Huh.. I've stayed in over 1,000 hotels and Airbnbs over the last 15 years and not once saw a bathroom with no door. Lots of bathroom windows, but always some kind of door.
I've stayed in a hotel where the toilet door was made of glass, and had big gaps. I was staying with an acquaintance, so things were really awkward. It didn't help that the shower was right in front of this frosted glass, so the person's entire silhouette was very visible when showering.
Another time, in Amsterdam, I stayed at an AirBnB where the toilet was on the balcony, and had a glass door (non-frosted) in the kitchen. Yep, if you needed to go, and someone was cooking, or was a neighbour, they were looking right at you.
And people voting with their wallet have led to literally hundreds of thousands of companies going out of business.
So yeah, it is successful.
ba-dum-tish!
Outside of the realm of science fiction, my sister followed a TV show for a while that was basically a set of advertisements for a modular home company. One episode featured the installation of a small home on a remote British island; the shower was a pipe outside the house itself.
We live way out in the boonies, so that helps.
(And if you haven't read the book you can guess what could possibly go wrong with this setup.)
(This wasn't Simmons' invention, incidentally; Larry Niven did it first.)
It's to encourage e.g. two coworkers to get separate rooms instead of one room with separate beds. The increase in revenue is more than the construction cost.
"You're welcome."
But you have to pick your battles with your partner. I'm turning the volume down, and when the battery's empty I don't exactly hasten to change it.
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.)
It's not a virtue to be so unselfcounscious. It's not about being ashamed or inhibited or in pathological denial of biological realities. It's about being fucking minimally considerate and just the tiniest bit self-aware.
What do you mean "same goes"? Are you saying there are cultures in which being loud on the toilet is considered proper?
https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/6w5hux/slurping_nood...
+ personal questions to real Chinese people.
Second link: Where do they say that 'making loud mouth noises is a sign of respect'? They say 'people slurp noodles' which is exactly what I said.
Anyway I’ve asked enough Chinese people about it to get the same answer. Not all do it, but some do it for these reasons.
I doubt you ever asked any Chinese.
Ask this specific question: "Do you make loud mouth noises while you eat as a sign of respect, or is it just normal to slurp noodles?" and see what answer you get.
There's a pretty significant difference; human diseases are much more likely to spread to other humans.
On the plus side, when I dayroomed there it was dead silent and the room had blackout curtains.
One of my short stories takes place in a not-to-distant future, where there is absolutely no privacy. In one chapter a child goes to a bathroom in an old building, and he sees that there is not only a door, but there is a contraption on it. A lock! The child runs out of the bathroom in fright. The audience learns only a little later that the child is frightened about what human-eating animals might stalk prey in that area, that anybody would ever think to lock themselves in there.
You might like “We” by Eugene Zamiatin.
1948 is one of my favourites, by the way.
Same for living rooms and bedrooms (those I would expect to at least have some curtains aside).
Still not used to it, i like my privacy and ability to shamelessly say scratch my butt when alone if needed.
But then the horror to go to the US and find toilets in i.e. hospitals that don't have doors closing all the way. You can literally stare someone in the eye through the crack in the door, or over the door, while he's taking a dump. Holy cow. Imagine the sounds echoing through the collective toilet room. My god. I'm still recovering from my visit to the prestigious Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Having a s* together with someone in the next stall is a whole new level of intimacy I was not ready for.
The other side of the social contract obliges passers-by to not look inside.
The other strange thing that I found is that some apartments have little spy mirrors mounted on the exterior wall to allow the occupants to monitor what's going on in the street.
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.
Welcome to 18th-century small-village politics.
Most of us do not realise how utterly NEW individuality and freedom is. Not so long ago we were all Taliban.
Happy to see someone is trying to fix this trend.
Update: this is why you should put the lid down to flush. But put it back up again after because <reasons>
(Of course, she said it in German, so she complained about 'Wohnklo' in analogy with a 'Wohnküche' which is the German word for an open-plan kitchen.)
But I'm under no illusion that it would help with health or hygiene. Perhaps with mental health; the door is mostly there for social reasons.
What reasons?
A door provides at least some kind of physical barrier.
So in a hotel bathroom, you'd only be exposed to viruses from people you already share a room (or even bed) with.
SARS-CoV-2 would like to have a word with you (it can last as long as 28 days on smooth surfaces).
Even without being that strict about the discussion, I think GP was making the point that viruses can survive for many days, so stating that "you'd only be exposed to viruses from people you already share a room (or even bed) with." is an argument that requires some elaboration.
maybe this thread will end up being some kind of revelation, but I very much agree with the person you replied to. If I'm alone, I'm not bothered and the door may as well stay open
So when the plumbing was installed, obviously some went to the kitchen. And the bathroom, which previously didn't exist, was often an addition to (or a division from) the kitchen -- with a doorway [with a door] betwixt the kitchen and the bathroom -- because that made the plumbing easier.
IIRC, that particular feature disqualifies the home for financing with both the VA and with HUD for reasons of hygiene.
So by extension: According to VA and HUD, hygiene requires at least one door and at least one additional room of separation between the place where you shit and the place where you eat.
(Just to be clear: I think doors on bathrooms are great. I just don't think they really contribute to hygiene or health--apart from mental health.)
I’m sure a third would also help even more (front door of the house?) but most people consider that a bit excessive for daily use within their own domicile.
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.)
No real opportunity to put in another bathroom and I've talked with contractors. You could squeeze a really minimalist half bath in the pantry but then you lose the pantry and the washer/dryer need to go somewhere and the basement isn't really a good idea for various reasons.
But when there is no door, I can say with certainty that it was never closed because it doesn't even exist.
It's just that I don't believe they contribute to hygiene or health.
It takes some experience to realize that a place graded 7.x probably has serious issues.
The opposite situation can also occur. At my university, entrance scholarships were decided a few years ago based on students' aggregate score across 25ish dimensions (I can't remember the exact number) where students were each rated 1-4. Consequently a student who was absolutely exceptional in one area would be beaten out by a student who was marginally above average in all the other areas. I suggested that rather than scoring 1-4 the scores should be 1/2/5/25 instead.
I generally sample the lowest rating written reviews, to check if people are complaining about real stuff, or are just confused. For instance, if a hotel doesn't have a bar, some of the negative reviews will usually be about how the hotel doesn't have a bar; these can be safely ignored as having been written by idiots (it is not like the hotel is hiding the fact that it doesn't have a bar).
Occasionally some of the positive reviews are similarly baffling. Was recently booking a hotel in Berlin in January, and the top review's main positive comment about the hotel was that it had heating. Well, yeah, I mean, you'd hope so. I can only assume that the reviewer was a visitor from the 19th century.
- bathrooms with glass walls but with (glass) door
- bathrooms with walls but without door
- bathrooms with partially open walls, sometimes even with door :P
The worst was when I was once sharing a room with my daughter and the bathroom was one with glass walls and no shower curtain. We decided to schedule our toilet visits and showers so the other one would not be in the room.
(In that case, the reason it's done is fairly clearly that to accommodate a door they'd have to make the room bigger.)
I usually stay at chain hotels and this is never really a problem.
My sister shared with me a home listing that had a bedroom and basically a toilet in a closet, and no door — just a curtain for privacy. That was weird.
[1]: https://www.google.com/travel/hotels/Houston%2C%20TX/entity/...
And I don't even travel that much, around once a year on average.
You shit behind your bed, I kid you not
I stick to rooms with two digits in front of the decimal.
This is why I just stay home.
Just like in Windows, where the window has a border, but it is 1 px wide.
> Idiotic design trend.
Maybe some UX designers found work in other areas.