Bring bathroom doors back to hotels

"You're welcome."

1: https://youtu.be/ef_3Wj4T_ts

There was a time, over a year ago now, when I was working on a project that required some very raunchy, dirty, absolute gutter language.

ChatGPT would only get about 30% of the way there, and never further. It stayed restrained, always.

But ChatGPT + image gen? This produced unfiltered amazement.

It played out like this: Tell the bot to generate an image involving some ludicrously filthy text backstory, and it would generate and display a prompt for Dall-E. But that generated prompt seemed to bypass the filters and could be absolute trash -- plain, no nonsense, dirt-nasty holy-fuckballs craptacularity.

Dall-E would refuse the prompt, of course, but it remained in the chat log for perusal.

Later, they made the generated prompt disappear when Dall-E refused. (This may in fact be my fault. I sent it on some pretty deep dives.)

And nowadays, it seems that we don't get to see the generated prompt at all, even when Dall-E accepts a (very normal, not pushing boundaries at all) prompt and generates an image.

But for a minute there: I did get to peer into depths of the wildly creative foulness that the bot can concoct. What we see above (in GP comment) isn't even scratching the surface.

(I didn't write about this little "jailbreak" anywhere at that time because I'm selfish, and I wanted to keep using it myself.)

What do you mean "same goes"? Are you saying there are cultures in which being loud on the toilet is considered proper?

There's a pretty significant difference; human diseases are much more likely to spread to other humans.

That sounds utterly dystopian. Whose business is it if we want to shag in the morning?

It’s also completely self-defeating. Nobody can prove that they never did anything that someone else would disapprove. There are solid reasons behind the "innocent until proven guilty" principle.

My present house (in Ohio) also has its singular bathroom upstairs. The bathroom is on top of the kitchen. Neither room is an addition -- as far as I can tell, it has always used this basic layout.

According to aerial photos, it was built in the 1950s. It resides within a small but very industrialized city that was positively booming at the time the home was constructed; it definitely included plumbing from the beginning.

A previous house in the same city was definitely built before indoor plumbing. It was even built before separate kitchens were considered normal or necessary. It originally had only two rooms downstairs, and two rooms upstairs. Heating and cooking would have been provided by a central stove (probably wood-fired, and with no ductwork).

While it was stick-built, it was initially only a step or two above a fairly primitive log cabin in function.

By the time I lived there, it also had a kitchen, laundry, downstairs bathroom, another upstairs bedroom, and subgrade basement added. The bathroom was part of the kitchen addition, and one entered the bathroom through the kitchen.

I've actually lived in three houses so far that were initially constructed like that -- with two rooms downstairs, and two upstairs.

Only one of those 3 had a bathroom that was separated from the kitchen by a room, and that one was perhaps the oldest: The floor joists for the first level were made from logs that were hewn flat[ish] on the top by hand, and that still hard bark on them. For that house, the bathroom was its own small separate single-story addition that jutted off of the side of [what had become] the dining room.

The house I grew up in was larger and much more-nicely finished in terms of things like woodworking and trim, but was also very old by US norms. It was built before both plumbing and electricity, though it included gas lighting (!) in every room. The partial basement, kitchen and downstairs bathroom were additions, but the bathroom connected to two different common rooms even though it was physically adjacent to the kitchen. There also was an upstairs bathroom, and which was created by taking part of the master bedroom and making it into a hallway while the the original bedroom closet became the bathroom (with a small and somewhat haphazard roof extension where the bathtub was).

Anyway: The point, other than that old houses present interesting evolutions, is that old houses often (but not always) had bathrooms attached to the kitchen -- and that we usually seek to keep them separated these days in newer construction, at least in the US.

I've also lived in a few different apartment buildings (many of which were "old", but all of which were initially intended to be apartment buildings), and all of those bathrooms were separated from the kitchen by a hallway.

And all of these bathrooms had doors. I don't understand the questioning of bathroom doors that I see here in some comments -- at all.

(I shall spare at this time the details of the house I once owned that had been an old farmhouse (with no gas, no lights, and no plumbing), and which had subsequently been divided into a triplex that contained a total of 17 distinct rooms. I could probably write a whole book about that place.)

Even regular programs in front-loading machines (at least in the European countries I've been to, these make up the absolute vast majority of machines) are longer than typical top loaders. Top loaders are faster but put more wear on the clothes and use more energy and water. A regular, "non-EU" cycle will typically take around 2h. The EU one will typically max out the 3h limit.

My Bosch dishwasher takes 3 hours I guess due to efficiency, it seems reasonable. I didn’t go with a European washer dryer combo though (my laundry room has a vent and I’ve heard that heat pump tech still isn’t good enough).

My shiny new (2025) Bosch washing machine has a big button on the front which switches from the default 3 hour programme (for 40 degree wash) to 1hr 30m. Like, it's not very _well_ hidden :)

Interestingly, the 3 hour programme isn't really a 3 hour programme. If you use it, the timer will generally start at 3 hours and drop to an hour or so after 20 minutes. I have no idea what the heuristic is, and the manual is silent on the matter.

Not necessarily. Just like natural evolution doesn't requite its participants to understand themselves, neither does the market require anyone at a business to understand why they are successful.

I have to admit that I'm getting very tired of the unsustainable push for endless growth driving companies everywhere to jack up prices as high as people will tolerate and then also delivering the least and worst product/service they can possibly get away with on top of it. It means that everything is getting shittier unless you're willing to spend insane amounts of money to get what used to be standard and more affordable.

It's becoming exhausting maintaining a list of businesses I no longer want to give money to and products/services I won't pay for. This is especially true as companies change names, redesign products, and buy up one another. the list just grows and grows all the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_plume

There are good reasons to keep bathrooms physically separated from where you sleep and hygiene is one of them, along with not wanting the bed to be a front row seat to the sights, smells, and sounds of whatever is going on in there and not wanting an expensive hotel room I'm paying for to be like a prison cell.

Not having a bathroom with a door is an incredibly low baseline. I can only think of a single Airbnb that I’ve stayed in that’s been worse than that

(The key to the Airbnb was missing and the host was inaccessible)

And almost any regulation gives a (relative) advantage to the people who can afford the lawyers and bureaucrats to furnish the documentation to show that they are in compliance.

Reminds me of that Burkiss Way sketch where somebody wants to book tickets to a West End show, but they all involve the spectators being poked in the eye with a pencil:

https://www.buttercookie.de/The%20Burkiss%20Way/Transcripts/...

The hospitality industry has self-imposed standards as to what kind of amenities a facility should have in order to rate as a two-star hotel, three-star hotel, etc. Things like TV, shampoo, and hair dryer are on that list. If customers make enough noise about bathroom doors, the rating organizations might actually add that as a requirement.

These days, some people see scaled-back housekeeping as sort of a ripoff while others of us are fine without the sometimes interruptions.

Then why do they even offer twin rooms?

Doorless bathrooms are not explained by saying hotels (that offer twin rooms) secretly want all twin room guests to pay double and use two single rooms. Most hotels don't even have very many single rooms!

It may be different in small places where there's only one or two hotels. But most cities have dozens to hundreds of hotels, not all owned by the same conglomerates. There is no way they'd miss out the entire twin-room market by pretending not to have them. And they certainly wouldn't take the reputational damage by pretending you'll get a normal twin room when you book, but hit you with a doorless bathroom twin room when you arrive. The booking website will have photos showing the typical room layout, in order to give prospective customers clarity about what they'd be booking, so they choose to book there.

I'm no hotel tycoon either, but the idea that it's a secret ruse to get people to pay double doesn't make any sense to me. The idea that they're blindly following some design trend, or that it lets them make the rooms physically smaller by giving the impression of a bigger room, are much more plausible ideas.

If they want to save money, hostels are usually half the price of hotels. Why would they even choose a hotel in the first place?

Plus, my experience is that hotels will simply cancel your booking, or force you to upgrade, if multiple people turn up to check in for a single room. They don't need some passive-aggressive doorless bathroom, they have the right to tell you to book a 2-person room (whether twin or double bed) for 2 people.

The business travelers are looking at a website with hundreds of hotels in the city they're going to. If you don't offer a twin room option, they don't think "well shucks, let's just get two single rooms". They go to the next hotel, out of hundreds, which has a twin room option. It may cost more, but it won't cost double. They'd be complete idiots to pick two single rooms if what they wanted as a twin room.

You can't compel them to book your single rooms, and you definitely can't compel them by springing a surprise doorless bathroom on them in your twin room option after they've paid and arrived. That's when they expense a taxi to some other hotel and report their findings to their entire company, who never book from you again.

Simply offering a twin room option means you expect unrelated or distantly-related people will book it. If you don't want that, take away the twin room option. Business travellers will not share a double bed. You get all that benefit of double-profit (if for some reason the travellers are morons or they're going to bumfuck nowhere and you're the only hotel), without going to the expense of removing bathroom doors.

Even if I'm alone in a hotel room, I'd prefer to contain the odor to the bathroom.

Maybe not everyone literally poops with the door open with their significant other but I’d personally have a hard time marrying someone who couldn’t exchange farts for a laugh.