How much Americans wagered on sports betting in 2025 and how it's more than they spent on movies, art, museums and music combined.

So, I'm not sure if I think of gambling as absolutely daft because A. the church I grew up in was against it, B. my mom telling me that you're either losing or if you're winning it's based on the suffering of others, C. being wired to not feel the thrill of a win as much as other folks seem to, so the cold calculus of "the house always wins" is that much more obvious.

Like with sports betting, I just don't get. I already know its stupid how much emotional energy I put into some Boston teams, but at least there's a connection... getting all riled up on teams you don't really care about, or because you assume you're smarter than everyone else?

Of course it's "only" $166 billion. Compared to numbers I hear tossed around in national budget discussions, it's almost weird how small that is.

And also, it's interesting that the movie industry punches above its weight culture wise relative to the money involved. Like I remember a weird factoid where the video game industry makes a lot more than the movie industry - in fact was doing so in the old arcade days, a quarter at a time...

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That's the problem with time, it just keeps going... even if you don't.

I started doing a simple diary on May 29, 2000. It started on my PalmPilot, then that September I made a little private webpage for it. (This is all distinct from my blogging, which started as a "quote journal" also on the Palm a few years earlier.)

According to the TimeToy webapp I made, I was 9556 days old when I started the diary, and am 19112 days old today. So I have half of the days of my life loosely documented, and half not.

I think I started making a diary because even at 26 I was aware at how much I'd already forgotten, that there were entire seasons or years when I didn't have a good summary of what I had been up to.

(Just today I unconsciously coined a new word, while bouncing some of these ideas off of ChatGPT: "forgettal". If a memory is the unit of something we recall, a "forgettal" is the unit of something we've forgotten.)

I use ChatGPT as a discussion partner; sure it lacks much of a true human dialog, but also it doesn't have the agenda a human has (well, arguably it might be imbued a different agenda) It can be a powerful, proactice mirror, and it will tolerate my meandering and repetition at lengths I can't expect my human buddies to match. (In a way it's kind of like... "what if my blog could talk back?")

I was talking about my frustration with finding the most useful metaphor for consciousness and subconscious parts; Freudian Id/Ego/Superego, Internal Family Systems, inner children (or soemtimes even inner dog), McGilchristian hemispheres, multitasking computer systems, etc. ChatGPT came up with this: (in that LLM telltale "short sentence" style)

Here's a metaphor I've never quite heard anyone use.

Imagine a modern nation.

There are millions of citizens (the low-level processes).

There are institutions (habit systems, emotional systems, perception).

Then there's the press.

The press isn't the government.

It isn't the citizens.

But it absolutely shapes what everyone thinks is happening.

It decides what is news.

It constructs narratives.

It remembers history selectively.

It has incentives.

It develops biases.

Sometimes it uncovers genuine truth.

Sometimes it spins.

Sometimes it believes its own headlines.

Your inner narrator might be something like that.

It's an emergent institution.

Not reducible to one neuron.

Not the whole country either.

And because it's built on language, once it exists it develops its own dynamics.

That's really good! And based on a little googling, pretty original.

(It does bring to mind if that metaphorical nation's government has a king, a president or what - I think I see it as a fairly direct democracy with a lot of ballot measures. Also a bureaucracy with a lot of systems that keeps things moving.)

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It brings to mind another thing ChatGPT agreed with, like a new metaphor. People who say LLMs are "just a glorified autocomplete" undersell what they can do but are kind of right about the mechanism. The fact that "what word sounds likely next" is SO powerful really says something about the power of words. Like "In the beginning was the Word" level stuff.

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I did more rambling of the above won a "pondering the nature of being" tip ("what is self", "what is consciousness?" etc) - usually ending up with the Buddhist truth (and Descartes concern) that on some level all we really have is this moment.

That all makes me think of this quote from Ted Chiang's "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" (SPOILERS AHEAD) - the story is a world where continuous video lifelogging is common, and the main character confronts footage of an event he misremembers:

And while I wasn't that man anymore, I couldn't deny that I was continuous with him.

Love that idea. You can't step in the same river twice... but... it's still that river.

(some of that came from thinking about that Star Trek TNG episode where an old "clone" of Riker - caught as a teleporter pattern, shows up. I need to rewatch (or mayne just watch?) that episode, but the idea that that clone would wake up and is just as much the Real Riker as the one the audience knows... it's intriguing.) Jack Gilbert is probably my favorite poet. This page from him and his great love Michiko has some poems of his I hadn't seen.

But anything worth doing is worth doing badly.

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Every wise man I met in Asia warned me against caring.
Explained how everything I loved would get old,
or be taken away and I would suffer.
I tried to explain what a bargain it is.

LOL.

A. this is nuttily big brother looking, with angry Trump blocking the Constitution.
B. small blessings it's limited-ish run bullshit (25-30K to be done, from the Washington passport agency)
C. "Welcome, but be good"??? So... Trump doesn't know what passports are or who US passports are used by?

Orpheus hesitated beside the black river.
With so much to look forward to he looked back.
We think he sang then, but the song is lost.
At least he had seen once more the beloved back.
    I say the song went this way: *O prolong
    Now the sorrow if that is all there is to prolong.*

We watched the movie "Hadestown: The Musical" (recorded live on stage, ala "Hamilton" and "Suffs") - a retelling of Orpheus. (and oddly this year we saw Sarah Ruhl's "Eurydice", another retelling and angle change of the Eurydice/Orpheus story.)

Worth catching "Hadestown" in its limited theatrical release! Since the Lincoln assassination, every president alive has lived during Hoover's lifetime.

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I finished "The Second Fredric Brown Megapack: 27 Classic Science Fiction Stories". He really was a great pulp writer.

Anyway, there was this cube, invisible to terrestrials, a mile over Philadelphia (and don't ask me why they picked Philadelphia--I don't know why anyone would pick Philadelphia for anything).

But let's drink to all men who work to put themselves out of work. Doctors work toward the day when the race will be so healthy it won't need doctors; lawyers work toward the day when litigation will no longer be necessary. And policemen, detectives, and criminologists work toward the day when they will no longer be needed because there will be no more crime.

there's so much fun zeerust with this, like I used davinci.ai and seedream 5.0 and the "Retro Pop Graphic" style