ahhh, fuck me.. at least it was just the presale, so i have a shot when they go on sale to the public.. going to be a tough ticket, though..

not sure if anyone on here even likes pavement, but i needed to vent...

that is all/

Say what!?! Pavement is back together?

one show only apparently so far, next year in central park.

you still have one more shot though right?

Well eff that! I'm gonna go egg Steve's house this weekend...that should send him the message!

they've added two more shows already....

*edit....debated getting tickets for the thursday one, $97 for two tickets with fees? to stand in central park? i don't think so*

I'd love to see this guys again!

Hopefully they will add some more dates, but I won't pay a ton to see them.

I've seen them a dozen or so times and have never paid over $20.

I had to buy a ticket to the last Malkmus show off of ebay and it was still under $30.
Pavement is one of my favorite bands from the 90s, but I wouldn't pay $50 to see them.

My mate used to own race horses with one of them.
How's that for random...?

Yes, it's the drummer. He lives in Lexington, KY. They use to stop by Louisville, KY all the time and sometimes they would crash at my friends house (way back in the day).

yup, that's him.

They're evidently doing a whole tour. I'm sure tickets won't be cheap, though; it really seems like a Pixies/Jesus Lizard-style cash-grab thing to me.
Of course, I could never figure out what people found so fascinating about Pavement anyway. I guess it was a "right place/right time" thing.

Bob Nastanovich is the guy who owns horses.

And man, the idea of a Pavement reunion makes me feel old... It kind of baffles me why it’s surprising since they didn’t have too many conflicts outside of the Gary Young (their first drummer) being a tad mental.

But $97 a pop?!?!? For Central Park? Ditto what they said. I’ll see if I can grab last minute tickets from anyone desperate to dump them. But that’s a high price for nostalgia.

Yeah, I'd probably pay $25 to see them. It's not like they put on an electrifying show or anything. For the price they're charging I'll just be happy with those delux double CDs they put out for Crooked Rainx2, Slanted/Enchanted, Wowee Zowee.

I just had to buy scalped tix to see Sunny Day Real Estate.
I hate scalpers.

I hate modern scalpers. I work in online tech development, but online ticketing is the worst thing for the consumer to ever happen in the world of ticket buying. Back in the pre-Internet days, scalpers weren't that bad. Because many were genuine brokers. You work 40 hours a week and then want a ticket and not wait in line? These guys will get you one for a reasonable markup. I recall it being maybe $20-$40 over the ticket price back in the 1980s/early-1990s. And if you showed up just as the show was starting, many guys would sell you at something close to—or less than—face value just to unload a ticket that's about to go stale.

Nowadays, these scumbags literally create programs to buy tickets as quickly as possible and some venues clearly work with them.

There is no EFFING way any normal person who is not a super-hacker can compete with that kind of setup. It's criminal. And the sad thing is what the heck is the solution?

Sucks.

What actually appears to be working (at least somewhat) is this new "paperless ticket" routine; Miley Cyrus and Springsteen, as well as No Doubt, have used it. The ticket buyer has to present the credit card they used (and an ID) at the door, otherwise no go. You can't resell or transfer the ticket. Sucks if it turns out you can't go etc, but at least it prevents the massive Craigslist/Ebay scalping wars.

That actually makes sense! Hope other venues can do the same.

Still think that sucks. What about buying tickets as a gift for someone? And yeah, the non-transferability is lame - there's been a handful of concerts I had tickets for and wasn't able to attend at the last minute. However, I was always able to get my money back by selling the tickets at face value.

Captcha, or re-Captcha is supposed to prevent bots from buying bunches of tix. I'm told that these can be bypassed by bots as well tho (using OCR to decode the images?).

Not OCR. Something far more disturbing: Poor people in developing countries. Seriously. Read this article here.
"No CAPTCHA can survive a human that’s receiving financial incentives for solving it, and with an army of low-wagedhuman CAPTCHA solvers officially in the business of “data processing” while earning a mere $2 for solving a thousand CAPTCHA’s, I’m already starting to see evidence of consolidation between India’s major CAPTCHA solving companies."

The basic way this stuff works is someone does set up a centralized script to grab every captcha image they can get from a particular site/system. Once farmed, these data processing centers offer poor folks the opportunity to make money by doing "data entry" by looking at the captcha and typing in what they see.

Once the company gets a big enough database of decoded captchas, they now have product they can sell.

And in the case of ticket companies, you better believe those captchas command a good fee. So no matter what you come up with, rest assured in 24 hours some poor person in India will type it in, decode it and suddenly... It's defeated...

Strange world we live in.