Boo Khaki

Yes... but could he do it on a wet Tuesday night in Leeds?

Twitter will be hilarious next year if Leclerc is regularly outperforming Hamilton. 'mon Lewis moronity and Ferrari conspiracy theory tends to go hand in hand, so I'm looking forward to the inevitable "Ferrari are deliberately sabotaging their own newly signed driver" nonsense should Hamilton continue looking as ordinary as he has since 2022

Fair enough. I had NYG as about a 7 win ceiling, but I suppose if DJ could get back to how he was playing in 2022 that could be revised up. I don't think the East is all that great either, but I think the Eagles and Cowboys are still better teams, and it's always tough to grab a WC if you are the 3rd best team in your Division.

I'm not sure if this is sarcasm or not, but did you really believe the Giants had a shot at the playoffs before the season started?

I tend to start one save on a new FM release, and then play it through until I buy another version of FM. Very rarely get further into the game than 10-15 seasons, and sometimes that is after 18months to 2 years of on/off playing. I've never seen the attraction of just grabbing Barcelona, zipping through about 100 seasons in a month of real time, obliterating everything, and then deciding you need a "challenge" so starting over with Man City, but that's how a lot of folk seem to play FM, and that's entirely up to them Oh, and full 90 minute matches don't actually last 90 minutes real time. A half is usually 10-15 minutes real time, maybe 20 if there are a lot of stoppages.

Only at the start of a new game, and only until I'm absolutely happy that the team is set up precisely how I want it, players are where I want them to be, and the team is playing the football I envisaged rather than the football SI's misleading and idiotic "roles" system makes them play. It's a hangover form the old wibble/wobble system that was perfectly suited to making small tweaks and giving precise instructions. When they did away with it in favour of the Roles system, they totally hamstrung the users ability to control cause and effect. "I want you to play a bit higher up the pitch" became "what the f**k does a Trequartista do, and how is it different from an Advanced Playmaker". Unfortunately SI's descriptors of the roles say nothing at all about how the are represented in the match engine, and in a lot of cases the player doesn't actually do what the role suggests anyway, so in order to set the team up precisely how I want it often involves totally counter-intuitive instructions, and fighting against SI's system rather than it helping me to do what I want. I'm not sitting watching 20 years worth of full matches, it usually takes maybe 4-5 matches to get it right, then its just extended highlights. Different if I've built a split new tactic mid-season, which is common in a new iteration of the game, then I'll want to watch it a bit to ensure its doing what its supposed to be doing. I suppose I come across as a control freak, but the thing about FM is there are a lot of different ways to play the game. I'm an old LLAMA, so I don't sign players my scouts haven't discovered, so no just going out grabbing that Argentinian wonderkid you know scores 40+ a season and can be had for 50k. This means I'm usually playing with inferior players to the opponent, so the tactical side is much more important, as is acquiring and moulding players with very specific attributes to suit very specific roles. Better players obviously make a huge difference in terms of improving results, but when it's barebones stuff and difficult to improve the squad, something as simple as having a midfield 3 who are a bit too flat can cost you a ton of points and mean the difference between 6th and promotion.

Holy f**k. No Kemi. Twitter has become an absolute sewer since Musk bought it. It's chock full of bots peddling alt-right garbage, racism, misogyny, etc, it's completely unmoderated, and committing Hate offences isn't even enough to get your content taken down and account banned. This is not because Musk has lost control of his own domain, but by deliberate design. If your idea of "free speech" is freedom to spout whatever the hell you like without consequence, including stuff that would see you arrested if you said it in public in the UK, then I suppose Twitter must be great. Most normal people see it for exactly what it is and are leaving it in droves. Translation - all sorts of bigoted shite pops up on X now when it did not previously, due to the fact it has next to no moderation, and what little there is has been instructed to let anything stand no matter how egregious. She's one intellectual rung above the old "calling out bigotry is bigotry" shite you hear from sectarian morons.

They were asking £40 for AAA Megadrive games 30 years ago. One of the main reasons I stopped being a console pleb and joined the PC master race. Console owners get taken for mugs, and always have been.

Yeah, that's fair enough comment. I've gone down this rabbit-hole elsewhere, and there are a few folk who are so wedded to cash that they'll go to extremes in an attempt to "win" the debate, such is their disdain for e-payment systems. I'm guilty of getting dragged down with them, only I'm usually the one making the counterpoints that in their extreme, verging on "near-collapse of civilisation/Government out to get you" scenario, cash isn't going to save your arse either. Totally accept all the points about failures of a few hours etc, but again with the caveat that I've experienced ATM systems failing as far back as the 80s, so reliance on cash is hardly failsafe as it is.

I can see a scenario similar to last week where Herbert takes the start, but any sign of the OL being completely overmatched or #10 himself showing discomfort, and they sit him down. Although he started the game last week there was apparently an agreement made beforehand that if he showed any sign at all of the injury bothering him he'd be benched. I can understand that you always want to hope for the best, but I think Herbert's injury history is now significant enough that they really shouldn't be taking any chances with him at all. It's totally at odds with Harbaugh's repeated off-season emphasis on protecting JH as much as possible, hence the Alt pick, and his rationale behind moving a serviceable RT to RG, a position he's never played before. If you are purely concerned about W/L, then I think you can put it in context by acknowledging that if the Chargers were somehow to eke out a win here, it's not going to be by Herbert standing in a clean pocket and torching the KC secondary for 400+ yards. A heavy dose of efficient running, some good D, and some luck with turnovers etc might get you there, but that is just about as possible with a healthy Heinicke under C as it is a hobbled Herbert. JH doesn't hand the ball off any better than TH

Not a chance, and if they have any sense, they'll sit Herbert and let Heinicke take the absolute beating that is coming. Three OT's on the Weds Injury report, neither Alt nor Slater are going to play, the interior OL is already hopeless in pass-pro, and they'll be lining up with at least one Practice Squad level OT, apparently Foster Sarell at LT if the rumours are to be believed. It would be an act of criminal negligence to send Herbert out there behind that considering he's already dealing with a high ankle sprain. Even if the line was 100% it still wouldn't likely lead to a competitive game, because Joey Bosa is still crocked and unlikely to play more than a handful of snaps, if that, and the Chargers pass rush completely vanishes any time JB is not on the field. Derwin James will also be serving a long-overdue suspension, so the Chargers totally lack the tools to counter KC's O. They really ought to be treating this as an exhibition and doubling up their Week 5 Bye in an effort to get a few players healthy. I doubt Jim Harbaugh will see it like that though. I hope it doesn't come to it, but if they start Herbert and he gets seriously hurt I hope the local media tear Harbaugh to shreds in the press conference. The only way this is close is if it's one of those ridiculous games where LAC hands it off about 50 times for 300 yards, and KC commits at least 4 or 5 turnovers. I'm fully expecting an ugly blowout win for KC, but I honestly couldn't care less about the scoreboard because LAC has no business squabbling with KC this year anyway. I just hope they get out of it with no more devastating injuries, or what should be a 7-9 win season could rapidly become yet another 4-5 win season with Herbert on IR and edging closer to being Andrew Luck MkII.

*Scurries off to research home cinema release date* Wait..."forced"? Did an usherette appear and hold an ice-cream wafer to yer throat?

I think I've figured out why I just can't take to this at all. It's not the corny scripts, it's the casting itself. I'm not talking about the multi-racial aspect, but some of the lead actors themselves. The guy playing Sauron just isn't a convincing Sauron in any way. Part of that might just be bad scriptwriting and poor direction, but the actor doesn't in any way resemble a Sauron, and he doesn't at any point do anything to convince you he actually IS Sauron. It's just completely flat and lifeless. Elrond is one of the most bizarre-looking Elves imaginable. The actor certainly has a memorable face, I suppose he perhaps fits the "unconventionally handsome" descriptor, but he simply isn't Elven-looking in any way, in fact, in my personal opinion he's just plain old ugly and would be more suited to playing a significant Orc character after make-up/prosthetics. Similar to Sauron, he just doesn't pull off a convincing Elf. I look at him and think "weird looking Man, with pointy ears", not "Elf". Celebrimbor is another one. Gives off "school teacher" vibes and I just can't take him seriously. The Adar character I think gets by, just, but that feeling acceptable is probably down to it being a non-canon character devised for the show, so there is no preconception of how the character should look or act, or what sort of "vibe" they should exude. Galadriel just comes off as a temperamental brat, even though I think the actress herself manages a passable likeness. The less said about the show's version of Tom Bombadil the better. Just f**king whit??? The Dwarves aren't too offensive, in fact, I think the Durins are the least discordant part of the show (aside from Durin III seemingly being driven mental by his Ring already, which isn't canon), however, the Dwarf women? err naw... As bad as Jackson's depiction of the Dwarf men in the "Hobbit" movies. None of them even have beards ffs I think they could have done a lot more to make the big, evil characters a lot more bloody convincing than they are. How about some flashbacks of Morgoth and Sauron in full bad guy mode? Nope, we get some guy in a shit wig and a kaftan mincing around and occasionally smirking slightly. Oooh I'm shitting myself.... Oh and Isildur is a twat. I suppose if they are trying to depict the fact that he was always a crap human, hence his inability to resist the Ring, then they're doing a good job of that, but I doubt it's that deep and suspect they've simply written an awful character and miscast the part, again.

TL:DR Has it got tits in it?

Dearie me. Just musing to myself.. If Charlie and various royal siblings, sprogs and grandsprogs were eliminated in a freak meteor storm tomorrow, to the extent that the current Duke of York became the Monarch, would this lot duly stick a portrait up in the home dressing room for their majority non-British 1st team squad to puzzle over? He's still 8th in line, so as outlandish as it is, it's not beyond possibility.

Only three certainties in life - Death, Taxes, and an Israeli incursion into Lebanon in the dog days of a US Presidency.

If he was still on the Tag, Airdrie to Cove and back in time for curfew would take some doing.

Sure. Although I wouldn't mind a cashless society, I'm not an anti-cash zealot who wants to see it made history as soon as humanly possible. I think it's clearly handy for contingencies in some respects, even though I very rarely use it myself. The only point I was really making is that the "but tech failure" folks invariably seem not to have thought it through to its conclusion. If tech fails, you're going to struggle to lay your hands on cash in the first place, and this has always been the way of things since ATM's became the norm. Not just that, but in a majority of places the actual transaction is tech reliant, and the acquisition of cash in significant quantities is tech reliant, so if tech fails so comprehensively that electronic payment becomes inviable, the whole cash chain goes with it and soon enough you'll either run out of cash anyway, or run out of places able to accept it. It's similar with the "government is tracking you" lot. To what end? Some people have suggested it will ultimately end up in State control of your personal access to your own wealth, so, for arguments sake, they could "seize" your bank account and prevent e-systems accepting personalised electronic payment like cards, phones etc. Aside from the fact this is usually espoused by a certain type of conspiracy nut, who appears to envision themselves living "off-grid" with a suitcase full of ten pound notes, "the government" already has plenty of ways of utterly f**king you if they so chose, none of which can be ameliorated by carrying around a bundle of cash. Sure, you might be able to fill your petrol tank a few times and live off Greggs, but eventually your cash will run out, and at that point you are f**ked because all means of access to more, beyond robbing/stealing, are shut off to you anyway. It's usually the same loonies who are dead against smart meter installation, and justify that with all sorts of wild claims about "being cut off" or being tracked and so on, seemingly oblivious to the fact that utilities suppliers can cut you off regardless of whether your meter is mechanical or Smart, and all the while posting via a phone that has to communicate with a nearby mast. I've even heard one complain that Smart meters are a con because they, themselves, use electricity and therefore the consumer has to pay. Presumably this person winds up their existing clockwork meter with a big key before bed each night.

I admire your optimism. 0-2 would be a defensive masterclass compared to how we've played recently.

Remember all the "this three at the back thing is shite and we need to go to flat four" shouts in here late last season? Funny how quickly the enthusiasm for that has wilted away since we're conceding 2+ per game playing with a four. To be fair, I think it's the players and not the system that is the root of the problem, but I also think it needs borne in mind that we played a three the majority of last season and still couldn't defend leads and shipped a ton of goals while doing so. Still think there is a whole lot depending on Clark Robertson, and later down the line big JS coming back, but by that point it will be January and the window will be open anyway. FB's need to start finding their feet quickly, because if not it's going to be a slog between now and New Year when we can feasibly find replacements.

I'd have Snell back in SD because I think it's inevitable Dylan Cease will test the market and end up elsewhere. Wouldn't be averse to us signing Perez beyond this season as well, because we've lacked a viable 5th SP for eons and I'm tired of AAA call-ups having their arm fall off or entire seasons of Bullpen games a la 2022.

Spoonies do this with Leffe There is absolutely no indication anywhere that the glass it is served in is a 2/3rds, and even if you ask for "A PINT" of Leffe the staff never point it out.

I always laugh at pro-cash advocates bringing up the "tech can go wrong" point and remind them of the countless times I was left wandering around with no cash... because the ATM system had collapsed. Unless you are suggesting a return to the days where your employer trailed into a bank, withdrew a load of cash over the counter, and then handed you a physical paypacket at the end of the week, then the "tech" angle doesn't really wash because it f**ks up cash use just as much as it does card/phone. How are cashiers supposed to accept cash as payment if the POS is down, they can't register the sale, and can't even open the till?

Vegans = worse than Hitler

Pads rode their luck a little bit in the early going, but eke out a win in Dodger Stadium. Game ending, post-season clinching Triple Play in the bottom of the 9th 2 back of LAD with 5 to play, Pads already have the H2H so a tie on record gives the NL West to SD. 2nd Seed is still on, with an outside chance of 1st if the Phillies collapse.