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I went to Leicester on the weekend and returned to the Retro Computer Museum, where I donated a load of my recently retired dad’s old programming manuals/guides/books and various accumulated magazine cover CDs etc. If you’re within travelling distance of Leicester you should definitely check out the RCM. It has a load of consoles and micro computers from the 70s through to 00s set up in their main room, most with everdrives full of ROMs so there’s a large selection of games to play. They’re almost all running on CRTs as well, so they look good and you can use light guns for the PS1 and NES. There’s another room set up with 6 desktops running an endless LAN game of Quake (I’m not sure which Quake) and some other PCs in there (I think I saw one playing the Oregon Trail).

Beyond that is the arcade section, which is mostly emulation boxes, although really well made ones. One of the (very chatty) members of staff was showing the workings of their light gun machine to me and it’s essentially just a laptop in an arcade cabinet, hooked up to a flat screen TV. But the TV can be taken out and rotated through 90 degrees for games that originally had that aspect ratio (like Centipede, for which there is a trackball on the control panel). The light guns are those new Sinden ones which are essentially just webcams in light gun shells. There’s a lot of technical fussiness going on in getting it all running smoothly, but when it does, it goes well. It does feel a little bit of a shame that they’re not interested in original hardware for the arcade machines (in contrast to most of the good barcades I’ve been to, which do have original cabinets running the games they were built for on original screens), but conversely I can see the appeal of having a wide choice available for visitors. I always get choice paralysis on those though and when you’ve got literally 100s of games on one machine, I think there does need to be some manner of curation in how that’s presented, like a “we recommend” section in the ROM list.

The arcade section also has some 90s VR machines, the type you’d have seen on Tomorrow’s World or Bad Influence. I got to have a go one last time, which was running Dactyl Terror, the epitome of 90s VR: blocky polygonal graphics, checkerboard platforms floating in space with weird architecture on and you have to shoot poorly realised pterodactyls. It’s not good, but it’s definitely something worth experiencing.

The other big draw of the RCM though is the library upstairs. When I went last time it wasn’t open to the public. It is now, but they do little tours rather than letting you free roam. That’s because it is just a dozen rows of shelving chock full of the near complete libraries of games for every platform imaginable. Plus loads of magazines, books, some odd bits of hardware (Commodore 64 laptops, for instance) and a Sinclair C5 hanging around. There are display cabinets in the foyer with some particular rarities that have been donated by various people from the games industry as well: a prototype Amiga CD thing, one guy’s various awards and IIRC the handheld system that Rare made speculatively to pitch to Nintendo before finding out the Game Boy was in development.

If you like games and computers, you’ll definitely be able to fill a few hours well there.

I also stopped into Leicester city centre and Super Game Shack, which was having a 15% off sale, meaning I was finally able to pick up a copy of Pokemon Gold for a nice price.

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Ben, Todd

Graham died of a “brief and sudden illness” after visiting Ukraine and is one of the few Trump allies to be a vocal supporter of Ukraine, so… Russia killed him, right? Not paranoid in suspecting that, am I?

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Christian, Todd, JRCarter, lorcan_nagle

Al-x wrote:

But they are all gone: 5X Brazil, 4X Germany, 4X Italy. Time for new teams to emerge.

England and Spain have each won the World Cup before. France have won it twice. Argentina have won it three times, including the last one, where they beat France in the final (who beat Morocco in the semis).

It definitely feels like whatever plot-armour he’s had with the media has finally rusted off and they’ve decided they’re allowed to actually do negative coverage with the merest hint of teeth.

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Dave, Todd, Ben

Yeah, I heard about it. I don’t think it’s an entirely terrible idea that someone in the UK searching for news topics gets results that are both from the UK and from trusted news organisations rather than some Russian shill American etc. But of course it’s very easy to interpret it as the legacy media wanting their thumb on the scales, curtailing independent voices that aren’t towing the mainstream narrative etc. So, I don’t know. Given how the UK government’s recent forays into trying to police the internet have been going, I don’t expect it to turn out well. But being able to filter YT search results by country of origin would be a good step.

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lorcan_nagle, Dave, Uncle Retrospective

Can’t even die in a storm now because of woke.

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Todd, Dan, Uncle Retrospective, lorcan_nagle

Todd wrote:

This digital entitlement is tied to the specific disc, and it will move from account to account if you swap the physical game with a friend

Surely they’re not able to track individual discs though? Two copies of the same game should be identical.

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Dave

lorcan_nagle wrote:

A fan group did the upscale, there’s been a lot of similar projects uploaded to YouTube.

I’m sure I’ve said this before, but when I was a kid I thought Zeus was saying “Until you find the Kingdom of Hades, your bodies will remain as light as stone”.  I know the script says it’s “lifeless as stone” but that’s never what it sounded like to me.

Yeah, it’s not an amazing translation job in places, but as far as anime dubs go, I didn’t find it too egregious (what bugs me is when you get a lot of English shoved into a short space because the Japanese was so succinct or when you just get repetitive babble, because the mouth flaps run so long). I guess being originally French probably helped on that front.

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lorcan_nagle, Ben

Dave wrote:

Martin Smith wrote:

That’s a great action shot.

Thanks – I’m not great at posing figures so I cheat them by lying them down so they can defy gravity (in the first photo that backdrop is flat on a table).

Ah, smart!

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Dave, Todd

That’s a great action shot.

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Todd, Dave, lorcan_nagle

Todd wrote:

What’s the point of a PS when you have a computer?

Adding to what Ben and Dave had said, the big plus of consoles has always been the (relative) plug and play element of them. I was an Atari ST and then PC gamer as a kid in the 90s and going from that to getting a SNES in 96 (and then an N64 not long after) was a revelation. You can just put the games in and they work! You don’t have to fiddle with settings and worry about compatibility etc. That division has shrunk over the years – PC compatibility is less of an issue, consoles have got fiddlier with updates and installations etc. But it is still there.

There is also the element of price. While console prices have gone up (even as this generation has aged) PC component prices are worse and even Valve can’t make a reasonably priced standard machine with the Steam Box (Steam Machine? I forget the name) having a massive price tag for relatively mediocre specs. The volume of and standardisation of console manufacture ameliorates those costs a bit (traditionally anyway).

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Ben, Todd, Dave

For some reason, I had the urge to watch the first episode of Ulysses 31 last night. It’s a show I definitely remember from my childhood, but I was very much watching it on a vibes-based approach, the overarching story is lost to me (beyond it being the Odyssey in Space) if it didn’t just sail over my head entirely. The version I found was seemingly in HD (I’m not sure how – I don’t think the show’s had an HD release) and had English, French, Japanese, Spanish and Italian audio options. Which means I now know how much of a banger the Japanese theme tune is, especially those opening few bars.

There seems to be two French ones; one is just the English theme in French and the other has a much different vibe.

 

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Ben, Dave, lorcan_nagle

Dave wrote:

January 2028 will mark the end of physical disc production for new PlayStation games.

https://blog.playstation.com/2026/07/01/physical-disc-production-ending-in-january-2028-for-new-games-releasing-on-playstation-consoles/

That’s not going to go down well, though I wonder if they’ll get more ire for announcing they’re shutting down the PS3 and Vita stores.

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Dave, Todd

I can’t remember where I originally saw this, so apologies if it was here and I’m repeating something.

A team has been working to restore Mainframe’s first 90s CGI TV show Reboot in full HD. The show was archived on D1 digital tapes, which means seems to mean they’re in as high a quality as they were originally rendered in. But D1 tapes are now obsolete and working machines are really hard to find. Interesting overview of how they’ve progressed in this video (with a nice tease for Transformers fans at the end).

Mainframe has been uploaded the restored episodes (though seemingly not the final restorations, as far as I can tell) to their YouTube channel. I definitely recall Reboot being on CITV back in the day, but I never really followed any of what was going on. Think I’ll try and remedy that.

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Todd, Dave, lorcan_nagle

Ben wrote:

So, get this – scalpers are already flogging GTA VI preorders.

And, and they are getting sales!

For a game with practically infinite digital supply.

… Wha? How?!

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Todd

Andrew wrote:

They’ve since advised that a physical disc will be released a few months down the line.

I think that’s kinda worse. Because unless that’s branded differently (GOTY edition etc) it’s just going to cause confusion between existing stock of unresellable codes-in-a-box and disc versions. And even if it is separately branded (and presumably priced), it’s just going to feel like a rip-off to everyone who got duped into buying the CIAB.

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Todd, Ben

That sounds cool. Where’s it available?

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lorcan_nagle

I saw Supergirl this morning and eh, it’s pretty mediocre. The story and performances are fine, I guess, but visually it’s horrid. It’s set across multiple planets but they all look the same: underlit, drab, sepia toned. Ironic that the first director Gunn’s hired while studio head is visually nothing like him and instead a bad Snyder wannabe.

Oh and there’s a cover of Jimmy Eat World’s The Middle in here that is not only dreadful but so mismatched to the moment that I’m not convinced they listened to any of it beyond the title before deciding to put it in.

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Dave, Todd

I guess Rockstar sees the sea of used GTA 5 copies in every CEX in the country and thinks “we should be getting that money”. It is scummy. My most hated thing about the Switch is the proliferation of those awful code-in-a-box games (replaced for Switch 2 with game key cards, which can at least be resold). Doing this is pretty much what killed off the physical PC game market.

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Ben, Todd, Dave

I ended up bailing on Cuphead. I got to the second area and spent several hours just getting my ass kicked by the sweet castle gang, the Egyptian genie thing and the roller-coaster clown. I eventually threw away my gamer pride and dropped to “simple” difficulty for the roller-coaster guy. It’s well named because while it’s simpler, I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily easier. On the roller-coaster guy, it removes the roller-coaster cars that come in across the screen that you have to dodge from the second section. This does make the balloon animal section simpler and maybe a bit easier, and it removes the final section (which I only got to once) entirely, but the third section with the horseshoe vomiting horses is extended to fill and it’s not like it makes any changes to number of hits to kill (in fact, they’re probably higher because of the adjusted section lengths), numbers of other enemies etc. I managed to beat him at that difficulty, but it still took a dozen or more goes. And then the game immediately goes “well, you didn’t really beat it”. I tried the sweet castle gang on simple too, hoping it’d get rid of the little jelly bean dudes that run out of the castle as you fight the random set of three of the four underlings before the queen(?), as they were what was screwing me up. But no, it leaves them and just nerfs some of the sub-bosses ancillary dangers. I spent another hour or two on that and still couldn’t beat it. So, sod that. Might try it in co-op some time, see if I can get any further that way.

 

With that aside, I decided to finally start Fire Emblem: Three Houses. It’s been out 7 years(!) now, there’s already been another one and a new one is on the horizon, so I figured it was time (and I’ve had my copy in my backlog about a year). I knew a fair amount about this before starting – I’m very familiar with Fire Emblem, I know there’s a school element and I’ve used Byleth in Smash Bros. Still, I was really surprised by how Byleth is in this game (at least in the couple of hours I’ve played). That is almost completely a blank slate. I’ve played plenty of JRPGs with a main character that’s designed to be a self-insert for the player, but even by that measure this is strange.

You have an option of a male or female version and can name them whatever you want. This means all spoken dialogue avoids using the character’s name and has to go with genderless euphemisms “your child”, “professor” etc. Fine, I guess. But Byleth’s dialogue, such as it exists, is all completely unvoiced and is reported in your choices rather than given as proper dialogue most of the time. Byleth also just has the weirdest, blankest expression on their face all the time and is constantly doing this inane gesture when you select your dialogue options. And it’s just so weird and immersion breaking. Maybe there’s some story explanation coming for it, but given how long this game looks like it’s going to be (I’m over 2 hours in and just at the first proper battle) that’s requiring a lot of patience on the player’s behalf.

What makes it weirder is that it’s not like this is the first time Fire Emblem has done customisable player characters. Fates had a plethora of customisation options, including three different full voice options for each gender of its main player character, Corrin, who still had dialogue, personality etc. Admittedly all the cut-scenes in that were 2D stills and thinking about it, I’m not sure the dialogue was fully voiced rather than just sound bites and barks, but still, doing two full voices for Byleth (one male, one female) doesn’t seem particularly onerous in the grand scheme of things (and they have voiced combat barks etc for them). And even if it is, their vacant stare still feels like a conscious choice and very odd one at that.

It’s just really surprising to start a game that has a big narrative with social interaction elements and find that the main character is a gormless puppet, especially when they’re meant to be a teacher (which is a whole other area of weirdness, the way Byleth and their father are press-ganged into this military academy church place). I really didn’t get that impression from Smash Bros.

Still, the social bits I’ve done are fun, the characters are an interesting bunch and the main combat seems solid as ever. I really like that you get the standard FE grid view of the combat map but can zoom in further than that and get a full 3D terrain with more units spread about. When I first read a review of a Fire Emblem game way back, they said that the individual characters were all representative of units of soldiers, ala Advance Wars. That’s never actually been explicit in the games, until now and it’s a cool addition.

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Ben, Dave

[Martin Smith]

Is there really much interest in Byrne going back to the X-Men? Grouchy old man with a load of prejudices and grudges tidying up fan-fiction of how he would have done the X-Men decades ago that he published to his core audience already on his message board. About the level of decision I expect from Chris “hey let’s tank our successful Transformers books so we can soft reboot GI Joe again and I can write Rom” Ryall.

is not exactly an authorized Marvel title,

I mean, if it isn’t, it wouldn’t get published, surely?

 

• This reply was modified 3 weeks, 2 days ago by Martin Smith.

Arjan Dirkse wrote:

Emm sky news is reporting that the nutter who threw a 3 year old boy in a crocodile enclosure – the boy was subsequently mauled and is in hospital with serious injuries – has been released, on bail. I sure hope that is misinformation, because if it is true, well…that’s totally fucked.

 

edit:  BBC is reporting it too. Incredible.

 

edit the 2nd: someone mentioned the possibility the perpetrator was in a care facility for the mentally handicapped and was released but under guidance of a caretaker. That is nt part of the news coverage however. Sloppy not to mention such a thing.

been bailed and was “unfit for interview”.

People may be considered not fit to be interviewed because of their physical or mental state.

I don’t know, you wait over 100 years for your constituency to get an MP who’s not a Tory and he gets himself arrested in under two years.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjdgzzlgvxko

MP Cameron Thomas suspended amid police investigation

A Liberal Democrat MP has had the whip suspended pending the outcome of a police investigation, a party spokesperson said.

It is understood that Tewkesbury MP Cameron Thomas was arrested by Gloucestershire Police on Wednesday.

A Liberal Democrat spokesperson said they could not comment further while the police investigation is ongoing.

Gloucestershire Police and Thomas have been approached for comment.

A party spokesperson said: “Cameron Thomas MP has had the party whip suspended pending the outcome of a police investigation.

“We are unable to comment further while the police investigation is ongoing.”

The former RAF officer has served as MP for Tewkesbury since the 2024 general election.

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Todd, lorcan_nagle

lorcan_nagle wrote:

That is… actually a use case for Super 7?

I’m as surprised as any one. But yeah, I am well up for a full line of these: the 12 original guys, Galadria and Virulina, Merklynn, maybe the Sun Imps, hell, if it goes well maybe they’ll even do the unreleased 88 characters.

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Todd, lorcan_nagle

I started playing Cuphead this weekend, as it had a sale to go with the announcement of the 8 Bit sidequel at SGF. Absolutely gorgeous presentationally. It is as hard as you’ve heard. It’s taking me about an hour for each level (most of which are just a boss fight) and at several points I’ve thought “maybe I should just put it down to the lower difficulty for this one and come back when I’ve got some better upgrades?”. I haven’t though and the sense of accomplishment on finally beating a level is immense. That said, I do think its difficulty is not entirely fair. There’s a boss fight against a Dragon Quest esque slime for instance, who will leap across the stage and you have to avoid that, shoot him and duck under the lunging punch style attacks he’ll occasionally throw in. What makes it unfair is that the length of its jumps is entirely irregular and impossible to gauge. I can appreciate them wanting to avoid a predictable pattern but the benefit of a pattern that you can learn to read and/or predict (as other bosses have) is that you can beat it through determination and not just with a dollop of good fortune. I beat a blimp woman who turns into astrological signs and then a crescent moon, last night, and I still couldn’t tell you how you’re supposed to be able to dodge the the laser beams from the UFOs beyond just getting lucky.

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Ben, Dave

Some pics of the Super7 Visionaries leaked (over a week ago – not sure how I missed it given I’ve been looking regularly) and while they’re just render mock-ups they look like they might be quite good (font choice on the packaging aside). And they’re doing proper holograms, surprisingly. I like the addition of staff hold back accessories/options.

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Dave, Todd, lorcan_nagle

RTD2 has me hesitant to put anyone on a pedestal and JMS has been responsible for some notable stinkers himself (not just the tail end of his Spider-Man run but that Superman arc where he just walked for some reason), but yeah, I’d take him running the show. Better than the other mooted alternatives (McTighe). But he needs to bring a production company and money with him, presumably.

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Dave, Todd

[Martin Smith]

Yep, I think Ian summed it up nicely with “absolute shambles”. If he’d just ended with an unfinished regeneration, it would be far less of an issue, but he had to amuse himself by throwing Billie Piper in there without seemingly even thinking about what it could possibly be. Now, not only is it someone else’s problem, but it’ll quite possibly never get resolved, especially if whoever the show gets farmed out to decides they want a completely clean break (which would be understandable).

His attempts to spin this as a positive are… not convincing.

This bit especially reads like the show’s been taken away from him against his will:

Will they keep the theme tune? Will they lose the blue box?

It’s unlikely, but I would like it if whoever takes over convinces Gatwa to come back for a bit. Give him a clearly defined shooting schedule that allows him time to do other stuff on the side (and some knee pads I guess), handwave away the Piper stuff and that regeneration and let him have another season or two to do better.

 

• This reply was modified 1 month ago by Martin Smith. Reason: tiding pasted quote

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Todd, Ben

Damn, I’m going to have to get one now to try out.

I do wonder what they’re going to do when they complete the SF2 set. I mean, obviously they can move on to 3, Alpha, Final Fight etc. But as they get into the weeds on the objectively less popular characters from those (Rose, Rolento etc) will they keep doing reissues of these main SF2 characters to keep them available?

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Dave

lorcan_nagle wrote:

Metal Hero provided footage for Saban shows in the 90s, in this case VR Troopers and Big Bad Beetleborgs.

Oh, I had no idea they were sourced from the same show.

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lorcan_nagle

Damn I need to get on those Jada Street Fighter figs.

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Dave

Ben wrote:

Plus the Goa’uld got done in series 8. They brought in the Ori for s9-10.  Atlantis wrapped up the Wraith and Replicators. It was all very tidy.

Yeah. The only real sticking points of accessibility if you continue on from the original series are a) that humanity has spaceships now and b) a Lucian Alliance Goa’uld transport ship blew up on Earth in an episode of Universe (which I took to be a watershed moment of them having to reveal the existence of aliens to the general populace, but I might be misremembering that and I guess it’s easy enough to lie about). Everything else is prime to just set aside or drip feed back into the series from a fresh start, ala 2005 Doctor Who.

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Todd, Uncle Retrospective

Todd wrote:

njerry wrote:

But, to be honest, I can’t remember the last time I LOVED one of his books. Maybe the first HUCK series?

I remember reading the first volume of Chrononauts and thinking this was one of the most vapid and superficial comics I had ever read. There were some later series I tried the first issue and dropped immediately. I pretty much stopped buying his stuff. I still have a stack of MW comics that I haven’t read yet. (To be fair, I have a LOT of unread comics!) I just don’t feel any urgency to read them.

Oh god, yes, Chrononauts was awful. Just paint by numbers emotions tied to a sort of alright but not that original concept.

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Todd

Todd wrote:

I do wonder if the majority of his readers simply outgrew him? I know I did.

I certainly did. He’s definitely a writer that appeals to, broadly, an adolescent mindset, which presumably doesn’t have a huge crossover with people able to fund Kickstarters. Is he even still associated with Netflix if he’s doing stuff through Kickstarter? I haven’t heard of any of his work in years now, but I don’t really follow comics news that closely any more.

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Todd

Yeah, and everything Gero had said was stressing that it was going to be accessible to new viewers, wasn’t going to just be a nostalgia revival for SG-1.

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Ben

[Martin Smith]

I saw that new He-Man, sorry, Masters Of The Universe film today. Overall, I thought it was pretty rubbish.

It certainly has good bits. Sir Idris Elba is as solid as you’d expect and Alison Brie is great as Evil Lyn. But beyond that, it has many problems, which I’m going to spoiler tag.

The first 2/3 of the movie is very much Roger Sweet’s He-Man, that is brawn above brain, masculine power fantasy. It feels like it’s written by a 14 year old edgelord and seeing He-Man rip off a guy’s horn, jam it up into his jaw and then kick him off a mountain into lava just feels wrong.

Now, it definitely tries to pull back from that in the end, by emphasising that Adam was chosen to have the power of Grayskull for his humility, compassion and humanity rather than to exert brute physical strength. Which absolutely doesn’t work, for several reasons. First is that the film’s take on all these qualities feels like parody. While on Earth, Adam has ended up with a job in HR and all of that is cringeworthy corpo-compliance talk: group recitations of mantras, people “telling their truth”, everything a shitty workplace sitcom from 15 years ago would have run into the ground. It feels like intentional “anti-woke” right wing strawman of not being a dick, especially with the way the film revels in its violence, which makes it all the more surprising it tries to pull it back at the end and go “that’s good, actually”.

Second is that we don’t really see any evidence of Adam’s compassion and conciliation stuff. There’s one micro-scene where he’s trying to resolve an HR issue at work, which again, is essentially played off as “ha, look at this nonsense job he has.” Beyond that, it’s all him being a wuss played for laughs, such as when he tries to talk down Trapjaw. Which leads into the third problem with it: for all that the film purports to adhere to the Filmation morality of He-Man, all his attempts at amicable conflict resolution fail and he has to resort to violence. Talking down Trapjaw ends up with Adam ripping his gun arm off and using it to kill all the minions with him. When he tries to talk down Skeletor, it doesn’t work and he resorts to beating the shit out of him, which the film practically orgams over. Adam’s big “rallying the troops” moment – which I guess is meant to showcase how nice he is – is similarly awful. It’s mostly played for laughs and its main thrust is “we need to work together to escape, because where has working alone got us?” even though none of them were working alone! They were all captured in groups!

It’s brainlessness about on par with the rest of the script. The tertiary characters – Fisto, Ram Man, Beast Man etc are not only thin as hell, they’re inconsistently written. Near the end, Ram Man looks askance at Fisto for having called him that, despite Ram Man having enthusiastically claimed the name earlier. The film straight up forgets about Roboto for five minutes. Cringer is completely wasted and instead of being transformed into Battle Cat just agrees to disregard his entire personality (which has had a cumulative two minutes on screen, at best).

Perhaps most baffling is how the film is just embarrassed by its source material. That thing about Ram Man’s name? Turns out, he’s not called Ram Man (though his real name isn’t given) that’s just one of the “silly” names Adam gave to people from Eternia after being stranded on Earth, as he drew pictures to try and remember them. Same with Fisto, Mekanek, Trapjaw and others. The film even dismisses the name He-Man as laughably stupid, only using it right at the end and not at all seriously. And I’m sorry, “Evil Lyn” and “Skeletor” are fine but “Ram Man” and “He-Man” are a bridge too far? What are we even doing here lads if you’re embarrassed by the name of the main character of what you’re adapting? 25 years on from “what, you’d prefer yellow spandex?” and we’re still doing this self-apologetic crap?

The film decides to make no distinction between Adam and Adam as He-Man, there’s no “He-Man” personality, which isn’t a terrible choice. But it also has *everyone* aware that Adam is The Character Not Called He-Man and yet, it still shoves in a gag at the end where, upon receiving a distress call, Adam slinks off with Cringer to transform as if he has a secret identity to hide, with everyone else commenting how weird that is as he knows they all know. And I don’t get why that’s there rather than as a slight at the cartoon. Because it’s not like Adam says anything about being a fan of superheroes while on Earth and wanting to emulate them nor tries at any time to hide his transformations earlier from anyone. Just arbitrarily does something stupid for a bad joke.

But that’s pretty standard for the level of shitty writing this film has. Its willingness to mock the Filmation series and the franchise generally is galling given how vacuously it’s written. When Teela rescues Adam, she tells him what Skeletor has done to Eternia. He wonders why he’s done it. “Because he’s bad,” Teela tells him. “No, there must be something more to it than that,” Adam says. “He has a skull for a face,” Teela says, as if that proves everything. When Adam tries to find peace with Skeletor (before beating the shit out of him) he asks Skeletor why he’s so determined to have the power of Grayskull etc and the film rejects any attempt to give Skeletor anything approaching motivation. “Because I’m a villain” he says (I think – I’ll come back to that). Fucking Orko shows up in the credits to do a mock Filmation moral summation and says something to the effect that “and people who have skulls for faces are bad”. And I guess that’s alright then! I mean, I don’t need deep lore and backstory for Skeletor, but fuck me are we really doing a Filmation moral that is “judge people by appearances”?

Skeletor’s problematic in other areas. Visually, he’s good – the design is well realised – and the script is… well, it’s hard to fairly judge because Jared Leto is so fucking shit. Not only is his voice heavily processed to have way too much bass, which makes it near impossible to make out some of his lines, his take on the character is as insultingly banal as his Joker. It’s vaguely British, I think, the laughter is forced and hesitant. So bad. It makes Mark Hamill just doing the Joker in Kevin Smith’s MotU cartoon a classic by comparison.

I think this film is going to do well for the same reasons the Michael Bay Transformers movie did well. It’s glossy, it’s got a “cool” take on the characters and edgelords will be all over the violence. But just like how Bay missed what made that franchise special, this film fails to understand MotU. I’m not even that invested in MotU – I watched the original cartoon as a kid but it’s certainly not something I can bear now as an adult. But I recognise its qualities, and this film misses them. The 200X series was far more successful in taking the premise, owning its eccentricities while making it more “mature”.

• This reply was modified 1 month, 1 week ago by Martin Smith.
• This reply was modified 1 month, 1 week ago by Martin Smith.

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Uncle Retrospective, lorcan_nagle, Todd

Infuriating. If it’s far enough along to have announced it, it should be far enough along that it gets to at least make a pilot.

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Uncle Retrospective, Ben, Sean Robinson

I finished Live A Live last night, which took me longer than I expected. It’s a HD-2D remake of a mid-90s JRPG by Square which was released only on the Super Famicom. It’s a staple of the SNES fan translation canon though, as it was translated by the early 00s. Given it didn’t leave Japan, I was a bit surprised it got a modern remake and English translation.

It purports to be a short story anthology with 7 tales set in different time periods – Prehistory, Imperial China, Twilight of Edo (Shogunate Japan), the Old West, Present Day, Near Future and Far Future. Although the base controls and combat system are the same between them, each has been designed by a different team and has a different focus. Far Future has only optional combat (until its final boss) and is instead sort of a survival horror thing, very Alien influenced, whereas Present Day is pretty much all combat, as you take a guy through duels against various martial art masters to steal their moves (it’s a bit like a Megaman boss rush mode but you’re playing as a Blue Mage).

Combat’s pretty cool. It’s turn based but with a time-based system (so kind of the Active Battle System in contemporary FFs,) but grid-based, so you have to think about attack distances, patterns etc, as well as charging time and elements.

As you might expect, there’s more to the game than just those seven stories as it adds an 8th when you finish them, which highlights a linking theme that’s run across them. You then get a final chapter where you build a party from the 7 protagonists and take on the 8th. That all ran a lot longer than I was expecting to be honest, which did temper my enjoyment a bit (I was hoping to get it done before a certain day). The bigger issue with it is that the linking theme and narrative just doesn’t entirely make sense. I don’t think it really adds anything to any of the stories as they were and it requires you to kind of ignore bits of them for it to hang together./

Still, over all this is really enjoyable. It looks gorgeous, it plays well and it just feels like something different in a genre than can be quite formulaic.

Robert Kirkman’s licensed the Gold Key characters, so I guess this means we’re mere weeks away from Turok: Dinobot Hunter.

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Andrew, lorcan_nagle, Todd, Ben

New Zealand was going to do it first, as well as reducing the amount of nicotine in cigarettes (which seems like a pretty good policy even if you don’t want to ban them) but backed off it when the government changed.

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Todd

The 4K restoration of the TVM came out yesterday, which I completely forgot about. The Beeb’s put the restored titles on YT and man, that ominous last line of the voice over and that version of the theme tune still gets me, like I’m 9 years old again.

And they got McGann to do the subscription beg for the end of the YT upload too.

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Todd, lorcan_nagle

But food, even junk food, has a positive benefit of being, you know, food. It’s misuse (and in some cases not even that) which causes obesity. You could even argue alcohol has the same limited positive health benefits when taken in moderation. Cigarettes don’t. It’s an artificial product we created entirely for a recreational activity that causes damaging health effects.

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lorcan_nagle, Ben

njerry wrote:

Arjan Dirkse wrote:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/apr/21/bill-banning-people-born-after-2008-from-buying-tobacco-clears-uk-parliament

This is probably my fault; just the other day I saw a cigarette display in some shop and said to my UK cousin “I’m surprised people still smoke, knowing what we know about the health risks.” Maybe my cousin has a connection with the NHS.

Honestly, anyone under the age of about 45 who smokes is an unmitigated idiot. It has been common knowledge for that long that cigarettes are incredibly harmful to health. To choose to take up smoking at any point since the late 90s ish is just a moronic decision and your resultant health issues shouldn’t be the state’s burden.

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Todd, njerry

Various bits of Japanese Beast Wars tat
So I’ve discovered an affordable (for the moment at least) Japanese proxy shipping service and have mainly been using it to get vintage Beast Wars merch. First amongst these were a set of character magnets, chibi versions of the original 10 characters from the show (unfortunately, Black Arachnia, Inferno, Tigatron and Airazor didn’t figure into any of the BW merch Takara did back in the day). And two from BWII, which seem even harder to find. Pointless? Maybe. But fun.

Speaking of, the other pick up I’ve really found myself falling in love with are these soft vinyl finger puppets, made by the same company, Harveston, and also available in capsule machines back in the day. Sofubi finger puppets like this are a thing in Japan it seems and I just think they’re neat. They’re really characterful in their SD style and just nice to pick up and fiddle with. I’ve got eight of these so far, with Scorponok on the way. Just need to find Waspinator (who I’ve spotted on eBay, misidentified as a kaiju and very cheap, except for postage, because it’s in Thailand).

Harveston did a five pack in the same style for BWII, but candy company Kabaya also did some of BWII and then BW Neo and I’ve got most of the Neo ones (with the rest and all of BWII on the way). These are about the same size, but of a harder vinyl. The holes in them are far less circular and thus harder to get a finger in, if you’re so inclined. The stylisation is less SD and more chibi. So they’re not as nice, but they’re still fun.

I’ve really been won over by the finger dolls and have been looking into ones of other licenses. Final Fantasy, Street Fighter, Pokemon (where they seem to have done literally every Pokemon over the years), Marvel, Disney, even Thunderbirds. Although weirdly, the Thunderbirds ones are named as “lighter covers”, to put a Bic lighter in. Seems a very mixed message and maybe not a great idea to put something that can melt on a lighter?

The last of the BW tat I’m going to talk about (but not the extent of what I’ve bought) is Tamagoma. These are the answer to the eternal question of “what if Beyblades were egg based and featured Beast Wars characters?”

They’re by Takara and a year before they came up with Beyblades, so do feel like a rough take on the idea. Each egg can split in two and have a little BW pvc placed in it. The bottom half has a gyroscope in it and you use the included ripcord to set that spinning, so it can balance on its rounded point bottom and then… well, not do much. The packaging suggests that the idea is that it’s a game and you win by your egg hitting the release switch on your opponent’s egg. But they don’t have anywhere near enough lateral movement for there to be any chance of them moving towards each other, let alone hitting each other, unless you put them right next to each other. It also says you have to set it going while holding it and then gently place it down on the play surface, which seems a world away from the “let ‘er rip” nature of Beyblades

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Todd, lorcan_nagle, Dave

Blokees Transformers Defenders
I got really into Blokees when they first started but that burned out pretty quickly after half a dozen of the Galaxy class models. But the Defender line has started adding in Beast Wars characters and I am a sucker for Beast Wars (more on that later). So after getting Cheetor as a test, I bought a full case of wave 6, netting me Megatron in robot and beast modes and Optimus Primal in robot and beast modes (plus loads of others to sell, Maybe). And they’re really cool!

Defender is a smaller size scale, coming out about the size of a Battle Beast, and with more chibi proportions. It works really well, they feel more distinctive than the Galaxy ones and, crucially, cheaper. I’ve ended up keeping Shattered Glass Rodimus, Ultra Magnus and Perceptor from wave 6, picking up Shockwave, Scourge and Cyclonus from previous waves and got in a full case of the brand new wave 7, from which I’ve kept Lio Convoy, beast mode Lio Convoy, Magmatron, BW Galvatron, Gigastorm and I’m still on the fence about Ratchet. Oh and Big Convoy, though I had to get him separately (my case came with the evil Big Convoy variant, the one variant of the four possible I didn’t want). Another instance of having to reign myself in a bit. I’ll definitely get any BW character they do, but with G1, I think want to limit it to some of the big hitters and characters I care about (and Perceptor, it seems). Maybe the Lost Light crew?

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Andrew, Todd, lorcan_nagle, Dave

MOTU Origins

200X Skeletor

It’s ironic, given I’ve been slowly trying to sell off my 200X collection, that I’m finding myself really into these 200x cartoon collection figures. I picked up Skeletor first, from the Entertainer (which seems to be the only High Street chain stocking them) when I intended to get Panthro. I figured there was less chance of Skeletor hanging around long term (I feel like there’s so much 200X Origins coming out just now that it’s going to be short run and cleared out quickly, possibly to make space for the movie stuff).

Skeletor has an incredible face sculpt. Lovely colours. And just all over, he nails the look of the cartoon. He comes with his havoc staff, which is also great and his dual swords. Unfortunately, the swords didn’t get paint apps, so the blades are just the bare purple and orange plastics. The bigger issue is that they’re just not a great design. The idea is that the two peg together to make a dual handle and two pincer like blades. The original 200X ones kinda worked, but these hard plastic ones are too thick, so the handles and blades end up off-set. Plus, they were warped in the pack and even a couple of heat treats haven’t straightened them out. But Skeletor doesn’t even need swords, really. He’s got a stick! With a skull on it!

Moss Man

I’m not sure why, but when I saw the 200X cartoon collection was coming, Moss Man was the first one I was like “oh yeah, I need that!”. I think because he wasn’t in the original 200X line and was such an interesting redesign of the original (which was just Beastman covered in flock). This figure captures that redesign nicely. Lovely shade of green. Great head sculpt, with the elfin ears and dirty hippy beard. Accessory is just a plain green stick thing, but it’s got a subtle wood grain sculpt detail that sets it off. The use of a poncho piece helps disguise the stock torso and change his build. Really successful figure.

Herman
This (and Skeletor) isn’t the first attempt at a 200X Herman in the Origins line. The first came out a few years ago and was a weird bastardisation of the regular He-Man figure with 200X accessories. This new cartoon collection version really shows off how having a new buck style helps match the intended style, while still feeling part of the Origins line.

Again, there’s a really nice head sculpt on this, which captures the face (and hairstyle!) of the 200X He-Man. His clothing mostly feel right, though weirdly his furry loincloth (Kilt? It has a sporran) is covering over a brown crotch piece that has a furry loincloth and belt sculpted into it. And I’ve just noticed that his back has a copyright notice for WEB and Wolf, so it’s actually just Lion-O’s chest from the T-Cats line reused. Same on Moss Man. That’s funny.

The only disappointing thing with He-Man is his weapons. The power sword is a good sculpt, but completely lacking in paint apps, let alone the silly twisty thing the original did. And then he doesn’t come with anything else. No axe, no shield. Which isn’t a dealbreaker, but a little disappointing.

I am going to have actively reign myself in on this line, especially as they’re releasing such a glut of them all in quick succession (the sub-line started a few months ago and there’s already over a dozen figures). But I’m probably going to get Teela, Evil Lyn and Merman. Maybe Roboto and Man-At-Arms. Zodac too? And Beastman’s cheap on Rarewaves already. But not Orko. I draw the line at Orko.

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Todd, lorcan_nagle, Dave

Here’s a big dollop of things I’ve picked up in recent months and again keep forgetting to talk about.

MOTU x Thundercats

I ended up getting the rest of the proper T-Cats from this.

Tygra – who is mostly good. He comes with loads of translucent green Eternian parts. I don’t really know why (presumably a reference to… something?) but they’re nice enough. Didn’t stop them ending up in the tin with the rest. The head sculpt is brilliant especially. Unfortunately, the stripe paint apps on the arms weren’t dry when I got him, so they’ve smeared a bit. The bigger problem is his weapon. It’s the tri-ball bola thing he originally had, but Mattel have decided to give it a real fabric cord for most of it, which is just entirely unwieldy. Far too long, no ability to pose in any way and he can barely hold it at the fabric, so you’re mainly just left with “puddling on the floor” as your only option.

Lion-O – this is the wave 3 redeco which is the… cartoon version? I think. It’s nicer. Less yellow on the chest, forearm and muzzle patches. The Eternian accessories are now gold rather than metallic blue (in the tin, so moot) and his basic hair is a different shape too.
Overall, a nice figure. I really like the details on the eyes (helped no end by Mattel doing face printing now, like Hasbro does on 6” figures). The gauntlet he comes with is not quite the one in the original cartoon/toy, it’s more Eternian. It’s quite clever how it’s designed though – it’s just a replacement hand rather than a snap on accessory. It can also peg onto his belt, though not very securely.

Panthro – also the wave 3 cartoon redeco, which is more grey than blue. His Eternian bits are gunmetal grey rather than gold, but again, all in the tin. Beyond those, he has a spiky wrist strap, (such a goth), which is maybe slightly too large, and his nunchuks, which are good. Another solid figure which captures the spirit of the original.

Sorry, stock photos for all these guys. I’ve really enjoyed this line, it’s made me remember how much I like Thundercats when divorced from the original cartoon (which, opening titles aside, is awful). I hope they do some more after the MOTU movie passes. Wilykit, Wilykat, Pumyra, Bengali and Jaga feel kinda essential.

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lorcan_nagle, Dave

[Martin Smith]

You’re assuming the boycott will be over by next year?

Edit: The other concern with Discord is its push to AI, such as adding hidden scraper bots to servers without users knowledge or permission. Currently that can be mitigated but the owner of Discord seems like he’s drunk the AI kool-aid.

Also there’s an issue that we wouldn’t have full control on moderation/banning. I’ve seen stories of people having their full Discord accounts limited or banned due to decisions taken  not by that community or its users/mods but Discord’s (including an AI moderation system scanning posts and DMs), especially for political content.

• This reply was modified 1 month, 3 weeks ago by Martin Smith.

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Todd, Ben

I have my reservations about Discord (the age verification stuff, the push for Nitro) but it is functional and has been a decent enough fallback for the other former-message-board-community I’m part of. It’ll be a shame to see the Carrier go, one of the last of a dying breed of old style forums, but I get that it makes sense financially. There is always proboards as a free alternative option though…

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Todd, lorcan_nagle, Ben

I’ve been helping to clear out my parents’ lofts (yes, weirdly there are two for the one house) recently, and floorboard the main one. Amongst the various forgotten junk up there was a bag with a few PC mags from 98/99. Three PC Formats (the boring mag that would have articles about how to use Internet Explorer etc) and two PC Zones (the games mag, which Charlie Brooker used to write for).

I had a quick look on ebay and surprisingly they have some value, the Zones certainly (and slightly less surprisingly), so I put them up for a speculative £10 each or best offer, fully expecting to a) get haggled down on the Formats at least and b) take a while to sell them, if at all.

But no, been less than two days and three have already sold, at full price. And more Formats than Zones. One of the Formats is even going to the Netherlands. Baffling.

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Todd

Colbert very succinctly spelling out what will happen with the Trump IRS slush fund.

 

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Todd, Ben

Ben wrote:

For a change, a RefUK by-election candidate has been suspended in advance of the election, and not after.

Speedrun record achieved.

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Todd, Ben

Arjan Dirkse wrote:

What are people’s main complaints about Starmer, concretely? Is it reasonable to expect another candidate from the same party would do a better job?

My problem with Starmer is that he is completely lacking in principles and backbone. He stood to become Labour leader on a very clear set of pledges, heavily playing on Corbyn’s existing platform and support, and immediately abandoned pretty much all of them. I’ve highlighted in green the ones he’s actually followed through on.

Then as leader of the opposition he went into the general election with a completely different set of pledges. He got elected with a massive, if fragile, majority which  gave him the opportunity and ability to make big, meaningful changes to the country. Instead, he’s doodled around in the margins mainly, while spending most of his energy immediately courting Reform supports.  Most of whom are never going to vote for him anyway, whose vote he wouldn’t need for five years anyway and, if he actually spent his time focusing on positive, meaningful changes that other people liked, he wouldn’t need because his own base would be stable if not growing.

While his Labour government have done some good things – removing non-dom status, the Renter’s Rights Bill, reducing NHS waiting times a bit – these are always pretty milquetoast in ambition and overshadowed by Labour’s own actions on largely meaningless distractions. For instance, renationalising the railways, the only bit of his leadership renationalisation pledge that’s stuck, has gone for the weakest, most drawn out option of just letting all the current private contracts lapse and then be handed to a publicly owned operator, but does nothing to renationalise the rolling stock, so there’ll still be a private entity involved unnecessarily hiking prices. His move to abolish hereditary lords has been walked back to letting some of them stay anyway. Some people give him credit for not getting us drawn into Trump’s war in Iran, but given we’re letting the Yanks launch missions from our military bases, it’s an entirely arbitrary distinction and one that the, crucially, the Iranians don’t accept.

Even the social housing thing; yes we’re building more houses (at the expense of green spaces, wildlife etc) but these are still developer led, not being built by councils. They’re cramming low quality houses in a tightly as possible, doing the bare minimum to meet regulations on things like sizes of rooms and solar panels (some new builds near me have two small solar panels inset into the roof, meaning that you’re not going to get much from them and there’s no ability to add more without completely redoing the roof) and then being put onto the already high market at a premium. The threshold for what counts as “affordable” is completely screwed up and we’re not replenishing our council housing stock properly (though right to buy is supposedly being scrapped, finally, which is a good move). So Labour have basically given housing developers the power to push through new developments on pretty much any land they want with no right of refusal to locals or even councils so they can put them onto a broken market with no hope of that ever driving prices down. It’s essentially state-endorsed participation for private companies profiteering in the tulip mania being sold as a chance for poor people to maybe get a bulb if they’re lucky,

Starmer has also proved himself to be a terrible politician. Farage and the right wing press constantly play him like a fiddle, dictating talking points and the narrative of the country. He is brittle and reacts terribly to criticism. He constantly comes across as a complete tool in PMQs and he is obsessed with shows of “strength” when dealing with dissent in his party – removing the whip from multiple MPs within weeks of getting elected over a minor revolt on the two child cap on tax benefits that he eventually lifted anyway – that are in reality total over-reactions that make him look fragile AF.

This comes with an authoritarian streak that surprises people who think his work as a lawyer was just human rights and ignore that he was director of public prosecution for years. His push for digital ID (which seems to be back again lately), the online safety act and the proscription of Palestine Action shows a contempt for personal liberty, privacy and freedom of expression. Rather than “review all UK arms sales and make us a force for international peace and justice” as he originally pledged, he has stamped out all dissent about our arms sales to Israel, who are engaged in a genocide and disingenuously frames all criticism of that as anti-Semitism. We have people who tried to sabotage an arms manufacturer’s facility, for which they were fairly convicted of criminal damage (and in one instance GBH) being sentenced as terrorists, despite this not being included in the charges, not being told to the jury that deliberated their case and kept from the media. We have defendants not able to present for parts of their own trial because witnesses are being allowed to present secret evidence that defence lawyers aren’t even allowed to tell their clients about.

The one thing his government seems to be actually focused on is eroding trans-rights. In the last few years, the UK has gone from the top of the most LGBT-friendly countries in Europe to 22nd. His government has pretty much revived section 28 (the law that prevented any positive acknowledgement of homosexuality in schools) but for trans-people and consistently failed to ban conversion “therapy”. Deaths of trans kids is sky-rocketing, due to both increased hostility and a health service that is now designed to intentionally fail and undermine them.

And that’s without getting into the nonsense with Mandelson and all the graft of freebies.

Ultimately, Starmer got the easiest landslide general election victory in history, it would have been impossible for him to not win that election. And yet two years in, the country is for the most part not better off for him being in charge. We’re not happier, healthier, wealthier or more secure.

Will any of the alternatives be better? Streeting won’t be, given he’s the architect of this trans-hostility and a Mandelson acolyte. Interesting that he’s saying the UK should rejoin the EU, because it seems a pretty transparent attempt to find a policy that might actually get people to like him. Rayner would probably be better, but is undermined by her tax snafu (even though she was cleared of intentional wrongdoing on that recently and I think it presents a good springboard from which to campaign for reform/simplification) and frankly general background misogyny and class prejudice. Burnham, might be better. He’s not as left wing as people are painting him, but he does seem to at least give a shit about people. Oh and Miliband… erm, don’t know really. He floundered quite a bit as leader last time, clearly letting himself be led around by advisors too much. But he’s seemed re-energised since that, so maybe he’d make a better go of it this time.

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Todd, Arjan Dirkse, Uncle Retrospective, Christian, lorcan_nagle, Dave

[Martin Smith]

Dave wrote:

Martin Smith wrote:

Not that I want to cheer on the further descent into chaos of the UK political scene, but it would be quite funny if Burnham lost his by-election and Streeting didn’t get enough supporters to enter the leadership challenge or went out in the first round.

I think there is a definite sense of voters being taken for granted when someone like Burnham gets dropped into a supposedly safe seat like this. As though his election as an MP is a foregone conclusion, regardless of the democratic process. For that reason alone it feels like it would be nice for him not to get an easy win.

I think with Burnham, the fact that this constituency that’s been vacated is within Greater Manchester makes the move less odious than it if it was Kent or something. And I don’t think the aspiration to go from GM mayor to PM is that bad. I mean, obviously, it is self-serving and opportunistic, any attempt to become PM is, but I think it can plausibly be sold as “I want to do more for this area as PM, do for the rest of the country what I’ve done here” etc. And there’s an argument to be made that these metro-mayors not having any position in parliament (and thus necessitating these shenanigans) is a flaw in the system to begin with. Not that being PM and a metro-mayor seems particularly compatible, but then I don’t reckon many PMs get chance to do much MP work for their constituencies either. They can do blunt force stuff – “no, I don’t think we will have that unpopular landfill site built in my constituency” etc – but it’s not like they’re out there helping Sharon from down the road stop getting exploited by her employer or pushing the council to fix some bad potholes on the council estate.

EDIT: Plus, the guy moving aside for Burnham is Josh Simons, who was behind getting a PR agency to investigate journalists that looked into his Labour Together think tank and then reported them to GCHQ for pro-Kremlin activities. So no great loss to parliament and democracy, frankly.

• This reply was modified 1 month, 4 weeks ago by Martin Smith.

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Uncle Retrospective, Todd, Dave

Martin Smith wrote:

Wes Streeting’s resigned, now let’s see if he can 81 (or however many it is) Labour MPs to publicly admit they want him to be PM.

I saw polling earlier, of the Labour membership, which suggests Starmer would lose to Burnham, Rayner or Ed Miliband, but beat Streeting.

Burnham’s now found a Labour MP with a safe seat in Manchester who will stand aside for him. He just has to hope that a) he wins the by-election (everyone will be gunning for him) and b) it happens before any leadership election.

Not that I want to cheer on the further descent into chaos of the UK political scene, but it would be quite funny if Burnham lost his by-election and Streeting didn’t get enough supporters to enter the leadership challenge or went out in the first round.

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Todd, Dave, Ben

Wes Streeting’s resigned, now let’s see if he can 81 (or however many it is) Labour MPs to publicly admit they want him to be PM.

I saw polling earlier, of the Labour membership, which suggests Starmer would lose to Burnham, Rayner or Ed Miliband, but beat Streeting.

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Dave, Todd

I’m currently reading Iron Man epic collection Age Of Innocence, which covers Timeslide, Teen Tony and Onslaught. I read the Teen Tony stuff in a different trade a few years ago and back then I thought it was better than its reputation. This time around, with the added context of Timeslide, well, it’s crap. But I still think it’s a concept with potential, a young version of a “great man” having to live in the shadow of his own achievements and failures. Unfortunately, Terry Kavanaugh doesn’t really manage that and none of the Timeslide stuff makes sense: the Avengers go back in time to get a young Tony Stark to defeat evil current Tony, for reasons never adequately explained. Teen Tony’s parents get killed and he ends up in the present/his future. He runs into, Meredith, the girlfriend he was with at the time and he continually refers to having disappeared on her for ten years, but there’s no way that can be the case, because Teen Tony is in a timeline where original Tony didn’t disappear into time, so from Meredith’s perspective they probably just broke up at some point. It’s also weird that Teen Tony’s just running around under his own name, doing his own thing, while adult Tony Stark has publicly died (yet hasn’t been revealed as Iron Man) and his company and armours are scavenged. Why is no-one having Teen Tony just be Tony and passing it off as some kind of time mix-up/reverse ageing experiment gone wrong? It’s the Marvel Universe, no-one would doubt that.

Anyway, all moot because it gets derailed after a few issues for Onslaught. I’m just at Marvel Universe: Onslaught now and, incredibly, in 25 years or so of reading American comics, this’ll be my first time reading it.

I did wonder though: if instead of the Image out-sourcing, Teen Tony and Waid’s Captain America and whatever else had been given a fair shake, would the MU have recovered as much as it did? Heroes Reborn (which I’ve also never read) is by all accounts not good, but it allowed for a hard reset of so many characters, a sweeping of away of so many crap 90s costumes (pouch-hemmed tank top Giant-Man, actual wasp Wasp, non-god Thor, alien armour War Machine) for something more traditional, mostly in Busiek’s Avengers. Without that, would they have recovered as well? Or would they have just kept throwing ever more wild shit at the wall to see what stuck, as the X-Men did in this period until Morrison revamped it?

Dave wrote:

Martin Smith wrote:

Would I need to have seen the first one to follow it?

I’m not sure how serious this question is, but no, not really. There are a few characters that return from that movie and a bit of backstory but it’s all recapped in this one.

There wasn’t even a fighting tournament in the first one – that happens in this one – so in retrospect the whole first movie feels like a glorified prologue for this one.

It does mean though that there isn’t much of Scorpion and Sub-Zero in this sequel as they were the focus of the first movie.

It was a serious question, though I realise it sounds a bit silly, as I’ve not seen the first but I understand it focused on some new character (Cole?) rather than the ones from the game.

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Dave

Would I need to have seen the first one to follow it?

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Dave

Oh, one more thing: that clipping BB opened of Ben writing about Fisk; that can’t have happened, surely? Fisk wasn’t outed as a crime boss before he killed Ben, was he? He killed Ben after Ben found his mother in the care home, which was when Fisk had outed himself as a philanthropist, but before the crime stuff was broken, IIRC.

I’d be disappointed if L&O is cancelled, but it’s really not as good as the original run. I watched a random episode of that recently (Everybody Loves Raymondo’s, I think it’s called) and every scene was dripping with wit and charm. The new one… not so much. And as much as I like Maura Tierney, I don’t think her lieutenant character works that well. They’re trying too hard to give her more to do than the squad commander usually gets and it just feels try hard. They should have just hired her as lead detective.

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Todd

That sure was a lot of stuff that happened.

Only thing I really found interesting was Heather’s unravelling mental state.

Hopefully that Punisher thing next week will be better, as will whatever it might be (if anything) that picks up with Luke and Jessica (and Danny?)

lorcan_nagle wrote:

Ben wrote:

Trump and Putin are going to die, and you can bet neither have any succession plans.

I know I keep saying it, but the satirical movie about the power vacuum after Trump dies we’re going to get in 20-30 years is going to be spectacular.

There’s definitely going to be a scene of his flunkies tearing off the shoes he makes them wear and putting on ones that fit, certainly.

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Todd, Ben, lorcan_nagle, Dave

[Martin Smith]

University of Sussex overturns £585,000 fine as high court rejects free speech breach claim.
The University of Sussex has overturned a £585,000 fine from England’s higher education watchdog after the high court rejected claims that the university breached free speech regulations in a case involving a former professor.

The ruling is a damaging blow to the credibility of the Office for Students as the court rejected the regulator’s lengthy investigation involving Kathleen Stock’s 2021 resignation, which came after protests over her views on transgender rights and gender identity.

Mrs Justice Lieven found that the regulator’s decision was biased towards punishing Sussex as an example to other universities.

Lieven wrote that the OfS’s final decision to fine the university a record £585,000 “was vitiated by bias because the OfS approached the decision with a closed mind and had therefore unlawfully predetermined the decision”.

The judgment also found that the OfS misapplied concepts of freedom of speech and academic freedom, exceeded its regulatory powers and refused to consider any changes made by Sussex or similar cases at other universities.

“The evidence supports a finding that the OfS had closed its mind to anything that would lead to not finding breaches and being unable to therefore sanction the university,” the ruling concluded.
…
The judgment was highly critical of Susan Lapworth, the OfS’s previous chief executive, saying she wanted to investigate Sussex to send a “strong signal” on freedom of speech to other universities, and that Lapworth’s “mindset from the outset appears to have been that she wished to use the university as a tool to incentivise the rest of the sector”.

…

The result also calls into question the role of Arif Ahmed, the former University of Cambridge philosopher who took over the investigation into Sussex as the OfS’s first director for freedom of speech and academic freedom.

The judgment referred to correspondence between Ahmed and Stock before Ahmed’s OfS appointment in 2023, with the pair exchanging compliments and criticising a non-binary US academic. It also showed that despite concerns about Ahmed’s potential conflict of interest, the OfS eventually enabled him to take a role in the investigation.

Lieven cleared Ahmed of influencing the final decision, saying: “The die had already been well cast by then.” But the judgment noted: “If Dr Ahmed had been the decision-maker I would in all probability have found that he had predetermined the decision by reason of having a closed mind.”

 

• This reply was modified 2 months, 2 weeks ago by Martin Smith.

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lorcan_nagle, Todd

The thing with the governor in this last episode summed up some of my problems with this season. Fisk needs the governor out of the way so he can have her compliant Lt Gov installed in her place. So instead of digging up dirt on her (admittedly they said she was too clean for this, but given she’s working with Shaggy from the CIA, that seems unlikely) or entrapping her in a compromising position as he did so much in s3 (like with Foggy’s brother the butcher) he just has someone go and kill her. It’s so… dumb, even if you take Fisk’s grief not making him think clearly and artfully, it’s just really fucking dumb.

Similarly, in the previous episode, why did Matt go to the mayor’s residence to confront Fisk. What was the point of that other than to set up a completely arbitrary fight scene?

I genuinely didn’t know Newsarama was still going. I’ve not heard anyone mention it in years.

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Dave, Todd

The single issue market is insane now. Surely it’s not in any way sustainable for much longer and they’ll need to switch to an OGN format?

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Todd

I’ve been increasingly underwhelmed by this season. It definitely hasn’t been as entertaining as the first. While there’s been some highlights – Swordsman was fun, especially his Reign of Terror commentary on his trial – it’s far less than the sum of its parts and feels like it doesn’t actually know how to escalate tension or stakes really. Matt and Karen just seem to be in a constant holding pattern, even when they’ve been doing stuff.

Jessica’s appearance this week was particularly limp. Given they put her in the promotional material before the series (which even trying to avoid things, I saw) I was expecting her to be more of a factor, part of Matt’s resistance movement (which the end of s1 really felt like it was setting up to be this big network and it’s really just Karen, Matt and occasionally someone else). But not turning up til episode 6 and then just doing a completely arbitrary fight scene? And her house arbitrarily attacked by a random CIA wetworks team for no fucking reason? What was the point? I can take or leave Jess having a kid now (it really doesn’t tally with MCU Jess, but I guess it’s been a while since we’ve seen her) but it seems like they had no idea how to actually use her in any meaningful way. Which is what this showrunner accused the original s1 team of doing to the Punisher, IIRC, and they rewrote those scenes. Maybe Jessica will prove more relevant to the plot in the next few episodes, but at this point I’d rather they hadn’t bothered.

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Todd

Porsche’s new Gen 4 Formula E car for next season (starts end of this year/beginning of the next). I think this is just a test livery – the dazzle pattern is a bit of cliche on that front and kinda pointless given the series has spec body work that all the teams get from the same supplier – but still, it looks gorgeous. Big improvement over the Gen 3 and almost as nice as the Gen 2. I hope Porsche stick with that shade of purple for one of their teams.

Gen 4 is a big opportunity for FE. The cars will have 600kW of power (over 350 on the current cars) which is about 800 brake horsepower, 0-60 in about 1.8 seconds and it should get up to about 200 mph. In a period where F1 has alienated a lot of people with its new ruleset, hopefully FE can capitalise. Probably not, given that electric power is being made the scapegoat for F1’s problems, so an all-electric series likely won’t appeal to people put off by it, I guess.

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Todd

I’ve been buying a lot of stuff from Japan recently. Mainly Beast Wars tat, video game stuff (GameCube controllers in Japanese exclusive colourways but also a complete copy of Kid Icarus for the Famicom Disk System. I do not have a FDS), but also blu-rays of the Ginger Rogers & Fred Astaire canon.

I first watched them all around 2012, when BBC filled the resultant void of putting all its kid programming only on the dedicated channels with old movies, and really loved them. Ginger Rogers especially is a brilliant comedic actress. Weirdly, of the 9 films Rogers and Astaire did together, the only one that’s had a blu-ray release in the West is Swing Time, in the Criterion Collection. I rented that a few years back and was surprised by how much I remembered being in it wasn’t. In Japan though, most of them have been release on blu-ray by IVC. I took a punt on getting one in my first proxy shopping shipment and it turned out to be region free, so I’ve scooped up most of the rest (can’t find a copy of Top Hat unfortunately and I might just get the Criterion release of Swing Time, as the restoration on these Japanese releases isn’t stellar).

I watched Shall We Dance last night, and turns out, all the stuff I’d thought was in Swing Time – the dance on roller-skates, Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off, Fred dancing with loads of women wearing creepy masks of Ginger – it’s in Shall We Dance. Which is fine, just a fluke of my poor memory. But it does make me question even more why Swing Time is the only one that got the nod from Criterion. It can’t be a rights issue, because all but one of them (which they did for MGM years after all the others) are in the RKO catalogue, so have the same ownership. So they must have purposefully picked Swing Time, even though it’s not the most famous (Top Hat), arguably not the best (Top Hat or Shall We Dance) and has a whole blackface dance routine they have to acknowledge. Or maybe that’s it. Maybe they picked it *because* of the blackface routine so they could do the commentary and special features about it.

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Todd, lorcan_nagle

Uncle Retrospective wrote:

Martin Smith wrote:

It’s almost like airing shows out of order is never a good idea or something.

I watched the first season when it aired and gave up because I had no idea what the fuck was going on.

What the fuck is wrong with these people?

You’d think that people who work in television, of all people, would understand the importance of being able to coherently follow a TV series, and yet…

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Uncle Retrospective, lorcan_nagle

I’ve started watching Don’t Trust The B In Apartment 23, which is a delight. Unfortunately, I got about halfway in in before I realised Disney+ has got the episodes out of order (they’ve gone with air date order and ABC showed them in a seemingly random order it seems). It completely messes up the running plot threads, the build up of relationships etc. I can see why anyone watching it at the time would have been thrown by that and how it could have led to its cancellation. You know, like it did for Firefly. It’s almost like airing shows out of order is never a good idea or something.

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lorcan_nagle, Uncle Retrospective, njerry

Arjan Dirkse wrote:

Argos is a radio show/ podcast in the Netherlands

Wow, that’s weird they branched out to that from the shops they have over here.

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Dave

Who is that Artemis Four pin-up by? I can’t make out the signature.

Dave wrote:

Karolina looks like she’s standing against her will.

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Todd, Dave, lorcan_nagle

https://www.channel4.com/press/news/channel-4-extends-its-reign-uk-home-taskmaster

Channel 4 has extended its deal for Taskmaster and, crucially, expanded its selection of international ones. NZ, Australia and Canada all to stream, including on the C4 youtube channel.

I had a set of the Narnia books as a kid, which I skimmed (I was terrible at reading as a kid) and there’s two bits from The Last Battle that stick with me: The dwarf that is in heaven with them all but thinks it’s trapped in a dungeon or something so can’t appreciate/acknowledge it, which even as kid I found kinda spitefully written. And then that because Susan got into *gasp* wearing lipstick she’s too much of slut to go to heaven with the rest of them. Which again, even as a kid I found dodgy..

Weird they’re printing that Kyle Rayner GL collection again. I don’t think they even bothered with the solicited v2 and 3 last time.

lorcan_nagle wrote:

Todd wrote:

Christian wrote:

I’m interested in this IQ drop issue,

A cognitive neuroscientist testified in front of US Congress, attesting to the fact that Generation Z (and Generation Alphas after them) are the first generations ever to decrease in cognitive abilities.

And it’s worth noting that in the US, this is by design.  The education system has been thoroughly sabotaged over the course of decades by the religious right

That and a very misguided approach to teaching kids how to read for decades.

Pakistan are apparently negotiating a ceasefire between the US and Iran at the moment (no mention of Israel in the reports I’ve seen, which seems like a big omission). And, honestly, the Iranians would be mad to agree to anything. There is practically no chance the Americans will stick to anything they say. Trump has already shown the worth of his word on all those “trade deals”, like the one with the UK, which suddenly became irrelevant the next time he had a tantrum and wanted to change tariff rates.

I’m no fan of the Iranian regime, but it’s hard to see how they’re really at fault for much of anything in this conflict. The Americans have achieved the impossible in making the Iranian government seem if not sympathetic then at least in the right. I kinda think the Iranians should just stick it out and wait for the Americans to crumble. Trump’s negotiating position is highly dubious.

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Todd, Ben, Christian

Christian wrote:

I’m interested in this IQ drop issue, so I’ve had Perplexity give me a quick overview

::sideways look at camera::

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Todd, Ben, Dave

Ben wrote:

£100k cap on political donations and Reform be squealing foul.

It’s as if Megatron went into politics, he who cares not for rights now pleads for them.

Another potentially really good bit of (lower case) reform is a public interest test for all contracts over £1m for public services, to see whether they’d be better served kept in-house rather than out-sourced. Which admittedly still might not do much if people just hand-wave through the test, but if applied properly, it could really cut down on the out-sourcing empires of the likes of Capita etc.

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Todd, Ben

Sean Robinson wrote:

Originally developed by Chinese alchemists in the 9th century who were trying to create an elixir of immortality, it was later discovered to be explosive.

The one thing they didn’t want it to cause!

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Sean Robinson, Todd

Todd wrote:

Tongue depressors and popsicle sticks become craft supplies

Right, but people still have lollies. And tongues.

I woke up today thinking about pipe cleaners (no, I don’t know why and I think it’s probably not even worth investigating). It took me years to realise they’re for cleaning tobacco pipes. Whenever they were used for crafts on Blue Peter or Smart or whatever, I assumed they were for cleaning pipe pipes, you know plumbing, which was confusing, because they’re far too small. I think I only made the smoking pipe connection while watching Bargain Hunt, where someone was showing off some pipes.

Anyway, what this led to me think about is how strange it is that an ancillary product that existed solely to service something else has ended up with an entire other life and purpose (as a staple of fair naff kids crafting items) while the main product is practically extinct. I’ve been trying to think of other examples of that, but am coming up blank. Anyone got any?

I wonder how much Hungary’s shithousery to Ukraine is affecting Orban/will be an element in the election.

I enjoyed s2e1.

lorcan_nagle wrote:

Huh.

You missed a few letters from your huzzah there, Lorcan.

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Todd, njerry

Wonder Man is getting a second season! Huzzah!

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Christian, Todd, Dave, Uncle Retrospective

Dave wrote:

It also feels like they haven’t really reworked the style of comedy for a British audience either,

Maybe it should be half an hour a week

So it should just be every other British sketch show ever made?

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Todd

Oh, I thought it was a screen cap of Andrea Martin from Great News at first glance.

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Sean Robinson

SNL UK launched last night and I thought it was pretty good actually. My main concern had been Weekend Update feeling a bit pointless given all the other topical comedy around in the UK, but by keeping it relatively short and also going quite dark and borderline bad taste, it actually felt valid.

The rest of the show was solid. A few wobbles, the usual SNL thing of not always knowing how to end a sketch, but it certainly wasn’t an embarrassment to the format or any kind of demonstration that the format won’t work over here. The fake ad was an all-timer, the cold open was pretty good political satire, Boovies Goes To The Films was good.

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Todd, njerry

I am getting increasingly hyped to see those “new” episodes of Dalek’s Masterplan at Easter (when even is Easter?!). I hope they haven’t screwed them up “restoring” them with AI though. The season 21 Collection blu-ray came out this weekend and that is apparently as badly afflicted as season 13, even though they said they’d “taken on feedback from the reception to 13” and adjusted it accordingly. I’m still vainly hoping it’ll be corrected before the standard edition releases (with replacement discs for everyone who bought the LE – sounds crazy I know, but they’ve just done that for season 20, which had some issue with juddering on certain players. Anyone with the LE can get replacements of pretty much every disc in the set, which are just the ones in the SE release).

The other three episodes comprise a brand-new box set (release date to be confirmed) in which the Tenth Doctor teams up with some of his other incarnations.

I wonder if one will be the 14th Doctor.

Huh. Well, I doubt anyone predicted that. Will it work though?

Curious as to how bad this must have been to not ever air.

Zhao seems a terrible choice for it though. Admittedly I’ve not seen her other work, but Eternals was dire and the MCU has, broadly, a very similar tone to Buffy, so if she couldn’t manage to work in that, I don’t see how she could have done Buffy successfully.

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Todd

Great news!

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lorcan_nagle, Dave

I’m actually getting somewhat optimistic about SNL UK. There’s some great people involved. Grainne Maguire and Humphrey Ker on the writing team, for instance.

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Todd

The UK version of the Floor ended last night and it was a final episode that rather highlighted the flaws in the premise.

The actual gameplay – two people naming things in pictures on a chess clock – is fine. Fun to play along with at home. And one duel last night, on US states, showed how good it can be when competitive. The winner only had two seconds left and I genuinely wondered if they were going to run out of states.

But that was one duel and a lot of the others showed the opposite end of the scale and how the show can struggle: when one or both people don’t know anything about a certain topic and have to muddle through. A key rule of game and quiz shows is that they’re not very fun to watch if the person playing is completely useless at them. (There are exceptions to that, of course: Taskmaster, House of Games.) That really is true of the Floor, especially when it’s a subject you’ve been looking forward to for the whole series. Formula One was on the board and finally came up last night, but played not by the person who brought it, but instead one guy who happened to know a lot about it and one guy who really did not. It’s not that fun watching a guy say “Damon Hill? Oh pass.” half a dozen times in a row having clearly given up the will to live. Even worse was a woman, who had dominated the last two episodes, defending on countries and not being able to recognise Canada and Brazil on a map.

This really came to a head in the end game. That is structured as best two out of three, on each of the subjects the contestants are holding and then a “neutral” third as a tie-break. Both contestants last night had inherited categories – cricketers and James Bond – and it became immediately clear that they’d given up on those and just wanted to go for the tie break. The guy with cricketers just didn’t even try on James Bond and passed his way through (and he really could have named some of them if he’d actually thought about it), while the woman struggled on cricketers for a bit, saying some random surnames a few times, before just giving up and doing the same.

So the whole series just came down to UK Tourist Attractions (which weirdly included 10 Downing Street, which I would argue is really not a tourist attraction, but heigh-ho), with the guy winning. “You’ve earned £50,000”, Rob Brydon told him, to which my reaction was, well, had he? Because he’d taken part in the second duel of the first episode and then fuck all til midway through the final episode. I mean he did a lot of great standing around! But ultimately he won largely from random chance rather than skill, which doesn’t really feel right. He gets £50k for winning three rounds, whereas other people did five times that and got, in some cases, nothing (or £5k an episode for having the most floor space). There were people who got to the final episode having literally done nothing. It made the whole thing feel somewhat arbitrary and chaotic, in a bad way. Less than the sum of its parts. The Risk-esque domination format is interesting, but flawed, given it repeatedly just ended up with the biggest area changing hands on a single round. The “name-the-picture” gameplay is fun, but doesn’t feel… weighty enough, I guess, to be what the tactical stuff turns on. Contestants bringing their own categories is a cool idea, but the way it’s structured means you’re too likely to end up with people who don’t know anything on one floundering entirely.

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paul f

It does look cool, although the head just makes me think it’s Grimlock. Isn’t it like £30 though?