dug

Been watching this over the last couple of weeks, onto series 3 now. It's fantastic! Absolutely loving it, one of the best things I've seen in ages.

Snap! Wordle 208 6/6

This Is Going To Hurt - Adam Kay A memoir of a junior doctor in the NHS. Taken from his diary, so essentially a series of anecdotes in chronological order, from his qualification and initial postings, through his years of (over)work as a obstetrics and gynecology surgeon, to his eventual resignation. Kay has a great writing style, clear and to the point with a sense of humour both sharp and dry. Many of his stories are very funny, proper belly laughs from me. Insertions of foreign objects into bodily orifices are usually good for a chuckle. Some stories are wince-inducingly painful. The one about the will stay with me forever. Fucking ouch. A couple of them are absolutely tragic. I teared up reading them and had to stop and do something else for a bit to take my mind off them. The overall feeling at the end though is anger at what the governments of the last forty years have done to the NHS, the crowning achievement of postwar Britain, cutting budgets and cutting services and cutting staff, all for the purpose of making a bit of wedge. Fucking vandals. I know it's such a cliche to say that it'll make you laugh and it'll make you cry, but in the case of this book it's true. Absolutely brilliant. Essential reading. Should We Stay Or Should We Go? - Lionel Shriver Ugh. I've never read anything by her before, and after this, I won't bother reading anything else. It's an interesting enough conceit: a middle aged married couple make a pact with each other that they will both commit suicide when they're 80, so as not to cause an unnecessary strain on society. Why should the NHS spend money keeping a couple of unproductive old codgers alive, blocking beds from being used by younger people who may need them? That's the set up, then each chapter is an alternative scenario on how their plan actually plays out. They start off pretty humdrum but get more outlandish as the book goes along. In and of itself this isn't a bad thing. A good writer could do well with this idea. But Shriver is not a good writer. Her prose is pretty lumpen. Functional but unmemorable. Even though I read the whole book in the last two days, the only passage of prose that even vaguely sticks in my mind is a bit about how they kissed and the force of the kiss resonated through the entirety of their married lives, something something something like a drum. And the only reason it does stick in my mind is that the exact same passage is used in like five or six of the twelve chapters. And her dialogue is fucking godawful. The two main characters just do not speak like human beings, they speak like newspaper columns on whatever topic Shriver feels like banging on about. Has she always been an awful right wing ghoul? Because the overall tone of this book is Daily Mail as fuck. One of the main characters is a socialist, frequently espousing pro-NHS, pro-EU, pro-taxation, anti-Tory views, but when he nears death and is really honest with how he really feels deep down, he never really believed in socialism, he just claimed to to gain moral standing. There isn't an emoji big enough. She also puts in quite a lot of "it turns out Brexit was fine, actually" in her projections into the future. And there is fucking loads of "the covid lockdowns were an unnecessary fuss over nothing." I haven't looked this up but I bet she's an anti-masker. But the crowning turd on the shit heap is the astonishingly racist chapter where Britain ends up being "swamped" by millions of ""asylum seekers"" (double quote marks there because I'm quoting her quote marks) who all have brown skin and no speekee da English good, and overburden the economy to the point of complete societal collapse. Oh, and some of the ""asylum seekers"" team up with Extinction Rebellion to form an anarchist terrorist group who go round blowing up the houses of parliament and destroying works of art and demolishing museums and whatever else Shriver thinks lefties hate. It's so fucking on the nose about what a Daily Mail reader's worst nightmares of the future would be that at first I took it to be parody. But then I looked it up and no, Shriver is in fact just completely anti-immigration. She's a shit person and a shit writer. Avoid this utter garbage.

Fffuuuuuuu. My first failure, after 16 goes.

That's definitely a factor. It was very handy to be able to push the stick forward and know that you're pushing it exactly forward. Unlike the switch controller where it turns out you're actually pushing the stick very slightly to the right of exactly forward. Although I need to have another go when not drunk. It's possible my alcohol consumption the other night may have been another factor in my crapness. *Cough*

I bought this for my switch after having a sudden pang for some monkeyball, and not feeling like digging the GameCube out of the cupboard. Actually, I don't think I could even plug the GameCube into my telly without some sort of adapter. Anyway, downloaded it and it feels like shit. I know I'm in my 40s now, and can't expect to have the same reactions as I did in my 20s, but.... I'm pretty sure the controller doesn't feel the same. Can anyone confirm? Is there some actual qualitative difference between a GameCube controller in 2001 (or whenever Super Monkey Ball came out) and a Switch Pro controller in 2022? Or the way those versions of the software reacted with the controllers on their respective consoles, anyway. You know what I mean. My essential question is: are the controls different, or am I just an old, shit cunt?

No, you never gain the ability to dash through purple lasers. Or at least I never did. I guess either there's a way of turning them off, or there's another route around the lasers to get to your goodies. Although, having said that, I did have multiple instances of items spawning in inaccessible places during my many runs. Only ever unimportant things like health pickups or obolites though.

Despite my whingeing and moaning earlier in the thread, I have continued to watch series 2, roughly an episode a day. I lol'd when 'Dan of steel' announced himself.

It looks like my Sandman deluxe or absolute edition decision has been made for me by factors outside my control! My incredible wife got me Absolute Watchmen for Christmas, and it's gorgeous. The artwork looks the best I've ever seen it. So, easy decision then, right? Absolute Sandman all the way? Problem is, it doesn't fit on my shelf. I have a whole shelving unit dedicated to comics and graphic novels; doesn't bloody fit on any of the shelves. Looks like I'm going deluxe for sandman then

I'm glad I'm not the only one! It seems everyone else loves it. I mean, I get the appeal of camp nonsense, but it's the same camp nonsense every episode. I won't bang on about it though. All you lovers carry on loving.

Ok I've tried. I just don't get the appeal. I watched the first series, and aside from a couple of amusingly bonkers moments, it was pretty dull. But everyone said stick with it, the second series is when it gets really good. So I've watched the first 7 or 8 episodes of series two and it's a big fat meh from me. Every episode is the same. Baddie characters turns up and it immediately obvious they're a stand user, but our heroes don't realise. Then it's shockingly revealed that *gasp* they're a stand user! Who could have seen that coming? The enemy stand user has a power that neutralises Jojo's power (or whoever's turn it is to fight this week) and defeat seems certain. But then it's revealed Jojo (or whoever) had a trick up their sleeve all along and the enemy is defeated! Now they're our friend! Or they're dead. Flip a coin. And the last episode I watched had that awesome anime trope of a 9-year-old looking girl having a shower but was interrupted, so spend the rest of the episode naked. Fucking gross. I'm done. Most overrated anime ever.

Thank you for your advice. Time to weigh up for myself which I want to get.

Ahh ok, I hadn't considered the absolute editions. I thought they were superceded by the deluxe ones. What advantages do the absolutes hold over the deluxes?

Hello, fellow deluxe oversized hardback edition addicts. I've decided that I need to replace my old ratty paperback Sandman books with some much nicer editions. The obvious choice seems to be the deluxe editions, which look very nice, but then I saw the omnibus editions, which look even nicer. Problem with the omnibus editions though, is that only the first volume is readily available. The only place I can find vol 2 is from an eBay seller in Germany, and they want £150 for it. Plus £20 postage. So forget that. Actually, there was one seller in America selling all three volumes, signed by Neil Gaiman, for £1500. Forget that even harder. So what do people reckon? Anyone have the Deluxe editions? Anyone have the Omnibus editions? Anyone a mad, glorious enough bastard to have both? Should I just get the deluxe editions, or are the omnibus editions so good that it's worth getting the first volume now and waiting until they reprint the others?

The more I play this, the more I like it. I think at at or near the end now. I have the and I'm at the fight with or whatever his name is. I said in an earlier post that it wasn't very challenging; well that changed! Some of the bosses in the second half of the game are much trickier than the early ones. Which makes sense. But they're fun and not frustrating. I like the music. It keeps the Metroid feel without just being tired rehashes of Super Metroid tunes, something which other games in the series have definitely been guilty of. I like the graphical style as well. I wasn't convinced at first, but I've really got into the 2.5d-ness of it. If Samus Returns is reasonably priced, I might play that as well.