jwz

Nicola Turner:

A site-responsive installation made mainly from dark wool and horsehair will fill the ground-floor galleries at 16 Hanover Square, extending in a procession-like manner that continues 12 metres up the façade of the Georgian townhouse.

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Humans Are Reading Copilot Prompts -- And They're Horrified

Human contractors hired to improve Microsoft's Copilot AI chatbot are constantly bombarded with lewd or sexually explicit photo editing requests and images that users have uploaded, including upskirt photos or putting women into sexual positions. These contractors are then asked to review whether the generated image successfully fulfilled the prompt -- such as, did the image generator make the woman's AI-enlarged breasts big enough. [...]

"Faces are always uncensored, and many of the prompts are sexual in nature and dubiously consensual," one person who works on the prompts told 404 Media. [....]

These contractors are not being hired to flag or vet offensive or inappropriate content. They are being paid to review the quality of Copilot's output, including in these cases of sexual imagery.

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Friday evening, the Folsom Street Fair web site finally published the map of the fair. (This is not unusual for them: many years they don't publish the map or schedule until after the fair has begun.)

And lo what do we see? That for the first time in over twenty-five years they have decided that our block of 11th Street is outside of the fair.

This has, to put it mildly, massive financial consequences.

So we mail them, and:

From: Angel Adeyoha
Date: Fri, Sep 25, 2026 at 11:15 PM
Subject: Re: Why is DNA Lounge excluded this year?
To:

Hey Devon,

The map has been public since our ISCOTT application, and we can't make a change to our footprint two days before the event, legally. We have moved to a closure system with fewer gates to make it work better for our staffing and traffic control, and so have to choose where closures that are emergency exits would work best. We didn't want to fence you or Butter in, especially since we haven't had any conversations about participation with your bar. We can for sure discuss what sort of participation you'd like in the future, right after we get done with this fair!

I'm sorry it caught you off guard and we're always open to meeting to discuss further.

Let me translate that for you from its native Douglas Adams:

There's no point in acting surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you've had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it's far too late to start making a fuss about it now. ... What do you mean you've never been to Alpha Centauri? Oh, for heaven's sake, mankind, it's only four light years away, you know. I'm sorry, but if you can't be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that's your own lookout. Energize the demolition beams.

Thank you, Vogon Street Fair Events.

Yes it did "catch us off guard" that for the first time in twenty-five years their organization chose to completely FUCK us with zero notice to the tune of $20,000 in combined lost sales -- from our outside bar that nobody can visit, and our free daytime indoor party that nobody will attend. "Golly gee, nothing to be done. Better luck next time, fuck you very much."

The street closure permit (ISCOTT 1532891) shows all of 11th Street marked as closed up to Harrison. There's nothing that indicates the block need only be partially closed. So they closed our entire street -- but intentionally excluded us from the fair anyway. Best of both worlds!

Brüt: Bare Chest: SXTPS:

And not just us, of course: our neighbors Butter, Buzzworks, Audio, Bergerac and Halcyon are also fucked by this.

To be clear, this is not the City who did this to us -- this was done to us by Folsom Street Events, the corporation that runs the Folsom Street Fair.

Why would they do this? Who knows. Did we piss someone off? Did they decide that we're just not "Folsom" enough for them? On that note, here are some photos and videos of our parties on Friday night, Saturday afternoon and Saturday evening:

Update, Saturday Evening:

At around 10pm, a crew showed up to start installing the barricades. Now, let me clarify what that used to mean: at literally every previous Folsom Street Fair, the "gate" was a couple of 3' tall stanchions, a card table, and a drag queen with a tip bucket and a hard sell. This time? the "gate" they were building was an 8' tall chain-link fence going wall-to-wall, blocking even the sidewalk. This was an Outside Lands fence. This was not a, "Welcome to the street party, please tip" gate, this was a, "You are not seeing Charli XCX for free" barricade.

Which means that this was not just a design and psychological barrier to people at the fair coming our way, they made it literally impossible.

Anyway, funny story, they started setting up that wall just north of Buzzworks -- so only Buzzworks, Butter and DNA Lounge were fucked. Audio, Bergerac and Halcyon got to be inside the fair. This did not sit well with Vlad, the owner of Butter and Buzzworks, and he went off. He told the fence installers that either they were taking it down or he was, and eventually they said "I am not paid enough for this" and left.

And then Angel (Folsom Street Events Executive Director) called the cops on him! An hour later, a squad car showed up.

Cop: You can't keep knocking down the fence, they will keep calling us, that's their property.

Vlad: No it's not, it's abandoned garbage in the middle of the street in front of my door, keeping my customers away.

Cop: Hold that thought, here is someone else we need to go assault, TTYL.

Then the cops went and sat on some dude and 4 more squad cars showed up with sirens blazing to rubberneck, as they do. I don't even know what this dude did, I blinked and suddenly there was a guy face down on the concrete getting cuffed.

So, I dunno man. Our best guess is that Angel has beef with Vlad for some reason unknown to us, and Angel considers DNA Lounge to be acceptable collateral damage in their little feud. Who can even tell. This is still some serious bullshit that is costing us a colossal amount of money and I would prefer to just be able to invite customers into my venue and provide them entertainment, food and beverages without someone trying to persistently fuck my shit up, so if Angel and company could knock that shit off that would be greatly appreciated.

As of 11:30 AM, they keep trying to put the barricade back up and Vlad keeps taking it down. I guess he hasn't been arrested yet. This story is "developing", as they say.

We are all hanging on by god damned thread here, and we don't need this kind of petty, vindictive, petulant, childish, circular-firing-squad nonsense from people who should be on our side. Jesus Fucking Christ on a God Damned Pogo-Stick.

ANYWAY.

If you could find the time to visit us at DNA Lounge this afternoon and evening, that would really be appreciated. I mean, if someone is going to so much effort to keep you away from us, we must be throwing a pretty good party, right?

• Free daytime party with Love Bizarre, 2pm.

• Nighttime party with Brooke Candy + Violet Chachki, 9pm.

We will be here all day, at the ass end -- literally the ass end -- of this fucking fair.

Update, Afterward:

You may be wondering how that all went! Well, at some point they stopped playing whack-a-mole with the fence, and the fence stayed down. This had the I-am-sure-unintended consequence of making 11th Street an additional entrance to the fair, as it had been in years past -- albeit one that had no donation-collectors, oopsie. As for us, we did alright. We did much better than I expected -- because had the fence stayed up, I expected crickets -- but we still took in almost exactly half the income as last year.

I'm really proud of the DNA Lounge and DNA Pizza staff, who still killed it today in the face of all this chaos and uncertainty.

Thanks to Charles Lewis III for his nice writeup about our parklet situation in 48 Hills! (Vote for us in Best of the Bay!)

But since this wretched timeline is one that moves backwards in all the worst ways, City Hall and the SFMTA want the Lounge's parklet destroyed. Again. Seemingly for no other reason than "just because." The 41-year-old club has two weeks to take down the utterly harmless, wholly beneficial structure, or face a 500-dollar daily fine.

You know how this very column has illustrated that Lurie's administration wants to turn SF into Manhattan? You know how we've said their idea of "a thriving San Francisco" is one that appeals not to artists, performers, or independent businesses, but soulless corporate interests? This is what we mean. The DNA Lounge is not only one of the few indie performance venues still around in SF (particularly, in the SoMA/Tenderloin area), it's one of the few -- if not the last -- concert venues that hasn't been assimilated into the TicketMaster/LiveNation mega-monster. It's a genuine San Francisco original that constantly finds itself at war with the very SF politicians who should be defending it.

Here are some photos of our lovely parklet from this very afternoon, being enjoyed by the attendees of our annual PRC / AIDS Emergency Fund benefit event. Look at all that wide open space for busses!

You may have noticed that we got coverage about this from one of the local TV stations. I'm not embedding it here because the coverage was... kinda bad.

One good thing came of it, though, which is they got Dorsey on camera saying "let's hope we can keep that parklet there". We did finally get in contact with his staff, and they are trying to set up another meeting.

SFMTA's position hasn't changed a bit, and they have still not made any real commitment to pausing the fines, which may or may not start next week depending on their mood.

Anyway, back to that TV segment: they showed up unannounced at 10am, interviewed Devon for half an hour, picked their favorite 5 seconds, and then gave the SFMTA bureaucrats a full-page copaganda press release rebuttal that went entirely unchallenged and made it sound like we just put this thing up in secret in the dead of night and they only just discovered it, which is the farthest thing from the truth. SFMTA were deeply involved in the parklet design before during and after both of its incarnations.

SFMTA like to keep saying it is "unpermitted", but the only reason for that technicality is that eight and a half years ago someone inside the city bureaucracy just... dropped the ball and didn't finish the paperwork. If they had just done their job and signed off on it when they were supposed to, we would have been fully permitted today -- with affordances for the 40 foot busses that were the standard at the time of permitting. How were we supposed to know that they didn't finish their homework? That's their job, not ours!

But because one of their own fucked up eight and a half years ago, they think they get to just make us start over from scratch with an entirely new set of rules that did not exist when this project was designed and approved. We're getting screwed because they didn't dot their i's and cross their t's when they were supposed to.

By the way -- something else I didn't mention last time, because though it is stupid, it will obviously hold no sway with bureaucrats: this idea that there needs to be room for two busses at the curb? It's absurd! It has literally never happened, and do you know why? Because there is ALWAYS a car there! One hundred percent of the time when I have seen two busses there at once (which isn't even all that common) there has been an Uber or a Lyft or a Waymo or a delivery driver illegally parked in the bus stop, and so the second bus stops at an angle with its nose out in the traffic lane. And the bus drivers and the bus passengers just deal with it and go on with their day, because that's life in the city.

"But that's illegal", says the bureaucrat. "They can't do that."

BTW, ask me about our so-called "bike lane".

Smooth Dunk:

Previously, previously, previously.

The SF Democratic Party [sic] voted on Wednesday to continue its support for Flock surveillance cameras:

Two major resolutions were in front of the party's 31 members -- 13 of whom were absent -- on Wednesday. One, written by former District 4 supervisor Gordon Mar, called for the city to impose increased guardrails for Flock's automated license-plate readers, and to consider suspension of its contract with the city.

The other, written by committee chair Nancy Tung and District 6 supervisor and former police spokesperson Matt Dorsey, asked the group to affirm its trust in the city's existing use of Flock cameras. [...]

At Wednesday's San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee meeting, a majority voted to reject Mar's resolution and pass Dorsey's. Dorsey's measure received 11 votes in favor, 4 votes abstaining, and only 3 against. [...]

Both sides acknowledged that the city's Flock camera data was illegally accessed more than 1.6 million times in 2024 and 2025, with lots of those searches reaching out-of-state agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And, more recently, the San Francisco Police Department admitted around 300 out-of-state illegal searches had happened in the last year. [...]

Mar raised another concern: Two of the committee's current members -- Lily Ho and Trevor Chandler -- work for Flock. Last month, the San Francisco Standard reported that a prior version of Mar's resolution was removed from the party's agenda by a subcommittee chaired by Ho.

Neither Ho nor Chandler offered to abstain from voting on Wednesday. The committee does not have rules related to conflicts of interest for issues like this one, Tung told Mar. They then proceeded to count both Ho and Chandler's votes.

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Techbros literally out here trying to disrupt the fraternity rape-house:

Today these so-called hacker houses are driven by missions, like the advancement of humanity, and have become critical nodes for the AI industry. Residents are often startup founders or engineers working at OpenAI or Anthropic. Rent can hit $10,000 a month for a room. [...]

Parties featuring psychedelic drugs and sharing of sexual partners are common, the people said. One house threw lavish events for the AI community so often that its owner claimed more than $200,000 of damage, including for a rodent infestation.

At the mansion in Hillsborough known as AGI House -- named for "artificial general intelligence" -- local police have logged 37 incidents since 2022. At least 17 were related to complaints about large parties and events, according to the reports. The others included an episode in December when a woman called police and told them that a male AGI House resident had pressured her to have sex; she climbed over a gate to escape. Last year, police were also asked at least four times to perform welfare checks, which typically happen when people experience mental health issues or are considered unsafe to themselves or others. [...]

Nixon said he planned to make AGI House even bigger. His concept involved "20 AI hackers, living in the same epic house for three months, 20 weekend hackathons, daily dinners with AI royalty, ship code again and again and again," according to Nixon's notes, which were released in court.

"This is a new golden age," Nixon said, according to the court documents.

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It's time for the Folsom Street Fair and we've got quite a lineup!

First a bit of an outlier, on Friday the Aniclover folks are bringing some kind of anime maid thing, your guess is as good as mine. But this one is phone-free, which I can certainly get behind. (BTW, if, in your dotage, you ever find yourself thinking that there's no new kink out in the world that can surprise you, check out an anime party. They have such specificity...)

Then we do the Full Folsom: Brüt, Bare Chest (sold out!), San Frandisco, SXTPS (it's supposed to be pronounced Sex Tapes but you and I both know it's a Sextopus); then on the day of the fair itself, we have our Studio 456 free daytime party, and in the evening right after the fair, a live show with Brooke Candy and Violet Chachki!

Remember, it's a marathon, not a sprint.

Then next weekend, Kreayshawn -- tickets are going fast for that one, get them now!

And with that lineup, might I remind you again to vote for DNA Lounge as Best Nightclub and Best Live Music Venue in this year's Best of the Bay poll?

"The doome warning all men to the iudgemente wherein are contayned for the most parte all the straunge prodigies hapned in the worlde, with diuers secrete figures of reuelations tending to mannes stayed conuersion towardes God: in maner of a generall chronicle, gathered out of sundrie approued authors by St. Batman professor in diuinite." 1581.

Internet Archive has the first few pages of a reprint of this Batman Grimoire which says:

The Doome is Batman's translation and amplification of Conrad Lycosthenes' Prodigiorum ac Ostentorom Chronicon (1557). In his Epistle Dedicatory Batman calls his book a "collection, translation, and interpretation." [...] His chief addenda are [...] a brief catalogue of illustrious and noble women which concludes with a prayer for the preservation of the noble and most illustrious Elizabeth. [...] In illustrating his book, Batman employed almost ninety wood-cuts, a few of which were copied from Lycosthenes.

"Wait, this whole thing is just more infighting between Protestants and Catholics?"

"Always has been."

Some of the illustrations from The Doome are here and they are wild:

But it sounds like Batman only cribbed some of those from Lycosthenes, and those are pretty good too: Though Prodigiorum has a lot of repeated illustrations. A lot.

There's a reprint of The Doome on eBay, but it's $500. (And people say I'm hard to shop for...)

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I hope you will be joining us for the Hubba Hubba Revue 20th Anniversary show this Sunday, Sep 20! Main floor seating has sold out, but some balcony seats remain.

Broke Ass Stuart has a nice retrospective:

How did this all get started?

Kingfish: "I got a call from DNA Lounge, asking if I could book a show on a Saturday night in September of 2006. My friend, Eddie Dane, and I scrambled, put together a line-up of our friends in the Bay Area burlesque community, signed-up our pal, Lee Presson, and his 10-piece swing band, and suddenly we had a show! We had absolutely no idea we were ever going to do another one. [...]

"I think the city was ready for our kind of entertainment when we first started. It was an era that gave birth to some really fantastic and enduring shows and events. At that time, on the heels of the dot-com crash, warehouse raves, and sort of the same ol' same ol' in the bars and clubs, I think people were looking around for fresh ideas and things to do. A new generation of burlesque, circus, and variety performers stepped in and created a new kind of Bay Area nightlife.

"People in the Bay Area are still fun, still engaged, and still interested in live entertainment, but challenging times, inflation, a terrible government and, pretty recently. a whole entire plague, have understandably left them a little less adventurous, a little more risk-averse, and that's too bad.

"With gas and food prices skyrocketing, live shows tend to be the first thing that people chop out of their budget. The problem with that is, it takes years and years to build those communities, and if they go, it is far from easy to get them back.

"When you lose your locally created arts, you lose the unique character and soul of where you live. Corporate entertainment can't replicate that, and San Francisco deserves to hang on to its character."

Kingfish and crew have built something truly incredible, and enduring, with Hubba Hubba. Almost nothing in the nightlife world lasts that long! Give them a heartfelt "Hooray!"

And to toot our own horn just a little bit here, I'm proud of the part that DNA Lounge has played in this as well. In a world full of corporate venues, run by management companies focused on national tours and slotting the same product into identical rooms in a dozen different cities, you won't find very many places willing to take a chance on local live entertainment like this, passing up more lucrative bookings and even taking a loss on it sometimes, because we love it and it is awesome. That's why we've been doing this every month for 20 years, and on top of that, every Monday for 12 years!

If I had to describe Hubba, it would be: a blender-load of Looney Tunes, The Muppet Show, SCTV and a bevy of 1930s screwball comedies -- "...but with a little sex in it. A little but I don't want to stress it." (Sullivan's Travels, Preston Sturges.)

Anyway if you like that sort of thing and by golly you should, come to the show, and join our Patreon, and as I've been going on about this week, vote for DNA Lounge as Best Nightclub and Best Live Music Venue in this year's Best of the Bay poll.

And of course also vote for Hubba Hubba Revue as Best... Dance Company? Theatre Company? Performance Company? I think they used to have a "Best Burlesque" category, but, honestly, Hubba is the 800 Pound Gorilla. But that's fine! It's an independent, locally sourced, artisanal gorilla, and it's very friendly!

See you at the bar, where Kingfish and I will be doing our best Statler and Waldorf.