when i was a kid i would go to the library all the time until 10, which was late for me at that age. i wasn’t a big reader, but it was a perfect excuse to escape family.
Our library hosts lounge night and a game night. Lounge night is lofi music and people enjoying themselves with games, movies, books, larping, and writers sharing. Poetry night and writers block aren’t personally my favorite but there’s those as well.
sell coffee etc. to pay the bills. all the cool kids are doing it. Libraries are looking for more visitors. Install a Starbucks with tables near the gaming PCs. books and chairs in the corner. Checkout counter is already done, Re: bars, Why do they all have parking lots? AA without the chanting.
Restaurants, bars are part of number first one. Coffee shops to me close early. Never seen one open at 10pm+
The library having games and such would be nice. They likely would run into the issue that thoae unfortunate would turn up and try to stay all night every time to get out of the cold/rain/heat.
Bars usually manage to bounce them without issue due to them not being paying customers. Getting bounced by a librarian does sound kind of cool though.
Cafes near me don’t open late a lot of the time. They close at about 5pm. So if you want some place to hang out after work? You have no choice other than a bar.
In the UK they defunded youth centres. Whatever shady shit we used to get up to at those, it was in a safe-ish place which at least one responsible person not far away in the worst case. Our behaviour/activities outside of those places once they were gone, as bored youths in a town of middle age to old people, was much worse.
The fuck? Abusing? They are homeless and just trying to survive and doing the best they can. They are making good use of their resources to embetter their own lives and the system allows for it. If homeless people go to the library perhaps the problem is not the homeless people but that THERE IS NO BETTER OPTION FOR THEM.
It is abuse in that it’s misusing the resources for purposes not intended. Public libraries are not meant to be hotels for the homeless, and it ruins the experience for everyone else. Hate me all you want for saying it but its the truth.
by actually taking up the offers of drug treatment they are given. I used to work in a homeless shelter and you’d be blown away at how little they care about anything but getting high. They have resources tossed their way for free and they refuse them because they only care about continuing their life of debauchery and drugs.
We should stop collective punishment because society has failed and left people without homes. We should deprive many people of good things because we don’t want to see the unhoused.
A majority of the homeless people in my local library are drug addicts. They are not people simply down on their luck. And they will continue to be homeless until they stop taking drugs. As long as they are on drugs/drinking there is no way out. And they refuse treatment most of the time.
Drug addict is a disease, not a failing of the individual, we lack the support to aid those with addict to better health.
Also, I am not saying you are lying, but there is often a direct mental association with the unhoused and addiction. A few of them may be addicts and we extrapolate it to the whole group.
You don’t understand how addiction or homeless work. They won’t continue to be homeless until they stop taking drugs. They need support systems to aid in recovery, and support for housing. Often times the unhoused become addicts after they experience homelessness, not the other way around, it’s a stress response to self medicate.
Also, at the end of the day, they are still human, and we should not treat them as anything less. We should not remove services from the whole because we are afraid of the unhoused. So many parks were never built because people were afraid of the unhoused, so many public bathrooms were closed, so many benches removed. We can’t continue on treating them like ourcasts.of society, we need to support them in getting physically and mentally healthy.
It absolutely is a failing of the individual. It can still be a “disease” at the same time.
A few of them may be addicts and we extrapolate it to the whole group.
Oh please, most of them are. Drug addiction is the leading cause of prolonged homelessness, followed by mental illness.
Often times the unhoused become addicts after they experience homelessness,
And often times their addiction caused them to be homeless. I’m not sure what value there is in trying to prove exceptions when the general trends are clear as day.
Society has failed them.
I used to work at a homeless shelter when I was doing some community service work and I can tell you first hand most of them don’t want help. They don’t care. They just want drugs. They get offered treatment opportunities all the time but they refuse because they can’t get loaded.
Here in Finland a lot of libraries are open pretty late (scan card and PIN to access, free of charge). Some close because of vandals, but it mostly works.
Not much socializing, though. Mostly people choose the drinking in domestic isolation.
That is why our local libraries started hosting board game nights. Mixed bag because there are already a bunch of successful board game clubs attracting the more experienced crowd.
That’s called a community centre and used to be pretty common. Growing up we had multiple that were run by the local Catholic organizations, and I think there were also some that were run by the youth branch of the various political parties.
But a key component of such a place being success is having a certain kind of open culture. There’s countries where if you throw 10 strangers in a room and return an hour later, you’ll find 10 strangers on their phone, having not uttered a single word to each other.
People also have a tendency to divide into subgroups and isolate from each other. It’s a step in the right direction and better than no community at all. But it can breed resentment and even violence. That’s a common problem of community centres here.
If we constantly tell people that their primary defining characteristic is their race, or their sexuality, or their nationality, and we tell them that those people are the only ones who can truly get them, then it’s no surprise this results in a culture of isolating into little demographic groups.
Yup, even though I’m pretty new to D&D I’m hosting a game with a few people from the us (I’m from Europe), nearly every weekend I’m chuckling because of the things they come up with, some of the best fun from the entire week, even though it’s literally 1 am for me at that time
Yes I get a little bit sleep deprived, but I fix it by oversleeping till 10 AM
Life sucks but this is some of the few things keeping me here
I refuse to play D&D online. It is my “real people time”, an irony considering we’re all playing imaginary characters.
About five years ago I started hosting D&D 9pm (21:00) Friday evenings. There was a restaurant in town that was open late, largely serving takeout orders. So we requested a regular table in the back corner and they offered us a free plate of nachos every Friday. We usually played for three or four hours, and a few people ordered drinks or finger food – enough for the restaurant to break even on the nachos at a minimum. It was our “bar replacement” activity. I immediately had buy in from the players, and had to turn people away.
I moved a few years later, and my new house had a large-group friendly basement suitable for D&D. In my new city, I posted looking for players for the same time slot: 9pm Fridays. I was oversubscribed within a few hours. We had a few pauses during COVID, but are still playing at the same timeslot.
I still use the “in person only” rule at my table. During COVID, a bunch we’re proposing we play online. I don’t want to play online. I can do that with innumerable games that already fill that niche. I want pencil and paper and friends.
Add comment