[HN Gopher] Way ahead of its time: The Remote Lounge NYC (2013)
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Way ahead of its time: The Remote Lounge NYC (2013)
        
       Author : Ivoah
       Score  : 315 points
       Date   : 2023-07-25 02:19 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (docpop.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (docpop.org)
        
       | buggythebug wrote:
       | Lived by here in the early 2000's - went a couple of times. Was
       | kind of cool! Don't remember when it shut down.
        
       | taterbase wrote:
       | There's a really interesting movie called "We Live in Public"
       | that documents one of the early tech pioneers Josh Harris as he
       | sells his internet radio company and then creates an underground
       | CCTV community. It's fascinating and equally frightening how
       | people behaved towards one another while sharing space and
       | constantly watching each other. It reminds me a lot the
       | relationship many twitch streamers have with their viewers. You
       | can find the movie for free on Tubi (in the states at least).
        
         | nhod wrote:
         | The founders of Remote were in fact the technical team Josh
         | Harris hired to create We Live in Public!
        
       | robbywashere_ wrote:
       | Probably got demolished and turned into a bank or a Verizon
       | store.
        
         | ShadowBanThis01 wrote:
         | Probably not a bank. Banks are getting rid of physical service,
         | not expanding it.
        
           | ttmb wrote:
           | They keep opening new branches around here. They are
           | glorified ATM lobbies with minimal staff who will often
           | direct you to use an ATM for anything that an ATM can do. But
           | they do keep opening them. I sometimes wonder if it's just a
           | complicated real estate investment play.
        
             | ShadowBanThis01 wrote:
             | Fair enough! You might be right.
        
       | creer wrote:
       | Why no "tour" or replication? I understand that night
       | entertainment is in part a novelty industry - but this took a lot
       | of effort and was apparently hugely popular in NYC. Any insight
       | as to why it didn't "tour"? or wasn't replicated? Did it, in
       | fact, loose money overall and/or from the start? What's the deal
       | with the (apparent) lack of replication of bar or nightclub
       | themes?
       | 
       | This is an open question - not specific to Remote Lounge or Meow
       | Wolf or Audium (San Francisco "sound experience") or the several
       | other creative ideas mentioned in the thread. To be fair, one
       | format that was endlessly replicated is the game arcade - without
       | bar initially and with bar now.
        
       | fallendev wrote:
       | This place seemed so cool, it's a shame it's gone now, I would
       | love to go to a bar like this.
        
         | supportengineer wrote:
         | Around 2001 in San Francisco I stumbled into the ruins of a
         | nightclub called the Caribbean Zone, and felt the same way when
         | I saw the waterfall and the Doobie Brothers' airplane
        
       | naetius wrote:
       | *its
        
       | Dowwie wrote:
       | I remember going there! There wasn't a single customer. I felt
       | like something was very wrong and I needed to leave immediately.
        
       | rationalfaith wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       | nimajneb wrote:
       | This is fascinating, I would definitely frequent a bar with a
       | theme like this. It's amazing.
        
       | bozhark wrote:
       | This would be really neat today if there were different bars in
       | different places all linked together like this.
       | 
       | No ?, just a really neat concept
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | chuan_l wrote:
         | Love this post and reading about " remote lounge " ! I ran a
         | night in a Chinatown dive bar here in Melbourne , Australia
         | back in 1998 and inspired by the release of FSOL " ISDN " back
         | then we streamed live performances from another club in
         | Adelaide using 2 - bonded ADSL 128 Kbps links. It worked great
         | despite just having enough bandwidth for decent audio and we
         | ran 2 - small parties that were done like this ..
         | 
         | Though my real vision at the time was to have all 4 - walls
         | projection mapped with video from other locations and perhaps
         | create an " in between " space. That could link with different
         | places around the world. There was a project in the UK around
         | 2005 that tried to do this using a circular ring with cameras.
         | However , am surprised that nobody has attempted more with
         | telepresence in public spaces ..
        
           | pmayrgundter wrote:
           | Super cool! What a great album and bitrate moment :)
        
       | fortran77 wrote:
       | I know the source article had misspelled "its" and it's policy
       | here to keep the original title, but can we change it to:
       | Way ahead of [it's] time: The Remote Lounge NYC (docpop.org)
       | 
       | or                    Way ahead of it's [sic] time: The Remote
       | Lounge NYC (docpop.org)
       | 
       | so it doesn't hurt readers' brains so much when they try to parse
       | the sentence?
        
       | bar000n wrote:
       | (2013)
        
       | jb1991 wrote:
       | I celebrated my 35th birthday at this place!
        
       | nhod wrote:
       | I actually was the sole developer who wrote all the software that
       | "networked" the custom hardware together. This project was so
       | ahead of its time and yet required some rather arcane programming
       | knowledge. So much fun though. AMA!
        
         | CSMastermind wrote:
         | How did they find you an pitch the project to you?
         | 
         | You mentioned that the project required some rather arcane
         | programming knowledge. Could you elaborate on this? What areas
         | of programming did you have to delve into that might be
         | considered out of the ordinary?
         | 
         | Was there any discussion about privacy when you were
         | implementing it?
         | 
         | Were there any features or functionalities that you wanted to
         | implement but couldn't due to technical limitations at the
         | time?
        
           | nhod wrote:
           | How they found me: When I was 18, I was hired by The
           | Disinformation Company (disinfo.com, the subculture search
           | engine, which presaged our now post-truth conspiracy-theory
           | laden world, though now sadly a shadow of its former self) as
           | their Director of Technology. (I was precocious.)
           | 
           | Disinfo had a cozy relationship with Razorfish, perhaps the
           | biggest of the new breed of digital transformation consulting
           | companies that emerged in the 90's. Razorfish was pretty
           | insane back then -- wildly smart and creative people working
           | at the absolute forefront of technology, much of which now
           | seems quaint and taken for granted.
           | 
           | As Razorfish rose and went public, it acquired a bunch of
           | companies, one of which was Disinfo. I ended up becoming
           | Director of Technology for RSUB, Razorfish's media division.
           | Razorfish also acquired another company called
           | Electrokinetics, which was all about hardware, and with whom
           | we shared an office. I started hanging around the hardware
           | guys, because, well, I loved hardware, and they were doing
           | neat things like letting you SMS a soda machine to get a
           | Coke. (This is 1999 -- this was the stuff of technology demos
           | of the future, not the real world).
           | 
           | When the Dotcom boom turned into the bust, one of the
           | founders of Electrokinetics left to start Remote. I stayed in
           | touch with them, heard about the project, started talking to
           | them about it, one thing led to another, and I started
           | working there!
           | 
           | Arcane knowledge: I was 21 at the time and had dropped out of
           | computer science to work at a startup, so some of this was
           | just being green, but some of it was also an utter lack of
           | documentation. I was using Perl to write this server, because
           | at the time everything was Perl. I had to read, write, and
           | route data to over a hundred serial devices (our Cocktail
           | Consoles) in a non-blocking fashion using DigiKey serial-to-
           | IP converters. In effect, I was writing the basics of a
           | networking stack (read packet, figure out where it was
           | supposed to be sent, transform it if necessary, send it
           | somewhere else) just over serial.
           | 
           | It wasn't really rocket science, it was just completely
           | undocumented. And also solved by, well, IP networking. But we
           | had to use serial, I was left with basically no books,
           | terrible man pages, and random mentions of stuff in Usenet
           | posts. Much of Linux's serial/tty subsystem was written very
           | early on in the development of the kernel, made rock-solid,
           | and promptly forgotten. What little documentation I could
           | find was sparse and in relation to C functions or syscalls.
           | Perl would then have a wrapper around it, and the wrapper
           | wasn't well-documented nor was it exactly like the underlying
           | call, so there was just a lot of trial and error as I figured
           | out how to properly get the server to wait in a non-blocking
           | way to get input from all of the different serial lines,
           | figure out what to do with them, and write back to them, all
           | in realtime.
           | 
           | Privacy: there was discussion, actually. We had a huge sign
           | when you entered the bar that said something like, "There are
           | hundreds of cameras in here and you agree that you have no
           | expectation of privacy by entering." The whole point was to
           | be a little voyeuristic, so it was very consciously not a
           | private place.
           | 
           | Technical wishes: This is great question, I had to think
           | about it for a bit. Amazingly, I don't think we had a lot of
           | things we weren't able to do. We were able to take screen
           | grabs and email them to people, so taking that a step further
           | I suppose it would have been nice to be able to capture
           | entire video streams instead of just still images, but the
           | whole place had this Jetsons retro-future vibe to it, so some
           | of the limitations were in line with the ethos of the place.
        
             | supportengineer wrote:
             | I would like to know who funded this project, not knowing
             | if it was even possible or not, within their budget?
        
               | nhod wrote:
               | The founders of Remote (Leo Fernekes and two other
               | partners, Kevin Centanni and Bob Stratton) were some of
               | the funding, and they partnered with a local family who
               | owned and ran a bunch of (very successful) dive bars in
               | the East Village. There may have been other funding too
               | but I think that was the majority of it.
        
             | qwertox wrote:
             | I love this response. How it gives so much insight into an
             | area of someone's past life dealing with interesting
             | topics, giving one a glimpse of what it was like back then
             | and there.
             | 
             | I'd enjoy reading this as a detailed book.
        
             | ckn wrote:
             | Hi Nick, this post was forwarded to me.
             | 
             | Good post, I remember those days well and this exposure we
             | had to all that tech absolutely had its influences for many
             | of us.
             | 
             | The real-world demo of that sms-soda machine was at the
             | Stockholm offices, and one of several why I eventually
             | moved out this way and have stayed.
             | 
             | Though razorfish stuff is pretty spot on except I'm pretty
             | sure Razorfish didnt BUY disinfo, but funded and supported
             | it, IIRC Gary and Richard retained ownership, that was a
             | content play for RSUB, which was a wholly owned subsidiary
             | of Razorfish.
             | 
             | ...and coincidentally Gary is selling all the brand and
             | contents right now.
             | 
             | ckn (Former IT Director @razorfish 1996-1999, Current
             | Security Champion for R&D @Ericsson)
        
         | detourdog wrote:
         | KPC that you?
        
         | docpop wrote:
         | Thanks so much for joining this conversation, I'm a big fan of
         | your work! Years before I joined any social network, the Remote
         | Lounge already had me thinking about online sharing, consent,
         | and the future of the web.
         | 
         | I'd really like To know how your experience working on The
         | Remote Lounge affected the way you viewed the rise of Web 2.0
         | and the way we share our lives online.
        
           | nhod wrote:
           | This is a good question. Remote (and its ancestor We Live in
           | Public) was way ahead of its time in regards to how public
           | people were going to be about sharing their lives online. In
           | many ways Remote was merely an instance of much larger trends
           | in society that began decades (centuries?) before. Sharing
           | your life with people you have never met; the culture (and
           | cult) of celebrity; the long tail; constructing a persona for
           | the public vs your private life; taking pictures of people
           | without permission or knowledge; meeting people in the same
           | room as you not via talking directly to them but through a
           | technological disintermediation; technology as art... Remote
           | had all of these things and more, all incorporated using the
           | available technology at the time. (The medium is the
           | message!)
           | 
           | Those same trends continued on as technology improved: as
           | hundreds of cameras in a single venue became billions of
           | cameras all around us and in every pocket; as capturing a
           | grainy black and white photo on a single debaucherous night
           | and sharing it via email became sharing high resolution 4k
           | sex videos on Grindr and Tinder; as dressing up infrequently
           | for a single night so as to take advantage of the video and
           | photo technology in an unusual venue became constant
           | "dressing up" via creating an entire persona you constantly
           | curate on various social media platforms; as small-time
           | surveillance you willingly went into for fun became
           | ubiquitous surveillance that made trillions of dollars for
           | new hegemonies and entrenched the other powers that be even
           | further; as the "innocent" early internet culture we started
           | with that was all about freedom and revolution and individual
           | power turned ugly and scary following 9/11 and became walled
           | gardens and centralized control. (As another commenter
           | pointed out, Remote opened shortly after 9/11 -- we were
           | supposed to open around 9/13, but then the world ended, and
           | we had to push it back a bit.)
           | 
           | Anyway not sure I answered your question fully but hopefully
           | got in the right neighborhood!
        
         | tetrep wrote:
         | Do you have access to the source code / would you be willing to
         | share it?
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | nhod wrote:
           | I don't, but if I did I would!
        
         | nateguchi wrote:
         | Can you give some details on the hardware? What was the image
         | capture device?
        
           | nhod wrote:
           | Oh, the video capture device: because we had everything on
           | analog CCTV, I had two analog TV tuner video capture cards in
           | the server. Plain old 640x480 black and white analog video.
           | When someone pressed the screen capture button on a Cocktail
           | Console, I changed the channel on the video capture card to
           | the appropriate channel, did a screen grab, and dumped the
           | file in a folder on the server. People pressed it
           | infrequently enough that two cards were fine to handle all
           | the volume.
           | 
           | Every day I'd create a new mm-dd-yyyy folder for images to go
           | to, and the Remote web site had a calendar on it. You could
           | go to the site, click on the night you were there, see all
           | the images captured by all people that night, and save your
           | images if you felt like it.
        
             | hackeman300 wrote:
             | Do those images still live on anywhere? Looks like the
             | original viewer has since been taken down
        
               | nhod wrote:
               | I don't think so. The Wayback Machine had some at one
               | point but I haven't kept up with it.
        
           | nhod wrote:
           | The Cocktail Consoles (as we called them) were all custom
           | hardware. Everything was designed to be rock-solid both
           | physically (bars are full of drunk people and liquids) and
           | operationally (everything had to Just Work). Leo designed a
           | core "motherboard" which was a PIC microcontroller (I forget
           | the exact model) that did five main things: serial I/O for
           | the buttons and joystick; serial I/O for the attached TV
           | tuner; serial I/O for the attached pan-tilt video camera;
           | audio from the telephone handset; and then multiplexing all
           | of that serial I/O and sending it over serial to a central
           | server (which I wrote -- in Perl!) which then controlled all
           | the Cocktail Consoles in the bar.
           | 
           | We used black and white cameras because they were both
           | cheaper and also had much better sensitivity to low-light
           | conditions (this has changed somewhat -- but not entirely --
           | in 20+ years) and black and white tube TVs because they were
           | cheap. (This part was actually really dangerous -- tube TVs
           | hold enormous charges after they've been switched off, enough
           | to kill someone, and we had the guts exposed on the insides
           | of the Cocktail Consoles. Had to be very careful). We used
           | public telephone handsets for the audio because of their
           | durability, and video game buttons and joysticks so you could
           | try very hard, and generally fail, to damage them.
           | 
           | The TV's, cameras, and telephone audio were all connected
           | over an analog CCTV system. The camera was video source and
           | the handset's microphone was the audio source for a given
           | channel. The TV could be tuned to any channel, and was thus
           | the video output device, and the handset's speaker was tied
           | to the same channel. Thus, if you tuned to any camera, you
           | would see and hear whatever was going on at that console, but
           | not the other way around, so it was rather voyeuristic. If TV
           | A was tuned to camera B, and TV B was tuned to camera A, that
           | established a bi-directional link, which meant you could see
           | and converse with the other person.
           | 
           | The serial data from all the microcontrollers were sent over
           | serial-to-CAT5 converters, so the entire place was wired for
           | Ethernet, but it was plain old serial over the wire. We then
           | had these serial cards in a Dell server on the other end,
           | which presented as roughly 100 serial ports on the server.
           | 
           | This was where I had to do a lot of learning. I was a good IP
           | programmer, but I had to reach back into the depths of the
           | kernel and learn all about TTYs and switch() and lots of
           | other stuff that even in 2000 was sort of forgotten. It took
           | me forever to find any good documentation on how to handle
           | that many serial ports in a non-blocking way.
           | 
           | I kept asking Leo to just put a cheap Intel box in each
           | machine and do it all over regular Ethernet, but he (rightly)
           | kept insisting on this low-cost, rock-solid approach. Today
           | the calculus would undoubtedly be different -- you would do
           | everything over IP -- but back then Leo had a level of
           | foresight I still admire.
        
             | supportengineer wrote:
             | All this was done in Manhattan itself?
        
               | nhod wrote:
               | Yep. 3rd and Bowery, before CBGB closed and the East
               | Village went from the bohemian hipster world of RENT to
               | the expensive place it is today. The Bowery had just
               | barely changed from "don't go there ever" to "oh, cool!"
        
           | nhod wrote:
           | Yep! First, here's a video from the guy who developed all the
           | hardware, Leo Fernekes. (He runs a great YouTube channel
           | called Leo's Bag of Tricks all about electronics and neat
           | stuff you can do. Leo's a genius.) Lots of details in here.
           | 
           | https://youtu.be/3i3db-QgHYE
        
             | 20after4 wrote:
             | I love Leo's videos. Really top notch YouTube content.
        
         | Bluecobra wrote:
         | Did the smoking ban change any of the social dynamics in the
         | bar?
        
           | nhod wrote:
           | Good question -- I left in 2002 and the bar smoking ban took
           | full effect in 2003, so I don't really know the answer.
        
         | barcode_feeder wrote:
         | Know of any comparably inspired venues in 2023?
        
           | meesles wrote:
           | Not exactly the same thing, but they had a phone version of
           | this at MeowWolf, the huge interactive trippy art exhibit, in
           | Denver. They had phone terminals laying around with a whole
           | directory of fake businesses. At first, I thought they
           | staffed the lines with employees, but it turned out to be a
           | system like this minus the video screens.
        
         | pcthrowaway wrote:
         | Can you share any information on why the Remote Lounge shut
         | down? I took a look and basically just found that it got
         | "seedy" over time: https://ny.eater.com/2007/11/30/6808673/the-
         | shutter-remote-l...
         | 
         | I'm curious if you think web2.0 expanded so rapidly that the
         | novelty of interacting with strangers over a camera was no
         | longer foreign to people (though it seems ChatRoulette didn't
         | even launch until after the shuttering of the Remote Lounge),
         | or if it was just the kind of gimmicky thing that had an
         | expiration date regardless of how the world around us changed
         | during that time period
        
       | betamaxthetape wrote:
       | An earlier (1968) venue with a similar concept was "The Birds
       | Nest", a pub / nightclub in the UK.
       | 
       | > They renamed The King's Head, an almost brutalist post-war
       | booze bunker at 2 King Street, installing a state-of-the-art
       | steel dance-floor, light-show projectors and a high-end sound
       | system.
       | 
       | > They also installed an in-pub telephone network so that if you
       | saw someone you liked the look of, you could dial their table and
       | have a chat across the room.
       | 
       | Source: https://boakandbailey.com/2020/10/watneys-birds-nest-
       | pubs/
       | 
       | [This information comes to me entirely second-hand, through
       | articles and an episode of a podcast, so I can't vouch 100% for
       | the accuracy.]
        
       | confoundcofound wrote:
       | Is there any way back (forward) to this sort of tech innocence?
        
         | rozap wrote:
         | I think the general concept has continued to circulate on the
         | internet. Chat roullete was popular for a long time,
         | https://chat.meatspac.es/ was a great niche for a while,
         | omegle, etc, etc. But like Leo said in the video, these sorts
         | of "experiments" are really sensitive to a critical mass, where
         | they're super fun if you have > N people on the thing at the
         | same time, and kinda weird if you have < N.
        
           | roughly wrote:
           | I think there's a bell curve here - weird below N, cool above
           | N but below X, and sufficiently full of unwanted penises
           | above X to get weird again.
        
         | chuan_l wrote:
         | I think two decades on and with " instagram " and other social
         | media people have lost their innocence if you will call it
         | that. Every image or camera shot is now curated , chosen from
         | multiples and even post - processed at the moment of its
         | inception. I used to wonder many years ago that if you could
         | record all of your life in real time as a film from conception
         | to the end. What that might be like to watch ? Self - image on
         | social media is very much like that , an endless performance to
         | a great invisible crowd ..
        
       | karlzt wrote:
       | This submission comes from this comment from yesterday:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36854960
       | 
       | People in 1920s Berlin nightclubs flirted via pneumatic tubes
       | (2017): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36854061 (307
       | points, 1 day ago, 123 comments)
        
       | sfuller808 wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       | pmayrgundter wrote:
       | Wow that place looks rad.
       | 
       | Another early one was @Cafe! They broadcast using CU-SeeMe when
       | it came out for testing from Cornell. Back in like 94? smth like
       | 256x256 greyscale, 1-10fps if we were lucky, but a pretty
       | reliable audio channel and text console for group chat.
       | 
       | Anyone here from there? I was critt34 from CMU.
       | 
       | A memory.. I met Seal on it once! He was at a party in LA and the
       | host had CUSeeMe opened on the same reflector @cafe usually hung
       | out on. I was DJ'ing Ministry on the channel from my dorm room at
       | the time and then someone came to comment on the music.. and I
       | suddenly recognized him.. OMG, you're Seal! He laughed and we
       | talked a bit about Koyaanisqatsi and then he said he was helping
       | on the soundtrack for Naqoyqatsi.
       | 
       | Early web/internet days were so enchanting
        
       | cglong wrote:
       | The most interesting thing to me is the timing: this opened just
       | one month after 9/11, the event that ushered in a new era of
       | state-sanctioned surveillance.
        
       | macNchz wrote:
       | The video by one of the creators (at the very bottom of the page)
       | is super interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3i3db-QgHYE
       | 
       | I was too young for this when it happened, but it reminds me a
       | bit of when randomized video chat sites (Chatroulette and
       | others?) first got popular in ~2009. I was a senior in college at
       | the time, and we'd have big house parties during which we'd sit a
       | webcam on top of a TV in the living room and just let it run,
       | connecting to random strangers. Fun and interesting dynamic as
       | people milled around the party and had brief interactions with
       | people from around the world.
        
       | stevenhubertron wrote:
       | I have spent many nights there. I was good friends with the
       | bartender and was there at least 1 night a week. Fun time. Have
       | lotsa photos of it.
        
       | paulgb wrote:
       | Neat! In case anyone else is curious where it was, apparently
       | it's the present-day location of the Bowery Electric.
       | https://www.theboweryelectric.com/
        
         | nhod wrote:
         | Trivia: it's called Bowery Electric because for many many years
         | before we moved in with Remote it was a hardware store
         | called... Bowery Electric.
        
       | pauldix wrote:
       | I went here in November 2001 right after it opened. It was my
       | first time in NYC. I loved it, thought it was so cool. After that
       | trip I decided I'd have to live in this city at some point. Moved
       | here in 2005 and been in NYC ever since. Remote Lounge always
       | reminds me of how magical and full of possibility the city felt
       | (indeed still is!)
        
       | foobarbecue wrote:
       | There is a misplaced apostrophe in the title.
        
         | foobarbecue wrote:
         | I'm curious -- why the downvotes? Does someone think I'm
         | incorrect?
         | 
         | The title here, to me, reads "Way ahead of it is time: The
         | Remote Lounge NYC." I had to think about for a bit before I
         | realized what was going on. I just thought someone might want
         | to correct it.
         | 
         | Edit: I see it's wrong in the original, so we just keep it, I
         | suppose.
        
           | kelnos wrote:
           | I expect you were downvoted because your post isn't
           | particularly interesting, and won't lead to thoughful
           | discussion, let alone thoughtful discussion about the article
           | in question. Sure, someone who doesn't know the difference
           | between "its" and "it's" might learn something, but, while
           | I'm not going to go so far as to say "that's not what HN is
           | for", it's... well, kinda not what HN is for.
           | 
           | Another -- unfair -- reason is that some posts about grammar
           | and spelling come off has holier-than-thou nitpicking. I
           | don't believe that describes your particular post, but it's
           | hard to convey tone/purpose in text, and people get annoyed
           | by stuff like that.
           | 
           | I didn't downvote you (at 21 hours later, it doesn't matter
           | at this point), but if your post was "in the way" of
           | scrolling to more interesting conversations, I probably would
           | have. I come to the comments on articles because I'm curious
           | about what people are saying about the content of the article
           | (and was thrilled in this case to find that a commenter here
           | was actually the person who built the software that ran this
           | bar). As much as I do believe that language and clarity is
           | important, I don't particularly care if someone mistyped an
           | apostrophe into the article's title. It's just noise to me.
        
           | ShadowBanThis01 wrote:
           | Looks like the title of this post has been fixed.
           | 
           | People downvote facts here, and persecute you for providing
           | corrections that are helpful to everyone. It's infantile and
           | depressing.
           | 
           | They need to stop and think: How do people learn? Often from
           | reading. Where do people do most of their reading now?
           | Online. So when you attack people who correct incorrect
           | writing online, you're attacking people who want to learn.
           | Most foreign-language speakers, for example, WANT to be
           | corrected so they know how to speak and write the language.
        
       | keepper wrote:
       | Way to bring a memory back. I remember going to this place.
       | Definitely wish there were more places like this now ( in nyc and
       | elsewhere )
        
       | paulorlando wrote:
       | I had heard about this place, but sadly never visited. But after
       | it shut down I was part of a startup that built a way for people
       | to do this with audio only -- via phones and a web browser. We
       | intentionally avoided video and images after studying the way
       | strangers interacted across different formats. Remote Lounge
       | looks fun, but for us it was more about long conversations where
       | you didn't care about the other person's looks. I sometimes feel
       | nostalgic for this type of thing.
        
       | kilroy123 wrote:
       | Very cool. I wish I could have visited. I miss wacky theme bars
       | like this.
       | 
       | One of my favorite theme bars was a place in Mexico City called
       | "Bang Bang" (closed down years ago).
       | 
       | It was Stanley Kubrick themed. There were little black and white
       | TVs everywhere playing weird stuff. Then in the back was a
       | replica 2001: A Space Odyssey bedroom; from the end of the movie.
       | With a glowing white floor. Many people would pile into the bed
       | to smoke, drink, and make out.
        
         | donretag wrote:
         | Not too far from the Remote Lounge was a Clockwork Orange
         | themed bar named Korova Milk Bar around the same time.
        
           | nhod wrote:
           | So many memories flooding back. We once had a party at
           | Razorfish and I somehow got in touch with random downtown
           | people who made weird alcohols. One of them was a woman who
           | made legit absinthe from real wormwood back before absinthe
           | was legal again, and the other one was a woman who made some
           | sort of narcotic "milk" alcohol inspired by A Clockwork
           | Orange. I'd be shocked if it wasn't the same woman as this
           | bar!
        
           | vxNsr wrote:
           | Just for reference korova is russian for cow.
        
         | ShadowBanThis01 wrote:
         | There are still some. In Milwaukee, and now Chicago, there's a
         | spy-themed bar called The Safehouse. The Milwaukee one has
         | survived for decades, and they're still regarded as pretty
         | cool.
        
           | cguess wrote:
           | Milwaukee is a weird town (disclosure: my home town, but left
           | awhile ago). If it wasn't so close to Chicago, people would
           | talk about it like Seattle or Portland. It's quirky with a
           | world-class art museum, the largest music festival in the
           | world every summer, a very reasonable cost of living, world-
           | class universities, and amazing outdoor opportunities sitting
           | directly on Lake Michigan and being a 30 minute drive from
           | tons of massive state parks.
        
             | ShadowBanThis01 wrote:
             | I'm from Chicago, and I think Milwaukee is pretty cool.
             | SummerFest was always so much better than Taste of
             | Chicago... at least the acts that played there. I never
             | even went, and I'm still confident that it's true.
             | 
             | One of my best friends lives in the suburbs along the lake,
             | and it's similar to the north shore of Chicago. Nice
             | neighborhood.
        
       | MrMan wrote:
       | [dead]
        
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