Miguel Sanchez

Seems like Caicedo's agent(s) is a big part of the problem with trying to figure out which club he's going to:

Fair fucks to Brighton for holding out and getting that. Billy Gilmour to be the next 9 digit footballer rolling off their production line please.

Blade Runner, like Alien, is the sort of film that should be right up my street but which just does nothing for me.

Limbo (PS4, 2015 - originally PS3, 2010) Some years ago in a review no doubt lost to the mists of time, I played Limbo and performed an analysis of the game's narrative and themes. Although it's long gone from the internet I still have it saved, and I read it after finishing the game again. It was a bit wordy, but it was all accurate. It was a bit wordy, but fine. I think I just wrote and posted back then. Now I finish the game, wait a week, spend half an hour writing then go back and check what I've written after another few weeks. I'll let you decide whether or not that's a good thing. I'm also not going to explain the game this time, I'll just get to the point and say it's really good and really smart. Limbo is classic video game stuff. It's a 2D platformer with a basic (yet detailed) aesthetic where you play a boy trying to reach a girl. You can move left or right, jump and grab on to stuff. There are some physics involved in the basic puzzles you encounter. What more can you want? When I played Fallen Order recently I mentioned how the gameplay in Soulslikes is essentially the most fundamental video game interactions possible. Is a side-scrolling platformer even more basic? As a concept it's certainly older, but maybe it's just my childhood SNES memories making it feel like year zero. When you know what you're doing you can finish Limbo in under an hour. Even on a first run, it doesn't take very long. There are some puzzles that might take a few tries to figure out, but the simple controls mean everything is intuitive enough to avoid being frustrating. That said, there are sections where the game plays with your expectations just enough to keep you alert enough to never become complacent. When you do mess up the boy usually dies in brutal, squelchy fashion. There are a lot of sharp things and heavy things to cause a gruesome death, while the possibility of drowning also pops up now and then. The brutal deaths were chosen deliberately as a way of discouraging players from not doing the puzzles properly. It's a good example of a design choice which works on two levels. Dying is shocking, but it makes you become invested in the boy's fate even if you don't realise it. There is a lot of symbolism in Limbo, and I don't want to spend too much time dwelling on all of it. The platformer trope of Boy Chases Girl is a classic as we've covered, but Limbo actually does something different with it. The basic premise is slightly different, and purely going by the game's title there is a lot to read into the different things the boy goes through as he goes looking for the girl. I think the game's length ensures a tight, well-measured experience which contains exactly as much content as it should for what it's trying to do. I don't think it's a symbolically complex game, but it's certainly an effective one. In terms of aesthetics, Limbo is the perfect example of why the obsession with video game graphics is often an exercise in redundancy. The boy and everything he interacts with is black. The background is varying shades of grey, with some flashes of white light every now and again. The result is one of the most visually striking worlds you could ever possibly want. The game's concept is haunting enough, but the art design complements it perfectly. The entire game feels like it exists in a dreamlike state of, well, limbo, which it should. Equally haunting is the soundtrack, which isn't even really a soundtrack. It's more a series of ambient noises with the occasional sound effects. It's the sort of background music you don't even really notice the first time you play. The more times you go through and become more familiar with the puzzles and the visuals though the more it stands out, and the more you realise just how haunting it is. I last played this on PS3 in 2017. I loved it then. Playing it six years later, most of the game felt familiar to me. I had forgotten a few sections and one puzzle in particular had me googling but even if the game was familiar, this isn't a negative. Despite knowing what I'm going to see I'm still able to recognise the quality and significance of what's going on. Ultimately I think it's just a pleasure to spend time with something I know is worthwhile. I'll need to try Inside again, I think that had little enough of an effect on me for me to be able to go back to it and review it without any preconceptions.

Quite right. My own approach to Football Manager was to give first team players 1-30 (with appropriate numbers for each position, obviously) with 1 and 25 for the goalkeepers. 31 and 32 were reserved for any extra goalkeepers added during the season, and any numbers from 30/33 upwards were awarded to new players in chronological order from their first start. The only real acceptable way of doing it.

And as I type this, Luzern have taken off #99 and brought on #69. Game's gone.

Squad numbers are fine. As nice as it would be for everyone to just be given shirts by position, I'm not that old. No football team anywhere should have enough players to need more than 40 squad numbers over the course of a season. Any player who asks for a stupid number should be docked wages until they stop complaining about it.

The corpse of ALF looks like he'll actually be good.

Now we're talking.

Players wearing numbers above #39.

Do any of you know who the leading scorer in the German league is? Exactly.

It's a pretty strange equivalence to draw then.

I'm going to guess and say the people working in and owning the places being targeted aren't all Tories.

It's the Romanian national team from 2011 with the contrast settings on the telly turned down.

Neil McCann looks very tanned.

This mob aren't very good.

That's Robert Smith in that picture.

Banter and memes lad. Banter and fucking memes.

I enjoyed his apparent aversion to calling goalkeepers by their names, plus a paragraph about Arteta in his technical area.

In the Loop is on iplayer. Malcolm, Jamie and Tony Soprano steal the show obviously. Do I look like I've ever set foot in a stationary cupboard? I do all my shagging in five star hotels.

I was online posting about it on another message board all proud because Glasgow had been featured. "It's called heritage sweetie, look it up" is what I believe I posted.

Had a dream last night I started watching The Sopranos again. In the first episode Glasgow, which was apparently full of Tony's friends, got completely destroyed. Absolutely covered in napalm. Buildings thrown through the air by fire. He was quite unhappy with it.

Watching the cycling earlier. (I like seeing Glasgow on the telly.) Between action it's showing various landmarks with descriptions of them, and Glasgow University was one of them. "Founded in 1451." "4th oldest university in the English speaking world." "Alumni including James Watt and Adam Smith." "Architecture has stunning Harry Potter vibes and is a must visit Insta-spot." How easily you can chart the decline of civilisation in a paragraph.

Week 31 update Nothing this week. I'm sure we're all waiting with bated breath to see if the megalolz beast finally goes.