I’ve been waiting for Maria Konnikova’s poker book for a while, and it’s finally coming out soon. As far as I understand, it’s not actually about how to play the game. It’s about decision making, told through the story of a journalist learning how to play poker.

Because it’s coming out soon, there has been a lot of press about it, and one of the most interesting excerpts was in FiveThirtyEight. It’s the title that got me: “The Hard Truth Of Poker — And Life: You’re Never ‘Due’ For Good Cards.”

Oh.

And this is the paragraph where that title kicks in:

Doesn’t this mean I’m due for a break? I can’t possibly keep losing. It simply isn’t fair. Gambler’s fallacy — the faulty idea that probability has a memory. If you are on a bad streak, you are “due” for a win. And so I continue to bet when I should sit a few hands out.

That “faulty idea that probability has a memory”—that is the story of cycling. I spent so many journal entries explaining why the current month had to work. Because it had been X amount of months since I had started trying. Because it had been Y amount of months since my last loss. I know that’s not the way probability works, but that idea popped up in my brain (and still does when it comes to other situations): Weren’t we due for a win?

Though Konnikova says that we only think this way when we’re losing. We think we’re due for a win. She says people don’t think about how the next hand will lose when they’re on a roll. But… that hasn’t been true for me. I do spend a lot of time fearing that the next time won’t work.

Regardless, it’s both comforting and discomforting to know that “Nothing you do matters to the deck. The cards will fall how they may.” Sigh.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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I play a lot of solitaire. (Actually, the ChickieNob and I both play solitaire side-by-side, so we can talk during it, but it’s obviously a solo game.) So I was totally excited with the idea that there are dozens of games—beyond cards—that you could play solo.

Looking at our shelves, the Sherlock Holmes game is easy to play via Zoom, but you could also play it alone. (And like the article says, it states 1 – 8 players. I never noticed that before.) You could play both hands in Yahtzee. (Much easier to do than a game such as Scrabble where you’d see the letters in the other hand.) I’m trying to compile a list, or look at the games and reimagine them with slightly different rules in order to play them alone.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

I’ve been playing with Window Swap. It’s a site where people can upload the view from their window, and other people can look through it.

There aren’t that many on the site, so you end up running into the same ones again and again. If you want to submit one and give me more to look at, you can read the upload directions here.

Enjoy the view.

Remember how I told you I fixed the freezer? I may have spoken too soon. On Monday, the freezer started making an awful rattling sound whenever we opened the door. We Googled online, but we could only find sites talking about this sound happening when people closed the door.

So we took the panel off again (we’re now pros at this) and discovered that we never dealt with the chunks of ice that were on the panel itself. The fan could spin, but it rattled as it clunked against the ice. So we spent the evening directing a stream of hot air from a hair dryer at the back panel as it hovered over a bathtub to catch the dripping water.

It made us feel like adults.

I mean, in the sense that no one was coming to save us and we had to deal with the wonky freezer. We put everything back together and plugged it back in, and so far so good.

By the way—if you don’t have one—refrigerator thermometers will tell you before you lose everything in your refrigerator that you have problem. We only discovered this tool after we lost everything in the refrigerator. But at least we’re good to go from this point forward if the freezer ceases to work again.

Second time is a charm?

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Stop procrastinating. Go make your backups. Don’t have regrets.

Seriously. Stop what you’re doing for a moment. It will take you fifteen minutes, tops. But you will have peace of mind for days and days. It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week. In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Road Less Travelled covers Father’s Day amongst other topics. “Dh admitted last night that he sometimes gets jealous of BIL and his obvious pleasure in being a grandfather. BIL has a huge heart, and he’s always been very generous about including us in things and assuring us that we are an important part of the family.” But, of course, even the biggest hearted people sometimes don’t notice what they’re doing. The post captures the quietness of the weekend this year. (P.S. I’m a little jealous of the future haircut. We don’t have one on the horizon yet.)

Slaying, Blogging, Whatever is remembering her grandmother on what would have been her 100th birthday. She writes, “I know I am projecting. I know it is mere fantasy. But, that is what we do when we miss people’s presence in our lives.” So true.

Lastly, My Foxy Family is navigating a difficult relationship. She explains: “He asked me to tell him my thoughts, to be honest even if it’s hard for him to hear. But I don’t want to hurt him. And I’m still not sure if it is safe to be vulnerable when I’ve been burned too many times.” Parenting after infertility is not always the happily ever after. She writes on her sidebar: “Infertility turned my world upside down and led my sober husband back to drinking.” Sending peace of heart.

The roundup to the Roundup: Freezer fixed for real. (I think.) Your weekly backup nudge. And lots of great posts to read. So what did you find this week? Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between June 19 – 26) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week? Read the original open thread post here.

A post bubbled up this week from 2019 asking how well you’d fare in rebelling under an oppressive regime. The answer is—as you’ve probably guessed—depressing. It couches the question within the story of The Handmaid’s Tale. How many people would rise up and fight a corrupt system?

Few will fight Gilead after carefully weighing up the consequences – after all, the most likely outcome is failure and obliteration. What drives forward fights against an oppressive society is a rival vision – a vision of equality, liberty and justice, and a sense that these should be defended, whatever the consequences.

You need to read the whole article to understand why people may not be happy but still allow things to happen. The article also points out: “Hannah Arendt famously argued, the atrocities of the Holocaust were made possible by normal people, manipulated into conforming to a horribly abnormal set of behavioural norms.”

Food for thought.