Straggler

Thanks for the advice guys, really helpful stuff. Terraria and Overcooked are looking the prime candidates at the moment. I'll let you know what the kids think. (possibly little big planet if the budget will stretch)

I''m looking for local co op games for my kids. It seems that the choices are really rather limited. They don't do shooters particularly and are a bit young for the more realistic racing games. I was hoping for something like micro machines for them, but that hasn't been around since PS3. they already have Trials Fusion and a bunch of lego games, I just want something to freshen up the portfolio to prevent them playing the same old thing time after time. (they also have minecraft which they enjoy). Any advice most welcome and if it can manage 4 players all the better thanks

It was me who wrote the little snippet about my natural reaction being to blame Westwood. you may want to read the rest of the post before you use it in support of this argument though... I go on to say that why that reaction isn't reasonable.

I decided to keep going on my career mode with Wycombe. I managed to get promoted into the Championship without getting fired for not hitting the financial goals. It is getting quite tricky to grow the club as it is currently worth 142 trillion quid. I kid you not. I'm impressed EA even thought to put trillions in as a possibility. Anyway in the Championship I have been asked to grow the club worth by 10%. 14.2 trillion is roughly 7 times the GDP of the UK which, I'm imagining, will be tough without being in the Prem. That said I am already on over 3 million in shirt sales, so I guess ... baby steps. How exactly Wycombe became the worlds largest economy I'm not too sure, but FFP rules must be tighter than I thought as the board gave me no budget at all for transfers and are insisting that I invest in youth to improve the squad. 142 Trillion in the bank and no money to spend. Doug Ellis must be back in charge.

Thanks Bof. Your kind words and obvious generosity of soul have calmed the beast raging within me. I have simply decided to never eat anything in a can that doesn't have a ring pull or similar non can opener requiring opening facility ever, EVER again and thrown the can opener away. Obviously I can't just chuck it in the bin for fear of spearing or slashing open the poor bin man who comes to pick it up. It is more sea urchin or throwing star in it's current form so I have secured it in a cardboard box and labeled it as hazardous waste. Speaking of which, what gives with tuna manufacturers? Not satisfied with killing off dolphins why do they get let off joining the 21st Century and putting bloomin ring pulls on their cans? What's up John West, ring pulls to good for you!? and in other news, my son came home from school today with an invitation for the family to go to the schools Christmas fair. But they didn't call it a Christmas fair, they called it Decemberfest. WTF is Decemberfest? Unless they have appropriated Octoberfest from Germany and are providing a beer tent with comically large beer jugs and sticking it in December I'm gonna be pissed off. Given that it is a primary school I doubt it is the case. Maybe they have gone full pagan and we will be dancing round a massive bonfire in animal skins, if that happens I'm cool with Decemberfest, but if they have taken one of this countries most sacred religious figures (Santa) and cheapened him with this tawdry PC gone mad nonsense I'm gonna go mental. I already have to call opal fruits sodding starbursts, Top Gear the Grand Tour and Donald Trump President, now we have Decemberfest. I'm too old for this poop. (I may also not be as calm as I may have suggested in my first sentence).

Oh FFS, muther funstering blister packs or clam-shell packaging or whatever the name is for the hard plastic product covering designed by the devil in the depths of hell and sent to suffocate the joy out of any purchase. It's not like it is even an expensive purchase, to my mind it needed precisely no packaging, but no, I have to knacker a pair of scissors to get into it, slash may hand open on the now razor sharp edges, walk away for a bit to calm down then I had a brain wave. I'll youtube it, there are bound to be "life hacks" (which also pisses me off, they are not f'ing hacks, they are just helpful tips, but right now EVERYTHING is pissing me off cos of that damn packaging). Anyway youtube says to use a can opener to get into one of these Fort Knox bastards, which is sodding poetic because inside the fricking 7th circle of hell that is this transparent force field of doom and lacerated fingers is my new bloody can opener. F this in the A.

My fav signing from the summer. Really like Adomah.

How did I forget this one?

Match day was the start of a gaming habit that has lasted a life time. the art of going diagonally still serves me pretty well in modern football games to this day.

I agree with so many of the games mentioned here that I shan't repeat them all, but I will add three that my inner child is still thrilled about. Match day - Spectrum ZX Gauntlet - Atari ST Double Dragon -

Exactly, those 2 extra years makes all the difference.

http://tinyurl.com/hz9rp3g History Tells Us What Will Happen Next With Brexit And Trump This chap saved me writing a longer post

I love history, although this discussion does rather put pay to the common misconception that hindsight is 20/20. If hindsight was 100% accurate all historians would agree on everything. TBF I agree with much of what you have written about. I very nearly put a comparison of post war Germany and present day USA in my last post for the sake of context. I think if I was saying that the rise of Trump the rise of Hitler are the same and will lead to the same result it would be a massive stretch. However I think I could write a pretty interesting (to me anyway) dissertation comparing the two and I could do it in a way that has a basis in fact, without hyperbole and without being ludicrous. I wouldn't like to second guess my conclusions without doing the research fully first, I know almost nothing about Donald Trump outside what I have seen in this election whereas I've read chapter and verse on Hitler. 2 small bones of contention. That there could be no equivalent of the brownshirts in the US is a prediction of the future presented as a fact. The greatest document ever written in the English Language is not the US constitution. I prefer Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

I am a historian. Got my BA and everything. If I was looking at Trump as a neo-fascist I would suggest that he has no intention of trying to disarm anyone. His core support is the gun toting, open carrying 2nd amendment crowd. However if you are looking for a group of people to turn into a militia to help weed out "enemies of the state" like Muslims and help round up groups that do not fit the new image of the USA then you could do worse than start with these folks. To use Hitler as a classic example of a Fascist ruler, the first thing he did was shore up his support in those of German descent (the Aryans if you will). He then used that support as the will of the people to weed out opposition as unpatriotic and then beyond that drove division between the good Germans (his supporters) and the enemies of Germany (Jews). The process of law became subverted to serve only Hitler and his party rather than an independent body and all of this was done with the support of the electorate. By the time anyone woke up to what was happening, the state and Hitler had a vice like grip on the media, the judiciary and the military. He had also encouraged his own support to brutally put down using violence any opposition voice. Proper opposition was unable to form for fear of or the actuality of internment or violence. A modern day Fascist would be mental to disarm the average gun carrying citizen, they would almost certainly start by bringing them into the fold and pointing at a common enemy for them to unite against. Hitler did not come to power through a coup or a revolution (although to be fair he did try the former). Hitler was elected and much of what happened following his election can be described as the democratic will of the German people. It certainly was not the domination of the German people through military might. I could pretty easily draw lines between how Hitler came to power and how Trump got elected, but I have been facepalming enough this morning and don't need to do it anymore.

So is this day 1 or do we have to wait a few more days before the11 million or so undocumented migrants are deported?

I think you would get on really well with my wife. I don't agree with her either, but then I lose most of my arguments at home. She was saying months ago that Trump would win because she has not faith in the humanity of people in general.

I agree with you Awol. The status quo is not satisfactory, but my concern is that in order to give the establishment a kicking we are turning to the nationalist movement to provide it. There is no credible opposition to either of these positions that represents me. In my mind we are going from bad to worse. There needs to be another option which can offer fairness to the disenfranchised, but does not rely on demonising others. Granted adding my voice into the mix is like peeing in the ocean and expecting it to change colour, but I can't just sit and do nothing.

The results of this election and the Brexit vote have really begun to shift my opinion on humanity as a whole. I've had the good fortune to travel round a lot of the world and found kindness and good people everywhere I went. Living abroad too gave me a real sensation that in the main people are generous and fair minded. The world as it stands today feels more like the below the line comments on a Youtube video being expressed out loud. All those keyboard warriors that I had always thought were not serious and would not dream of saying what they write in a real conversation IRL, or were such a minority suddenly had a voice just like theirs running for president of the USA. It turns out that there are enough people who either agree with these sentiments, or are at least prepared to ignore them, to make him president. I totally get the idea that the little guy is getting a raw deal at the moment. Big business and lobbying groups are using the world as their personal playground forcing the rest of us to clean up the mess they leave and pay for the services they use but refuse to contribute towards. I know how it feels because I am one of the little guys with no power and no representation of what I want in the corridors of power. I pay my taxes, I worry about my mortgage, I worry about my bills and as the economy tanks, the share price of my employer drops away I worry about my job as I see people getting laid off all around me. The Liberals in the UK represent as closely as any party do what I want to see from my representatives and I can't stand them either (the sniveling performance as part of the last coalition has turned me right off them) But to get from not liking how things are today to voting for the hate fueled rhetoric of the likes of Trump and Farage boggles my mind. Yes they represent something different, but aside from that wtf have they got to offer? Trump is a liar. He was trotting along at north of 80% of what he was saying as untrue in the debates. If you are fed up of being lied to by an elite who are divorced from your day to day struggles why vote for a proven liar who has spent most of his adult life trampling on the little guy. FFS one of his only coherent policies was to lower the taxes on the most wealthy and to reduce inheritance tax. That aint about to make it better for the guys working out in average joes gym. Yes I want things to change, but to vote for Trump on the basis of what he has said is turkey voting for christmas time. This upswell of dissatisfaction could have been used for so much good. We could be bringing the banks into line so they are not able to mortgage our futures for their own short term profits, we could have been taxing multinational corporations properly, we could have been reforming the EU to make it more accountable and less bureaucratic, but here we are, getting shafted by big business the same as ever and blaming global problems on people that don't look like us. I'm a little bit sickened by the whole thing. The bottom line is that I really don't like the way things are headed and I don't in any way feel represented by any of the main political parties. My solution is that I'm getting involved. I have campaigned before, but got so disenchanted with the political system that I didn't feel that any of them deserved my support. I'm now so disgusted and worried that I will have to hold my nose and do what I can. As an aside to the idea of getting involved I would like to point out that I don't agree with Brexit. The idea of going out in public and saying so at the moment is really very intimidating thanks to the spiteful atmosphere that some of the newspapers and generating at the moment. I now live in a country where I am worried that I will be discussed as an enemy of the people and of democracy for expressing a personally held view that a decent chunk of the population agrees with. It is however partly for that reason that I feel I have to say it before my right to goes away.

Oh for the love of god. If we have learned anything from the Snowdon leaks it's that the secret services collect and mine colossal amounts of data. They would check for duplicates of what they have already seen first (automated process will take a couple of minutes including the time it takes to boot up whatever software they are using). They then search for keywords and phrases that are characteristic of classified information which will reduce it down again. Using these methods they will be able to narrow it down to a small enough set for a single person to read any possible pertinent emails in a day or so. They have probably spent much of the last 8 days watching cat videos for it to have taken as long as it has. General Flynn is either horribly out of touch or deliberately misrepresenting the truth. My bet is on the latter. It is so disheartening this electoral process, almost nothing the Republicans say can stand up to any scrutiny whatsoever, yet they manage to carry on spreading such palpable bullshit with apparent conviction and with no consequences.

43-57 in Blackburn's favor

I would like to see use embed some decent technology into the fabric of the stadium. Levi Stadium in the states (the home of the 49's) has a really nice integration of wireless with enough bandwidth to service everyone in the ground and an app that helps you find your way around the ground whether that is to hotdogs or bathrooms. It also has the capacity for you to order food and drinks from your seat and have it brought to you. Also with the future of VR and augmented reality there are really exciting ways of having your phone enhance what you are seeing infront of you or further in the future, graphic overlays and stats displayed on the eyeware of your choice. Whatever technologies we may want as consumers to use it all starts by enabling everyone to be connected with sufficient speed inside the stadium. It would be a big miss to do all the redevelopment and not take into account the sort of enhancements these sorts of technologies can bring.

I think it is quaint that we have sent 800 troops and 2 tanks to stop the Ruskies. Unless we are defending the "hot gates" the numbers seem a little light.

He also played in the midfield 3 against Newcastle when Adomah was playing as wing back. Bacuna was awful that day too. That said in the first half there didn't seem to be a single player who knew what they were supposed to be doing. That was the infamous game of the 3 centre backs at home and was a bit of a shocker all round. I can handle him being 5th choice midfielder and 3rd choice for right back, but I don't rate him any better than that. Sadly I'd have all but one of our midfielders as 5th choice so it is a bit of a Hobsons choice who you pick.

Czechlad, I got rid of the lot of them. Mostly because I can hold a grudge but partly because I wanted to sign Renato Sanches. I'm bringing through a bunch of youth players but they need supplementing with a better player and for me Sanches is the man. He has been amazing for me. I also got Rashford to go upfront as I accepted 25 million for Ayew and had to replace him. Rashford cost me 12 million . Everything else I'm doing by bringing in youth which is working everywhere other than defence. Got quality wingers for days.

Found another little annoyance in career manager mode. In my youth squad I have players demanding a contract but when I try and offer them one they ask for a zero year contract length. The lowest I can offer is a year and they reject it as too long, but still ask to keep negotiating. It does make it tough to hit those youth development targets.