A troubling amount of gambling

January 19th, 2026 - A sleepy Monday morning

One of the more bizarre new mindsets I've had to adopt in Finland is the fact that I go to the mall for everything. Grocery shopping? Mall. Eating out? Mall. Getting on the metro? Mall. Going to the doctor's office? Believe it or not, that's at the mall too.

Blame it on the terrible weather 65% of the year, but malls and indoor shopping centers end up forming a huge hub here in Helsinki. The one I go to for just about everything is a few blocks from us and called Kamppi. It's great; good spread of restaurants, shops, good grocery store, excellent metro stop. And just very clean and spacious. So much so that when my son was little and couldn't sleep I would sometimes bring him there early in the morning just to walk him around in his stroller.

It was on one of these walks around that he pointed out a shop - right between an off-brand Apple Authorized Seller and a Passport Photo place - that I had seen, but never really studied, to ask what it was. This happens a lot when you live in a foreign country. Assaulted by a constant barrage of foreign language, symbols, and abstracted cultural touchpoints, your eyes sort of glaze over and start filling in what things probably are. This is how you end up grabbing, not milk, but something called "sour yogurt drink" because it had the shapes and colors and general "vibes" of what your brain assumed would be milk.

But I digress.

This storefront my son was pointing out with interest had dozens of screens inside of all sizes and mounting configurations and, at this moment, were predominantly featuring images of horse racing. We were going through a big horse phase at the time, and so any sort of equine activity in the world was always met with great enthusiam. "Horsies!" he exclaimed. I couldn't disagree with him there. So we stopped and watching the horse racing through the window for a moment as I finally studied the place. With all the counters and screens I had always assumed it was some sort of cell phone or cable service provider; the clean lighting and white minimal decor certainly sound that idea as well. But as my son watched the horses go around the bend I realized that this was, in fact, a betting parlor.

Whenever I walk past the place now I always glance in curiously to see what the betting of the day is, and I'm always amazed to see how many people are inside placing their wagers. I'm from the United States where betting and gambling still has an air of, if not mystique, then at least a certain amount of seediness, and so the knowledge that such a place is just sitting there mere storefronts away from baby supply shops and bookstores jangles me a bit. It's kind of like when I moved back to Los Angeles in 2018 to discover legal marijuana dispensaries with the clean lines and aesthetics of an Apple Store. All legal, but years of association were hard to shake.

Finland, as it turns out, has a pretty serious gambling problem, with somewhere between 4-5% of adults having a degree of gambling addiction and there being constant calls for more regulation. It should be easy to do, as Veikkuaus (the company who owned the betting parlor I saw) has a monopoly on betting parlors, slot machines, and other "gambling-related devices or companies," but Finns are also getting slammed constantly by ads on buses, TV, social media, etc. for gambling apps or websites from other countries where the regulations are absolutely nil.

I have a growing concern, however, that Finns are not an outlier here. The United States is going through it's own plague of sports betting apps, gambling sites, slot machines... And these are just the companies that are honest about the fact that they peddle in gambling. Look at the world of video games - especially "free to play" ones - and you'll see a cess pool of microtransactions, loot boxes, "spin the wheel," and more all designed to pull people's wallets into ever inescapable whirlpools of chance.

These worries came to a head for me this past weekend when I was taking my son to his swimming lessons on Saturday morning. At Kamppi (there again!) a huge coralled area had been set up for something called "King Colis." Inside the corral were hundreds and hundreds of unmarked cardboard boxes of all shapes and sizes. I originally assumed that these were part of some display still to be opened and assembled until I noticed that people were digging through the boxes, with an enormous line of people waiting to do the same.

I'm a deeply curious person by nature, so I couldn't help googling this "King Colis" to see what it was, and learned that it's a company that collects lost or abandoned parcels from shipping companies... and then allows people to buy them by the kilo - blind to their contents. I checked the prices and was stunned. To buy a "premimum 15kg package" is upwards of 300 euros. With absolutely zero guarantee that what's inside will be worth anything nearly that.

I tracked down an article talking about this company, their IRL lootboxes, and the customers who buy them, because I needed to know why people were buying. What did they think they were getting. And the answer across the board seemed to be that people were hoping to get something more valuable than what they had paid so they could resell it. It was the same strange optimism I had seen across cryptocurrency, NFTs, Pokemon Cards, Beanie Babies... now applied to literal junk.

There's clearly something about gambling that is perfectly sized to fit into a certain slot in the human brain. That notion that YOU could be the lucky one. That YOU will be the one that picks the diamond from the rough and will be rewarded for it. Not because of anything you particularly did, but because of just innately special lucky YOU. And if won't be you this time, then by Jove, certainly the next time! Roll again! Drop another coin in the slot! And we're at this dangerous unregulated point where companies are taking advantage of that to the hilt and running for all they can, until the regulation crackdowns eventually come.

Because, god, I hope they do come. Things are too bleak and too hard for people to resist the promise of getting rich quick. The hope that this horse race will be the one that turns everything around. That this digital bit of fluffery ends up being worth something in the end. That this mysterious cardbox holds, not garbage, but the secret key to a better life. It's all the same magical thinking repackaged over and over again, and the result is always the same: the house always wins and the rich get richer.

Hopefully when my son is older this period of time will be looked at the same way we look at old cigarette ads - Can you believe we used to advertise gambling to kids in mobile games? said with the same tone as Can you believe doctors used to recommend cigarettes? - and he'll just have these vague memories of seeing betting parlors on our trips around the mall. I think there were video screens with horses? It was at the mall?

I'd be willing to bet that life will still center around malls though; Finns are letting that shit go anytime soon.

-e

I swear I used to be excited about technology

January 8th, 2026 - drinking a bitter morning coffee

There's a picture of me from 1990 at 2 or 3 years old, not even out of diapers, poking away at the keyboard of an IBM home PC. I had my first email address before I'd lost all my baby teeth. All of my early animation, art, game development, was all done with computers. As far back as I can remember, I've always loved computers and the internet and the amazing potential they represented for creating things and connecting with people around the world.

All through my teenage years and into my 20s, I'd follow news about this new gadget, that new computer. I'd religiously watch Apple keynotes and keep tabs on all the new announcements with a feeling of excitement about what they represented and what could be next.

But now?

Every new tech announcement, every new company, every new piece of hardware, makes me suspicious now. I wonder how a new product will be used for surveillance, how "AI" will be stuffed in, how something will be subscriptionized, monetized, monopolized, to squeeze every ounce of profit out of the user's experience... We've gone from computers and technology eliciting a sense of wonder to being the harbingers of dread and exhaustion.

And the exhaustion is the worst part of it, really. I feel a duty to protect myself, my work, my family, my child, from being exploited and manipulated by new technologies but doing so requires so much vigilance and attention, and I worry that at a certain point my stamina will run out. And if does, what new technology will suddenly slip under my radar and into my or my family's life?

These are the sort of paranoid thoughts I thought I would never have about technology, but here I am in 2026 worrying about digital monsters lurking in the shadows.

But I try to stay optimistic.

Yes, technology increasingly scares and exasperates me. But I'm trying to find small ways to embrace and go back to the version of technology that I liked. Things like doing this blog entirely in HTML and not posting about it anywhere. Or only listening to full albums as opposed to algorhythmically-generated infinite playlists. It takes more work, but it's more satisfying. The friction is what makes it feel like you did something. And reconnecting with that, realizing that's a value of mine, has been worst something I think.

What a world, I think to myself. What a goddamn world. But we're doing what we can.

-e

New Year, New... Something

January 7th, 2026 - vaguely around pre-lunchtime

I'm back at the office and, hoo boy, is my brain not into it! I've got no meetings, things are kind of directionless, but I'm sure they'll be busy again in no time.

On the bright side, I've gotten a lot of other random things crossed off my to-do list. And I discovered a neat new musician named Chloe Qisha.

I think I'll go eat some lunch now and see if that helps things.

-e

What's "Indie" mean anyway?

December 15th, 2025 - Dark drizzly afternoon

One of the big game releases of this year that took the industry and gamers both by surprise was Sandfall Interactive's debut title Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. It was big, it was lush, it was beautifully made, and it came from a team that no one had ever heard of before. As the word spread, as the love and fandom for it grew, people became fascinated by the drips of its backstory that were coming out - "It was made by a team of only 30 people!" "It was made for only $10M!" - and it was quickly pedestalized as an antithesis to the "AAA Bloat" that has been plaguing the industry in recent years.

And then just as quickly, sentiment soured. Turned. Discourse started. People were quick to point out that, in spite of claims of a team of 30, the credits had 400 people listed. The $10M budget attracted scrutiny as napkin math-crunching folks guesstimated the numbers. Were these claims lies? Fabrications? Why? Does it matter?

"Indie game" is something that means less and less with every passing year, losing meaning even faster than "indie music." My favorite definition I saw was a tongue-in-cheek YouTube comment: "Indie means a game I like that you haven't heard of."

Regardless of what it all means, what definitions are, I would love to live in a world with the narrative that a little team of 30 could make an industry-shaking game for less than $10M. So regardless of how true it all is, I'd like to believe in it because it's the kind of games I'd like to be making someday.

-e

Christmas is on the way

December 10th, 2025 - Afternoon coffee

Hard to believe another Christmas is already on the way. Our fourth one since having a child. So fun to be seeing the Christmas season through his eyes; the excitement, the wonder, the never-ending questions about the lore of Santa and how he operates... Christmas has always been a bit stressful for me in the past; taking care of shopping, figuring out how to visit all the people I want to visit, but I'm trying to embrace the joy that my son is feeling about everything and focus on that.

So much of my 2026 is up in the air right now, and I'm trying to focus on feeling excited about that too.

-e

Quiet On The Surface

November 21st, 2025 - Waiting for an appliance delivery at home

We had our dryer die on us a few weeks back. It had been struggling for months; stopping early, making big groaning sounds of protest with even the lightest loads of laundry, but I sort of hoped it would pass. It, in fact, did not pass, but rather fully kicked the bucket on me when I tried to dry a load of my son's wet outdoor clothes only to have it just... not start. The timer still counted down, it still thought it was drying, it even beeped happily at the end of the ghost cycle, but the poor thing was still and cold the whole time.

Luckily my landlord acted fast, got a new one ordered, a delivery time was set for today... and I have been sitting here for two hours like an idiot as the window came and went with zero call from the delivery people yet. Maddening. Especially because I have places I would've really rather been than stuck working at home this afternoon.

I've been extremely busy at work lately - both the day job and the contract work - but in a very strange state of not being able to publically talk about or point to anything yet. As someone who lived and died by his freelancing for years, it's an odd feeling and constantly makes me worry that the work will dry up. In truth, I'm also just really proud of what I'm doing, and the teams that I'm working on are doing, and want to share it with the world. And hopefully I'll be able to soon. For now I just need to sit here impatiently waiting.

-e