Social media and other apps glue people to the screens using features derived from video slot machines in casinos, writes Michaeleen Doucleff at NPR.org.
“People struggling with gambling addiction often cite video slots as their game of choice, studies have found. Some people gamble on these machines for extraordinary periods of time, [NY anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll] found in her ethnographic fieldwork. They can play for 24 hours, even 48 hours straight. Some people even told Schüll that they wear adult diapers to the casino so they don’t have to stop gambling to use the restroom.”
Three of the features are solitude; bottomlessness, or the never-ending feed; speed — new content keeps coming at you fast; and teasing, where the feed never gives you quite what you’re looking for, but it comes close.
Cory Doctorow reviews Ada Palmer’s “Inventing the Renaissance." That book is high up on my to-be-read list.
Eric Trump bragged about a $24M Pentagon deal his company landed. The Trump family openly flaunts its corruption. They’re proud of it.
Another conflict roils the Middle East. A Marine warns that the war will come home
Travis Veillon at the Times of San Diego:
We just closed more than 20 years of fighting under the banner of the Global War on Terrorism. Nearly 7,000 American service members were killed. More than 50,000 were wounded in action. Those are the clean stats, the ones that fit nicely on a quick-moving chyron. They don’t capture the moments that stay with you.
I saw men in the dirt, covered in blood, watched friends die, and knew in real time that nothing about that moment would ever leave me. The news shows don’t capture the blown knees and backs that ache every winter, the blast-induced traumatic brain injuries that never fully heal, or the marriages that shattered under the strain
And they don’t tally the deaths that happen long after the war is supposed to be over.
At least 30,000 GWOT veterans have taken their own lives since 2001. I don’t see a number, I see people I knew. More than one from my own unit. That number dwarfs battlefield deaths, but barely registers in the conversation about starting the next campaign.
Sony portable television, 1963 www.facebook.com/AncientTh…
Barefoot women dancing in the snow, New York, 1916 www.tumblr.com/vintageev…
Starman Jones by Robert A. Heinlein, cover John Berkeyvhttps://reddit.com/r/CoolSciFiCovers/comments/1staq21/starman_jones_by_robert_a_heinlein_cover_john/_
