Panto_Villan

Someone raised in another thread that it’d a really challenging place for the club to be - lots of strong teams in there, so you probably can’t get away with rotating the team like we did in the early stages of the conference. Yet the prize money is still far, far less than the champions league (and not that much more than the conference). I thought that was a good point. But yeah, it’s kinda amazing that the worst we can do this season is to show a major improvement on last season - which itself was one of the best seasons we’ve had in ages. It’s a hell of a safety net. It’s just a shame the money is so tilted towards the CL really.

That's not what most sources I've seen say, though. A couple of examples: CNN - "The United States has collected specific intelligence that suggests senior Iranian government officials were caught by surprise by Saturday’s bloody attack on Israel by Hamas, according to multiple sources familiar with the intelligence. The existence of the intelligence has cast doubt on the idea that Iran was directly involved in the planning, resourcing or approving of the operation, sources said." BBC - "The decision to attack, Mr Raz said, was taken "by Hamas, based on its own interests, arising from the Palestinian reality" (this article quotes a bunch of Israeli military figures and academics all saying basically the same thing) Obviously any discussion needs to acknowledge that Hamas benefits from Iranian weapons and training, but that's not the same thing as supporting the Hamas attack on Israel. And that makes sense when you think about it. Iran primarily want Hamas to exist as a deterrent; it's another front that Israel has to worry about if they want to take on Iran. Hamas launching an attack on Israel that isn't part of a wider Iranian plan just gives Israel the opportunity to isolate Hamas and wipe them out, removing an important Iranian piece from the chessboard.

You're assuming Hamas were doing everything under Iranian orders. But the various Iranian-aligned militias are proxies that Iran can influence but don't control directly, and the problem with proxies is that sometimes they do their own thing. I very much doubt the Hamas attack was greenlit by Iran as an attack on that scale doesn't actually serve their interests. You can see that with how Hezbollah acted immediately afterwards; instead of joining in an attack on Israel like you'd expect (and Hezbollah wanted to do), Iran was trying to restrain them. Obviously the leaders of Iran are monsters too. I'm not defending them. I'm just saying the region is a tinderbox right now and Israel is deliberately taking this opportunity to kick Iran in the face as many times as possible, because they'll win if Iran backs down and they'll win if Iran decide to fight back because America (and probably the rest of the West) will be forced to join in on their side. That's great for Israel and terrible for everyone else.

Let's be honest, Israel are the ones provoking all this at the moment. They know the Iranian government is struggling domestically, and doesn't want to pick a fight with Israel right now with all those US forces stationed offshore, so Israel are taking the opportunity to attack as many Iranian-aligned targets as they can in Syria and Lebanon. Including destroying an embassy, which was itself a pretty serious escalation. Of course Iran are going to retaliate. They can't let Israel walk all over them. Israel and Iran are like two boys on the schoolground who have been eyeing each other up warily for ages, throwing the odd jab and insult at each other, but they've both been too cautious to start a proper fight. But now Israel has come out swinging because he knows his big brother is in town.

I really wish I’d paid more attention in French at school now because I’d love to be able to read what they’d written on LilleTalk about last night. I bet even the most levelheaded Lille fan was either having an aneurism or just incoherent with rage. Do we have any French speakers who could get us a few choice quotes?

Chill out, it was just a friendly warning. You said you don't know much about the crypto game world, and I've worked in the games industry for almost twenty years - thought you (or anyone who reads this thread) might be interested in hearing the opinion of a professional before you potentially made an investment. If not then no worries. Just trying to give people the information they need to make their own decisios.

I mean, I take the wider point you're making, but we could still have ended up in exactly this position even if that 75% figure had been calculated with the utmost scientific precision (in fact, there'd be a 25% chance of it happening).

OK. I didn't realise you were a true believer in Bloomverse. Then just a quick warning from someone that has worked in the video games industry for a long time. The tech video that they have on their website is the sort of amateur stuff you'd expect to see from a two week student project - where I work if a new grad applying for a job had that in their showreel, they wouldn't be getting an interview. There have been crypto games with perfectly competent development teams, of course, but this doesn't look like one of them. There's literally one 3D artist and maybe 2 programmers? There's also fundamental problems with any crypto game that means they only appeal to players who are more interested in the crypto part than the game part - it's extremely hard to compete against mainstream games that don't have the same design constraints on making the player experience more enjoyable. So I'm not saying crypto games will never have any players at all, but it's a relatively small audience and development studios are very expensive to run. Please do let me know if their ICO raises more than $1m. I've seen big raises from the more capable teams, but I'm curious what a white paper and a low-grade tech demo can raise!

Yeah, it was great thanks. I hope you enjoyed watching this team and manager? I'd certainly like to watch them continue to play together in future seasons, but each to their own I suppose.

Yeah, I heard the commentator say that (I had no idea) - but Martinez looked puzzled about whether he was allowed to continue or not, so I was guessing he didn't know it either. I might be wrong though.

We could never replace Martinez. Even if we got another keeper as technically good as him, you'd need to search every looney bin in the country to find someone with that kind of personality. Getting sent off after one penalty is also completely on brand for him too, to be fair. Thank god there's some obscure reason why it doesn't count (I bet he didn't know that).

Jesus that was stressful. Absolute chaos at the end. Martinez has to be man of the match. Made it his personal mission to live rent free in the head of every Frenchman.

We could never replace Martinez.

A couple of really great chances created in extra time, their keeper did really well on both. Hopefully he's run out of heroics now. God I hate penalties.

Bloody hell that guy's head...

Yeah, I really hope we don't rue that Luiz miss.

Get in early to make a bit of money before it inevitably crashes and dies, right? As an actual video game that people want to play it's never going to succeed. I think it's fascinating so much of the altcoin scene revolves around projects that everyone knows are ultimately doomed to failure, where everyone is just trying to work out if any given project looks "real" enough that the price might rise for a bit and give them the opportunity to make some money at the expense of everyone else trying to do the same thing. It's really just gambling based on group psychology.

Feels like you've read waaay more into my post than was actually written, but whatever. Thanks for all the insults.

Yeah, Johnson is saying he’ll be calling a vote on the aid package on Saturday - really hope he holds his nerve and Trump doesn’t start demanding the vote be cancelled.

Obviously football is never this black and white - but yeah, I was absolutely sure that it was the only way we could qualify for the CL, I’d name a weakened team in the semi final or even the final. It’d be hugely disappointing in the short term but I think it’d pay off for the club in the long run. Also - I’m not sure it will necessarily be harder to compete in the league next season if we keep hold of our best players and can use the CL to attract a few upgrades. We’re a good team these days and presumably there’s a decent chance top 5 get CL next year as well.

Yeah, I agree. Hopefully we can have both. However there’s a lot of people talking hypotheticals in this thread about whether CL qualification or the Conference League is more important, and if I could only pick one then it’s not going to be the Conference League.

This isn't going to be a hugely popular opinion here, but I don't see the Conference League as a "proper" trophy worth derailing our progress for. I'll be delighted if we win it, but for me it's just not on the same level as the FA cup / premier league title / the Champions League as it's a competition that the top teams don't play in. Because of the strength of the PL whatever English team ends up playing there will probably be among the favourites to win it; I imagine we'll see a lot of PL teams winning it in the next few years. I also don't get the logic of anyone saying trophies are all that matter - I mean, if that's what you believe then why not get ourselves relegated so we can win the Championship trophy next season? Clearly the quality of the competition matters too. I wouldn't trade the club going backwards for the Conference League trophy, as there are bigger prizes out there and I think this team and manager have the potential to win one of them if we can keep them together.

What interest are you getting on the cash in your ISA? They frequently have pretty bad interest rates. If you're not getting a good return on it (3.5% upwards) then it'd be better to have the cash somewhere like the H&L Active Saver instead, as you'll get more interest and it'll probably cancel out any tax savings you'd make from the ISA. In general the advice is only to keep as much in cash as you need to cover yourself in emergencies (say 6 months of outgoings, in case you're unexpectedly made redundant etc) and then invest the rest in the stock market, usually a low-cost tracker fund that tracks the world index (e.g. the MSCI World Index or something similar). The interest earned on cash generally doesn't exceed inflation, so in most cases you're actually losing a small amount of money each year by holding cash. If you're approaching retirement or some event where you'll want to spend your savings and you want to reduce the risk of a stock market crash damaging your savings, you should shift some of the stock money into bonds instead, as they will return less money but will drop in value less if there's a recession. Of course, this is long term savings advice. If you're only planning to keep your investments for a few years then it's difficult to give any advice - all assets are kinda overvalued at the moment and there could be a big crash round the corner at any moment, in which case holding cash is smart. But people have been saying that for literally a decade now, and the stock market has kept going up.

Benteke is still in my top 3 favourite players I've seen playing for Villa, but I think we've officially reached the point I wouldn't trade peak Watkins for peak Benteke. Benteke was phenomenal, but where we are now I feel like Watkins would get into this team ahead of Benteke. Sure, Benteke would have been more exciting to watch, and better when we were fighting relegation or needing moments of magic under Stevie G, but the skillset needed to play up top in a team fighting for the top 4 is different. I think we underestimate Watkins a bit sometimes because at first he felt like he was here for his athleticism rather than his skills, and first impressions tend to stick. But the progress he's made has been incredible. The thought of a Villa player winning the golden boot would be pure insanity even a couple of years ago.

Yeah, but then their proxies have proved very effective as the recent wars between Israel / Hezbollah and Houthi / entire Arab world have proved. The best Iranian troops are Republican Guard, not their conventional military. Israel is too strong to be conquered militarily (especially if the US is backing them up) but Iran and it’s proxies still pose plenty of threat, even if we were somehow capable of shutting down their nuclear program once war kicked off. Not really a war anyone wants to fight.