Humour
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Please Gamble Irresponsibly: The rise, fall and rise of sports gambling in Australia
Australians lose more money gambling than any other country. But how did we get here? In his inimitable, hilarious style, sports historian Titus O’Reily charts the rise, fall and rise of sport gambling in Australia.We’ll gamble on anything, from two flies crawling up a wall to less important things like federal elections. And thanks to the internet, phones and gambling-tax loving governments, these days Australians can indulge their love of a punt no matter what they’re doing. Aussies could be at the birth of a child or performing open-heart surgery and still put a bet on.
It wasn’t always this easy. Once, you could only gamble on sport illegally. Which, it turns out, was actually also pretty easy. But over the last thirty years gambling on sport has been legalised, first slowly and then very quickly. Now almost every ad on TV is about sport betting, and even some of the players are getting in on the wagering.
Please, Gamble Irresponsibly traces the history of gambling in Australia from horseracing in the colonial era, through the rise of SP bookies and organised crime, to the commercialisation of the industry and its impact on communities and the integrity of sport. With billions of dollars involved, what are the odds of putting the genie back in the bottle?
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£9.50 -
Help I S*xted My Boss: A hilarious guide to avoiding life’s awkward moments
‘Funny, filthy and fantastic. Cackled from start to finish’ – Rylan Clark
How do you ask your mate for that £50 back?
When is OK to trump in front of your partner?
And what should you do if you’ve accidentally sexted your boss?William and Jordan are from very different worlds.
William’s an etiquette expert, with his tongue firmly in his teacup and unparalleled knowledge of table linen. Jordan’s a TV and radio presenter, the patron saint of Burnley and an expert in all things common. Together they’ve entertained millions of listeners worldwide with their hit podcast Help I Sexted My Boss.
Now, they’ve pooled all of their wisdom on how to get through life’s most awkward moments.
From candlelight suppers to picky teas, first dates to flatmate dramas, Help I Sexted My Boss is full of both useful and useless advice. This is your indispensable guide to navigating the trepidation and challenges of modern life.
‘Hilarious lads.. and weirdly useful. This generation’s Ant and Dec. If one of them was really posh. Great read’ – Vicky Pattison
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£9.99 -
Change Your Gambling, Change Your Life: Strategies for Managing Your Gambling and Improving Your Finances, Relationships, and Health (Harvard Health Publications Book 2)
A research-based guide to controlling the destructive urge to gambleFrom Howard Shaffer, PhD, a noted expert on gambling addiction, and Harvard Health Publications comes Change Your Gambling, Change your Life, a landmark new book which explains how gambling problems are related to other underlying issues: such as anxiety, mood fluctuation, difficulty with impulse control, and substance abuse problems. Dr. Shaffer offers a series of self-tests to help evaluate the degree of gambling problem and analyze the psychological and social context of the behavior, with specific strategies and approaches for ending the problems with simple tools that anyone can do.
- Explains why many people have a problem controlling their urge to gamble and how that can be corrected
- Includes a toolbox of resources for anyone who wants to stop the vicious cycle of gambling
- Offers advice for avoiding slips and preventing backslides and how to deal with the consequences
With candor and expert advice, Change Your Gambling, Change Your Life provides proven techniques for controlling the urge to gamble.
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£11.40 -
Posthuman Gaming: Avatars, Gamers, and Entangled Subjectivities (Routledge Advances in Game Studies)
Posthuman Gaming: Avatars, Gamers, and Entangled Subjectivities explores the relationship between avatar and gamer in the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game World of Warcraft, to examine notions of entangled subjectivity, affects, and embodiments – what it means and how it feels to be posthuman.
With a focus on posthuman subjectivity, Wilde considers how we can begin to articulate ourselves when the boundary between self and other is unclear. Drawing on fieldnotes of her own gameplay experiences, the author analyses how subjectivity is formed in ways that defy a single individual notion of “self”, and explores how different practices, feelings, and societal understandings can disrupt strict binaries and emphasise our posthumanism. She interrogates if one can speak of an “I” in the face of posthuman multiplicity, before exploring different analytical themes, beginning with how acting theories might be posthumanised and articulate the relationship between avatar and gamer. She then defines posthuman empathy and explains how this is experienced in gaming, before addressing the need to account for boredom, the complexity of nostalgia, and ways death and loss are experienced through gaming.
This volume will appeal to a broad audience and is particularly relevant to scholars and students of cultural studies, media studies, humanities, and game studies.
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£24.80 -
The Neuroscience and Neuropsychology of Gambling
Gambling disorder is a behavioural addiction that represents the clinical extreme of a spectrum of gambling-related harm. What insights can neuroscientific and neuropsychological methods provide to help understand this condition and improve existing programs for treatment and prevention?
This volume describes recent research using an array of contemporary tools including structural and functional brain imaging, and neurocognitive assessment. These analyses consider brain activity and psychological functioning in people with gambling disorder under resting conditions, due to tasks of reward processing and inhibitory control, and as a function of important sources of individual differences including depression and impulsivity. This volume also synthesizes contemporary research using animal models to examine decision-making under uncertainty from a behavioural neuroscience perspective, as well as synthesizing evidence from pharmacological treatments for gambling disorders. These findings complement research to understand substance use disorders and other emerging forms of behavioural addiction. This volume contains contributions from many of the leading research groups in this exciting field.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of International Gambling Studies.
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£31.90