jigger

Apparently the Economist doesn't like being quoted:

"Dear Sir/Madam,
We understand that you are the host provider for thai360.com.
This is a formal notification to request immediate deletion of the copyright infringement as detailed in this email, pursuant to 17 USC s. 512(c)(3)(A) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA").
The content hosted on thai360.com constitutes copyright infringement of NLA's represented The Economist Newspaper Limited's content.
The original content can be found at the following link:
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/05/22/magas-assault-on-science-is-an-act-of-grievous-self-harm
The infringing content can be found at the following link:
https://thai360.com/index.php?/topic/66407-maga%E2%80%99s-assault-on-science-is-an-act-of-grievous-self-harm%C2%A0/
Contact details:
Hannah Gower for and on behalf of NLA Media Access Limited,... "

So I'll be taking that article down ;-(

The real operatives behind Project2025 put the orangeman there to distract everyone, while they dig around behind closed doors...

Changing the USA thread?

This thread has been going on for many years, and keeps getting longer (now more than 2000 pages).  It's persistency and continued engagement suggests to me that it should be it's own forum or sub-forum, instead of a thread.

Anyone got a better idea?

The database that underlies the board crashed yet again today.  The management is all lined up bowing down in abject apology.

For the technically inclined: In order to forestall these events in the future, I added 8GB to the swap file for the underlying instance at AWS. With luck this problem won't happen again.

Yes, we dropped Nanaplaza.com because Khun Sanuk, who lived in Thailand, felt threatened by the Internet crackdown that was going on at the time.

I don't think that is much of a risk these days, but I did put it up for sale in hopes of "monetizing" some of my various Internet projects.

Alice!  Who the fuck is Alice!

You used to hear this (Aussie?) song at least once every night somewhere and the whole crowd would sing the chorus! Hadn't thought of that song for 20 years....

Yeah, I rarely "ignore" or "block" people- but someone asked and I thought people should have the option, rather than asking me to ban people.

The information in KS's post "Dummy's Guide to Thai360" is now obsolete since the software has changed over the years.

In particular, in "How to ignore people", he says click on their profile pic.  This no longer works, you have to hover over the profile pic, and a menu pops up that allows you to put that poster in the Ignore category.

We now have 2044 pages of posts on this thread.  I'm tempted to suggest we at least start a new thread, if not separate it into a couple of separate threads. Maybe all the discussion of OrangeMan's idiocy can be in it's own discussion?

Thanks.  I unpinned the post that referred to it.

This used to be a meetup spot, but I don't see many mentions since years ago?  Anyone been there lately?

I believe KS's original setup was on Delphi Forums.  At one point, we had an archive of old posts from there, but it seems to be lost 

I'm the only mod at the moment, and I didn't delete anything.  How long has that post been up?  There is an auto-deletion than can occur after, maybe, ten years?

No, this was a place on it's own plot, kinda spread out with a bar and a big open-air dance area. Line of taxis out front. My TG of the moment took me there on our motorbike.

The deep reaches of the web yielded up the following text, from a column in the Bangkok Post called Nightowl from 1996.  Before the Internet, I had an airmail subscription to the Post, just so I could read Trink's columns.

Quote

 

October 5, 1996

Nightowl Logo
THE TRINK PAGE

The end of an era?
The nitery entertainment centres of the capital when I came on the scene were Rajdamnern Avenue, between the Democracy Monument and the Royal Hotel, and New Road, near the Oriental Hotel. The former catered primarily to locals, the latter to a mixture of locals and residents. Foreign shows were featured at the Rama Hotel (Silom Road), Cafe de Paris Night Club (Suriwong Road) and Sani Chateau Night Club (Gaysorn Road).

Apart from a few watering holes, Patpong Road was an unremarkable business area. There was a tailor shop, druggist, dentist, airline offices, a place selling greeting cards, a couple of small restaurants. Imbibers usually walked to Club 99 (Silom Road) to satisfy their thirst. It might well have remained that way but for the Vietnam War. With it, Udom, the head of the Patpong clan, had a brainstorm.

Having spent years in the US, Udom foresaw (correctly) that what the American GIs coming here on their way to fight the good fight most wanted was to tank up. Where better than on Patpong Road and its parallel street, Patpong 2? It was a time when farangs could rent shophouses in their own name and he offered a good deal - long leases and no tea money down. Locals took advantage of this deal as well.

To be sure, entrepreneurs in other areas recognised the same opportunity. New Petchburi Road opened and soon there were oases cheek by jowl along its entire length, with a massage parlour on every block. Upcountry, each Air Force base had an ale house zone outside its gates. And lasses poured from farms and villages to work in the gin mills or become mia noys. Long common in the Realm, prostitution went into overdrive.

As bistros were given preferential treatment, other businesses left and the Patpong area became famous the world over. When the first floor establishments were all rented, new ones filled the second floors and to an extent the third floors. Yet it was a boite on New Petchburi Road, Thai Heaven, which boasted the largest number of demimondaines - 200.

After the war ended and the GIs returned home, their clientele was replaced by tourists - Germans, for the most part, who came to see whether the Patpong area lived up to its notoriety. It did. There were also R&R visits from hard-drinking oil workers in other countries. There were other changes, too. The powers-that-be mandated closing times, minimum age for employees and periodic physical examinations.

Udom maintained his policy of not taking tea money, but he jacked up the rents every time leases were to be renewed. Publicans balking at this were told that they had the alternative of moving. There was a waiting list of saloonkeeps waiting to move into the Patpong area. To meet their overhead, the night spot proprietors felt they had no option but to raise their drink prices - now the highest in the metropolis.

Apart from its massage parlours, New Petchburi Road is no longer a nitery entertainment area. Opened as a counterweight to the Patpong area, Soi Cowboy never measured up to it. Its nearest rival is Nana Entertainment Plaza, which has already stolen some of its thunder. Looking to its laurels, the Patpong area still has its universally recognised name going for it.

With Udom's passing away at 79 early in the week, the question is whither the Patpong area? The surviving members of the clan lack his determination to keep it going. Over the years, offers have been made to buy and tear it down - replacing it with high rises and such. It is situated on prime property. One such offer is well over US$100 million (about 2,500 million baht), I've been informed. Is it too good to refuse, I wonder?

* NOT only are the daily downpours filling the reservoirs as I noted in my previous column, they are spilling over and causing crop damage as well as floods. Krung Thep is experiencing floods after heavy rains irrespective of overflowing reservoirs. Unlike years past much of the water is claimed by the sewers or evaporates in several hours, but until then the level is ankle or calf-high. Then again, the traffic-lights are affected by showers - either blinking on and off or breaking down. Which makes driving through intersections particularly hazardous. The constabulary does what it can, but what about when they aren't on duty during the wee hours? Cases of "TIT" (This Is Thailand).

* SINCE Parliament was dissolved, the heat has been off the Patpong area. Dramshops have no difficulty staying open till 3, constellations (after hour meeting places) till 6. Presumably this will last until the elections. I'll keep you Posted.

* VINAI has asked me to pass on that Cosmos Bar (Patpong 2) now opens at 2 p.m. instead of 11 a.m. Done.

* FARANG CONNECTION (NEP), run by David and Ya, was busted for showing. Inconvenient, to say the least, because it is in the process of being subleased. Oh, well.

 

Yes, I'm the only mod at the moment.  So people can report things to "the mods" and I'll deal with them.  I'm currently feeling my way through to see what the workload is. Of course, also interested in volunteers, and opinions on ways things should be handled.

I'm not unwilling to sell the board if someone or group came along that thought they could do a better job with it. There's lots of value here: a long history, reasonable amount of traffic, and interesting discussions.  The key is to instantiate some kind of revenue stream. 

It's astounding to me how many Americans are gullible, angry, and stupid. 

It's scary how social media has allowed those masses to be manipulated.

Sadly, it's worldwide, as autocrats ride a populist wave.  Trump in America, Orban in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey, the list goes on.

On one of my trips to Phuket, we several times hit this club in the center of the island, with a jungle-themed name like Amazon or Zulu???

Anybody recall this place?

Yes, a mistake while in a "driving on the left" context.  I've never minded driving on the left- except for that one issue where you make a left turn and end up on the wrong side of the street.

She turned out to be a pretty competent driver, and took me quite a few places 😉  In my experience, when you find a good one- it's best to let her have her head.

And then there was that time on Phuket where the previously demure and compliant TG on the back of the motorbike, after I made a typical driving-on-the-left mistake, demanded we pull over and let her drive...

I must apologize to all for the various issues lately. In recent months, the site has been down repeatedly for various reasons:

- crashed database several times- which happens when the system runs out of memory

- full filesystem- which stops the web server process

I am planning to move the site to another service that will offer more memory and disk space- in hopes these problems will recede.

Email problems:  I was just notified that email from the system was not getting out.  That problem should be fixed now.

In case anyone gets worried, I don't intend to shut down the site without at least a full discussion.  

Khun Sanuk and I ran this board together for many years, trying to keep conversations reasonably civil, and protecting everyone's privacy so that potentially controversial topics can be discussed.

In the post-KS era, there will inevitably be people reconsidering where they want to put their focus.  If people are dissatisfied with how the board works (or the db failures that have plagued us lately 😉 they are certainly free to go start their own forum.

However when one of the mods abuses the trust of this community, by

1- abusing mod privileges to harvest the personal info of the entire community in order to lure them to his rival board

2- revealing that personal info by emailing all the addresses to the entire list.

It must be addressed.  We thank Coss for his previous contributions.

Jigger

I will be running an experimental migration of the site to a "shared hosting" account sometime soon.  Back when the site was busier, we had problems with running out of memory- so I'll have to see how it goes.

I see no reason to hide my activity here.  When KS and I started this site on a lark sometime in the 1990's, he lived here and I was living in Hong Kong and visiting Thailand whenever I could.  He enjoyed being the official voice of the site and I stayed in the background.  Now both the site and I are US-based, so the privacy concerns are reduced.

We started out an early social network called Delphi, then a free bulletin board system called IPBoard running on a server on Soi 23.  IPBoard morphed somewhere along the line into a for-profit  product called Invision Community.  They charge $80 for support and maintenance, which isn't too bad. It costs about $25/mo for the current setup in AWS, but I have plans to move it to a cheaper and simpler hosting solution shortly.  So the cost isn't a big issue.

Ever the optimist, I feel like there is a viable niche for info sharing and camaraderie among farang visitors (and locals, and alumnae) to the Thai entertainment scene.  I see a lot of "guest" users browsing, and a lot of search-engine queries looking for things we have online.  But to convert any of those browsers into members will require, at the least, some updated content. 

For some time now, the centrally-controlled advertising-rich social networks like Facebook, Twitter, etc., have been stealing all the activity and eyeballs- but that industry has peaked.  People are tired of being pawns in various billionaire's games.  So this may leave a little room for grassroots efforts like ours going forward.

Jigger

Nice to see all the old board members, too bad it has to be a tragedy that caused it. 

Since the beginning of this board, Khun Sanuk was the public face of the board, and I have stayed in the background tending to sysadmin duties.  I'll continue to do that for the foreseeable future.  We may need to consider a new moderator or two to make sure things are attended to.

Jigger