Miguel Sanchez

Do any mainstream celebrities say they're Rangers fans? Off the top of my head you've got darts and snooker players and that wrestler. Hardly a who's who.

A lack of spatial awareness in public just seems to be part of the main character syndrome plaguing people nowadays. Doesn't matter if they're on their phone (although these people are always much, much more ignorant) or distracted by something else, but someone just having no regard for their surroundings is by far the most irritating thing I encounter in the public.

The song is called The Best, not Simply The Best.

This is Spinal Tap (1984) After watching this I did some research to see how accurate it was. What a time it must have been to be making music. Or doing whatever the boys are doing here. God knows what sort of film you could make now with the world's global pop stars and their obsessive fans. The Terminator (1984) This film was my first introduction to many things. On screen nudity. Love. Time travelling killer cyborgs. 80s dance music. This genuinely gets better over time and it's a travesty that so many terrible films with the Terminator name exist. In The Heat of the Night (1967) A dead body turns up in a small town in Mississippi in the middle of the night. Fortunately a combination between Sherlock Holmes and Mystic Meg is sitting in the train station. The only problem is it's 1966 and it's a small town in Mississippi and he happens to be black. As compelling and insightful as the racial tensions are, the actual crime and the solving of it feels a bit convenient, as if it has to happen purely because it has to. Fortunately several great performances keep your attention. Napoleon Dynamite (2004) Why is something so weird so funny? Why is something so uniquely personal and localised so funny? I don't know, but it is. Actually I do, it's surreal, it's weird, and it's still somehow relatable even if you're not a suspiciously adult-looking man going through an awkward high school phase. Tyrannosaur (2011) An extremely angry, drunk Scottish man befriends Sophie from Peep Show when he ends up at her charity shop after killing his dog and getting jumped. He doesn't take kindly to her praying for him, but it turns out they both have a dark home life and there's a lot to unravel. It's bleak, it's brutal, but there are two very good performances and you don't really leave this feeling as down as you might think. The only complaint I have is the soundtrack, which is often too loud and feels a bit dated. Very mid-00s indie. It's a bit much. Children of Men (2006) This film where the UK government rounds up refugees into camps in exaggerated, dystopian fashion while the world of civilisation crumbles around them is set in 2027. Hmm. All the men have gone infertile and there aren't any people being born and the world goes to shit. But it turns out a group of outsiders have a pregnant girl, and they get in touch with a civil servant to try and get her out of the country. I watched this for the first time in ages a few months ago, and was underwhelmed. I liked it more this round. I think I was paying more attention. I think my biggest complaint is it's almost too cinematic. It's a dystopian mess with terrorist bombings and armoured public transport, but a lot of the shots in the city look a bit too detailed and a bit too staged. I don't think I know enough about films to properly assess it. But I don't think the style fits the subject matter.

Nope, Govan. I daresay it's not unique to one area though.

I don't know if they're definitely Bully XLs, but I've seen a few dogs like this around here the past few weeks. Big slabbering mutants that immediately start barking and pulling on their leads the minute somebody walks past them and their owner. I'm just waiting for something horrible to happen one of these times.

Week 36 update Two deaths this week. First up, the actor John Cairney: Scottish actor John Cairney has died aged 93 - BBC News Spoilers. Cairney died at 93 so he's worth 32 Base Points, with a Solo Shot taking @The DA's total to 82 points. ============ Second death this week was TV comedian and impersonator Mike Yarwood: TV comedian and impersonator Mike Yarwood dies aged 82 | TV comedy | The Guardian Luckily, if you're not ancient and have no idea what all this means, there's a nice compilation on youtube: Yarwood died at 82 so he's worth 43 Base Points for @peasy23 and @Scorge. peasy gets a Deadly Duo bonus for 68 points, Scorge adds a Vice-Captain for 90 points. As a result, the standings look like this: 1. JustOneCornetto 405 2. psv_killie 376 3. Michael W 295 4. Arbroathlegend36-0, peasy23 288 6. chomp my root 271 7. Desp 264 8. LoonsYouthTeam 245 9. Karpaty Lviv 241 10. The Naitch 240 11. ThomCat 239 12. The DA, Scorge 235 14. gkneil 234 15. cdhafc1874 229 16. Arabdownunder 228 17. buddiepaul 226 18. Billy Jean King 225 19. Mark Connolly, weirdcal 224 21. Bert Raccoon 222 22. qos_75 221 23. amnarab 219 24. Ned Nederlander 209 25. Miguel Sanchez 199 26. Bully Wee Villa 192 27. Ziggy Sobotka, TxRover 190 29. Ludo*1 188 30. lolls 180 31. Donathan 179 32. Shotgun 170 33. Savage Henry 169 34. D.V.T., microdave, throbber 166 37. HI HAT 162 38. ParsJake 160 39. pub car king, The_Craig 157 41. Aim Here 155 42. DG.Roma 154 43. sophia 148 44. Indale Winton 142 45. Sweaty Morph 140 46. alta-pete 139 47. get_the_subbies_on 138 48. Frosty, HK Hibee, willie adie 134 51. djchapsticks 133 52. Fuctifano, thistledo 125 54. kilMARKnock 116 55. doulikefish, tamthebam, The Master 111 58. Melanius Mullarkay 110 59. Arch Stanton, mozam76 101 61. Lofarl 99 62. Oystercatcher, weemac 97 64. atfccfc, Ray Patterson 96 66. HTG 95 67. Moomintroll 93 68. Enigma 90 69. dagane, pawpar 87 71. German Jag, sparky88 84 73. blackislekillie 74 74. Jimmy Baker 71 75. ICTJohnboy, superwell87 69 77. paulathame 68 78. lichtgilphead 67 79. expatowner 60 80. Priti priti priti Patel, superbigal 58 82. Dunning1874, sleazy 55 84. Empty It, The Hologram 48 86. DeeTillEhDeh 42 87. Oceanlineayr, Salvo Montalbano, Shipa, statts1976uk 39 91. mathematics 37 92. 10menwent2mow, dee_62, mizfit, parxyz, scottsdad, senorsoupe, Suspect Device 32 99. choirbairn, Derry Alli, stanton 31 102. BillyAnchor, Christophe, Lex, PWL 29 106. Everyone else 0 The spreadsheet has also been updated with these scores: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RxCIfczRUmrRrW79tUQ0vJ5KaHZpYENsTKmDqW4X3W4/edit?usp=sharing

Just before the update, and since I missed this:

I watched a 9/11 documentary on iplayer earlier - Inside The President's Bunker, or a similar title. Interviews with Bush and all his advisors and the senior people involved in it at the time. There was something quite sobering that, twenty years later, George Bush was more articulate, more intelligent and more compassionate than their recent presidential efforts.

In an alternate universe they're called Ships With Holes Will Sink and WWPJ is the name of this song:

Double figures plz.

Can you believe the Newton Heath fans complain about their midfield while McSauce can't get a game? Hilarious.

Adverts (or films, or anything) that use song but cut out parts of it to skip to the recognisable bits. There's an advert for hotels or something with Don't You Want Me that cuts out the two lines with the key change before the chorus and it sounds so wrong.

So have I and I'd never say I'd been there.

Alan Wake Remastered (PS4, 2021) Alan Wake is a game about Alan Wake, a writer who goes on holiday with his wife to the secluded town of Bright Falls to get away from a period of writer's block after finishing the last book in a long-running series. You play as Alan Wake, the world's most unfit man. The game starts with Alan and his wife Alice landing at Bright Falls and going to the cabin on the lake they're staying in. While you're there Alice surprises him with a typewriter and a pile of paper. Alan storms off in a huff because he wanted to get away from writing, and the next thing he knows he's outside it's dark he hears screaming and he runs back into the cabin only to see that Alice has seemingly jumped off the deck and into the water, so he jumps in after her. I had never played Alan Wake originally and didn't know anything about it. I knew it was a third person horror game but that was about it. My assumption was that I'd like the game, since the premise is largely something that appeals to me. Ultimately, I enjoyed its literary pretensions. Although it seems obvious in a game and story about a writer, there's a lot of narrative depth and complexity. Reality is often subverted in a way which suggests Alan is responsible for all of the things happening to him, which is an interesting premise for a story. You can't argue with that. The problem is that it doesn't do this well. It does pretty much nothing well. I've played this game from beginning to end twice. I've read the very detailed Wikipedia article. I've read all 144 collectible manuscript pages you find in game. I still don't know what the plot is. I'll try and summarise it. It turns out the cabin Alan was staying at doesn't exist. Only it does, or did, but there was a writer there some decades before called Thomas Zane who stayed there. He had a girlfriend called Barbara and they disappeared. When Alan turns up, Barbara is actually the one who steals Alice away and holds her to ransom, trying to force Alan to write a book to get her back. She actually is taken hostage, Alan ends up following one of the kidnappers who he later discovers is in cahoots with a psychiatrist who works in Bright Falls. He deals with struggling artists and Alice secretly planned to get him to see Alan to try and help him. But it turns out that Thomas Zane and Barbara are in The Dark Place and The Dark Place turns various objects and people against Alan in the present - it gets dark, swirly, people appear in the woods and in town covered in darkness trying to attack Alan. If you defeat them you get away, but more come. Alan and his agent Barry go to this farmhouse outside of town owned by two old, viking-obsessed former rock stars who brewed their own moonshine and wrote a song about how if you drink the witches brew then you can find out where she is, so Alan and Barry get plastered and this gives them insight into getting Alice back. Thomas Zane pops up periodically too, for some reason he's in an old fashioned diving suit and looks like a Big Daddy from BioShock. Then... I think eventually you get Alice back. I don't even remember how it ends, and I'm writing this much earlier after finishing the game than normal. In my old age and relative social seclusion there are times I think I can feel my brain deteriorating in real time. Not anything serious that I'm going to go into detail on here but just not getting things. I felt like that when I played Alan Wake the first time. By the end I realised it wasn't my fault. This game's plot is incomprehensible. As I said, it's an interesting premise. That's where it ends though. You end up struggling so hard to follow it you stop caring. By the time it reaches a resolution it's so contrived it's not worth it. And that's before we get on to the characters. Weirdly, for a game about a writer there are very few characters who react to things the way an actual human does. When Alan arrives in town he goes to the local diner and meets a waitress who's a massive fan. She gushes about how much she loves him, all his books, the usual stuff. Later she gets possessed by The Darkness and she calls him telling him she has the manuscript he's working on to free his wife. Hello, Alan. Yes. I have the. Manu. Script. You should. Come. Over. It's like Smithers' screensaver. When Alan turns up at her house and asks for the manuscript she instead offers him coffee, and he accepts. In the same voice. The coffee is then drugged, because The Darkness which wants him to write a book things making him waste time running around after his wife will help. He wakes up at night and Rose is gone and there's no manuscript. When will his luck turn?! That's just the lack of logic, there are plenty of characters who are just plain irritating. There's Alan's obnoxious agent, Barry, who manages to do a better job of embodying Alan's self-doubt than all of the possessed people and objects trying to kill him. There's the rogue FBI agent who turns up... in fact I don't think I know why he turns up. Or why he constantly tries to shoot Alan whenever he appears. I do know why he calls Alan by a different writer each time though - someone thought this would be funny, and they're badly wrong. Hey Stephen King! Hey Hemingway! Hey Brett [sic] Easton Ellis! Hey Dan Brown! I'm not kidding, there's tons of these. There are pretty much no sympathetic characters anywhere in this game, and it's because they're all written like people who just don't behave the way people do. The setting doesn't help in this regard either. The game's development actually shifted from an open world to a more linear experience, but with aspects of both making it into the final game. The result is a fundamentally linear experience - you have an objective marker you need to follow (but no minimap) to a place to advance the story. But there are also large open sections which feel like they were designed to be explored, but aren't. Often they'll just be a stretch of road where you can drive a car while Alan's voiceover dumps some exposition if you haven't been following what's going on. The result is the setting and Bright Falls are less impactful than they probably should be. I don't have any investment in the location because I'm just being funnelled through an array of corridors, with nothing detailed or interesting to find. In addition to the nominally interesting story conceit, there's also potential here with gameplay. You do have guns for stopping the possessed people, but you have to shine light on them first to get rid of the Darkness on them. You have a torch which you need to replace the batteries for, along with things like flares and flashbang grenades in some places. You can also use environmental objects occasionally, like exposed electric cables, to guide your enemies to their death. This aspect of gameplay is about the only thing I can praise the game for, as it's both straight-forward and consistently varied enough to be interesting. It's also undeniably satisfying launching a flaregun into a group of four howling monsters and watching them evaporate. Sadly, there are problems here too. Shining your torch at an enemy is fine. Only it doesn't stop the bigger ones from moving towards you. If you then back off you'll end up backing into a wall or an object you can't see, you'll get stuck and they'll catch you and you'll die. If there's more than one enemy then you can't shine your torch on all of them, so you'll back up and you'll die. You need to get rid of the Darkness on them to be able to kill them, so unless you have flares or anything to stop them (and there are occasionally bigger enemies like lumberjacks or bulldozers or combine harvesters), you're going to die. The shooting also doesn't have much weight to it. It's really not a satisfying gameplay loop, apart from those few occasions you get a big group kill. Speaking of which, this is one of those deeply annoying games which aspires to the cinematic. Frantically backpedalling from three or four guys surrounding you, pulling out your last flare to buy yourself some space? The game will slow down and rotate the camera 360 degrees in slow motion to show you just how dramatic the danger you're in is. Only now you don't know which direction is which and you're probably going to die. Press the dodge button just in time to avoid a clawing hand? Slow mo camera time. And here's another thing that annoys me, you know how in third person games if you press the right stick it swaps shoulders for the aiming view? Alan must be left handed, because if you do this the game just switches you back to the other shoulder a few seconds later. In the game's brief tutorial section at the start which explains the combat, you're told that it's often a better option to run into light rather than try and kill every enemy. You'll find streetlights and other things periodically which act as safezones and checkpoints. This is fine, and obviously based on what I've said it would seem preferable to actual combat. The only problem is it's one of those games where your character can sprint for about three seconds then needs an oxygen mask and a cup of tea before they can think about doing it again. It doesn't help that there's no stamina meter (he breathes more heavily but he can't sprint even when this stops) or that it's the same button to dodge and sprint. Why? This isn't a game newly released, it's a game that was 'remastered' ten years after it first came out. Based on what I've looked at it was relatively well-received. How? The game doesn't look or sound nice either. For a gameplay premise centred around the contrast between light and dark there's very little in the way of style or atmosphere. I actually got quite far in the game before I realised I had the brightness turned up too high. When I was in the woods I could see everything with no problems - trees, rocks, enemies, that sort of thing. When I turned the brightness down it just felt like my TV wasn't working. The sound quickly gets irritating too, with the same music cue every time enemies 'suddenly' appear and the same nondescript swirly noise in the background just before. I also think the PS4 version has an uncapped framerate, because during cutscenes my console was silent, during gameplay it turned into a jet engine. And this wasn't even utilising any HDR settings. I'm not going to tell you I'm the most technically minded enjoyer of video games, but this seems like easy thing to rectify. If everything else didn't annoy me so much I might not have been so bothered, but here we are. Quite early on in my time with this game I realised what it reminded me of. It's like Deadly Premonition written by David Cage. A surreal love letter to TV shows like Twin Peaks and the Twilight Zone, only without any of the skill or insight to make something as engaging as those were. There are probably more details about Alan Wake that annoyed me as I was playing but I'm honestly surprised I've been as restrained as I have here. At some point in my time with it I realised this is technically probably one of the worst games I've ever played. And yet, I never really hated it. There were times when I played on the hardest difficulty I really questioned what I was doing with my life, but that was about it. Despite the amount of words I've typed here, it's not going to live long in my memory as a benchmark of anything. It was just a very stupid, unenjoyable period of my life where I ended up feeling quite aggravated in the process of not achieving a lot. If you think it's impressive that it's managed to make me feel so unenthusiastic about video games, then I suppose that's something. It's probably not what anyone was going for though.

If there's one thing Rangers fans are renowned for, it's spending money to support their football club.

This somehow gets worse every time you see it.

I can understand why conspiracy theories about 9/11 exist. Speculating about who was responsible for it and why makes some sense because of the sheer scale of the event and the preparation that must have gone into it. Along with it happening at a time when the internet wasn't ubiquitous and life in general wasn't as digitally catalogued and immediately observable as it is now, I can see why people might be sceptical. Especially when you consider the American presidency at the time and their subsequent foreign policy. What I really don't get is people who go in for saying there was no plane. Or it was a missile. Or it was lasers. I remember one (permanently stoned and or drunk) loser on another forum I post on saying years ago "it'd be like an aluminium drinks can hitting a brick wall" and you just think... how can you argue with these people? Are they so incapable of processing something so horrible that they just refuse to believe it could be possible, and will cling on to any alternative explanation no matter how stupid? People physically stood and watched planes flying. They were filmed. Yet you'll get people arguing otherwise. Wild.

£6.90 for 60ml of toothpaste. And I thought my Oral B was a ripoff.

As much as I've enjoyed everyone's excerpts from The Swamp, you all missed the best example of obliviousness to reality: The nerve!

As long as you hum louder than the fridge when you're in the kitchen you'll never notice it.

Oh, okay.

Worked well for Walter Smith and Rangers.