Nicole Noren: “I’m not going to have blood on my hands.”

Nicole did you vote for Kamala even after she made it clear she'd keep doing the genocide?

jesus, i knew shit was getting wild with sports gambling, but i did not know that ESPN seems to have basically merged with one of the big platforms (draftkings).

as a not-a-gambler, ive long felt like an outsider to the phenomenon of sports gambling. when i cut-the-cord with cable and switched to streaming and digital library development, i just kinda lost track of sports along the way. live event shit has come a long way, but it was a different area of the platform than i cared about mostly. then all the CTE shit hit and my understanding of college athletics as a corrupting influence grew. i just stopped even trying to stay current after that.

it was definitely an area where i felt a growing divide between my expectations for myself and the expectations of performing masculinity. like i stopped knowing who was contending for what bowl or what the brackets and matchups looked like.

the thing is, when i would talk to friends still into that world, they were all implicitly acknowledging it was boring and frequently expensive (finding a way to watch a specific teams games). and they were mitigating the boredom of staying current by forming fantasy leagues and making wagers. "it makes the games more interesting." god i heard that a lot.

meanwhile, im just like, why should i have to do all this just to maintain some expected level of engagement, when I'd honestly rather spend the sunday afternoon watching a documentary about concrete.

anyway, gambling addiction is fucked and so grim in the current political economy.

I think the problem is that the regulatory apparatuses around gambling and sportsbooks are still based around brick and mortar gambling establishments and haven’t adapted to the new online norm. Sadly, it probably won’t be addressed until we get a Black Sox-type situation where one of the billionaire owners is on the losing end of some sportsbook malfeasance.