Jamie Zawinski

Success is a relative term. If you follow his blog ( https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/ ), it's been a slog in many ways. If it's not Live Nation, it's the municipal/state government, NIMBYs, etc. The retail/entertainment industry is also full of terrible and/or expensive companies that do everything from PoS/inventory down to suppliers being monopolies themselves. He's definitely a curmudgeon, but DNA lounge has been a struggle. He's even had to resort to setting up donations. He's made it abundantly clear that while he's rich, he doesn't have infinite money.

The website is either old or very retro cool: https://www.dnalounge.com/gallery/2026/01-24/020.jpg This picture from a recent concert looks how I imagine the Bay Area: https://www.dnalounge.com/gallery/2026/01-24/020.jpg Edit: There is a video streaming service of alternative music videos of which the complicated UI I can't quite understand: https://www.dnalounge.com/musicvideos/ Edit2: Hahahaha! You have to copy the links into the browser as the DNA greatly dislikes hacker news.

He does the same redirect whenever someone links to his DNA Lounge: https://dnalounge.com (NSFW)

Jamie Zawinski [1][2] (Netscape/Mozilla/Emacs/XscreenSaver fame) is running something similar called DNA Lounge [3], and has a blog with all sorts of stuff [4], from automating things with perl to running a night club business. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski [2] https://www.jwz.org/hacks/ [3] https://www.dnalounge.com/ [4] https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/

From the OP's quoting of Facebook: >"Your ad content violates Facebook Ad Guidelines. Ads are not allowed to promote the sale or use of adult products or services, including toys, videos, publications, live shows or sexual enhancement products." From DNA Lounge's page, http://www.dnalounge.com/calendar/2015/04-10.html: >"From the dawn of humanity, to Ancient Egypt, to the glory that was Rome; everybody loves a burlesque show! Join San Francisco's world-famous Hubba Hubba Revue for an epic night of tassels & tease, thousands of years in the making!" It's an adult live show, a burlesque. Facebook policy rules it out and it's very cut-and-dried. The only reason this appears to be here is an attempt at viral marketing. 13+ social media site won't advertise 18+ (or 21+ presumably if it's USA based on drinking laws) live show for adults with softcore sexual content. Flagged.

> (BTW I would pay money for an Emacs fork and modernization project) Maybe go talk to Jamie [1] and see if he's willing to give it another go [2]? [1] https://www.dnalounge.com/ [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XEmacs (for some background: http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html Jamie Zawinski later went to work at Netscape where he was responsible for the Unix version, and named the Mozilla open-source project that you have heard of. He cashed out of Netscape and bought the DNA Lounge nightclub. On his blog, he likes to point out software inanities with the caption "This is why I sell beer now")

Crowdfunding is by far not the worst offender in all of these fees. What about event tickets? Even http://www.dnalounge.com/ charges outrageous "service" fees when buying tickets online. For NYE, the ticket price is 50$, service fee is another 10$ -- that's some 20% commission! (And not at all unique to NYE, either.)

"This has led to an oppressive level of mandates, fees, permits, taxes, licenses, and neighborhood activist oversight to be imposed on all businesses" If you follow http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/ you get a pretty good view of some of the regulatory obstacles.

SF is surprisingly hostile to late night music for a city of its size. The DNA Lounge blog is a good window into what it's like to own a club in SF. Here's a classic post where jwz compares SF to Austin after attending SXSW for the first time: http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2009/03/16.html

JWZ: http://www.dnalounge.com/ http://jwz.livejournal.com/profile edit: 1) dupe. 2) @netik is involved with DNA lounge too.

Yelp is implying a supportive relationship that does not exist. Quite the contrary - jwz does not want his business listed on Yelp. He does not like Yelp, and his blog describes some of the issues. (Eg, Yelp requires/d "a photo in which your whole face can be seen" while DNA Lounge wanted to use "our logo as the image" - quotes from jwz's blog.) How would you like me telling everyone that "I'm frank_nitti's best friend", and (honestly) raising money for you, when you don't want me in your life? wk_end comments about it being "free money". DNA Lounge already has a Patreon page at https://www.patreon.com/dnalounge and a one-time donation page at https://www.dnalounge.com/donate/ . What happens if an alternative GoFundMe site, auto-generated by Yelp, results in a reduction of the overall donation stream? Then it wouldn't be "free money", would it? So, who decides if this plan is appropriate for the business? Hint: not Yelp.

From https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2016/12/19.html (copy and paste link into address bar): > I know that with this level of transparency and vulnerability I'm setting myself up for a bunch of wisecracks from people who are all too eager to tell me what I did wrong and how they totally would have done it differently, having created nothing of lasting value themselves. How this situation [could have been avoided] or that was "obvious" [that it would happen]. Haters gonna hate, I know how it goes. I really hope this will work out for the proprietor. They're asking for $110,000 recurring donation per month to meet monthly payroll, San Fransisco rent, utilities and unpaid bills (without offering a tangible reward). While that amount of money ($1.32 million annually) arguably could be better spent on more worthy causes, it will be incredible if the recurring donation business model turns out to successfully fund relatively niche content of this magnitude.

Open a nightclub: http://www.dnalounge.com/

I second al3x and add what I said last time: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=170750 Bill Wyman, who has never written a word that rang false to me, said it better than either of us back in '99: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/11/03/sf/index.html Alex sees an upside to SF that I don't. Apparently you can DJ at a club in San Francisco. But your favorite band skips San Francisco, because there are so few venues to play at. I could opine about that, but JWZ said it better than I did: http://www.dnalounge.com/donate/ (San Francisco was a crappy place to see music back when bands were playing the Maritime Hall, lest you think I'm being opportunistic here). There are some excellent restaurants in San Francisco. Unfortunately for SF, NYC, DC, Boston, Chicago, and Seattle can all go toe-to-toe with it. SF gives you Michael Mina, NYC gives you Per Se, and throws in The Spotted Pig. For such a small city, SF throws down admirably, but it is simply outgunned by the big cities. Of course, this is all a moot point, since you're probably not going to live in San Francisco if you move to the bay area. You are probably going to live somewhere in the South Bay, and the South Bay is an unforgiveable suburban wasteland. Alex is one kind of person for whom San Francisco isn't ideal. I was him 10 years ago. Now I'm a different kind of person for whom San Francisco doesn't work: someone who wants to live in an actual neighborhood. There are 6 other young families with kids on…

Reagan halted antitrust enforcement and nobody fixed it, so they were allowed to own controlling stakes in several industries and freeze out competitors. They get exclusives with bands, agencies, venues, and promotions so at each point anyone who tries to do something else runs into a package they can’t compete with: a band which doesn’t play ball won’t get the big venues, a venue which acts independently won’t get the big acts, etc. It’s clearly abusive but they managed to spread enough money around to avoid action before Biden, and then Trump overturned that because he has the same mentality. jwz has been writing about this for years. I don’t remember if he’s playing games with the HN referrer header on dnalounge.com but you probably want to use https://tinyurl.com/yskf7ypz instead of https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2018/01/31.html.

His blogs (LiveJournal, and later on, his own WordPress instance) and website has content going all the way back to 1993. I remember finding it as a teenager and reading all the stories and being enchanted by them. At some point he did write why he bought the club, he was moaning about the state of night life in SF, and a friend said something like "Why don't you do something about it?"... so he did. Edit: found it: https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/1998-1999.html

Here's the (2018) viewpoint of somebody who actually owns and operates a concert venue in SF: https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2018/01/31.html (HN referers banned, so cut & paste into a fresh tab)

DNA Lounge has a bunch of events. Mostly night club stuff, but tonight (Wednesday) there’s a game development meetup featuring Magic Leap: https://www.dnalounge.com/calendar/2023/04-26a.html

My wife and I went to a showing of Hackers at DNALounge in 2020 - https://www.dnalounge.com/calendar/2020/02-28.html. They set it up to look like Cyberdelia. After the movie they ran a costume contest. The showing was just weeks before the pandemic truly hit America, and we felt pretty lucky that we made it home with out anything.

Link for the curious https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/

The start is here: https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2000/03/

This one (although it works with any link he owns) , just so you know it's NSFW https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2006/04/

You're probably thinking of jwz, and you're probably thinking of this blogpost: https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2006/04/ > For years I've had it drummed into my head that you always have to keep your systems patched, if you aren't running the latest security fixes, the script kiddies will eat you alive, running a six month old OS is like leaving your front door wide open, blah blah blah. Well you know what? Fuck that noise. I'm done upgrading anything ever. The next time I get this shit into a state that seems even remotely stable, I'm never touching it again. If we get hacked, oh well. I have backups. It has got to be less work to recover from than constantly dealing with this kind of nonsense. Or possibly this CodingHorror blog entry that summarizes a few other instances of jwz saying this: https://blog.codinghorror.com/let-that-be-a-lesson-to-you-son-never-up…

Wherein San Francisco wants to confiscate your ice cream cones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOreHYVTHGA (from https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2011/08/19.html)

Incidentally, if you think all this moralistic hand-wringing was centuries ago, famed SF nightclub DNA Lounge was in 2009 charged with, and I quote, "running a disorderly house injurious to the public welfare and morals". https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2009/02/13.html (Note: jwz doesn't like HN referrers, so c&p into a separate tab)

Sorry to be too brief. this is a quote from a blog post by jwz, former internet person and now pizza restaurant owner, on this topic. https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2020/07/10.html The whole post might make more or less sense.

> I doubt JWZ needs it. Dude's broke AF. https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2016/12/19.html

Perhaps this should be a more relevant link, or is JWZ intentionally redirecting it from https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2017/06/14.html Either way, the hairy-ball-eggcup picture is inspired.

Post with more details on the financial situation: https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2016/12/19.html It's quite candid and interesting to read. For those of you that don't know jwz, you may know: - He was one of the first employees at Netscape and came up with the name Mozilla - He maintains XScreenSaver - jwz's law: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. - Originally maintained XEmacs.

Apparently, they hit a rough patch - https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2016/12/19.html