I just wanna be a winner ... and it's your free thread

July 1, 2024 12:07 AM

As we enter the latter half of 2024, the question is: have you ever won anything? Perhaps in the tombola at a summer fete? A prize for art or poetry or writing? An election where you were a candidate? A scooter uh motorbike on a TV game show? A word game? Maybe you got lucky in life or employment, or got some free cheese, or scooped a big lottery cash prize? Winning literally, or figuratively? Happily or sadly? Or do you want to win something specific? ... Or write about whatever is on your mind, in your heart, on your plate or in your journal, because this is your weekly free thread. [Post title/inspiration by Brown Sauce from 1981]
posted by Wordshore (13 comments total)

well, it's Canada Day up here in the nation of the same name. So in honour of all that, here are The Guess Who
posted by philip-random at 12:17 AM on July 1 [1 favorite]

Tombola [1][2] winnings of the season so far this summer in rural Worcestershire: a bottle of cheap plonk and a bottle of aftershave, a bottle of prosecco, another bottle of prosecco. Other games played: croquet (in which the vicar blatantly cheated). Cakes eaten: a lovely slice of lemon dessert, and a Victoria sponge with apricot jam filling.
posted by Wordshore at 12:20 AM on July 1

so i’m in this run-down hotel in brussels and make the mistake of taking the stairs down to the reception desk instead of using the elevator like a normal person. so anyway the door that claims to be the ground floor exit locks behind me after dumping me off in a very narrow corridor full of unmarked doors, most of them either locked or with no handles. this results in me spending about 20 minutes wandering through the backrooms while wondering if the next door i managed to open would either 1) lock me in a corridor/closet with no openable doors at all or else 2) set off every fire alarm in the building or i guess 3) feed me to slenderman or whatever

eventually i made my way out but not before passing through a series of staircases littered with miscellaneous detritus and with no working lights and then crossing some kind of rooftop deck(?!) on what claimed to be the first floor and then going through a couple more darkened staircases and finally emerging on the street outside a different building after opening a featureless door with a broken handle by holding down the latch with my thumb.

my working theories for what it was that i walked through are as follows:
1) it’s a series of defensive fortifications built in preparation for the language war turning hot
2) it’s where they throw people who pour belgian beers into the wrong glasses
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 12:29 AM on July 1 [4 favorites]

So today is my daughter’s birthday, but YESTERDAY was my baby sister Gretchen’s birthday. The day she was born (6/30/1960, just short of my 7th birthday), my little sister Brigitt and I were at the Missoula Mercantile where I entered a raffle and won the grand prize - the board game Monkeys Wild.
posted by skyscraper at 12:43 AM on July 1 [1 favorite]

Also the Mercantile was pretty interesting. All sales (cash or check, no other option) were sent off to a mysterious place via pneumatic tube with the receipt returned by the same method and, best of all, as a child, you could have your shoes fitted using an X-Ray machine. Aimed at your genitals.

My daughter turned out great, thank you for asking.
posted by skyscraper at 12:57 AM on July 1 [2 favorites]

The deer madness I mentioned last week has grown into a viral monster consuming the anime community and I am absolutely psyched to be joining Team Brainrot. In further surrender to my inner weeb I have begun Japanese Duolingo and am absolutely crushing the early stages (7000 points in three days) as thoroughly as I had previously crushed Turkish. The Turkish ended when my lovely Turkish friend left Boston, so I’m concerned about burning out again but since I watch almost nothing that is not anime* I may have an anchor this time.

*(except machine learning, sailing, and advanced carbon fiber vacuum molding techniques, in roughly that order)

My folks visited Boston along with my nephews this past week to see the aquarium, and I showed the two of them - true Boomer fundie evangelicals - that first deer promo vid linked above. While I’m ashamed to be trolling my parents as an almost-44-year-old man, I confess their reaction was everything I’d hoped for.

I again attempted to fall in love with Stellaris and again I thoroughly failed.

I’ve been dithering over whether or not to get a Framework 16 laptop, but am somewhat put off by the reported power issues. In theory it is now technically possible to connect an eGPU with 8x PCIe lanes via the Framework’s rear dedicated GPU module adapter, so I’ve been wondering whether to just buy one and tackle a drop-in-place 3D printed dock + eGPU enclosure with an RTX 4060 TI 16GB as a fall project? If I pulled it off I’d be able to just have one Linux laptop for everything - including a true desktop replacement - but the sole open source hardware setup for eGPU docking seems pretty iffy at the moment. I am serious about switching to Linux in the next week or two, but maybe it would be better to gain familiarity with that in a slightly more stable hardware context, first (I have years of OpenBSD commandline experience up through rolling custom kernels so it’s not a *nix thing, it’s X / Wayland that has me worried). Open to advice on this, or just sharing the glory of deer anime and simple joys of deliberate self-inflicted brainrot.

What’s that? Have I ever won anything? Oh…[gestures to the above paragraphs] life, clearly.
posted by Ryvar at 2:05 AM on July 1 [1 favorite]

We were in New Orleans, walking around in the French Quarter close to the river, when we entered into a candy shop, Southern Candymakers. We bought pralines to take back home with us. 6-12 months later, in the mail we get 4 boxes of pralines. No idea what happened or why, but then talking it through, remember that my partner filled out a card with her name/address on it and threw it in a "win a shipment of pralines" sign on it. Lo and behold, free pralines! And free, surprise pralines.
posted by Carillon at 2:17 AM on July 1 [3 favorites]

For a while there Mr. eirias and I were entering raffles at neighborhood festivals and routinely winning “a free X per month” kinds of prizes. It was ice cream at least twice. These prizes tended to be poorly documented, just plain paper certificates, and we’d show up each month to collect our winnings and encounter a lot of cashier side-eye; still, I don’t think we ever went home empty handed. Small business owners, if you’re giving away a prize like this, please make something that doesn’t look like it was printed at home from an Apple IIe.
posted by eirias at 2:34 AM on July 1 [2 favorites]

I won a raffle once. It was at a bushfires benefit gig, and I got a bunch of CDs, which should give a hint as to the age of this story.
posted by pompomtom at 3:20 AM on July 1 [1 favorite]

Hawaiian shirt day at highschool- I dressed as a pineapple and won first prize. I had a paper hat with paper leaves, a hoop around my middle, another smaller hoop around my legs, and multiple strips of brown fabric holding the pieces together.

Very awkward and cringey as I look back, but it's the only contest I've won.

Oh and there was the time a group of History and English teachers went to a trivia fundraiser and... Well let's say we weren't the target audience for difficulty.
posted by freethefeet at 3:23 AM on July 1 [2 favorites]

Back in web 1.0 days, when all the companies realised they needed a website but still hadn't much of an idea what to do with it there were quite a few competitions worth entering. I won Worms 3 iirc and Dark Reign computer games but also a year's supply of beer (1 can per day - actually 16x 24 tins). I believe the latter wasn't totally legit. Basically I played an online game and on the day the competition closed had the second best score, which should have got me 24 beers, a bag and a rugby shirt. However, big beer company's contracted IT provider dropped the ball, when I wrote to ask for my prize I amazingly was picked from the hat as the winner of the draw prize, all the beer.
posted by biffa at 3:27 AM on July 1 [1 favorite]

I have won a few "door prizes" at various club banquets, back when that was a thing. In fact, sitting on my desk in front of me is one of those prizes, a $25 gift certificate for a store nowhere near where I live and in a store where $25 isn't going to go far. I must have won it...10 years ago? More? It sits right next to a Nordstrom gift certificate I rec'd in the mid 1990s from my parents which I misplaced, forgot about and recently found again. It was for $50, which might have stretched to a pair of Docs (maybe) back then, and now wouldn't get more than a pair of shoelaces, given [gestures]--I've often wondered if they'd still honor it (assuming Nordstrom is still around, haven't been in one in 30 years).

I have not won the powerball, which would be far handier.
posted by maxwelton at 3:42 AM on July 1 [1 favorite]

I'm working at a big box store, and corporate insists on yearly "team" all-store meetings. These are held at 6:00AM on Sunday before the store opens. Yeah. So the good part it's paid time, the bad part it's the store manager reading from the corporate produced slide show and adding in occasional specific store 'metrics' since numbers are what matters.

When employees arrive and clock‐in, we are each given a ticket with a chance to win pre-selected store merchandise. The goods range from bug repellent to store logo t-shirts to full-sized grills.

Readers, the only thing I've ever won, after years of supporting volunteer fire department raffles, after buying chances at a myriad of other fundraisers....was at one of these store meetings.

But, it thankfully wasn't the big fancy grill because where does one put such a thing? And it wasn't the bug repellent which could have been useful.

It was a wee plastic watering can in the most ugly brick brown color imaginable. Yet, although ugly, the thing has proven very handy for watering my houseplants. So my win wasn't the win one would wish for but it's the win I needed along the way.
posted by mightshould at 3:53 AM on July 1 [1 favorite]