Several years ago, did a little oopsy by calling the cops on 2 black men who refused to buy coffee or leave the store. This is completely legal, but it made them look bad, and so corporate did some typical damage control and got ratio'd on :marseybluecheck::

will close its more than 8,000 company-owned U.S. stores on the afternoon of May 29 to provide to its nearly 175,000 U.S. employees “racial-bias education geared toward preventing discrimination.” Both Starbucks founder Howard Schultz and CEO Kevin Johnson have apologized on behalf of the Seattle coffeehouse giant.

In recent days, also officially declared a “Use of the Third Place Policy,” making it clear that anyone is a customer and is welcome to use its store space, including bathrooms, regardless of whether one makes a purchase.

“We are committed to creating a culture of warmth and belonging where everyone is welcome,” the statement said. “We want our stores to be the third place.”

The Third Place Policy whose URL now results in a server error, meant that would no longer be able to kick out customers who failed to make a purchase. The obvious then happened:

But as I have sat at different locations in New York lately and overheard conversations around me, I witnessed firsthand a new scene that I hadn't quite observed before: At times, stores were mostly occupied by non-paying customers with their own drinks and food while some paying customers looked puzzled and left frustrated without finding a seat. I have also seen customers inside a store being openly solicited for money. source

The same writer did another followup piece a year and a half later which sources the least surprising study ever:

Monthly visits to dropped 6.8% compared with other nearby coffee shops after the open-bathroom policy was put in place in May 2018

With the free bathroom access, the researchers looked at the proximity of a given store to a homeless shelter and found that customer traffic declined at almost double the rate at stores closest to homeless shelters versus those farthest away.

Customer traffic wasn’t the only thing that was hurt. The average income of Starbucks’ customers has dropped compared with the average income of other nearby coffee shops, thanks to fewer visits from “its wealthier clientele.”

The full report is 43 pages, and everyone involved could have saved a lot of time by submitting the sentence "homeless people are stinky" to peer review instead.

Shortly after, closed its (bathroom) doors

Now, the coffee chain is effectively saying it can’t be America’s public potty any longer.

And, because an rdrama post wouldn't be complete without , here's a couple posts from baristas whining about the homeless:

Let me start this off by saying I have nothing against the homeless. I feel for them, I really do. But my store has a homeless couple that comes in every day and stays from open to close. They usually come in, set their 3 or 4 giant trash bags of belongings in a corner and hog the cushioned seats in the corner literally all day. What really bugs me is that they're constantly making out. Like, sloppy, slobbery, making out. We've had several customer complaints about it and I've asked my manager about it and she basically said as long as they're buying coffee they're good. Anything I can do about this?+17

CLEAN IT UP

a not so gentle reminder that unhoused people are people too. if they are in the cafe, leave them the frick alone and mind your business. provide them with the same hospitality you give to every other customer. the unhoused are no different. as long as they aren’t doing something inappropriate or being disrespectful to you, other partners, and the customers, they can stay as long as they please until closing. don’t bother them if they are outside sitting down either. don’t be a peepee is what i am trying to say here. this isn’t a store issue, this is a human decency issue. +751

Every single post is bowing and scraping in subservience to the unhousedchads stinking up the place. Good thing for Redditors the stench doesn't travel over computer monitors or it might break their bubble of moral authority.

grande rant: homeless customers

i try to have sympathy for them but at this point its very hard. i feel bad for being bothered by them, but i need to rant for a minute.

they usually order a venti or trenta water but get quite angry if we dont give it to them the second after they ordered it.

they also walk through our drive thru and ask customers for money.

sometimes they just come and stare at us through the windows or do drugs in our parking lot and our male shifts have to go scare them off.

not so much now, but earlier in the pandemic they would come up without maks and cough on us. or they would come up with a mask on but take it off just to cough on us before putting it back on.

they used to steal our tip jars

The homeless are people. Talk to them and explain the rules you have to enforce. Learn their names. Just like anyone else if they are treated with dignity they may treat you with respect as well.

Tldr

Man buys over a million cds, Vinyls, and cassettes from a failed company in an attempt to start the company over again. Abandons his family and buys and moves into a warehouse in another state in one of the most violent cities in America. Spends over half a million dollars to get cockblocked by the city for zoning violations and gets robbed over 30+ times. He sneeds about the city and it's inhabitants on twitter documenting his journey. He's also trying to build a fusion reactor and a science museum in the city

MY CASSETTES!

Backstory

Murfie was a startup company that focused on the digitization of physical media into digital media. People would send their CDs, Vinyls, and cassettes, which the company would store in their warehouse and rip the contents onto their own platform for people to stream. Murfie even allowed people to buy and sell with other users on their platform.

During sometime during early November, the company asked all of it's current customers to make sure they renewed their current subscription before November 17th. No more than 5 days later, the company sent out an email to it's customers saying that the compnay was ceasing all operations including the website. This abrupt shutdown shocked everyone, that even that former CEO had one idea what had happened .

The situation only continued to spiral out of control. Murfies ToS had a clause that promised its customers that they would return all of their physical media in the case the company shut down (For a small shipping fee of course ), but with all of their services down, customers had no way of getting back their cassettes and cds. In total, there were close to a million CDs, cassestes, and Vinyls left somewhere in limbo. Unsurprisingly, people were soying out about this:

😢 Our first “startup” client was Murfie. We’re super proud of being part of their story, and our world is better off because of their music-ownership-focused journey.

They have my 100+ cd's and $1000+ dollars. nothing to be proud of if they leave people in a lurch.

At this point everyone had lost hope that they wouldn't get their stuff back. Until one determined man showed up.

John Fenley

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Introduction

In 1991, a group of 13 individuals bought a small piece of land in the middle of the desolate and dry desert of South Africa. This group had dreams and hopes of creating a prospering town for its people. However since its establishment, the town has been in an endless cycle of controversy with journoids all across the globe and the South African goverment sneeding that the town is an abomination that shouldn't exist. That town is Oriana.

Knowledge is Power

We must educate and familiarize ourselves with these terms:

• Afrikaan - Colonizing Mayos who originated from germany, france, or the Netherlands

• Boer - Means farmer but is used interchangeably with Afrikaan since most of them were farmers

• Volkstaat - A proposed view to establish an all-white Afrikaner homeland within the borders of South Africa, most commonly proposed as a fully independent Boer/Afrikaner nation. The concept excludes Afrikaans-speaking coloureds and South Africans of English ancestry, yet is sometimes misunderstood to include them.

The Birth of a Nation Town

Shortly after the end of Apartheid in South Africa in the early 90's, The goverment of South Africa attempted to move forward in bringing all the diverse amd vibrant communities together in pursuit of a functional multicultural society.

Afrikaans realizing that they'll lose their majority rule and would have a harder time passing legislation, decided the best way to show umbrage with the new rules was to seperate and create an ethnically monogamous country of their own kind within South Africa. Unfournately for those Afrikaans they had virtually no chance in their conquest for land against the SA military and general population.

An example image of the Volkstaat the Afrikaan dreamed of creating:

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I did a poll a while back asking what I should write about. Surprisingly "my old boomer times" won by a large margin. So I present you with a history of MUDs, the thinking man's multiplayer game.

Telnet

Back in the 1800s (yes, that's how far back I'm going) Americans invented all kinds of awesome things: telephones, machine guns, movie cameras, record players. Two of these devices, the typewriter and the telegraph, were combined into something even more powerful. The keyboard of one typewriter sent electrical signals to control a typewriter at a distant location. This was known as teletype. It's how big organizations like militaries and multinational corporations sent data for about a century.

Teletype Model 33.

Eventually Americans invented even more cool stuff like mainframe computers capable of doing time sharing. This meant they could respond almost instantly. You could connect a teletype to the computer but that was suboptimal as the teletype couldn't print as fast as the computer could think. So the printer was replaced with a video screen, and now you had a dumb terminal. It could show text on a screen and accept text input but that was about it. These came into use in the 1970s among big organizations that could afford to pay for the luxury.

A DEC VT100 terminal. This is the standard terminal that's emulated in software.

Another revolution quickly followed in the 1980s with microcomputers, little computers so cheap that an individual person could own one. These were not very powerful at first but they were smart enough to pretend they were a dumb terminal and connect to mainframe. It's a computer emulating a terminal emulating a teletype.

Telnet being used for something more serious.

Why waste your time with this history lesson? It's important to understand the environment we're dealing with here. The Telnet protocol that you use to connect to a MUD is all about text. The technical details of how it gets from one place to another are more advanced, but in the end it's just alphanumeric characters going in and out like a machine from the 1800s.

Gaymers Rise Up

As universities got mainframes capable of time sharing, computer games soon followed. Among the most revolutionary was 1976's Colossal Cave Adventure. The player explores a cave system made up of a network of rooms. Each room has a text description and it can have items in it for the player to pick up. The player gives commands by simply typing in what they want to do. Many more games following this formula followed and the text adventure genre was born.

Don't get eaten by a grue.

Zork was among the most popular of these new games. Some nerd at the University of Essex loved to play a version of it called Dungeon. In 1978 he decided to make a multiplayer game based on it, which he naturally called Multi User Dungeon, and the MUD was born. In 1980 the university was connected to the internet, exposing MUD to the whole world.

UNIX Nerds Emerge

The roots of the MUD genre were now firmly planted but it would be many years before it bloomed. There were a number of technical obstacles which made it prohibitively expensive for all but a lucky few to play MUDs. The internet was only available at a few dozen universities and major computer companies, most of which frowned on using it for monkey business like playing games. By the late 1980s there were several MUDs running on commercial networks like CompuServe and AOL but these charged obscene amounts for connection time. Microcomputers like the PC became available but were still far too expensive for an ordinary family to get just to play games. A modem had to be purchased separately and these were incredibly slow and expensive as well.

Remember how to calculate your THAC0.

Despite these challenges, the 1980s saw great progress. A new nerd monoculture was sprouting in America and Europe, one that would prove to be fertile ground for the emergence of MUDs. The UNIX operating system and C language were taking over university computer science programs replacing a hodgepodge of weird proprietary systems. This made it much easier to share code, which would be crucial in the golden age of MUDs. There was compatibility in culture as well. Every nerd liked The Lord of the Rings and Dungeons and Dragons.

Explosion

Ultimately MUDs would explode in popularity not because of some revolutionary idea from a creative genius but simply because computers got better and cheaper over the years. By 1995 you could get a Windows PC with a modem for a reasonable price. The fiber optic backbone of the internet was laid and in the early 1990s the government allowed it to be used for commercial purposes. University computers became powerful enough that running a MUD wasn't too big a drain on resources.

Around 1990 a few free (as in Richard Stallman eating something off his foot and calling it "GNU") MUDs appear. Most MUDs in the future are descendants of these, especially the enormously influential DikuMUD. However there are also all kinds of MUDs with their own unique codebase, some of them quite bizarre like one based on LISP. The most enduring are true labors of love, often based in a university computer science department and passed down from one class of students to the next.

A map of the city of Midgaard. DikuMUDs generally kept the same layout.

Some MUDs were for roleplaying. You were expected to stay in character pretending you were an elf or a Romulan or something. As shameful and embarrassing as it was to engage in this type of behavior, it had a charm. You were essentially cooperating with the other players to write a story in real time. If nothing else, you could learn how to write quickly under time pressure. Some of these artsy-fartsy type MUDs let you create your own areas and even program them. It was kind of like Second Life except without graphics or Bardfinn. With no graphics and such a simple user interface it was easy to add whatever gameplay mechanics you could think of.

But most were simple hack and slash affairs. You go out to an area appropriate for your level, preferably in a group, and hunt for mobs. When you find one you type something like "kill orc" and enter combat, taking turns attacking each other. Occasionally you "kick" or "cast magic missile" or whatever your class' special power is. When you kill it you get xp, gold, and maybe equipment. This should sound very familiar to you. MUDs were inspired by D&D and in turn became the basis of MMOs. EverQuest, the first MMO to achieve mainstream success, ripped off DikuMUD to a large extent.

Legacy

The golden age of MUDs lasted until around 2000. During this period they were really the only game in town. There were multiplayer FPSs and RTSs but nothing that gave you a similar experience. On a 56k modem it took a few seconds just to download a jpeg. Internet connections were much less stable, frequently cutting out for a second or two. So text still made sense as the medium for a multiplayer game.

Then MMOs arrived like Spanish conquistadors, bringing ruin for our civilization. Better PCs and better communications technology like DSL finally allowed the dream of a "graphical MUD" to come true. These were the shiny new thing. Why read walls of text written by some random 20 Finnish nerd boy when you could be looking at 3D graphics instead? If you had any normie friends they would be playing WoW, not words words words. Of course some MUDs have survived and are still thriving today, but the age when there were a thousand running at a time with all kinds of creative new ideas is over.

You can't compete with graphics like this.

So why do I lament the passing of this era? Is it just nostalgia for a time when ska ruled and action movies had real stunts? No. It's more. That was a time when we were free. Free to express yourself. Free to make your own world. Free to implement any crazy gameplay system you wanted. Free to be a Romulan. Jolan 'tru, dramanauts.

Modern YGO being hard is one of those lasting imprints the franchise left on the wider zeitgeist, along with draw 2 cards and le censored boobays

It's not exactly wrong. IDK if it's much harder than Magic because im not a boomer. But one of the boomerisms used often is ":klanjak: we have black cards now!?"

I'm going to go over the new summoning mechanics implemented over the years and then some actually unintuitive rulings.

New Monster Types

Most of this is set dressings. They aren't harder than the ol' reliable Fusion monsters, with one expection, which i'll get to.

Synchro

To Synchro summon, you just need monsters on the field whose total stars equal that of the Synchro monster, with one of them being a Tuner monster. One Tuner, any number of any monsters. You can see if a monster is Tuner by looking at it's tribes on top of the effect text box. They work like normal monsters in any other context.

To Syncro summon Stardust Dragon(8), you'd use Galaxy Serpent(2), a Level 6 monster, or two Level 3 monsters along with any other combination. It's just addition r-slur

Some of them can specify other materials, restrictions on how few monsters you can use and the like. But these are few and far between. It's also still just addition

XYZ

This is even more generic. To summon a Rank 4 XYZ monster, you need 2 Level 4 monsters. Simple. Do take note, you can't use an XYZ monster as a generic material for another XYZ monster, because they technically have Ranks instead of Levels. Which is mostly an arbitrary distinction and won't come up often.

The complicated thing about XYZ is what happens to their materials. They don't go to the Graveyard like Fusion or Synchro materials. You stack them under the XYZ card you summoned. XYZ monsters have effects that activate by taking out some of those materials and putting them into the Graveyard, but this doesn't activate effects of monsters that pop when they are sent to the Graveyard. Quite unintuitive, but just consider that a card is in the aether if it is under an XYZ card. Most cards can't interact with them, unless they have an effect specifically to do just that. This wasn't always the case, but it was changed several years ago to prevent some unintended interactions.

Links

Links just requires as many monsters on the field as their Link rating. You can see their Link rating on where their DEF stat would be, because Links can't be put on defense position.

When using Link monsters as material for a new Link summon, you can use their rating as how many monsters they count as. So, to Link Summon a Link 3, you can use 3 monsters, or a Link 2 + 1 monster.

They have as many arrows on their art border as their rating. If you have no Link monsters, you need to summon your first one on the Extra Monster Zone, which is the 2 extra Zones added with this mechanic. All subsequent Links must be summoned to a zone which is being pointed to by an existing Link monster.

This isn't complicated in execution, but does raise eyebrows by those who came back to the game. Since zone placements have not mattered much before Links came around. Also makes it hard to play without a mat if you aren't very careful with how you place your cards.

Pendulum

This is the start of complicated mechanics in this write up.

Okay, why do they look so weird? Because they are both monsters and spell cards. But not at the same time. If you summon them, they're monsters. If you play them on the spell & trap zone, they're spells. Only one effect text is in the works at any given time, depending on it's position. Top for spell, bottom for monster.

To Pendulum summon, you need to play 2 of them as spells, on the left-most and right-most zone of the S&T zone. These are called the Pendulum scales. They're numbers under the left and right arrows on the card. These are always the same number.

Once a turn, you can summon as many monsters as you want from your hand, whose levels are between the pendulum scales. If you played SG and TG magicians in your pendulum zone, your scales are 1-8. That means you can summon monsters whose levels are 2 to 7.

Pendulum monsters also don't go to the Graveyard when destroyed. They go on top of the extra deck, face-up. You can summon one of these Pendulum monsters on your extra deck with your pendulum summon. They work like Link monsters, in that they have to either go into an Extra monster zone, or a zone a link arrow points to.

Even though these cards don't go into the GY when destroyed, they mechanically work like do. So if you had Banisher on the field, they would be banished instead of going to the extra deck.

Too much text

I might as well use Pendulums to segway into the most common complaint, cards have too much text.

Endymion here is the face of what was the one good Pendulum deck for years, so it's hardly a misplaced example for the problem.

As I said in the previous segment, at any given point only one of those text boxes is in effect, so you don't have to take it all in one go.

Problem Solving Card Text

PSCT is what Konami came up with to standardize card text and leave less things up to interpretation. Cards made before this have weird phrasing;

Under any condition? sounds foreboding.

But this format has a problem with verbosity.

Look at all the punctuation. Colons signify conditions for the effect, semi colons start chains, commas separate steps of the same effect, stops end an effect.

The original version played in Japan is a bit more readable. They separate different effects by numbered points. Konami America didn't chose to import this part of the game for some reason.

No Keywords

Unlike Magic, YGO doesn't have keywords. It was only a couple of years ago they abbreviated Graveyard to GY. This causes a lot of common effects creating text bloat.

Take Once Per Turn for example. This is a stipulation that is printed on most cards made in the last decade. The most common form, called Hard Once Per Turn, is signified by "You can only use each effect of "Card Name" once per turn". The use of the "Card Name" makes it so you can't use duplicate copies of the card either. But since YGO cards also have long names besides long effects, this contributes to the problem. If they got the point across by just writing HOPT at the end of the card, it would greatly improve readability.

Perhaps the most egregious example of this is writing rulings that are already implied.

This is a Gemini card, shown as a tribe on top of the effect box. But the gemini mechanic is still written beneath it. Anything preceding the point in this card text is also in every Gemini card. They can remove that paragraph and nothing of value would be lost. Geminis suck anyway, so

Confusing Mechanics

Targeting vs Non-Targeting

Can Dingirsu "Send 1 card your opponent controls to the GY." Obelisk, who is "Neither player can target this card with card effects."? Yes. The targeting mechanic requires the card to specifically use that term. The window to respond also opens when you target with a targeting effect, but if it doesn't target you can only respond as the effect is activated. On that note;

Destruction vs Non-Destruction

Can Dingirsu "Send 1 card your opponent controls to the GY." Cocytus, who is "Cannot be destroyed by your opponent's card effects."? Same. For an effect to be destruction, it has to say it verbatim. It also skirts by effects that pop when they're destroyed. But Banisher also banishes them, like it does with Pendulum monsters, because they were supposed to go to the GY.

Spell Speed

Spell Speed is a fan term to show which effects can be responded to by an effect. The slowest effects are Normal Spells and Ignition effects.

For example, Lonefire Blossom can "Once per turn: You can Tribute 1 face-up Plant monster; Special Summon 1 Plant monster from your Deck." You can only activate this effect during your Main Phases. It can't respond to your opponent's effects, nor can it be activated during your opponent's turn. Same is true for normal spells like Monster Reborn.

Traps and quick effects are faster, they can respond to the activation of other effects and can be used on your opponent's turn. Quick effects are signified by this logo on spells, and as text on monster effects:

But the fastest cards are Counter Traps, which can only be responded to by other Counter Traps

Inherent Summon

Question, Steelswarm Roach can;

when a Level 5 or higher monster would be Special Summoned: [Text]; negate the Special Summon, and if you do, destroy it.

Then which of these cards would it be able to negate the summon of, Cyber Dragon or Beat Bison?

It's Cyber Dragon. Why? Because it doesn't have a colon or semi-colon. Roach negates Summons, not effects to summon. Cyber Dragon's ability to summon itself from the hand is an effect, but it doesn't activate. It just happens. This is an Inherent Summon, which goes for Extra Deck summons too. Meanwhile, Beat Bison activates an effect that special summons itself. If you wanted to negate the summon of Beat Bison, you'd need an effect that negates monster effects.

Summons don't start chains, but the monster hitting the field does. Think of the summon as the game state immediately preceding it hitting the field.

Summoning Conditions

Sky Fire is a strong monster with a hard summoning condition. But thankfully it has a support card that can summon it from the GY "ignoring its Summoning conditions". Now you can just mill it to the GY and resurrect it for easy access, right?

No, as it turns out. If a card has summoning conditions, it has to be summoned properly first before it can be cheated out with other cards. So, Flattop can revive a Sky Fire that was properly summoned but then sent to the GY, but can't revive a Sky Fire that was sent to the GY from the deck by Foolish Burial.

Fun fact, Sky Fire's groin missles were removed in the TCG because it was too phallic for the American audiences.

Missed Timing

This is a distinction of When and If. If the activation requirement for an effect is written as "If [thing] happens" then it will activate with no problem. But if it is "When [thing] happens" it will miss timing, and won't resolve.

An effect misses timing when it isn't resolved immediately after it's activation. This happens when an effect is chained to the when effect. Chains start resolving from last to first activation, so if a when effect is chained to; it will activate, another effect will activate and resolve, then the when effect will miss timing.

If you Synchro Summoned Whale, which can:

When this card is Synchro Summoned: You can destroy all your opponent's Attack Position monsters.

But your opponent chained a quick effect to it's activation, the effect won't go off.

Negate Activation vs Effect

When an effect is negated, the effect tries to resolve and then fizzles out. But some cards also negate the activation, which makes it so the effect can't even attempt to resolve.

This doesn't come up often, but if a card has a once per turn clause, if its activation was negated, a second copy can be used afterward. But if the effect is negated, you can't activate any more of that card, since the once per turn effect has already attempted to resolve. Even more of an edge case; while cards that can only be "activated" OPT can be reused if their activation was negated, cards that can only be "used" OPT can't. Because you already used them, even though they were negated.

Negating at the point of resolution

This is an amendment to an amendment of the previous point, but this is another form of effect negation. Cards that negate at resolution don't have colons or semicolons in their text, meaning they don't start chains. Unlike other forms of negation, here the card activates like it's going to resolve, then just fizzles.

Normally, negation that is not continuous are applied as a reaction to an effect, forming a chain over the effect that it will negate. With resolution negation, you choose to negate as the effect is going through, like if you are going to negate the chain 1 effect of a chain with 3 steps, you'd wait for the first 2 steps to resolve, then negate the final effect at it's resolution.

Funny interaction with this mechanic, Cerulean Skyfire is one of the only non continuous ways to negate Super Polymerization.

Fin

So yeah. This has been my compilation of 200iq rulings you won't find in your childhood rulebook. Tell me if you have any questions