Build a steampunk house. Everything would be brass, wrought iron, and red brick, with levers and gauges and Tesla coils.
If you had a billion dollars: What are some truly bizarre or weird or eccentric things you would do?
I wonder if there is anything like an escape room but which plays like a cross between a LARP and a TTRPG. You could have an actual dungeon that was imagineered and then your party would have to traverse from room to room and then fight the hypothetical monsters. And if I did it as a billionaire, it would be slightly larger than the average escape room. You could even make the shells of the rooms movable so as to make the dungeon layout different every so often.
The only reason I can think of that it hasn’t happened yet, if indeed it hasn’t happened yet, is the liability of having an employee fighting you with fake weapons. And it wouldn’t be the same if you can’t feel the heft of the weapons in your hand, even if you then have to pause and roll some dice to see the actual outcome of the battle after you fake fight.
You know that episode of South Park, where Cartman inherits $1m and he buys a failing theme park so he can use it exclusively, because he doesn’t want to waste half his days waiting for rides?
Well, similarly to that, I’d buy an entire ski resort (ok maybe $1bn might be stretching it but just go with it), then use it just for myself. Ok, I’d start to run into the same problems that Cartman did, like having someone to operate and maintain the lifts/cable cars, security to keep people out etc, but this is my fantasy so just pretend I have enough money for that too.
- Pick up this cute little cottage at 650 Sandy Bay Road, Sandy Bay, Tasmania.
- Fly Dopers out for a Dopefest for one week, everyone staying at a local hotel.
- Take a cruise or three on the Queen Mary 2, in the best suite they have.
- Donate a couple of hundred million to Radical Women.
I love my home, so I’m good there. I’d probably build 2 or 3 ‘vacation’ homes. Nothing elaborate.
There is a '57 Chevy I have my eye on. It’s had a complete body off restoration. They dropped a 350 in it with a 5 speed manual. It’s a seriously gorgeous car. I’d build a special garage for it with an indoor target range.
Lot’s of money would go to various animal shelters. I’d set up some sort of fund for them.
Good point. That being said, here we go 
.
Having given it more thought, rather than buying the local castle, I’d buy some empty land just outside of town and build a mansion like the one from Clue. I’d stock the library with all the books on my “wouldn’t it be nice to own those” list. Lettered editions of every Stephen King and Dean Koontz book I can locate for sale. First editions of the old classics. Cool books of all sorts.
Oh, and before I move in, I’d hire professional movie makers to reboot Clue. I’d give them instructions to make sure the witty dialogue is still a main feature, but to not have the plot holes the original had.
Speaking of RPGs, I’d buy the rights to Xenogears, hire the team that made it, and have them make a complete version of the game.
Buy Epstein Island and turn it into a Trump theme park.
You want to shoot your gorgeous '57 Chevy?
Then I’ll fund a refuge for battered '57 Chevies. I will accept old Porsches and Mercedes Benzes.
I dream of building a factory to make big, modern, solar powered Zeppelins. I know quite precisely how to do it, and probably 500 million €uro would be enough.
All the charity and donations and so on I do not consider neither bizarre nor weird nor eccentric. We don’t speak about those things in public.
A very good idea, but the same argument as my last point may apply. What is bizarre or weird… etc about that? It’s original. It’s fine. Go for it!
Hmmm. Will it have a Trump corruption library? Lies and hipocracy by the GOP library? Trump putt-putt golf where you are encouraged to cheat?
I’m in.
All such good ideas will be considered. As for hipocracy, we could have a pool for the kiddies to wade with hippos from Colombia, our alternate choice for 51st state if Venezuela won’t cooperate. After playtime is over, they (the kids, that is) can nap in the Dozy Don sleep center while their parents pig out at the Epstein Island McDonald’s, home to the Endless Trump Buffet.
Start a college. Traditional humanities / arts / sciences majors only, none of this “marketing” or “leadership” BS. No online classes. No classes with more than 30 students. No personal electronic devices in the classroom at all. If you’re blind or dysgraphic, you get a human notetaker. The quality should be high, as this is one of the few non-crappy work assignments available for first-year students (see below).
Tuition is kept low. Not zero, but at a level where a hard-working student can reasonably be expected to earn that amount of money during their breaks. To offset this, everyone is expected to work 15 hours a week on campus, doing the kinds of jobs other colleges would hire staff to do. First-year students get the crappy food service and cleaning jobs, unless they come in with a high-demand skill, like being a native speaker of a language where the college needs tutors. After that you can move on to something more interesting, and hopefully graduate with varied work experience and skills.
Everyone takes three semesters of Great Books: pre-500 CE, 500-1650, and 1650-present day. Faculty teaching this course can hash out the reading list among themselves and change it up from year to year, but it’s the same across all sections, there’s a substantial political thinking / civic education component especially in the last semester, and a lot of reading and writing are expected. Everyone also takes two semesters of Clash of Ideas; different sections can have different topics and themes depending on who’s teaching it, but it is always a debate-heavy class that requires a ton of public speaking as well as writing, and the use of Reacting to the Past games or similar activities is highly encouraged. Everybody also takes four semesters of a language, including lots of education about the relevant culture(s), followed by some sort of study abroad experience, whether for the summer or a full semester. That’s it for core curriculum requirements.
Students are expected to do the reading, not cheat or plagiarize, carry out their work assignments responsibly and competently, and generally act like decent citizens of a community, i.e., no harassing or bullying other people, leave common spaces and property in the same or better condition that you found them, no breaking the law, etc. If you don’t fulfill those expectations, you absolutely can fail or be expelled, since this is an eccentric billionaire-funded institution and not a tuition-driven one.
Faculty are all full-time and benefits-eligible, except perhaps in cases where it’s desirable to hire someone who is a full-time professional in a non-academic field to teach a relevant course. They are paid reasonably, given absolute academic freedom outside of stuff like Great Books where there’s a common syllabus, and get small classes and very modest research expectations in exchange for making a serious commitment to undergraduate teaching and mentoring.
Canvas, Blackboard, and other LLMs are not supported by the university. You want your course to have a website, you make one yourself. We did just fine without them for decades.
The word “rubric” is understood to be a technical term pertaining to medieval manuscripts and nothing else. The word “assessment” is to be pronounced with an abundance of hissing sounds, like a serpent.
OK, I’ll stop now…
I’d have my beloved Juke completely refurbished and painted.
I’d visit all the Disney theme parks and go top of the line. Most expensive rooms, lighning lanes, best restaurants, etc.
Ice machine in the living room of my newly built house so I can watch TV without having to get up.
Really elaborate cat trees for the cats I’ll have just adopted.
Buy the Washington football team.
Change the name to “the Honkeys”.
Visit the town of Twatt, Shetland, Scotland.
Visit the town of Twatt, Orkney, Scotland.
Find a worthy gentleman with roots in both communities.
Bribe, er, I mean, lobby the Crown to make him a Lord of Parliament.
Build a large building reminiscent of a religious building. (Sometimes I want a Gothic cathedral. Sometimes I want a Greco-Roman temple. Either way, its focal point will be a larger-than-life statue of me.)
Collect a lot of Chuck Norris memes.
Substitute my name for Chuck’s.
Have them translated into Latin, in the form of verses suitable for singing as Gregorian chants.
Hire a choir, dress them in monk-like robes, and have them sing the chants in the temple.
I’d rescue Hampshire College. It’s probably not too late.
And I’d build a large faculty for square dance weekends. A big room with a nice wooden floor that holds… Perhaps 10-12 squares. An adjoining game room with good lighting and nice tables. And two smaller dance hand holding perhaps 4-6 squares, also adjacent to the game room. A separate dining hall near those four rooms, and a commercial kitchen. An assortment of bedrooms to house the dancers. With both parking and public transit access, so dancers could fly to a nearby airport and get there without renting a car. Maybe in/near Chicago; Chi-Town has good international airports. Or maybe Toronto, as international travel to the US has gotten problematic. And I’d endow it.
Its charter would give first priority to square dance events, but it would also be open for other social dance groups, on a lottery system with slots opening 2 years in advance, and first come, first serve for any slot that didn’t book in the lottery. With other community events able to book, but lower in priority than the social dance groups.
Speaking of game room, if the place(s) I lived at didn’t have a large arcade, I’d make my own classic arcade with both video games, pinball, and redemption games. It would be weird or eccentric because half of the fun of an arcade is hearing the crowd around you, so I wouldn’t have it all to myself. I might set the price so it’s usually around halfway full.
I’d do the same thing for music: I’d open up a small music venue and subsidize punk and/or alternative acts to play there. But I’d limit ticket sales so even for popular acts so it would also be maximum of 50% safe capacity - which is still pretty friggin crowded since I’ve been in places where you couldn’t move, and halving that would still mean you’d always have to move around people when you’re walking. But that’s the perfect size of a crowd to feel the energy in a live act. It would still lose money on a lot of acts, probably only making money if I could score a mid-range act for cheap (for instance if it fit well into their schedule.) I’d have to operate it as a bar on off nights to recoup some of the cost.
Have a reproduction of Mjolnir made of iridium so that it really would be almost too damn heavy for anyone but the strongest people to lift. Then donate it to Marvel Comics.
Osmium is the metal you’re looking for, I nitpickily think.
Osmium is maybe marginally heavier than iridium, for a long time the difference was almost too close to call. But for reasons unknown to me iridium is usable whereas osmium is not; possibly because the latter is distinctly toxic.
So there would be two reasons it couldn’t be lifted?
I’d build something underground, but not because I want a survival bunker or something. I’ve just always liked being underground. In grad school, I used to TA classes in a building that was four levels underground, and I found it very calming. Build a nice house on top, but with access to a nice bunker type place under it.