places:player:red_bar [Improbable Island Wiki of Often Not Lies]

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The Red Bar is a drinking establishment located just a hop, skip, and a stagger northeast of NewHome on mapsquare M6. It's patterned after a scuzzy Tennessee roadhouse, but thousands of miles away from Tennessee and without the roads.

The origin of its name is wordplay on the red status bar next to a player's name in chat that formerly indicated that a player is offline. ¹⁾ Busted or no, the Red Bar is a place conveniently close to NewHome to kill time waiting for one's friends to show.

There is stuff to do there. Like watch the bug zapper out front. Or get a memento. Or play the jukebox. Or sing the 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall song. Or try to get the bartender to tell a joke. ²⁾

The running joke about the bartender is that his name would change every week, suggesting that either there is a high rate of turnover among shifty bartenders, or the owner just couldn't remember the guy's name. For a long time now his name has settled on Callahan. ³⁾ He spends most of his time asleep behind the bar.

¹⁾

It used to be a solid red bar; as of this writing the solid red bar has been replaced by a broken bar. There has been some discussion about changing the place's name to The Busted Bar or something similar.

²⁾

He fucking cannot tell a joke.

³⁾

It's an homage to Callahan's Crosstime Salloon, a series of stories by Spider Robinson.