Miguel Sanchez

I am a big fan of people taking videos at gigs. There are countless hours of footage of bands on YouTube I would never have seen otherwise. Many more countless hours of other bands/artists I don't listen to, I'm sure. Considering how hard it would have been to record stuff from even pre-2010, never mind record stuff that was actually still worth watching, I'm amazed at the amount there is. I'm all for this sort of thing now, provided people who do it are using equipment that makes it worthwhile and provided they don't interfere with the view/experience of other people there. If you're in a good position it's very easy to record a worthwhile video and still enjoy the performance the way you would. I also understand that article (I didn't read beyond the lines I quoted because I could feel a Falling Down moment coming on) is skewed towards a specific perspective, and the decline in standards of BBC online articles over the past few years contributes to the somewhat loaded introduction. However. If that is even remotely close to an accurate, sincere anecdote or recollection of an evening then the person responsible for it should be put in solitary confinement with no stimuli at all until they've learned the error of their ways. Then left for about another decade to serve as a warning to anyone else who takes that attitude with them into the world.

'5G makes my phone pretty worthless' - BBC News

Cars being given more drag in contextual situations might be stupid and dangerous and complete at odds with the concept of engineering or competition, but it brings us one step closer to the Anti-Gravity Racing Leagues with weapons as seen in the WipEout video games, so who can say if it's bad or not?

Is this why ending his texts with WATP wasn't enough to keep Gio in a job?

Still, she's done a bit of advertising so her OF should be getting a boost.

Oh that's the vaginal dryness woman. Well.

Frankie Boyle and four people I've never heard of in the new series.

Kanye West

I love my phone I would never switch to Samsung.

You know how get a swat team booting your door down if your taxes are 50p out? Here's a guy who ran the biggest ponzi scheme in history being interviewed on morning television: oops!

Here be beauty, there be pie charts.

You wonder how far Ferguson could have gone if he'd never discovered Monster Munch.

Winnipeg Jets: fight results in two arrests | CTV News Have any P&Bers ever had a "spit mask" applied to them while being lifted?

Bastion (PS4, 2015) Bastion is a 2.5D button masher about a Kid who wakes up one day to discover the ground isn't the ground any more. He's on a bit of rock floating where the world used to be and there's an extremely deep, smooth voice narrating the things he's doing with a remarkable degree of prescience. After you get up and walk around eventually you reach the Bastion, before travelling into parts of the world looking for things to restore it, and find out what the Calamity is that caused the ground to disappear. The story in Bastion is a bit nonsense to be honest and I realise as I'm trying to type it out that I really can't summarise it. Caelondia was a city which was at war with the Ura and through a few characters we meet along the way (and the game's narration) we discover the history of conflict between these two peoples. The only information you get is from the narration, so a lot of the time it's hard to think the game is something that's especially deep or fleshed-out, since you'd get a similar idea of the story if you were playing it with your eyes shut. That isn't to say the world and the narration isn't engaging. The voice (which is from one of the NPCs) is always enjoyable to listen to and there's not really a way of describing the atmosphere he creates besides... cool. The game is relatively minimalist in terms of its gameplay, environments and music and the result is a neatly stylised experience which keeps you engaged throughout and strikes the right blend of giving and withholding detail. You're never overwhelmed with lots of information, because there isn't enough for that. There's always just enough to be getting on with and it's all so pleasant you just want to keep going. The art style helps a lot with this. There's a slight hand-drawn feel to the ground and environments. Because the Calamity destroyed the world you have a vague, muddy background with the ground appearing in tiles as the Kid walks across it. As these appear it helps stop the game stop feeling small and constricted, creating the illusion of scale where there isn't any. It all just looks nice, and the movement of the environment is synchronised with the narration to add to it. Everything from the characters, objects, enemies and weapons all have a unique charm about them, so however you choose to play there's always something to catch your eye. You collect different weapons as you progress through the levels. For the most part you'll have a melee weapon and a ranged weapon, and you can collect materials to upgrade these as you return to the Bastion hub world. By the time you upgrade whichever weapons you're using (or the mortar/flamethrower combo if you know what you're doing) you'll pretty much be unstoppable, but there are other decent options if you want to vary your experience. There's a basic levelling system too which gives the Kid upgrades, adding things like better damage or absorbing health from enemies. You can also add modifiers to the enemies which increases your XP and Fragment rates, allowing you to buy and use more upgrades. There's something for everyone in the weapons, and if you really really like the game there's a lot of replay value from trying different combos. As I started writing this review I had to try quite hard to stop myself from calling the game a roguelike. It looks and plays like one (it's by the same team who would later make Hades, and it controls very similarly) and it's really the best way to describe the combat. There are lots of different enemy types which require different approaches to overcome. They all get introduced with a nice bit of backstory from the narration and it just adds a bit of character to the thing you're battering the square button at. The movement controls aren't very fluid (which makes sense, given it was released on mobile several years before PS4) so occasions where you face a lot of enemies can feel a bit overwhelming. The balance is usually fair enough for this to not be a problem though, unless you're playing with lots of modifiers. If you really want to test out the combat there are four arenas you can enter where you learn a bit of backstory for the game's four characters, facing waves of enemies. There isn't any gameplay benefit from this, but it's a good challenge. Bastion is a pretty short game but it just works very well. The whole thing feels very tightly controlled from a creative and mechanical perspective. It's pretty short and the story/characterisation is very direct, but everything feels like just the right amount. I don't think there's anything about it I'd change. Maybe the effectiveness of the shield at countering attacks. That's about it. I enjoyed it and I'm glad I finally got around to playing it.

It's all kicking off in Winnipeg:

The bit in Con Air with Steve Buscemi and the little girl is a bit weird isn't it

"Turkiye"

She's leaving next month to be a data analyst for the police. I don't know either. Songs about Bobby Sands, the Easter Rising, Bloody Sunday, "it was like a history lesson." Harrowing.

Until Doddie Weir died on Saturday I was planning on posting about one of my planned picks for next year who died last week, Borje Salming: Maple Leafs legend Borje Salming dies, was living with ALS (espn.co.uk) He was one of the first European players to play in the NHL at a time when everyone from outwith Canada was assumed to be a big soft floater who didn't care. One of the most famous hockey pictures is this one, after a skate to the face and 250 stiches: He was diagnosed with MND (or ALS as the Americans call it) and although at 71 his quicker decline was probably to be expected, it was still shocking to see. At a Toronto game a few weeks ago on the weekend of this year's Hockey Hall of Fame inductions they had a pre-game ceremony where you could see the effect it was having on him: 55 points and a probably Solo Shot bonus lost. It's still not a way I'd like to go.

Girl in work today showed me videos from the weekend when she went to see the Wolfe Tones These people walk among us.

Week 48 update One death this week, rugby player Doddie Weir: Doddie Weir, former Scotland and Lions second-row, dies aged 52 | Scotland rugby union team | The Guardian There's also a nice video tribute from Tom English here: Doddie Weir: The rugby titan who captured the heart of Scots - BBC News I watch BBC Breakfast before I go to work in the morning and although I only really see 20 minutes of it or so, over the past few years there's been a lot of time devoted to another rugby man and popular Dead Pool pick, Rob Burrows, as he's lived with MND for the past few years. Doddie Weir was featured here occasionally too but I hadn't seen him for a while until a couple of weeks ago when he and Burrows were featured along with Ed Slater, another rugby player recently diagnosed with the disease. The last I remembered was befitting of the famous commentary description of him as a "mad giraffe" - he looked like a rugby player. Tall and large. In this most recent appearance though he looked about half the weight he was before. He was in a wheelchair and had difficulty speaking. Since I started running the Dead Pool I've taken a bit more interest in the ill and dying and I don't think I can imagine anything as horrible as MND. To me, it's a combination of two things. You see someone like any of these rugby players, or Fernando Ricksen, and it's an athlete. It's someone you associate with being physically strong or remarkable, and you're just used to them being fit and strong. Then you see them diagnosed with this disease and see what it does to them and it's hard to rationalise this against the perception you have of them, or imagine such a rapid and obvious physical decline. The other thing to consider is what it must be like to go through this yourself. Seeing people like Weir and Burrows and how they fight through the disease doing the good they have, I don't think I could do that. They're lucky in that they have the support of family and friends, and they have a platform to raise awareness of it, but it must still take a massive amount of resilience to carry on. I don't know that I could. I hope I never have to find out. This month, a former teammate of Burrow's, Kevin Sinfield, ran seven ultramarathons in seven days to raise money. He's over £2,000,000 so far. Weir died at 52, so he's worth 73 Base Points. He's worth an extra 37 for a Vice-Captain and an extra 73 for a Captain. He was a popular pick, so I'm going to list them all separately: 73 Base Points for: @Arch Stanton, @ayrunitedfw, @Blootoon87, @buddiepaul, @gkneil, @HI HAT, @ICTJohnboy, @Karpaty Lviv, @Lex, @LoonsYouthTeam, @Lofarl, @mathematics, @Melanius Mullarkay, @paulathame, @pawpar, @peasy23, @psv_killie, @qos_75, @Raidernation @Sergeant Wilson, @sleazy, @sparky88, @The_Craig and @The Naitch 110 as a Vice-Captain for: @10menwent2mow and @thistledo 146 as a Captain for: @cdhafc1874, @Fuctifano, @JustOneCornetto, @mozam76 and @nessies long lost ghost After all of that, the standings now look like this: 1. Bishop Briggs 691 2. JustOneCornetto 680 3. Indale Winton 635 4. Ned Nederlander 571 5. chompmyroot 551 6. Arch Stanton, sparky88 518 8. Billy Jean King 460 9. Arabdownunder, gkneil 445 11. weirdcal 430 12. psv_killie 426 13. Moomintroll 416 14. mathematics 394 15. peasy23 391 16. The_Craig 388 17. buddiepaul 361 18. Fuctifano, Sweaty Morph 342 20. Savage Henry 338 21. thistledo 336 22. pawpar 327 23. The DA 321 24. pubcarking 315 25. cdhafc1874 305 26. Raidernation 291 27. Melanius Mullarkay 280 28. The Master 273 29. scottsdad, tamthebam 262 31. nessies long lost ghost 259 32. Arbroathlegend36-0 255 33. Blootoon87 253 34. lichtgilphead 237 35. Karpaty Lviv 235 36. microdave 228 37. HI HAT 222 38. ICTJohnboy 221 39. senorsoupe 219 40. Desp 217 41. ayrunitedfw, The Naitch 213 43. Sergeant Wilson 209 44. ThomCat 208 45. Aim Here 205 46. Florentine_Pogen 202 47. gingette 199 48. jimbaxters 196 49. sleazy 194 50. Lofarl 176 51. paulathame 171 52. LoonsYouthTeam, thisal 160 54. qos_75 159 55. Mark Connolly 153 56. mozam76, The Hologram 146 58. 10menwent2mow 144 59. Scorge 141 60. mizfit 136 61. sophia 131 62. Lex 125 63. willie adie 115 64. Hamish's Passenger, speckled tangerine 112 66. Les Cabbage 111 67. Miguel Sanchez 105 68. Bully Wee Villa 104 69. Oystercatcher 85 70. djchapsticks, Enigma 81 72. Ray Patterson 76 73. cambozpar 74 74. statts1976uk 68 75. D.V.T. 59 76. Aladdin, BillyAnchor, doulikefish, invergowrie arab, smpar, Soapy FFC 58 82. Cardinal Richelieu, get_the_subbies_on, RossBFaeDundee 52 85. HTG 48 86. Amarillo Bairn 44 87. Bert Raccoon 39 88. Curmudgeon 35 89. Bold Rover, Clockwork, dagane, Duszek, Hedgecutter, lolls, Stringer Bell 29 96. amnarab 27 97. Everyone else 0 The spreadsheet has also been updated with these scores: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mup1IJllKHs0a47J8G6IXUkvShJrV28Iuc-Kkn7RKuo/edit?usp=sharing

Ben Shapiro patter now. Fabulous.