Chindie

That wasn't trolling.

Nobody will ever say 'Corn Nuts - Corn to the Core' with such conviction. He'll be a loss. Rogan will walk away soon enough too. He's already dropped how many events he covers. And I doubt the new money behind the UFC likes him or his views much.

Some veteran or humanitarian will have died I'm sure, somewhere.

Further to the Hobbit talk.. **** hell is that Necromancer stuff shit, particularly in the third movie. It's just plain bad. And then they make it worse with Blanchett's weirdly bad Galadriel doubling down on being really shit. It's actually an achievement in how bad it is. Smaug is the best thing in the trilogy.

I'm no audiophile or hi-fi fanatic (I easily could be, but that way lies bankruptcy), but I'm surprised a UHD Blu-ray player would be the first port of call to replace a CD player.

I was lucky enough to get Watchdogs 2 for Christmas. For a game that's had as much praise as it has, I'm quite surprised by it. I just don't like it very much. It's a quite poor open world title with a gimmick that I don't ever feel comfortable with. And every mission is the same. Drive to place, Batman vision stuff to hack to get in, press Y, leave. It appears to have been praised entirely on a knowing online media style, and not being Watchdogs 1. On the plus side, I also have Dishonored 2 and Deus Ex Mankind Divided to have a crack at, and I bought myself Superhot and Hitman to enjoy in the coming weeks...

I suspect there are actually quite a few who regret it. But it's such a taboo they never say. I'd certainly regret it if I bred a serial killer, or just ended up with a real shit of a child, but I also reckon there's a decent number of parents who would quite like to roll the dice again and see what became of them if little Jimmy wasn't around. I used to work with someone who I always felt somewhat resented having kids. They didn't outright say anything but you could just tell that the kids were not a highlight of their life and were largely a burden. Other colleagues would have the glowing conversations of what little Jon and Jane got upto this weekend and this particular colleague had to be drawn on the topic and then quickly wanted to talk about something else, and when they did mention them it always was in terms of how they had got in the way of doing other things and so on. I'm sure they were a perfectly good parent and I'm sure their partner saw things differently, but I always felt like they kinda begrudgingly agreed to the kids thing for their partners sake rather than their own joy. I honestly don't think the 'oh you don't understand until you have them' and 'they're your world and that's great' thing helps.

You're playing up your 'mischievous' posting style and getting bites would be my take. I'm just making a mischievous comment

Feeling loss isn't cool and manly enough clearly

Kalinic was not at all good at Blackburn.

You've said yourself you felt sad when Cash and Peel went. You know the feeling. People feel loss differently. I don't think there will be many people today sat there absolutely distraught that Fisher is dead, but millions will have a sadness, perhaps only slight, that she's gone and the work we have is all there will ever be now.

He can be both Satan and a bell toll of problems to come. And whilst he may not have been in office when he said those words, it's a fairly standard human methodology of looking at the past to understand the future. The man said those words, he's now in a position to actually exploit them and use that viewpoint to influence real world positions. Maybe he will maybe he won't, but I'd feel happier with someone there who hadn't said those words, and I'd surprised if staunch Leavers felt different.

I think is bizarre that people seem unable to understand that figures that directly impacted a person's life gives them a feeling of grief. Of course a great many people died this year who did 'things that mattered', who saved lives, tried to improve the world, whatever. But those people are not usually people that the masses (and certainly in the West) were touched by. Did some veteran do more for humanity than Carrie Fisher? Absolutely. But Carrie Fisher touched more people, even if that touch was frippery of life. The are hundreds of millions of people for whom Star Wars was a great moment of their childhood, and provided them with joy, and she was a pinnacle of that. It's not a surprise people are affected by her loss, whilst they ignore to some poor old bloke who was at Dunkirk with a hundred thousand others. I'm not that bothered by Carrie Fishers death, or a great many other celebrities that popped their clogs this year. But I can empathise. When my dad died last year, and I was just a day or so later starting to understand what the world now looked like, Terry Pratchett died. I had read Pratchett's work since I was about 8, and reread them over and over in the years since, devouring new books at launch, finding joy in every word. Even in the shadow of losing my dad, just a day or so before, I felt the grief of Pratchett going. I'd never met him. But his work was a cornerstone of my world I guess. And it hurt, even with the pain already there of losing my dad.

In fairness I look forward to the next Leave voter posting the latest bad news... I don't think it'll happen. And King's comments weren't really anything new. We've heard 'there'll be pain but there can be opportunity' countless times. You'd be fool to say he's wrong, or the others that said as much, the issue is rather more how painful it'll be, how long it'll be painful for, and how things are afterwards in light of any opportunities.

I remember the calls for Bradley here. Destined to be a failure.

You're not far from where I am I think. I'm actually in the middle of a rewatch of the extended editions as we speak. I like some of the design, Smaug isn't the Smaug that's been in my brain for 20 years but it isn't a bad take at all, a lot of the environments are pretty good, but the dwarves are too happy caricature of the dwarves we already had, ask the orcs look downright bad bar maybe Azog, maybe, the Goblin King is a disgrace... Also I think doing a 2 part movie you break at the barrel ride. Bin the Necromancer stuff (it's done so badly it's no loss, even though it should have been a brilliant tie between the series), bin the family friendly additions that Jackson padded everything with, and you have a nice 2 part, 6 hour framework of a good movie with a natural break.

I adore LOTR. I love the books, I love the Hobbit. The LOTR adaptations aren't perfect, but they are great movies. The Hobbit trilogy I like more than many but it's a far far worse group of movies than LOTR. They started making it without finished scripts and basically winged it. And you can tell. Jackson used it as a platform to experiment, making a series of movies he didn't really want to make to do something he did want to do, play with technical advancement in cinema. And that didn't work either. The first movie is too slow and too knowing in its humour that betrays is quaint origins, as well as being too indulgent. The second is better but still takes things slightly too far, and has that utterly bizarre GoPro footage and stupid ending. And the third is an afterthought that didn't understand the best parts of that story's end and somehow managed to take a really cool part of the extended story and do simultaneously nothing with it, and absolute shit with it too. The look is wrong all through it, the CGI isn't bad but the design is, the CGI orcs don't stand up to the practical effects but it's the designs that hurt the movie. They aren't good. And that is true of the entire series. They've tried to tone down the world they made with LOTR to suit a younger audience, but maintain that relationship between them, so you get this weird midway point that didn't work. I still like the films for what they are, but they're such a disappointment in light of the earlier films and, frankly, what the book offers. There is a spectacular 2 part movie in the Hobbit. It isn't what Jackson have us. The series also stands out as having one of the most obvious commercially minded edits in cinema history between the 2nd and 3rd films. If they ended the 2nd movie where they really should have, they worried nobody would watch the 3rd. So they chopped 10 mins and hastily added it to the start of the 3rd, where it sits exceptionally awkwardly. Had they not got greedy, the book breaks into 2 quite cleanly, but they wanted 3 and overindulged. Appropriately, it's messy.

Remember the £350m bus? And how everyone who knew anything, even the people riding around in the bus (including Farage, who actually told the Leave campaign it was too obviously not true to use it's been suggested), knew the figure was complete horseshit? They've doubled down! We actually will save £450m a week! The Grauniad There are times where you ask yourself, in this order, am I dreaming, or is it April 1st? Bearing in mind Fox already said we weren't going to have a bonfire of the regulations, and London can't afford to have the same if it fancies offering financial services to Europe again... Also, yay! More friendly Brexit branding. I await fluffy cuddly shiny happy Brexit.

On a forum which has often specialised in reaches for metaphors, that's one helluva reach. And seems utterly utterly useless with it.

Free speech means he can say whatever he likes (putting aside that we don't arguably have it in this country, quite). It also means everyone else can point at him and point out how much of an oxygen stealing word removed he is. And everyone else who thinks the same.

The latest episode is the best they've done so far, largely because of the Ford v Ferrari section, which was genuinely good. The studio stuff is mostly shit, the celebrity thing absolutely embarrassing, and the scripted comedy stuff is the worst they've done which takes some doing.

He's so fast he can basically do anything. As kurtsimonw says he can time travel, and being that fast pretty much defeats anything, so they have to find ways to neuter him or the story is very short.

I don't think overuse is the problem. It's the movies they use him in. If Warner can pump out good Batman movies they'll keep making money, he's a character that has been universally popular for over 70 years and only had wobbles when they upped the camp factor. And there's no other superhero with so many acclaimed stories they could just do straight adaptations of. BvS is not a good movie but, accepting that it's a non-traditional take on the character, given how murderous he is in it, Batman's the best part of it. They're positioning him as their Tony Stark in their series, the tent pole figure the rest hangs off for a while. If they make that work, they can bang out films and he'll be cool. I actually kind of think Nolan's series made the character popular again despite Batman, really. Nolan's take is quite a dull version, not really being much like the character in the comics, and his great movie, the Dark Knight, hangs off a spectacular performance of a very different take on the Joker. I actually think the foundation is there now for Warner Bros to make a really good comic accurate Batman, they just really need some good scripts to make the most of it. Unfortunately Snyder's best work is when he just has to copy a singular work (300, Watchmen) and Justice League is going to need him to work from scripts, like BvS, and that didn't work.

I dunno. Justice League could be alright. Depends on what they actually end up doing with it. That they stated it as a 2 parter and changed very late on is a worry, Steppenwolf as a villain is a worry (Darkseid must be in it, right?), Cyborg... But if they don't go too dark and don't get too invested in trying to make it more than an action blockbuster or try to pack it with too many iconic stories it might be ok. There's a decent movie in BvS, it's just buried under rubbish. Justice League might wash some of the nonsense away. Maybe. Wonder Woman has decent early talk and has done for a while, the only dissenting voice being a disgruntled ex-Warner employee. I don't think it'll be a classic but it might be alright. Aquaman just won't work. Underwater scenes for most of a film? A pretty rubbish hero? Nah. Sirens will probably be naff.

Rumour has it there will be another Justice League trailer soon, and this new photo came out the other day. Not quite the Trinity, but that sure looks like a Snyder movie. Not sure about that Batsuit, he looks better when there's some contrast in the suit than the all black, especially in a more comic inspired style they've gone for. That Flash suit is plain dumb the more you look at it. And like every story featuring the Flash, it'll try to do something to hamper his power because he's basically so ludicrously powerful there's nothing that can't be overcome by him. Also, David Ayer is signed up to direct Gotham City Sirens. Which totally isn't a female lead Suicide Squad. A team up movie of the main female Batman villains - Harley Quinn (shock horror), Catwoman and Poison Ivy - seemingly Warner Bros have decided they can outmanoeuvre Marvel on female lead films starting with Wonder Woman, and this has been fast tracked into production. And Patrick Wilson has been hired as the villain for Aquaman. He'll play Orm, the Oceanmaster. If that film is good I'll be gobsmacked.