I used to hang out with those types. It's similar to country clubs, airline lounges, and first class travel. It's not so much about the amenities of the luxuries as much as it's about whom you meet. Or don't meet. You become good at golf as part of an upper class social thing.
I have had hosts be this direct, and we all went, "okay," and left. And came back when invited with no hard feelings. Usually D&D games, but also movie nights.
"The one thing about working concom is that fen sometimes enjoy freaking the mundanes."
The one thing about working as science fiction convention staff is that your attendees sometimes like being weird to outsiders, just to see them react in amusing ways, and that can be annoying to deal with.
You assume adventures follow similar logic. For example, when was the last time you encountered latrines, garderobes, or outhouses? Or thought about things like "how come this remote temple on this mountain has no food prep area?"
Nobody ever thinks that a tribe of lizard men, after the party slaughters half the scouting party made of mostly the most healthy of males, won't make the rest evacuate and take valuables with them?
A coworker had a Corgi that detected seizures. I got to travel with him, and see how the dog operated. Vest on? Working. Wouldn't even poop. Vest off? Go nuts! Ran around the hotel room, used bathroom on a leash outside. VERY good dog, very well trained. Didn't bark once, which for a Corgi is impressive. Barks were for alerts only, I was told, but my coworker didn't have a seizure while I was with him, so I didn't see that part.
I had an older cat that had broken hips that healed wrong. So when he laid down, he did this weird sploot on his belly that cats normally don't do. One of my younger cats imprinted on him, and also did the sploot. The first cat died, the other one splooted that way the rest of her life
I'm old, but "The Mephisto Waltz," a1971 horror film about a dying pianist (and Satanist) taking over a young piano players body. Lots of murder, lots of screaming, and decanters of blue liquid. My parents took me in a drive in to see it, and I guess thought I'd be okay with it at age five, sleeping in the back of the car.
I worked for a large computer company in the late 90s, early 2000s. When XP came out, they said there would be no site licensing. This meant we had to keep track of license keys for thousands upon thousands of systems, costing millions. This was before KMS or anything.
"Nothing we can do," Microsoft said. "We have no gate key."
Our server farms at the time were 40% Windows NT 4, 55% Sun systems, and 5% Linux. So we said, "okay," and called Red Hat. In a year, our back end was 60% Sun, 35% Linux, and 5% Windows NT. We were already in talks to start switching to Linux workstations for desktops.
"Oh, you mean this gate key," said Microsoft.
Asshats. They lost our server business, but let us use XP with a site license.
I only have one machine using Windows because I don't want to be "left behind" in the corporate desktop world, but it's on my "left hand monitor" while my center and right of three monitors are Kubuntu. The specs won't let me use 11 on any of my systems. My company laptop is still Windows 10 as well because some of our security software doesn't run on 11 yet.
If I didn't have to work in the corporate space, I'd quit Windows in a fast second. I have been using Kubuntu as my daily driver for almost 10 years now.
In high school, we had a science fiction club. I was vice president in my senior year. A year after I graduated, I was hanging out with some fellow graduates and one of them said, "How come you hated Christine so much?"
"Who?"
"Christine Smith. The blonde girl?"
"The blond girl who wore all those surfer shirts?"
"Yeah. Whats so bad about her?"
"Nothing. She was always so quiet. I barely remember her."
"Yeah, well she practically threw herself at you, and you treated her like she didn't exist."
"She did?"
"Yeah. We even tried to make it easy. We set her up at parties to talk to you, and you just acted like she wasn't even there. You were so rude."
"I literally had no idea. I totally would have dated her."
"Yeah, well, too late. She got so depressed after you graduated, that she ended up dropping out of everything and tried to kill herself. Shes been hospitalized and her parents moved away to be with her. Like, couldn't you gave even said hi? Just because you made vice president of the club didn't mean you were better than her or something."
The stupid thing is that they could have approached this in a much less dickish manner. Seriously. First, they are making money off us as it is with their demographics and the fact they are not utilizing this cash cow as before means they have gotten too greedy for their own good, or mismanaging funds which is a completely unrelated problem. Long ads, unskippable ads, expensive premium. This is the beginning of the end of something they used to offer as free, resting on their laurels as a monopoly, like the airline industry. When they are now practically forcing the cobra effect. Eventually, it will get so silly, it will go the way of the dod like Angelfire. AOL, and Geocities. Or, soon, Netflix.
I would have started it similar to Patreon, like, "by donating $1/mo, you can support artists like this," and incentivize the publishers with monetary gain and higher search results. Nobody is gonna miss $1 or $12/year. You multiply that by millions of viewers, that's millions of dollars on top of their demographics. Second, they could have had a 5 second bumper, similar to PBS, like "This and other find content is brought to you by Exxon and the Chubb group" or whatever. Five seconds. Front and back. Not enough to cause outrage. Skippable, but not so annoying, everyone skips.
I lack that enzyme genetically. I am allergic to alcohol, and so when my stomach can't digest beans corn, or even eggs, they sit in my intestines, start to ferment, and I am in a world of hurt.
You're probably right, however, you can also be not profitable because of shitty business decisions, ineffective management, embezzlement, and inventory waste. It could have been the two kitchens and various levies and taxes in that location. If they had lines, it also means they had a finite cap of serving customers per hour, and if cost or any other of the things I mentioned could still outweigh what they made per night.
The unionization could have been a scapegoat, when they secretly declared bankruptcy, sold the assets and name to another owner, and reformed in a second location. That happens in nightclubs a lot in popular districts.
This. I was eight when I found out. My mother was in denial and kept using santa as a manipulation tool for good behavior until I was maybe 13, but she was an alcoholic with the tentative grasp of reality. I got super bitter about Christmas until I was homeless as a teen.
Christmas was the first major attempt to wrestle back what I felt I was owed as a child. I refused to be bitter, because I saw that as giving in to the people who wanted me to fail. I enjoy Christmas as punk as fuck.
Still hard, though. I can't find anyone as into it as I want to be and don't have the energy to really go all in as I want to.
No age limit in this household. I'd say "just show up with a bag," but I just gave treats so some 4yo with no bag. If an adult asked? They'd get them.
I just want to be kind. I wasn't allowed to trick or treat as a kid. I did as a teen, and you know what? Nobody cared how old our group was. We got candy like the rest of them. God bless those neighbors.
I used to hang out with those types. It's similar to country clubs, airline lounges, and first class travel. It's not so much about the amenities of the luxuries as much as it's about whom you meet. Or don't meet. You become good at golf as part of an upper class social thing.