Bitcoin (which is basically an asset now – still not really a currency because it’s not useful, but no worse an “investment” than incredibly volatile stock) and into the world of “memecoins” where the idea is basically to mint, hype your trash token to a bunch of rubes, and then liquidate and pocket all the money. (Or in other words, bet some money, and then watch the line go up and sell before it crashes, just like that game at the end of the last paragraph.)

It’s not just that these things exist (which is mildly problematic on its own), but they’ve become even more accessible than ever. You used to have to go to a casino or sportsbook (or a guy at the bar or whatever) but now you just install an app or go to a website, type in your credit card info (or buy some “sweepstakes coins” – more on that later), and you’re ready to start betting. On sports, it’s just an endless scroll of games and buttons to tap to immediately place a bet. Click “See More” or whatever it is in your app of choice and suddenly instead of just picking winners, you’re picking who’s going to score, what the first play is going to be, or longer-term bets like which teams are going to win the championship. I even like sports betting and have had some minor success at it, but the day it launched in my home state, I remember thinking both “Sweet, gonna do this all the time now” but also “Uh, maybe this is a little too easy.”

But if you want to bet on things like elections (or be even more of a ghoul and bet on things like wars and assassinations) there’s “prediction markets” like Kalshi and Polymarket. The CEO of Kalshi says his goal is to financialize every difference in opinion, and that’s basically what these “markets” do. (I don’t see any markets specifically open about murders; maybe they don’t allow that, but there are some on Polymarket now about if/when the US will launch a strike on Iran or Russia capturing particular Ukrainian cities.) If you think something will happen, you can find that market and buy the “shares” in the outcome. The price of a share is based on the calculated odds (every “winning” share pays out $1, and you can find shares for sale from anywhere from $0.003 up to $0.998 depending on the market), but then you can also sell that share to some other sucker along the way. It’s like betting on your bets! (Or like options trading for people who are even less informed about how trading works!)

How is this legal? For sports betting, it’s legal because sports. (Even before sports betting was allowed to be legalized nationwide, there was a special exception for horse racing – gambling has always been ok when it supports a particular industry.) For “prediction markets” it’s legal because you’re buying tradable contracts, which is totally not betting. For sites like Stake, you buy fake money in bundles (and they inflate the fake money, so for like $50, you get 500,000 Gold Coins (that have no cash value and aren’t redeemable in any way) but then you also get a FREE BONUS of 50 sweepstakes coins (or whatever any given site calls them) that you can also play with, and those sweepstakes coins are redeemable for cash and prizes! You’re not gambling with money, you’re buying tokens and then you can win more tokens and trade your tokens for money! (Yes, that’s how it works in a casino, but generally, casino games online are not legal, barring a few jurisdictions where they are, like Pennsylvania, where I have managed to lose tens of dollars like a quarter at a time playing blackjack on my phone. Even I’m not immune to this nonsense.)

Look, I like to gamble. I think it’s fun. I bet on sports; I go to casinos; I play the lottery; I play poker. Do I sometimes win? Yes. Do I usually lose? At some of those, yes. (I think I’m profitable over my lifetime at poker and sports betting; I have definitely never won the lottery.) Would it be better for my finances if I just never did any of it? Obviously. I would also have more money if I never bought board games or went on vacation or ate at restaurants, and I’m never going to stop doing those things, either.

Is it destructive? Not for me personally(other than having lost money), but in general, probably. States with legalized sports gambling have overall lower credit scores, more bankruptcies, and more debts in collections. And that’s just the regulated sportsbooks that are licensed by gaming commissions and required to provide things like self-limiting, self-exclusion, and information to assist with gambling addictions. Kalshi at least has a disclaimer at the bottom of the page that trading incurs risk (although no links or phone numbers for addiction) and Polymarket not only doesn’t have anything like that at the bottom of the page, but it doesn’t even have a bottom of the page! If you keep holding Page Down or spinning your scroll wheel, you just keep getting more markets forever! (Okay, one, it’s probably not “forever” but I’m not gonna find the bottom and two, there is page footer with links, but those also don’t provide any help getting your out of your downward spiral of betting on the over/under on the number of views on the next Mr. Beast video or whether there will be a Magnitude 10 earthquake this year.) Despite being sketchy as hell, Stake does have a big section of their website about responsible gaming, so that’s cool. (They also have leaderboards where you can rank up by betting more, so that’s not great.)

It’s obnoxious. It used to be that gambling was weird and sketchy, but now ESPN not only talks about the lines in the pregame coverage, but also now runs their own sportsbook. And everything is sponsored by sportsbooks now. Your game gets interrupted constantly by reminders that you could be betting right now! You can bet mid-game! How are your bets doing?! You know that parody from Family Guy where the “subliminal message” about smoking was just a guy yelling “SMOKE”? It’s basically that. (Oh god, can you imagine the advertising for weed if that gets fully legalized?)

So yeah, it’s a way to squeeze more money out of people who don’t have any. It’s addictive, and it’s everywhere. It’s kinda fun. It’s probably fine. Probably. Not the downfall of society at all.

Hey, look! The first post of 2026, and it almost got posted within the first week. That’s a good start! I’ve been thinking about some of the talking points I wanted to put in here for a while now, and while I haven’t really “drafted” anything yet, I wanted to get it out here, so here’s what I’ve got.

First, we all know that “AI” as it’s being marketed excruciatingly and shoved into everything is a big pile of shit. Most “AI” integrations aren’t anything more than chatbots or algorithms or what would have been basic automations a few years ago, but now we call it “AI” so venture capitalists will throw all their money at it. The “AI” built into Microsoft Word is just the spelling checker turned up to 1000% such that, instead of just realizing you’ve typed something that isn’t a word, it sees that you’ve typed a word and starts suggesting what words normally come after that. Hell, that’s what Clippit (the actual name of the paperclip) was doing back in Office 97. (“It looks like you’re writing a letter!”) It’s not “new,” and it’s not “intelligent,” and honestly, it’s not even all that helpful.

Next, we have what people are actually doing with these things. We have people “writing music” and filling Spotify and YouTube with it, and people “making art” that’s terrible, with people with the wrong number of fingers and legs that bend the wrong way, and people “writing” text that doesn’t make any sense and isn’t coherent at all. It’s all trash, where people with no desire to “make something” but the desire to “have made something” can babble out some prompts and copy/paste output into the platform of their choice and say they did it. They don’t get any of the satisfaction of creation, but that’s not what they wanted, anyway. When someone wants to make art, they can just do it. Maybe it’ll be bad (and it always is your first time, because creation is a skill that takes practice and training) but that’s ok, because it’s still yours. Hell, I think you would get more satisfaction commissioning someone to make art for you than you would just getting a bot to do it, because then at least you can think “they made this for me.”

And then we have the heinous shit people are doing, most recently getting Grok to make CSAM and post it on Twitter. Like, just literally being like “hey chatbot, take this picture of a child and make them nude” and the bot’s all “here you go!” As if the internet wasn’t enough of a pedo hellscape (that exact phrase being used in a report about Roblox) but now one of the largest social media platforms owned by the richest person in the world is helping!

But ok, my gimmick here is that everything is “fine.” That everything that’s critically acclaimed actually is just whatever, and everything that sucks also has something wonderful and worthwhile. So what’s the positive to all of this garbage?

Honestly, at the moment, not much. I mean, there’s the abstract positive that a lot of really stupid people with way too much money are spending all that money on nothing and we all continue to not like it and not buy it. That’s at least worth some entertainment value.

There’s also that some of this nonsense is actually almost useful. Right now, all the air in the room is taken up by LLMs, basically prediction engines that can look at a “token” (basically, a snippet of text, or a piece of an image, or something) and have some knowledge of what tokens are usually found around it and reproduce something that sounds like natural language, or looks like a picture, or whatever. That’s where we get all this “AI” slop filling everything, but for things where reproducing what came before is all you need, like writing simple code (or interpreting existing code), it can help people to make those little tools we wish we had, so we can get back to the stuff that’s actually productive.

Nobody really talks about machine learning or neural networks anymore (because being able to deepfake your dead grandma is apparently more marketable) but things like speech recognition and handwriting recognition (that were impossibly futuristic at one point, then cutting edge, and now for the most part they just kinda work) are based on that stuff. (My understanding is that generally, these are just algorithms, and not really “AI,” but those algorithms are trained using a lot of the same types of systems that train ChatGPT and other LLMs.

And then there’s using the same sort of training on things like financial data, that could potentially change the way things like forensic accounting or actuarial work is done. (Of course, they could lead to things like the model that ended up being trained to “spot cancer” based on images of moles and “learned” that moles with rulers in the picture were cancerous, so the principle of “garbage in, garbage out” still applies.)

Basically, there are a lot of solutions out there just looking for problems. (And right now, companies like OpenAI are betting trillions of dollars that the problem you have is that you really want a chatbot to tell you to kill yourself or post crap to social media to be read by other chatbots so that even more chatbots can post comments about Obama.)

It could go the way of cryptocurrency, where a lot of money and time will be spent telling us it’s “the future” when ultimately it goes nowhere except for a small community of diehards and a very large network of grifters. (Really, “blockchain” in terms of the technical aspects of a trustless public ledger is a neat concept. There still isn’t a use for it that wouldn’t be better of to just use a database, but it’s still a neat concept.)

Or it could go the way of something like digital cameras, where some people play around with it but people who really care don’t use it, until suddenly it just sort of becomes the way it’s done. (“AI generation” will hopefully never become the “way it’s done” but there must be some middle ground between “I made this by hand” and “a chatbot made this for me.”)

So yeah, “Artificial Intelligence” is stupid. If someone wants you to use it, they’re probably also stupid. If you’re thinking “I don’t know; I think there might be something to this…” you might not be completely stupid. Basically, if you don’t buy it, and don’t use it to replace actual human thought or creativity, then it’s fine.

Naturally, no content on this site is generated by any sort of AI. You can tell, because it’s stupid, but in a sincere and human way!

Wow – It’s been a while since I posted anything here. I’m also working on the actually controversial take of “Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is Fine” but I want to finish the game before I write it. Spoiler alert: it’s fine.

Anyway, Gen Con! The largest gaming convention in North America was like two weeks ago, and I’m just now sitting down to post my stupid opinions about it. Here’s a brief rundown of the weekend…

Travel

About an hour into the (9-10 hour) trip, the transmission blew up in my friend’s car. UItimately, we rented a car and got moving again, but it cost us a few hours. Thankfully, the rest of the way was uneventful.

Board Games

Naturally, I played board games. Some new ones I played are:

• Vantage: Really enjoyable sort of “choose your own adventure” game where you explore a planet and then stuff happens to you. Played it once during the convention, liked it enough to buy it, and then played it with friends at home and they liked it too. Yay! I don’t want to give too many details away, but if you like games like Tales of the Arabian Nights, you’ll probably also really like this. And there’s SO MUCH CONTENT – 802 different locations and like 900 different items, creatures, and whatnot you can end up encountering.
• Grendel: The Game of Crime and Mayhem: Okay, Baader-Meinhof effect – I saw this game in the Gen Con event catalog and thought it sounded neat, so I got a ticket. Then, the game went up on Kickstarter and I discovered it’s based on an old comic book that I had never heard of. Then, during an RPG session later, the GM’s laptop wallpaper was of the comic. Grendel is having a moment, apparently.
  • To actually talk about the game for a moment, it’s a four player, maneuvering dudes and tokens around a map sort of game with player asymmetry. I found it easier to pick up than Root, which is probably the closest comparison. However, it has two main gimmicks (or if you find calling them “gimmicks” derogatory, then “things that set it apart”).
    • First, each player uses an entirely different set of mechanics to choose their actions on a turn. Grendel draws chits out of a bag, and plays them onto tracks on their player board, getting bonuses for matching colors; Argent plays a deckbuilder, flipping cards until they either choose to stop (and then do all the actions they revealed) or reveals 4 skulls on cards (losing their turn); the police move little police cars around a rondel on their player board; and the mob rolls dice and allocates them to action spaces.
    • The other gimmick is that, throughout the game, players earn “aggression” tokens that they use by dropping into little towers that sit in each of the map’s zones. Tokens have values from 1-3, and notably, are sized inversely to their values. That matters because each tower has a counterweight in it, and when enough weight is in there, the tokens spill back out, and then a “Mayhem phase” takes place, which is mainly where scoring happens.
  • I thought it was fine; I’d play it again, but the session had two major drawbacks (neither of which was really an issue with the game):
    • First, they only allocated an hour to learn and play the game. It’s not a super long game, but you probably want at least two hours.
    • Second, the person demoing it had only just received the copy and didn’t really know the rules all that well. They knew enough to teach the game mechanics, but not really to answer any complicated questions.
• Primacy: Another moving dudes around on a map game, but this one had (initially) symmetric action selection, and different spaces on the board contribute different resources toward scoring. I’d say the closest analog to this one that I’ve played before would by Scythe. (It felt much lighter and more accessible than Scythe, though.) It was fun to play, the person running the demo was the designer, and they were able to coach us through playing the entire game. (Or maybe like 90% of the game. We went into final scoring technically before we were supposed to due to time, but we were close to finishing anyway.) This one is a future Kickstarter that I’ll be watching for, but I’m not sure if I’ll go for it. Probably depends on price or what all is included.
• Enthrone: A two player… not hidden movement, because all the movement is public, but hidden… identity? game. There are 8 pawns on the board, starting on the outside and moving toward the center. You get three cards (out of eight, one for each pawn), and choose one to play with; on it is a particular pawn. You win if you a) get your pawn to the center of the board, b) remove your opponent’s pawn from the board, or c) remove three other pawns from the board that your card identifies. Really nice components, and a really interesting set of mechanics around how to move pieces and when to try to conceal your intentions. Greatly enjoyed playing it, but probably wouldn’t buy it because two player games are in a weird spot – I can’t play them by myself, but at a gaming meetup or something, you really want something that plays about four.
• Sidereal Confluence: Really old trading game – not gonna give it a review, it’s from like 2017, but I’ve had it for a while and never got it to the table, but at Gen Con, you can find a big bunch of people to play your weird game that plays up to nine players. (We only had 6, but still…)

RPGs

• Call of Cthulhu: I always try to get in one session at the con, and if possible, run by You Too Can Cthulhu. This one had the hook that all the player characters were pro wrestlers, so I was in. However, that really was just the hook, and had very little to do with what was really going on. It was still a pretty fun time, though.
• Mork Borg (or maybe it was CY Borg? It was in space.): Just hanging out with friends and screwing around. Someone had a really creative scenario they put together with some weird-ass characters, so I jumped in while they were playing. Didn’t personally get to do much, but that didn’t bother me.

CCGs

• Magic! I played one game of commander with an online friend and one of their friends. It was fun. Didn’t do any drafts or anything. Magic was all over in the stadium, so it was hard to just go jam an event in between other things, and also there wasn’t really anything “can’t-miss”. I’ve done the Unknown event at a Magic Con and a Gen Con now, and they’re usually more trouble than they’re worth. (Also pretty expensive.)
• Riftbound: It’s the new one from Riot Games based on League of Legends. I dunno; I guess it’s ok. The trial decks are neat (although all the cards are watermarked SAMPLE and are (hopefully) not printed on the actual cardstock the trading cards use) and it’s got some interesting mechanics. I’ll see if a scene for it pops up around me.
• I also saw people playing the Gundam TCG and the Godzilla TCG. I’m not interested in either, but people seemed to be having a good time.

Miscellaneous Other Things

• Glitter Guild Burlesque Show: Saw this for the first time last year and went back for more. A good mix of sexy and weird. Every convention can be improved with titties. (Although the seating arrangement this time made it rather difficult to see said titties. Still a good time, though.)
• Stage Combat Class: Took a stage knife fighting class last year and went back for a different one. This was advertised as a “mass battle” but only 5 people attended, so we instead did a small little melee around a table. Very fun. Would recommend checking out Counterfeit Combat if they do a session at an event you’re at. Will check out their offerings at future Gen Cons.
• The Exhibit Hall! To some, the main attraction. To others, the smelly pit full of jerks that’s in the way between you and new board games. I was able to get to all the booths I had on my list, although some were incredibly cramped, or were swamped with people buying some hit release that I couldn’t see anything else. No wagons/strollers/carts was a nice change, though. There was just some sort of… funk? Calling it a “miasma” would be overstating it harshly, but moving from either the corridors or the gaming hall into the exhibit hall did feel like there was a sudden atmospheric change, like it was hotter and stuffier. There’s enough other stuff to do that you could potentially skip it entirely, but I couldn’t let myself not look at anything in there.
• The Block Party: In terms of arrangement, it was pretty nice. A lot of space to move around, and an ok selection of stuff. Lots of long lines (72,000 attendees will do that), but if I wanted something, it was attainable. Didn’t get a lot here, though. A very mediocre burger one day, and a pretty darn good one the next day. Ate most other food at the other bars/restaurants around the convention center.
• Pinball Alley: Surprisingly accessible, but like $2 per play. (Granted, pinball at most arcade bars or whatever is usually at least a dollar, but still.) They had some nice machines and I had a little fun. It was fine.
• NOBODY WANTED TO PLAY BLOOD ON THE CLOCKTOWER but it’s fine. I have my local group I play with like once a month, and if I really wanted, I could have jumped into games with randos in the hallway, but… ugh.
• I didn’t get COVID like last year!

Summary

I don’t know; some years, I leave the con feeling really hype, like I had a blast and can’t wait for the next one. Nothing went particularly wrong this year (save the thing in the “Travel” section), and all the games I played were pretty fun. I met my friends (and some new ones) and hung out, played, caught up. It was a good time.

Except it wasn’t? Like, on at least one occasion while walking somewhere, I distinctly had a thought like “this is miserable” and it wasn’t at all (maybe the walk was, or my bag was heavy or something).

Except it was – I did everything I set out to do and all of those things met or exceeded my expectations.

So I guess… the vibes were off? Weirdly, several other people had similar thoughts – that they had fun, but also were unhappy, or… something? Interestingly, most of the people saying that were people who had been many times before. First timers seemed to genuinely be ecstatic and were already talking about next year. Maybe some of us are just over it.

It’s enough to make me say “maybe I’ll skip next year”, but I’ll still enter the VIG lottery in the fall, and I’ll still probably grab a badge in January “just in case” so I can get a housing time. Then I’ll book a hotel room if I have a good time “just in case”. Then I’ll have event tickets, and probably help GM something, and then I’ll get all amped up again. (Maybe I just expect too much?)

It’s fine.

Lots of people are complaining about how bad this part of AEW has been lately, and it has been some of the worst parts of the shows (or at least majorly disappointing).

The Revolution PPV ended with a string of five matches all rated 4 or more stars (out of 5), and then the Moxley/Copeland match, which was… fine. It actually was just fine. They did some decent stuff, but it dragged on a bit.

Then, Dynasty ended with the Young Bucks coming back, which was cool, I guess. (I’m not the biggest fan, but they’re good.) They helped Moxley retain the world title, but mainly to try to get Hangman back on their side by interfering with Swerve. Now that they’ve been back, they aren’t working with the Death Riders at all.

Now, the Death Riders have lost the trios titles, and things are breaking down. If you think it’s taken too long to get here, that’s probably true, but this angle isn’t bad.

So we’ve got a world title scene that is kind of interesting, some big returns, and a women’s scene that’s stealing every show. (Yeah, the AEW women’s scene is ridiculous.) It’s fine.

So Japan, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia happened since China. Max won a race, and then Oscar Piastri won the other two. We do appear to have a one-team season like we have in the past, but this year it’s McLaren. The Red Bull is still fast, but they’re a one-car team, so McLaren gets to run away with it. Mercedes and Ferrari are consistently scoring points, but not tons of them.

Between the McLaren battle and the rookies starting to get it together (somewhat), there should be some more fun coming this season. It’s fine.

Here’s where we see how far this page reaches…

Anyway, a few weeks ago, I went to see Starset do an acoustic set at a brewery in Baltimore. It was fun; they were really chill and Starset is, to me, a pretty big band to be doing a show for like a hundred people in the back of a brewery. They’re pretty good; I’ve been into their singles for most of their tenure, but never listened to their albums until last September when I saw one of their demonstrations and I got hooked. They put on a good show, and I’m looking forward to their next stuff.

However, some of their songs are just sort of there and the whole “sci-fi space thing” is just kind of shoved in. (Now, don’t get me wrong, some songs absolutely nail it.) They make good music, but I’m not going to draw fanart of them or get things tattooed onto me.

When I first had the idea of writing a post about Starset, I wanted to say something about how excessive and weird their fans are, but honestly, I think that’s just the nature of fandoms now, and I just wasn’t really involved before. And they all signed my copy of their book. They’re fine.

I meant to write a post like “The Australian Grand Prix was fine” but I didn’t get around to it, and then another race came and went. Whoops.

But the two races were very different. Australia had the weird rain on and off. The start was abandoned when a car crashed on the formation lap, then the safety car came out when two other cars crashed during the actual first lap of the race. Ultimately, only 14 out of 20 cars finished, but three different teams were represented in the top three finishers. And Max Verstappen didn’t win! (Marking the first time he isn’t in the Drivers’ Championship lead since 2022.) Some teams showed they had a lot to work on, and the rookies (outside of Antonelli) didn’t impress.

• Isack Hadjar – Crashed during formation lap
• Jack Doohan – Crashed during lap 1
• Gabriel Bortoleto – Crashed during lap 46
• Liam Lawson – Crashed during lap 47
• Oliver Bearman – Didn’t crash; finished last
• Andrea Kimi Antonelli – Finished 4th!

Overall, the race had its starts and stops (due to all the crashes) and the rain meant everyone was at something less than full speed. It was kind of a crummy season opener, but it was interesting. Mercedes finished 3/4; is Mercedes back?

And round 2 was on to China. Due to the timing, I did not watch this race live. (And I didn’t watch any of the Sprint Qualifying, Sprint Race, or Qualifying, which I will generally watch if they’re convenient.)

Lewis Hamilton won the sprint. Is Lewis back? Lando Norris started the sprint in 6th and finished 8th. Does he still not know how to start a race? Antonelli finished the sprint 7th, possibly locking up rookie of the year already.

Then Oscar Piastri got his first career pole, and four different teams qualified in the top six. Isack Hadjar was the top qualifying rookie (assuming he would actually go on to start the race), but Bearman, Doohan, Bortoleto, and Lawson would be the bottom four.

And then… a Formula One race happened.

When people complain about Formula One, they usually complain about things like “The races are boring” (and they kind of are; it’s ultimately cars going in a circle, but there are pit stops, cars locking up or running wide, and then the whole thing only takes about 90 minutes) or “the races aren’t competitive” (and… yeah, when you let the teams design their own cars, some of the cars are gonna be shit).

And that sort of happened here. The cars that started on the grid as 1/2/3/4/5/6 finished in positions 1/3/2/4/6/5. If you watch a race just to see who wins, then sure, an F1 race probably isn’t your deal. But there are more stories in a race than just who wins. Oscar Piastri won from pole. Yawn. But that was his first career pole. Lando finished second after starting third. He had to pass Max Verstappen on the first lap (something that, last year, happened the other way around way more). Both Ferraris looked good. Then they ran into each other, but the damage didn’t seem to impact either car’s race. Then they both got disqualified. (Which was notable on its own; it was the first EVER Ferrari double disqualification, and the first double for any team since 2019, and the first 3-car disqualification (Pierre Gasly was also disqualified) since 2004.)

Maybe it does look like we have a single dominant team. But that team isn’t Red Bull or Mercedes. (And Red Bull is looking like a one-car team as long as they keep developing a car for Max instead of for the team.) And maybe we have a single dominant driver (not Max Verstappen), but a 1st and 2nd in two races isn’t necessarily an indication yet, and George Russell (who I don’t even think I’ve mentioned yet) finished 3rd in both races. (And Max got a 2nd and a 4th.)

Formula One is fun. Each race isn’t wire-to-wire excitement, but there’s always something. And for as terrible as a… how many races? Twenty-four!?

For as many races as there are to go (too many), more stories will develop. Is Mercedes back? Is Lewis back? Will Red Bull find a second driver? Will any of the rookies besides Antonelli accomplish anything?

The Formula One season is long, and boring, and grueling, and exciting, but above all, it’s fine.

Watch this space for updates. Things are in the works.