red_bus wrote:I understand what this is and I totally agree it kills shops.

JasonZavoda wrote:Bad service ...

But I have genuinely never heard this phrase before!

JasonZavoda wrote:....the pizza and cheeseburger lifestyle have done in a number, one way or another, around me.

Presumably it is a US slang term?  Hmmm, guessing.. I suppose it might mean that most people now are too fat to go out and shop, or alternatively that everyone gets stuff ordered in (like pizza, but surely not burgers?).  Or, perhaps that an increasingly coarsened (i.e. fast-food) culture means that people do not care for complex gaming anymore. Or something else? It sounds great and I would love to use it - once I know what it means  :D

Sounds like game store owners in the UK must be cut from a different and much smaller cloth than most of the ones on the East Coast USA have been. Not slang, just a general description of the eating habits and their after-effects on game store owners (and comic store owners). It is really a Simpsonism but sadly accurate. It is about an increaingly coarsened waistline and arteries, not culture.

As for the FLGS dying, one of my other hobbies is bicycles, and it's very interesting to me that we're having this conversation here because if you go to any bike website where the conversation turns to the local bike shop, you will see posts pretty much exactly like Nogrod's rant, just substitute FLGS with FLBS.  

Like the FLGS, bike customers have the same love-hate relationship with the shops.  We like the idea of the shop being there and want them to stay around to help the sport/hobby grow but many of them are not what they should be.  Plus, the business is very tough nowadays so many are closing and few survive.

I think the problems game stores have are almost exactly the same as with bike shops, and the general consensus seem to be the same for both bike and game stores:

1. Stores are often opened by enthusiasts who love the hobby and mean well but have no business sense or knack for customer service.
2. The brick and mortar folks are getting slaughtered by the internet on product selection and pricing and they can't compete.
3. Patrons agree the shops could make up some of the loss with product knowledge, on-site services and customer service excellence but few do.

Number two is probably the key problem for both game and bike stores right now.

I must admit that as I write this I'm fortunate to have two very good game stores in my area that I like a lot.  I think they are both doing it right.  They both have owners that get to know their customers, who are friendly and knowledgeable.  They both are engaged in the gaming community and offer gaming sessions on site which seem to be pretty well attended.  

I should also note that both of them have diversified a bit, and that's probably helping them survive.  One of the shops' owners is a game publisher as well, and they are also a full comic store.  They have a very wide selection of card, RPG, board games and minis.  

The other shop doubles as a used bookstore and seems to do well with that.  This store store also sells and takes trade ins of OOP games and old books which is really an attraction for me and I think that is helping them as well.

Yup, them's the one. They have been going for absolute ages but you get the feeling that if you keeled over and died in front of the counter they would just step over you to re-arrange the D&D 4th Ed. on the shelves.  They do keep a decent range of Cthulhu and boardgames on the 2nd floor, but generally it is all a bit bland.  And expensive.  There was a better shop round the corner near the British Museum ("Playing Games"), which had a huge bulletin board for gamers. But that closed a few years ago. Plus a few miles north in Finchley there is "Leisure Games", which is actually friendly, and doing good business I think.

Hiya,

theres quite a big shop in Reading, Eclectic games: http://www.eclecticgames.co.uk/

At least, it runs quite a few tournaments, so it must be a fair size.

The bloke who owns it is really nice. His wifes a bit schizo tho.

Cheers,
KAL

Badmike wrote:With the number of hand held recording devices out there, you think people would put a muffler on their mouth in public situations, just in case your rant ends up on YouTube.  Especially if you were, oh, a teacher?  Unless you were a teacher who is also a moron:

http://news.yahoo.com/n-c-teacher-tells ... 08348.html

Mike B.

I think there's very little question that this teacher is a moron.  

I think the audio gives good examples of several things:

1)  The near-religious passion for Obama that clouds the reasoning of some of his supporters.

2)  The intense frustration that this group of students obviously brings this teacher.  (It's double frustrating when most of the kids are smarter than you.)

3)  The low IQ and shoddy education some people bring to the teaching profession.

4)  Even F students have IPods.

5)  How easy it is screw up as a teacher.  (Most teachers have launched into a rant at some point.)

If you pay attenion to this story, I bet you $100 this teacher does not lose her position.

As an educated and fully competent social studies teacher, it was very frustrating for me not to be able to get a job in that subject.

Instead, I was a substitute for lesser teachers who were teaching social studies because they couldn't teach anything else.  

In one case...seriously, this is a fact...I was once assigned to teach my own lesson as a social studies substitute.  The regular teacher had gone to the same graduate school I did, a year after me.  He cribbed a lesson plan from the lesson planning course curriculum that had been included as an example of how to do things right.  The lesson he cribbed was my lesson.

Other times, I substituted for teachers whose lesson plans revealed gaps in their professional subject knowledge and/or notions picked up from popular media that were not actual, historical facts.  In many cases, not only wrong information but exactly backwards information.

The teacher on the audio clip would be a good example.  She cannot tell real history or actual law from her political opinions.  She has interpreted a mild criticism of Obama as an attack on Obama...as if attacks on Obama were not allowed, or (as she claims) actually illegal.  She relies on the necessity for "respect" for her opinions rather than the "accuracy" of her opinions.  Like many of her political persuasion, she is able to mentally re-fence past her own opinions and thus justify a double standard.  Her IQ is apparently so low that this cognitive dissonance does not trouble her.  

These are the people for whom I was a low-life, unworthy subsitute.

After trying for several years and usually not even getting an interview, I concluded:

1)  Apparently, social studies endorsements are given out at teaching colleges like super-sized fries or king-sized drinks to go along with other fields of study.

2)  Subject knowledge and professional skills were apparently not important factors in hiring social studies teachers.

3)  If I was going to get work as a teacher I needed to either become a coach or switch to some other field of certification.

Believe me, everyone else at this school knows this teacher is an idiot.  She won't get fired and it ain't about the teacher's union.

Mark

Agent Cooper wrote:It's 1000% about the teacher's union.

It's 10,000% Not the plumbers union (actually it is a guild here in Delaware).

This explains so very much. I fear some here will find it "rediculous", though   :

belfasttelegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/techno ... 61908.html

I'm surprised the number is this low, from my experience:

... a third could not spell "definitely" while a similar proportion failed to pick the right spelling of "separate".

Mencap chief executive Mark Goldring said: "With over two thirds of Britons now having to rely on spell check, we are heading towards an auto-correct generation.

Are we headed "towards" an auto-correct generation, or are we headed "toward" an auto-correct generation?