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Yesterday I mentioned that DNA Pizza takes online delivery orders again, after a year-long hiatus. Hooray...

Perhaps it has been long enough since I talked about deliveries that you have forgotten how terrible everything has been! Let's recap!

We opened DNA Pizza in 2011, and from then until roughly 2015, we had decent delivery business. It was a pretty significant portion of our income. In fact, our delivery business was a big part of why it sounded like a good idea at the time to open a second venue, Codeword in 2015. We had been having trouble keeping up with orders on weekend nights, so once Codeword opened we staged all delivery orders from there, freeing up the DNA Lounge oven for in-house slices.

In the early days, we employed our own delivery drivers (we had a car topper and everything!) And while some restaurant apps like Eat24 and Grubhub existed at the time, they just ran the menu-and-credit-cards system: restaurants were still responsible for doing their own deliveries. But having our own drivers just wasn't economical and in around 2014, I held my nose and we switched to using "Uber Eats" for delivery. Again, at the time, they were a delivery company, which is a thing that (thanks to them) no longer exists. We conducted the transaction; they put it in a car. You used the app to summon a driver to pick up a bag instead of a person.

But in 2017, Uber abruptly decided that if you wanted them to deliver something, you also had to allow them to operate your online store, and let them take a percentage of that. So we dropped them on principle, and switched to Postmates. But then eventually Uber bought Postmates too. So we switched to Grubhub, who had recently started doing deliveries as well as ordering: this gave Grubhub the same downsides as Uber Eats, but at least they weren't Uber.

It was between 2015 and 2017 that Grubhub and similar apps started becoming really popular, and as soon as they did, our delivery business absolutely cratered. Not only did the number of delivery orders go way down, but deliveries became damn near uneconomical due to the huge cut taken by the apps, taking 15% to 30% of the value of the order rather than charging per mile for a delivery. Our margins were obliterated.

And on top of the extortionate delivery apps came the fraudulent "ghost kitchens", the fake clickbait restaurants all running out of the same warehouse that existed only as online branding. So by 2017, Travis Kalanick's debasement and destruction of the restaurant industry was nearly complete.

Twelve or fifteen years ago, the idea of a pizza restaurant that made no money from deliveries would have been inconceivable. Pizza was the canonical late-night delivery food for the entirety of the Twentieth Century. But here we are, "disrupted" by techbros.

Over the years, besides Grubhub, we used to use some other delivery services as well (DoorDash, Slice, Allset, a few others) but we stopped because we got no business from them. Like, literally one order a month or less. And that was back in the day when we did get a significant number of delivery orders through Grubhub. It was just that nobody used those services. Grubhub was, at least at the time, the 800 pound gorilla, the only game in town.

And then around 2022, Grubhub just flat out stopped working. They were so astoundingly incompetent that we got essentially zero orders through them. Their web site was never showing DNA Pizza to customers, even when they searched for it directly, and for close to two years their tech support was so useless that eventually we just gave up. It was so bad that in 2023 I asked the Lazyweb for help out of desperation, And despite turning up some technical contacts within Grubhub, nothing got better at all. So in early 2025, we just closed our Grubhub account and decided, "Welp, I guess we don't offer deliveries at all any more".

Then! Funny story! A couple months ago, a new "territory manager" got hired at Grubhub and hit us up with a "please come back" email. Devon's reply was so blistering that I'm just gonna include most of it here:

Your suggestions don't even begin to address the issue we had.

We had issues with your backend. Menus would vanish. I spent countless hours providing your support teams with steps to reproduce the problem. we got extremely deranked. I got support once to agree to completely rebuild our storefront from scratch so that we would be free of the various issues that support was unable to fix. Support just cloned the store and it had the same problems.

There was some deeply buried bug involving an integration from the otter tablet company that was disabling menus in some non-standard way. And we got de-ranked again, because our menus would turn off at inconvenient times with no way to turn them back on. Support was terrible and useless and never believed me.

So, no, having commissions waived won't do us any good when your platform itself was turning off our menus in ways that nobody who worked for you could figure out how to fix. [...]

I wasted easily 100 hours of my life over a few years on this nonsense.

Nope. Never again. Your company is terrible. You should get a job somewhere else before Grubhub gets bought again and they gut staffing even more.

So, let's hope this Chow Now thing works better than that.

As with all techbro disruption, you have to follow the money to understand this. At first glance you might think that Grubhub's customers are the hungry people ordering food. But Grubhub's actual income is the money that they claw back from the restaurants as subscription fees and a vig on every order, which means that their actual customers are the restaurants. And they will put the screws to each of those restaurants harder and harder, until they die off and another one is slotted in to replace them. They can do this because these days the restaurants have no other choice. This is a canonical example of the oft-misapplied term "Enshittification".

And the galaxy-brain version of "who are the customers?" is "the investors". It doesn't matter if Grubhub becomes so useless that it collapses entirely, so long as the VCs and C-suite get an IPO or private equity buyout just before that happens. Their victory condition is a mob bust-out, rather than a sustainable, long-term business.

Oh yeah! Speaking of Travis Kalanick's ratfucking of the restaurant industry,

Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2025 14:11:26 -0500
From: ██████@cloudkitchens.com
Subject: Request to Discuss New Market Opportunity

DNA Pizza Team,

Thanks in advance for your time and attention.

I'd like to connect and talk with you about a possible partnership with one of our food halls in the Bay Area. Have you considered expanding your reach to other markets? I'm not sure if what we offer would work for you, however, It wouldn't hurt to hear me out, take a tour, and see what options we can offer.

What are your thoughts?

Keep up the good cooking,

I did not hold back:

Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2025 12:28:34 -0700
From: [email protected]
To: ██████@cloudkitchens.com
Subject: Re: Request to Discuss New Market Opportunity

You have got a lot of nerve. Your company single-handedly destroyed the Bay Area restaurant industry and you still have the gall to come sniffing around the corpse. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, you absolute parasites.

BTW, have your Saudi owners murdered any journalists lately?

What I did not expect... was a reply!

Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2025 14:56:13 -0700
From: ██████@cloudkitchens.com
To: Jamie Zawinski
Subject: Re: Request to Discuss New Market Opportunity

Hello Jamie,

Thanks for your patience with me getting back to you.

It's unfortunate you feel this way towards CloudKitchens and what the company is attempting to accomplish for restaurant owners and operators in the industry. However, I appreciate your candor. I'll be sure to relay your message to the proper channels.

In summary, running a small business is a land of contrasts. Please buy our pizza, it's actually really good.

It's been almost a year since we closed DNA Pizza's Grubhub account, but we're back online now with Chow Now. It seems to be working ok so far?

The restaurant's hours are still tied to the nightclub, which means we only accept orders while DNA Lounge is open. This means, roughly, every Friday, Saturday and Monday from 8pm or 9pm to 2am; and other days of the week as the event calendar dictates.

So give it a try tonight! In... just about 4 hours.

This time the online ordering is (finally!) more directly integrated with our point of sale. With every other ordering system we've used in the past, when someone placed an order, it would show up on a customized, locked-down tablet provided by the outside company, and our cashiers would have to notice it ping and then transcribe the order into our system. But this new one talks to our POS directly, so it goes in like every other cashier order.

This means that it finally makes sense for an in-person customer to use it as a "skip the line" order -- you can place your order from the dance floor or the sidewalk, and then in a few minutes, head on over to the restaurant for pick-up. So that's kind of cool.

Anyway, wow do I have some things to say about online ordering, but writing that up has completely gotten away from me, so I'll save that for a later post.

I can't believe this exists. Someone did a 15 minute documentary on Whale, one of my favorite 90s bands. They only had two albums but I have 14 CDs by them, which might be their entire output. So Pixies influenced! So sleazy! (Their grungey-slow-grind cover of Darling Nikki is just... *chef's kiss*.) Tricky co-wrote/produced half their first album, before Maxinquaye.

I finally got to see them live in 1998 opening for Tricky on the Angels with Dirty Faces tour at The Fillmore, and they killed it, and then I saw them again headlining the following night at Bimbo's, and nobody came, and they were clearly angry about that and kinda jerky. I forgave them and loved them anyway.

Eye 842. Eye 842.

Previously, previously, previously.

That's billion with a B. So if you held out hope that filling out surveys or shitposting through it might turn this ship around, no. That much money has an event horizon.

Mozilla is cooked.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Coyote who swam to Alcatraz gets much fatter on prison island diet:

It's a 1.25-mile journey from Aquatic Park through frigid, current-swept waters to reach the tourist attraction. [...]

Aidan Moore, who works for Alcatraz City Cruises, said the coyote has been holed up near the parade grounds, where birds frequently nest. Bird carcasses have recently been found around the island, Moore said.

"He's certainly much fatter than when he arrived," said Moore. "We don't know how long he's going to be a resident here, because if he interferes with the nesting birds he might get relocated to the mainland." [...]

Kessler and a UC Berkeley researcher said the coyote likely left the mainland due to territorial pressure from the city's approximately 20 coyote family groups, each of which defends its turf against outsiders. With limited options for dispersing young coyotes -- about 30 are killed by cars in San Francisco each year -- this one apparently decided to strike out across the water.

Christopher Schell, an assistant professor at UC Berkeley who studies how carnivores adapt to urban environments, said coyotes rarely display this type of swimming endurance, but it's not unprecedented. He recalled reports of coyotes swimming up to three miles to islands from Seattle and Tacoma, Washington.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Once again, Patreon is going to strong-arm all of us into "charge at the moment of sign-up" instead of "charge on the first of the month." They have wanted this for years, and once again they are saying that Apple has given them cover to demand it.

Here's what I wrote when they tried to pull this shit a year and a half ago and then chickened out:

Patreon has two billing models, monthly (bills on the first of the month, or whenever they get around to it) and daily (charges you the moment you sign up.)

For several years now, they have been trying really hard to get creators to switch to daily billing whether they like it or not, with a series of intrusive nags and dark patterns. E.g., the "Settings" tab always has an "unread" alert on it reminding me that I have not made the "recommended" change.

Now they're going to force everyone to switch, and they're blaming Apple for it. And, to be clear, fuck Apple, but also fuck Patreon, this is their choice and it's going to mean that I can no longer use their service.

Here's a support request I just sent them, again, after clicking 15 levels deep into their FAQ before finding the thing that might contact a human. Since the email alerting me of this change came from a "noreply" address because of course it did.

Feel free to send your own:

Subject: Subscription billing is unacceptable

You recently sent mail saying that you're going to force me to switch from monthly billing to subscription billing.

Subscription billing is unacceptable for my Patreon. It does not work.

I sell monthly memberships to a physical nightclub. The memberships begin on the first of the month. I fulfill and mail the physical membership cards on the first of the month. If you make me switch to daily billing, that means I will have to do merch fulfillment on a daily basis instead, and I simply cannot do that.

If you force me to switch from a monthly cycle to a daily cycle I will have no choice but to stop using Patreon.

To be clear: I do not give a shit about the iOS app. Not one fractional fuck is given. If the solution to this problem is that people cannot sign up for, or access, my Patreon from the iOS app, that is 100% acceptable to me.

I know for a fact that none -- zero, 0% -- of my patrons have signed up using the iOS app. I know this because I had to warn them away from it, due to the 30% Apple Tax, and all of them complied. All of them. The iOS app is utterly meaningless to me and to my patrons.

(Also you are blaming this on Apple's bullying, which is simply not credible. You've been nagging me to change to subscription billing for years, with the little red error icon appearing everywhere. This is your decision. You are transparently using Apple as an excuse.)

I said this same thing to you a year and a half ago, the last time you tried to pull this nonsense. Second verse, same as the first.

Last time, support replied that they "completely get why this change would be upsetting" and "will bring my feedback to the team." Uh huh.

Update: This time, support just replied with "more information about to convert my account", because obviously any reading of the above would indicate that I am "confused" about it.

Patreon's absolutely awful level of service and support has been a huge problem for quite some time, but I am really not looking forward to having to figure out how to implement recurring monthly billing on my own.

Patreon, YOU HAD ONE JOB.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

"I'm going to hand out big dicks to little-dick ICE agents."

The Geneva Convention disintegrated. The Founding Fathers wept. Somewhere, a federal HR manager clutched their chest and whispered, "No. Not like this." [...]

Across the barricades stood a row of cops in riot gear. Helmets. Batons. Armor. Gas masks. High-vis jackets. The full authoritarian cosplay kit. They looked like they were guarding nuclear launch codes. They were guarding a hotel lobby full of ICE agents who were about to be spiritually obliterated by a box of clearance-bin dicks.

We opened the box.

The first dildo flew through the air like a rubber prophecy and skidded to a stop directly at the boots of a state trooper.

And that's when the United States government lost its entire fucking mind.

Before anyone could even laugh properly, before a second dildo could achieve liftoff, before reality had time to process the absurdity of what had just happened, the cops panicked like Victorian men seeing an ankle.

Tear gas.

Pepper balls.

Instant chaos.

The very first rubber dick to touch government-issued leather boots triggered a full-blown chemical weapons response. That is not metaphor. That is not exaggeration. That is a literal sentence that happened in America in 2026. [...]

ICE agents peeked out of hotel windows like scared children witnessing a public execution, except the execution was their dignity and the executioner was a $5 clearance dildo. Arianne was still smiling -- not because it was funny, not because it was cute, but because she knew, in her bones, that we had just cracked reality in half.

We didn't even get to the full distribution phase before they freaked out. The mere presence of one dildo at their feet was enough to trigger chemical weapons. That's how paper-thin their authority is. That's how little it takes to make them go full riot-cop meltdown mode. [...]

We proved that you can bring a trillion-dollar security apparatus to its knees with one well-aimed rubber cock.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Just another minor upgrade -- our beloved skeleton now has much more expressive forearms, thanks to some after-market parts I found from a freelance osteopath on Etsy. Pictured to the right rocking out at the Black Flag show.

Here, have a photo dump:

House of Harm Halou + Vice Reine AniClover Micro Mania Wrestling After Life Big Top Burlesque Death Guild Black Flag

Democrats Condemn ICE For Murdering Without Proper Warrants

WASHINGTON -- In a statement calling for more guardrails around ongoing immigration operations, Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives publicly condemned Immigration and Customs Enforcement Thursday for routinely employing fatal use of force without obtaining the proper warrants. "For weeks, Democrats have pushed to require ICE agents to obtain the necessary judicial warrants ahead of any murders they plan to commit," House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said in a joint statement on the current Homeland Security funding bill, which would allocate $500 million to developing "common sense" accountability measures for any extrajudicial killings carried out at the behest of the federal government.

"It is vital that the Department of Homeland Security uphold the rule of law when indiscriminately gunning down innocent civilians in the street; otherwise, the whole system could fall apart. Rather than doing things by the book, these officers are out there slaughtering everyday Americans without first filing the proper paperwork with the appropriate agencies. Our framework is designed to ensure that ICE conducts itself like every other law enforcement agency in the nation, enacting violence upon our populace with impunity and without consequence." Jeffries added that he empathized with immigrant communities who live in fear knowing that at any moment they could be killed without administrative due diligence.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Huh, looks like I haven't done a DNA Lounge blog post in two months. Well, there hasn't been a lot to talk about, because December and January suck. We had few events, low attendance, and one big, expensive cancellation. Hooray.

Anyway, one good thing that has happened is that, after nearly six months of investigation, someone who is much better than I am at reading tcpdump logs has finally figured out why the video webcast kept stalling all the time. So now you should be able to watch it for hours at a time without it rebuffering, instead of minutes, which is where we had been for a while.

Our uplink from the club is MonkeyBrains, who are wireless, because nobody will sell me a fiber link. And everything about wireless is trash and always has been.

When using RTSP or RTMP for video transport, there was an unusually high number of lost and reordered packets. These are hallmarks of a wireless network (thanks again, MonkeyBrains), but they only seemed to show up under load; meaning that you can't see the problem using mtr, speedtest, or iperf3, all of which showed 0% loss. All of the testing apps send a bunch of evenly-spaced packets of the same size, but the stream sends unpredictable bursts (because of MPEG keyframes) that lead to loss, and eventually those (successful) retransmissions kill TCP throughput. Then the video stalls.

So the fix was to switch to SRT ("Secure Reliable Transport", not to be confused with "SubRip subtitles"), which is a UDP protocol that implements its own TCP-like retransmission within a limited window, and with bandwidth smoothing. This avoids the bursting we were seeing when RTSP would blast out many large packets at once.

It took so long to figure this out, because none of the obvious tools were indicating that anything was wrong, even though your lying eyes saw the video crapping out all the time.

"Why don't you fix the stupid webcast already?" Because it's fuckin' hard, dude.

Oh yeah, also I got the payphone working again. Critical stuff here.

Anyway, come see Black Flag tonight. Is fun band, you like.