hiding by the bins.

when i started drinking, all the cool bars had websites.

not big websites, not complicated websites, but useful websites – often scraped together from handwritten html, maybe wordpress or one of the other php catastrophies that i have fonder memories of than they probably deserve.

there was usually a blog, and that blog usually contained information about things happening at the bar; quiz nights, theme nights, club nights, &c. sometimes they even told you what beers were on. the really cool bars made their own tills.

this came to mind because today i tried to go to the nice little gay bar near our flat to read a terrible book. there was a thing on in said bar – a movie night, i think – and so i did what a decade and a half of drinking has taught me and checked the bar's website to see what the movie was.

they do still HAVE a website, and it even tells you a bit about what the bar is, and does, and stands for. it's a squarespace (i think), but that's ok. it's not cool to know html anymore, and they even have a little link you can click that says “what's on this week” that takes you to a page with an image of a poster.

now, dear reader, you'd expect the page that says “what's on this week” to contain what's on this week... but for some reason this week is way back in june. it is nearly november.

it's okay, though. if you look at their instagram, the bar has been dutifully posting the little poster images of what's on this week since june for you to peruse in all their little 4:5 aspect ratio handheld-pocket-computer glory – assuming you have an instagram account, it's logged in on that device, and, and, and...

i don't really know what the point of this blog post was; it doesn't have a snappy punchline, i don't have a solution, and, hell, i can't throw stones – this blog is hosted by write.as because i throw them a chunk of cash every five years and point a domain at it and that allows me to not think about php or hosting or remembering to patch bloody debian or whatever. the website it the root of this domain is a carrd for the same reason.

and i know, this is “old woman yells at cloud”. instagram is how these things are done these days. i don't have a facebook account – i got rid of that in 2014 or so – but for my sins i do maintain an instagram account that i log into from my laptop because the mobile app is absolutely perfectly built to be a dopamine-generating waste of time even when you are just trying to look up what's on at your local bar and the mobile website doesn't fucking work...

but i can't help but mourn.