If you're thinking, "they're all dicks, aren't they"...

...you are a smart person.

Of the drawings, I'd say that it's 90% dongs; the rest are a mixture of smilies, pentagrams and cats, in about that order.

(I especially like the ones that just wrote out the word "PENIS", which is like, the Philip K. Dick of dicks.)

To generate this gallery, I had to place eyeballs on hundreds of thousands of signatures, going back to 2021. That's right, I just white-knuckled it, you're welcome. (If you're about to start replying with "Why Didn't You Just", I am begging you to Not.)

Now, if you're thinking, "Wait, why do you even still have that 5-year-old data"... you are, again, a smart person.

Even though the payment processors won't let you issue a refund or a chargeback on a transaction older than 6 months, our point-of-sale saves every bit of information it has about every transaction forever. "Oh geez, you should delete that" you might be thinking. There literally is not a delete button.

After a year, one might want to look at daily graphs, but there's no way you'd care about individual transactions, or anything of higher aggregate resolution than "hourly". Maybe "10 minutes" if you're a complete maniac. But nope, we still have the full PDF of the receipt, including name, last-four, scrawled signature and exactly what products were purchased.

(Though, the customer name isn't included most of the time, only sometimes. I'm not sure what the difference is.)

Anyway that means that when -- not if, when -- this vendor gets popped, all of that data will be stolen, sold, laundered, mixed, and purchased by a data broker who will annotate their profile about you with how much you drink and what, how many nights a week, and whether you attend gay parties. Some of it might even be true! That profile will then be purchased by your car insurance company, your health insurance company, the recruiters used by every future employer, Google, Amazon, Instagram, ICE, TSA, FBI, CIA, all of the "AI" companies, and Deputy Dewey of the East Cowfuck, Texas Police Department.

Oh no, what started off as a juvenile story about poorly-drawn dicks turned into a dystopian nightmare. Welp.]]> https://cdn.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/04/25.html/feed/ 46 https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/04/21.html https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/04/21.html#comments Tue, 21 Apr 2026 19:38:09 +0000 https://dnalounge.com/b/AVBU Speaking of our neighbors... Hey, remember that hideous flashbulb of an office building they built across the street from us in 2019? How's that going? Still walled up with plywood and sitting 100% vacant after 7 years? Blank wall covered with graffiti and posters rather than that "ground-floor commercial" we were promised? Emergency lights still strobing all night long?

Good, good...

I guess the matryoshka doll of shell companies begins with 340-350 11th Street LLC. The realtor on that sign does not acknowledge it existing. Zillow has a listing for it, which might be entirely fiction, but it does have this banger of a photo of the property that they lifted from street view. What's not to love!

At The Pound, Carracci, Cardinal and Cipriano carved out a pivotal and mostly unsung revolution in San Francisco's legendary music scene. The Pound was born on Feb. 8, 2001 with Jerry Cantrell from Alice in Chains playing the venue's first show. Its short-but-influential run lasted just five years; the Port Authority pulled the plug on their lease in fall 2006.

Along the way, The Pound hosted a blizzard of early 2000s bands that would go on to become household names [...] "Back then, no one wanted to touch these bands. The powers that be did not believe that these bands had any kind of draw, staying power. They're playing stadiums now," Cipriano tells KQED. "I was right. My big prize for being right is all the bands eventually go on to Live Nation and suddenly there's no room for the independent venues."

Cip is our booker here at DNA Lounge, so if you've enjoyed live music here in recent years, that has almost certainly been thanks to him!

Speaking of independent venues... About a year ago Yolo, the bottle service club that replaced Slim's in 2020 closed. (Oh no.) Then in January it was announced that some Oakland rapper bought it and named it after himself. Well The Budda seems to be closed already. The sign is painted over and everything. As far as I can tell they only did like a dozen events there total. They didn't even have a web site for the first month, only Instagram.

So I'm sure that's all going really well.

I've heard that Thee Parkside's last live show will be this weekend, and they're closing for good in July. And Bottom of the Hill is still planning to close at the end of the year.

Will the last band to play San Francisco please turn out the lights?

In the meantime here at DNA Lounge, we're still pushing that boulder up the hill. Same liver different eagles, as I often say. Come see some shows.]]> https://cdn.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/04/20.html/feed/ 5 https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/04/14.html https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/04/14.html#comments Tue, 14 Apr 2026 18:16:13 +0000 https://dnalounge.com/b/AVBN started using Chow Now for deliveries. It was a $50/month flat fee, and they were to drop the orders directly into our Revel POS on the back end.

Guess what, they completely failed at their one job. The orders would actually show up in the POS about one time in four, and they could not fix it.

Also we averaged $38 in online sales per week, which is like... a rounding error.

If you haven't read my long post about the absolute apocalypse that has been visited upon those of us who would like to deliver food to people in this modern world, maybe today's a good day to do that.]]> https://cdn.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/04/14.html/feed/ 13 https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/03/25.html https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/03/25.html#comments Wed, 25 Mar 2026 19:32:08 +0000 https://dnalounge.com/b/AVA5 Back in 2021 we finally received some federal grant money to keep us alive and cover the enormous costs of having been completely closed for 18 months starting in early 2020... This was the COVID-19 Shuttered Venue Operations Grant (SVOG) which I think is the Payroll Protection Program (PPP) wearing a trenchcoat. The money was incredibly helpful! And it was incredibly difficult to get. The amount of paperwork needed to apply for and receive the grant was insane. We just about had to allocate someone to babysitting that paperwork full-time for six months. The effort and complexity was far beyond the reach of most small businesses, which is why most of the money for these grants went to billion-dollar corporate grifters instead of to the people it was supposed to help, notable examples being Ruth's Chris Steak House, Veritas (SF's biggest landlord), Shake Shack, Nestea, RealNetworks, Lil Wayne, Chris Brown, Marshmello, Steve Aoki and Alice in Chains. And of course multinational superpredator LiveNation who managed to steal millions in Federal aid meant for independent venues.

Anyway, it took more than a year from when we applied to when we got our first check. A year with zero customers. And then in late 2024 -- nearly four years later -- they did some kind of rule-changing rug-pull on us. They were "reviewing our file" and demanded that we submit an "audit report consistent with 2 CFR 200 Subpart F".

Just more dumb bureaucracy, right? Well.

Hiring someone to do that audit report correctly cost us $20,000. TWENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS. And had we not done it, they would have demanded we pay back all of the money we got in 2021.

In 2021, they literally told us, "You have to spend all this money. If you don't spend it all within a year, on these things, then you can't keep it." So we didn't even have the option to sit on twenty grand to pay for the eventual audit, even if they had told us that was going to happen, which they did not.

Couldn't they have just given us $20k less and paid for the audit with that? No, apparently not.

Anyway, the auditors decided that we had done something slightly wrong. Let's say we had expenses A through Z, and we said, "We are using the grant to pay for A, B and C." The auditors said, "Oh, you can't spend it on C. But you are allowed to spend it on D through F, so all you have to do is file an amendment, and it all comes out the same."

So we do that... and... crickets.

See, in between when this audit crap started, and the auditors finished, DOGE had dismantled the Small Business Administration, and they just... stopped answering their phones, or email. Even the auditors could not get hold of anybody and that's their entire business.

So between October 2024 and March 2026 we were unable to get anyone at SBA to respond to our request to amend the grant! They didn't say "no" (if they said "no" they would have demanded that we pay back hundreds of thousands of dollars) but rather than saying "yes" they just kept sending us monthly automated emails from a "noreply" address noting that "your Audit Report is still outstanding" and that "Your timely response is anticipated and appreciated in order to resolve any compliance issues."

For two years.

And then today -- the rains have come and the crops are saved!

The Small Business Administration's Shuttered Venue Operators Grant Program (SVOG) has completed its review of your audit submission package. SBA has determined that your organization has fully and materially complied with Federal grant audit requirements for fiscal year 2022.

Our accountant and the auditors wasted so many (billable) hours just trying to get someone on the phone to respond in any way, so the total wasn't just the $20,000 we had to pay the audit firm. It also included all the work our accountant did. Fortunately accountants are boss-level note-takers:

• 43 emails with SBA;
• 286 emails with the audit firm;
• 4+ multi-hour zoom calls with the audit firm;
• Calling SBA every Wednesday to inquire on the status of our amendments, for at least a year -- 50+ calls lasting at least 30 minutes and getting nowhere, so that's 25 hours right there.

So besides the audiors themselves, babysitting this also cost us somewhere north of 250 hours of labor from our own accountant.

For nothing.

Nothing.

To get us right back to zero.

It's impressive how Apartheid Emerald Mine Space Karen and Cheeto Mussolini have made our government so much more "efficient".

This is where I mention that if you would like to help out with the DNA Lounge Accountancy Defense Fund, you can make a one-time donation or join our Patreon, which by the way is a really good deal.]]> https://cdn.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/03/25.html/feed/ 8