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PaperclipPerfector  18hr ago (text post)   780 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 27, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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This may be a small question, but it's about something fun and it can't wait till Sunday: I've bought my family tickets to a big soccer game, and the team we're watching sent us an email demanding that I prove by Tuesday that I'm a fan, or they'll cancel our tickets (flights, hotels, etc. already booked). Unfortunately, I'm not a fan of their team, we just want to watch the match. As such, I need someone to make an AI/filtered/etc. image of me wearing their shirt or scarf in a bar. It needs to look real enough to deceive someone looking to spot photoshopped images (but probably not super familiar with AI). If the image works, I'll donate $100 to a charity of your choice - or, if you happen to be interested, I can get you a World Cup ticket at face value minus the $100.

Please DM if interested. Why to trust I won't welsh on you: I have close IRL friends who are users and a couple powerusers on this forum who know who I am, so a callout post would hit my real-life reputation.

Mods, please delete if you don't like this. As I see it, this is legal and normal to do in the UK, though most people don't go as far as I'm trying. Plus what they're doing is kind of a dick move, the stadium isn't even sold out so it's not like the locals need the tickets.

Update for those following: after seeing some of the comments, I realized that I wasn't thinking enough like a hustler. I happen to be in New York right now, and the England football team were playing an international friendly today. I hared down to Chinatown, found a place that was selling old football shirts/bootlegs of old football shirts, bought one, checked the club's website to see where their NYC fans go for games, reached that bar while England was still playing, got some guys to take photos with me. A lot more fun than messing around with ChatGPT. Thanks all for your kind advice and offers.

Consider telling them that you're an American tourist and therefore cannot provide the requested photograph, but if the team is willing to send your family complimentary apparel and other merchandise you will gladly wear it and root for them. I have Photoshop and like to think that I'm fairly good at it, though who knows if it will be enough to fool anyone looking for it. DM me if interested. That being said, I think being straight with them would be better, up to the point that it might be worth making an international phone call to get it sorted out.

Bartender is British I believe.

It's pretty rare for Brits to call football soccer. Rarer still for them to be concerned about the availability of team gear in the states.

I am in America and say "soccer" for Americans' convenience, but I'm from... well, from what used to be called the British Empire.

This is trivial to do, in all honesty, and I'd do it for free if someone asked me to. Unusually, I do not usually accept offers to donate to charity, but I suppose Lightcone could use $100. It would take me all of a minute.

Note that the most popular (and most powerful) AI image tools are invisibly or visibly watermarked. This is unlikely to be an issue, because I doubt the people demanding proof are technically sophisticated enough to check. But caveat emptor. DM me if you wish, I'll do it, and I'm awake for a few hours.

Thanks for the offer - I did end up finding an analogue solution (see edit). Suppose that saves me from compromising my Landian principles... The reason I was asking for help is that, while I have a lot of experience with ChatGPT and Claude image gen, it just isn't good enough for true photorealism imo (that or I'm a promptlet), idk what the current cutting-edge tools are to get true photorealism, and right now I'm too busy to research into it.

BTW, speaking of football, if you are ever in London and want to catch an Arsenal game, there's a good chance I have a free season ticket that would otherwise go to a rando. You'd be very welcome to it.

I don't want your money and I have a subscription to both Gemini and GPT, so can drop an image to be edited into either. I also don't have an artistic bone in my body and don't have any special talent with prompting imageGen AIs.

I know this isn't a very impressive sales pitch, but this will take me 30 seconds so it's basically a free action.

I also think you'd be much better off buying a cheap jersey or something.

Alternatively, or simultaneously, this sounds like something you could (threaten to) take up under the consumer rights act and equivalent protections.

They are incurring real losses for you by effectively changing the standards of the contract post buy. That is a very very shaky place to stand, it doesn’t matter what weasel words they put in the terms and conditions.

I find that doubtful. This was almost certainly part of the original contract and the purchase was flagged for review due to purchase history.

Here's the relevant terms and conditions:

Home Match Tickets are for the use of supporters of the Club only. By applying for the Home Match Ticket and/ or using the same you hereby warrant and represent that you are a supporter of the Club and/or that you are not a supporter of the Visiting Club.

and/or that you are not a supporter of the Visiting Club.

Presumably OP will be watching as a neutral. Is, "I am from a different country and just want to watch the game," not enough proof that he won't be supporting the other team?

The purchaser specifically has to be, not just a non-scalper, but a fan? That's just unreasonable, IMO. But I guess there's no recourse.

There's evidently an issue where the home club expects a lot of away fans to show up for this particular game, and they don't want them dominating the home side of the stadium. I can understand why they don't want their stadium full of away fans, but it seems to me that warranting that you are a supporter of the team is one thing, but requiring proof before you enter is another. This isn't reasonable. I'm a long time fan of the Steelers, at least to the extent that I don't care about other teams, but I don't have any photos of me in Steelers gear. I own a ballcap I rarely wear, and a t-shirt that I do where but it's an obvious bootleg with the Grateful Dead skull and roses logo modified into a Steelers logo. I don't attend Steelers games or "events", unless you count watching games in a bar, and at that, it's not like people take pictures of my while I'm there. The only such photos I can think of are ones taken after the Penguins won the Stanley Cup, and that was in 2017. Hell, I went to Charlotte to watch Pitt in the ACC championship a few years ago (twice, actually), and I don't have any pictures from either trip. I don't know why they would expect their fans to have these pictures. It essentially means that buying the ticket isn't enough, and that there's an expectation that you buy their merchandise as well.

Yeah this is completely new. My brother has gone to many, many away games in the home end and has never seen this. I suspect it's because the club in question has a big reputation for violent fans and they don't want any of that to happen - and, let's be honest, they're not a club that really has to worry about tons of casual foreign fans or random tourists showing up.

Glancing at a random team's terms, it looks like you can buy a home ticket only if you are a fan (§ 1.2) and you can buy an away ticket only if you are a fan (§ 5.1)—so a person who is a fan of neither team in a game just isn't allowed to buy tickets at all. Maybe @Bartender_Venator can point out this problem, assert that he is a fan of neither team, and beg to be let in on that basis.

The way this works in practice is that nobody ever checks anything - every big team's games have a bunch of international tourists who don't care about the teams but want to see a game while they're in England - but if you have any items from the wrong team on you (even wearing their colours), or if you celebrate the wrong team's goal, you get kicked out and maybe kicked a bit on your way out. I could potentially argue this, but I doubt it would fly given that this is a case of the club choosing to enforce a never-enforced policy.

Doesn’t matter. If it’s not very clearly flagged in advance, such that he couldn’t have bought it without reasonably expecting this turn of events, then it’s not appropriate under UK law.

In general if a consumer would reasonably expect X, and not-X isn’t both clearly flagged and legally appropriate, and he has accumulated financial damage as a result, then the seller is up shit creek without a paddle. Doesn’t matter what the terms and conditions say. You can’t sign away your rights as a consumer in the UK, especially not three paragraphs into the small text.

@MadMonzer, do you have any thoughts? The above is true as far as I’m aware, and AI agrees.

I'm saying that it likely was clearly marked in advance. This isn't a new thing or something they're trying to trick people about.

People don't read disclaimers even when they're clear and require active consent.

Sorry, now I see what you mean.

That would make it more complex, certainly, though personally I doubt they did this. It seems a weird way of doing things in general and you’d expect them to demand this proof at buying time to prevent exactly this scenario.

The government is also aware that people don’t read disclaimers, and as a non-lawyer I would say that buying plane and hotel tickets signalled fairly clearly that Bartender expected to be able to get in. So I think even in that scenario he’d still have a decent chance.

What kind of a weird challenge is this? How is this real?

It is standard practice in European soccer to segregate the home and away fans in different sections of the stadium. I never knew how they enforced it until now.

I tried getting into soccer a while back, but the culture difference between European and American sports fandom was a much larger barrier than anything happening on the field pitch.

I remember when I went to see a game in Milan, I was able to buy a ticket as a foreigner, but I needed to show ID... the scalpers were there, selling tickets along with IDs? Somehow? It was weird, but presumably the whole setup was to ensure that the local fans of each team were kept separated.

I've never heard of this happening before, but I guess since it's an important game they expect lots of away fans to be buying home end tickets (again, a totally normal thing to do).

Many economically illiterate people hate scalpers. Presumably, when Bartender_Venator bought the tickets, the terms of service said something like "resale is forbidden and scalped tickets may be canceled", and this challenge is a roundabout method of checking whether he is a reseller.

The challenge is slightly overinclusive, since it catches not just scalpers but also those few purchasers who are neither fans nor scalpers. As a different commenter points out, Bartender_Venator presumably could try using that argument to invalidate the challenge—though I don't know how much success he can expect if he does so.

Or an away fan who might start a fight, that's a bigger concern.

Scalpers are smart enough to be able to provide the team with dozens of pictures of happy families at the ball game.

They are also asking for a photo ID scan tbf.

Wouldn't it be cheaper just to buy a team shirt or scarf and get a photo of yourself taken with it?

So I need to send the photo by Tuesday, and this is the exact wording of the email: "Therefore, could you please provide photographic evidence that you are a [Club] supporter which can be from a party, event or fixture wearing merchandise or [Club] related evidence (Please note any merchandise will need to be purchased PRIOR TO January 2026)." Even if I could find a jersey at short notice in the US (not enough time to ship one), I'd need to try to go to some bar and make it look like I'm at an event - there are no Premier League games this weekend, so I can't go watch one of their games. If it wasn't for that I'd just go down to a soccer bar and ask to borrow someone's scarf.

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