Ronnie

I don't enjoy comics generally but I can say that I've read MTMTE probably a dozen times and doubt I'll ever tire of it. I seem to notice at every re-read more seeds for things that will play into the storyline years down the line. It's a book which really does reward long-term, attentive readers. If you enjoyed Lost Light, then you're in for a treat, because the conventional opinion is that the book got less good as time went on and that Lost Light was weak in comparison to the outstanding first "series" (1-21) of MTMTE.

(I'm supposed to be working but I think I'm going to go off and read a volume now!) 

7 minutes ago, BigJag said:

That is a great classic Transformers comic image. Was it a cover?

No, it's from the last page of Aerialbots over America (US #21).

On 6/30/2020 at 1:47 PM, BigJag said:

I've heard [Regeneration 1 is] really good. With any luck It'll be part of the Hatchette run.

It's volumes 21-24. I didn't think too much of it. If you want to buy them, click the covers.

At least you've finally sorted out getting clothes that fit you

(Bah, your Cena-style oversized suit doesn't exist anymore  )

43 minutes ago, Chris B said:

The rest is variable, but with some definite high-points. I have All Hail Megatron and have been meaning to read it for a while.

There have been a lot of tears shed about that, principally because it ignored what had come before it. It never bothered me because I didn't like the earlier parts of the run anyway but others weren't happy. Personally, I thought seeing the old G1 TFs looking and sounding like themselves was great!

43 minutes ago, Chris B said:

The old 80s UK series by Simon Furman is worth looking back at, especially when Geoff Senior was doing the artwork.

Senior is pretty much the definitive TF artist for me. His artwork was much better than most of the other people's during that magical run when Furman was putting out his epics. (It was Time Wars, by the way.)

43 minutes ago, Chris B said:

The artwork is still some of my favourite from the run.

28 minutes ago, BigJag said:

Everyone should read it! Hatchette may still have their deluxe hardback version of it available. It was a bargain at £1.99 as the first instalment of their reprint run. 

Oh, don't even get me started on Hachette! They suckered me in with Target: 2006 as the first in the series, and only £1.99. I did the maths and figured I could just about justify the near £600 the 60-volume run would cost. I don't think they ever publicly announced it but they filled the series with some of the biggest rubbish I've ever seen with the most peripheral of Transformers (or G1, at least) links, expanding it by another 40 volumes. Shoddy service, spines misaligned, printing problems, charging twice, late deliveries, and extra £400 for a load of rubbish, which they're guaranteed to get because I'm stubborn and 80-something volumes into it.

20 minutes ago, DEF said:

I also had no idea about this. Really intriguing. I've not really read much of the comics.

It's not totally clear that it's Leader-1 but you can infer it by the presence of Cy-Kill!

20 minutes ago, DEF said:

I actually have All Hail Megatron issue 1 knocking about here somewhere, I should dig it out.

I'm not naturally a comics fan but I adored the series More than Meets the Eye, which started in 2012 and, after a namechange to Lost Light, finished in 2018. You could do worse than pick up a digital issue or two from Comixology for £1.59 to get an idea of whether you might like it too. Its sister ongoing series Robots in Disguise was also particularly popular.

21 minutes ago, FelatioLips said:

Quorn Nuggets are as good as, if not better than chicken nuggets because they're not even real chicken anyway.

That's pretty much the reason for the sausages being so good, I imagine. If a real sausage tastes great (and plenty are bland, of course) then that should be easy to replicate because it's not as though it's down to the presence of meat, is it?

10 hours ago, Loki said:

I’m never quite sure i’m of the logic behind it if I’m honest.  There are so many great veggie or vegan recipes and products nowadays - I really like the Waitrose bean burgers for example.  Mrs Loki made chinese salt and pepper tofu slices the other day that was amazing.  So why the obsession with recreating the texture/taste of meat?

Some of us are a little uncomfortable knowing that something was killed (and didn't necessarily have a nice life) in order to produce the meal that we really like the taste and texture of. In a lot of cases, that sense of guilt isn't strong enough to drive those feelings into the logical step of choosing not to eat that food rather than be complicit in its production. Similarly, there are people who know that meat production is ecologically harmful but are challenged to give up their bacon sandwich because ultimately they're depriving themselves of a pleasure for no significant gain. By presenting a perfect replica, you make it easier for those of us who fall into those categories to eat more ethically.

We're far from perfect in this household but we've discovered that Quorn sausages do a good job of replicating good-quality (relatively speaking) meat varieties, as do Quorn nuggets, and several other items from the brand. That has helped us reduce our consumption of meat. It doesn't always work: the mince feels somewhat synthetic to us, so we've rolled back to using meat.

6 minutes ago, Rapey Eyes said:

I have DM’d him. Maybe Neil or another mod can delete this account

It'd be a shame for you to lose your posts just because the permissions aren't allocated properly. One solution would be for the mods to let you create another account for the time being. There's functionality within the software to merge accounts together (ie keep the current one's posts but the new one's name) but I don't know whether the mods have access to it.

12 hours ago, Devon Malcolm said:

What's your source for this? And don't start crying about bullying, you've made the accusation so back it up.

Here's the image that Tilde shared. (I've edited out the phone number.)

The person making the allegation took it down, removed the phone number, and then reposted it.

Here's the reuploaded version:

It's clear that the user made an edit to the phone number. But there's a secondary edit too: she cropped the image, removing something key from the original:

Since when does your messaging feature show ads and give you an option to have them removed? It doesn't: but apps allowing you to create fake messages do.

And then there's the second smoking gun: that conversation is in the style of an Android phone. Yet:

I don't know about anybody else but I don't have both an Android phone and an iPhone. And if I did and I wanted to share a screenshot from the Android on Twitter, I wouldn't transfer it to my iPhone first. It seems reasonable to me that people might treat this particular allegation with a touch of scepticism.

Learning about pivot tables is the best five minutes you'll ever invest in Excel. I put it off for years and used ever more complicated SUMPRODUCTs etc, because I'd seen pivot tables referred to as something you learn in advanced courses. Without knowing what they were, I assumed they'd be beyond me. It turns out that they're easier than SUMs!

1 hour ago, HarmonicGenerator said:

But is that just coincidence?

From NPR's The Veteran And NFL Player Who Advised Kaepernick To Take A Knee:

Quote

So you probably know all this, but what you might not know is why Kaepernick started kneeling to begin with as opposed to something else, and that's where Nate Boyer comes in. He's a former active-duty Green Beret who had a stint in the NFL with the Seattle Seahawks. He initially advised Kaepernick to take a knee instead of sitting down during the anthem as a sign of respect. He recently wrote about this, so we called him.

...

BOYER: You know, this was two years ago, 2016 during the preseason. And he, you know, had sat on the bench. And I think it was actually his third time he'd sat on the bench. But it was the first time it had received national attention. And, you know, he got questioned about it, and he said, well, I'm not going to stand for the flag of a country that oppresses black people and people of color. And then he talked about, you know, social injustices and police brutality and why he thought, you know, he shouldn't be standing for the anthem.

And it struck a chord with me, of course, and it struck a chord with a lot of people - a lot of people in the veteran community as well - because obviously the flag and the anthem and what that stuff stands for means something, you know, very different to us. And I was pretty upset, you know, just because I felt like he didn't understand what those symbols really represent. And - but instead of letting my anger overwhelm me, I decided to relax a little bit, and I wrote this open letter that was just explaining my experiences, my relationship to the flag.

And Colin actually reached out, said he wanted to meet with me. And we sat in the lobby of the team hotel, discussed our situation, our different opinions and feelings about all this. And I suggested him taking a knee instead of sitting even though I wanted him to stand, and he wanted to sit. And it was, like, this compromise that we sort of came to. And that's where the kneeling began.

MARTIN: How did the idea of taking a knee come to you?

BOYER: I thought - at that time I said, look, I think your point has definitely been made that everyone's listening. Like, let's make a plan of attack now. And, you know, let's work on action for it. But he said, you know, what I've committed to this, and - I'm not going to do it until I start to see these changes I want to see. And, you know, I respected that decision and opinion. And I thought kneeling - personally, so I don't speak for everybody, I don't speak for every veteran. I've been told that numerous times by many people. But I thought kneeling was more respectful, and I will say that being alongside his teammates was the biggest thing for me.

And, you know, people - in my opinions and in my experience, kneeling's never been in our history really seen as a disrespectful act. I mean, people kneel when they get knighted. You kneel to propose to your wife, and you take a knee to pray. And soldiers often take a knee in front of a fallen brother's grave to pay respects. So I thought, if anything, besides standing, that was the most respectful. But, of course, that's just my opinion.

Somebody's making a killing if that's £15's worth.

(I know that Rashford's secured an extension of vouchers rather than parcels. Good: people should be able to get multiples more with a trip to Lidl than was being delivered.)

27 minutes ago, Glenryck Pilchards said:

=COUNTIFS('Datasheet'!$L$4:$L$519,"Yes",'Datasheet'!$J$4:$J$519,"John Smith") 

That's my one, just with a hard-typed "John Smith" rather than a cell reference

There are a couple of ways, depending on how you want to present your work. If you're happy to have a column C where the total is shown, then something like the following (in C1) works:

=COUNTIFS(A$1:A$4,A1,B$1:B$4,"Yes")


COUNTIFS(name range,cell on same row in name column,yes-no range,"Yes")

How you go from there is up to you. One technique is to copy and paste, using right-click > the Values icon, so that the formulas become hardcoded values. Then you would highlight the column of names and select Remove Duplicates (Expand selection) from the Data section of the ribbon, leaving you with one of each name, column B, and the total in C. Just delete B to finish with a table.

If you happen to have a list of each name already, then you just place the totals next to them to create a total. If the names are in column J:

=COUNTIFS(A$1:A$4,J1,B$1:B$4,"Yes")
  
=COUNTIFS(name range,location of name in table,yes-no range,"Yes")

4 minutes ago, johnnyboy said:

I hope it's an elaborate jape rather than "All Statues Matter."

It's only a 30-minute walk from me. I'm basking in being able to isolate myself from the world without it being perceived as a stigma but I'm very tempted to pop down there and see who they're protecting it from. Plus they're probably very bored and would welcome a chat. I suppose I could ask them what their favourite George Eliot book is. "I like all 'is books, mate."

19 minutes ago, tiger_rick said:

Am I the only one who genuinely has no idea what CIS means? Other than it being the name for the ex-Soviet football team for a bit.

It's the opposite of trans. Quite clever to apply like this, really.

Transatlantic/transalpine: across the Atlantic/the Alps

Cisatlantic/cisalpine: on this side of the Atlantic/Alps.

Edit: Chris B gave a better answer below.

It's Pitcos. You just have to know how to read the post. If he'd had an equivalent for "you" as he has for "they", it would've been all over that post.

It should've been obvious from this one bit he'd seeded: "it’s completely acceptable to demand that they choke on your fat trans cock and die or, in an even more extreme example, that they watch their tone."

33 minutes ago, Teedy Kay said:

Stats on Blacks being proportionately more likely to be victims of knife crime, haven't got a computer by me sadly, I keep shit tonnes on my work lappy. I'm sure it was a Mayor of London study (MOPAC) which used David Lammy's findings it was a couple of years ago like, but post 2015 I'm sure. From memory the percentage of non domestic abuse knife crime victims that were black was in the 60s per cent wise.

I thought it was a strange point to pick you up on. I suppose you said "in this country" rather than "in London", where it's not news that black people are disproportionately the victims of murder (44% of deaths for 13% of the population), the most common cause being stabbing (90 of 149 homicides in 2019).

Trump is despicable; that's no revelation. But it's not true that he was speaking about jobs when invoking George Floyd.

I don't believe for one second that he believed what he was saying but the caption and excerpt are a misrepresentation:

1 hour ago, Keith Houchen said:

@Ronnie I saw that exact picture on Twitter. I assume it’s from you!

Yes, I was the one with the rapid trigger finger and the quick retraction.

1 hour ago, Devon Malcolm said:

I want to follow Ronnie on Twitter!

Oh, there's nothing interesting there. Boring. I'll follow you in a minute so you know which account it is.

I received an unauthorised biography of Jacob Rees Mogg as a Christmas present. I suppose there wasn't any chance of it being an inadvertent duplicate so, on that basis, it wasn't the worst choice. It's entirely credible: the author is Lord Ashcroft, so nobody with an axe to grind, and the book is meticulously sourced.

Rees-Mogg is pretty much what you'd expect: privileged, though not wealthy, background: Eton; a gap year spent in the offices of friends of his father's, including Rothschild Investment Management; Oxford; straight into a job as an analyst with Rothschild Investment Management; marries an heiress; earns an average £2m a year, decides that's not enough, so starts his own firm and earns plenty more.

What really jumped out at me, though, and the reason for posting is the exposure of how people like him get more or less automatic entry to Oxford, a university whose name grants opportunities to alumni throughout their lives which others don't. Attlee, Eden, Macmillan, Douglas-Home, Wilson, Heath, Thatcher, Blair, Cameron, May, Johnson ... all post-War PMs who went to Oxford. We're told that it's for the best brains, and if it ever deigns to accept applicants from state schools then they have to boast academic records which show that they are at the highest level. But it appears that this isn't the case if you went to Eton:

I think you get an 'E' grade if you manage to spell your name correctly.

I've long known with the likes of Johnson and some other prize prats I've met that educated ≠ intelligent but this really is blatant, isn't it?

(Rees-Mogg got a 2:1, by the way.)

Edit: TIL that this is nothing special at all.

It transpires that Oxford had its own special entrance exam until around 1996-97 which was open to all. Once you'd passed that and the subsequent interview, you were accepted anyway but formalities were such that there would have to be a formal offer. Two 'e' grades was the minimum permitted by UCAS, hence being quoted routinely, to people from all backgrounds.

It might have been useful if the author had explained that rather than assumed we were all familiar with the workings of Oxford when we were children. Eh, he's a Tory ... 

He's just standing near bright overhead lighting. Look how white the top of his shoulder and topmost layer of his hair are, as well as the massive contrast in the wall over just a couple of feet.

53 minutes ago, tiger_rick said:

Is that true or is it hindsight? Sting had been coming from the rafters for a couple of years and I'm not aware that anyone was arguing against it. 

But there aren't reports about Sting not wanting to do it, as far as I know. Owen didn't want to do the gig in the first place. (Wasn't the return of the Blue Blazer a punishment because he didn't want to be portrayed as having an affair with Debra?)

There was a fascinating documentary by John Pollock released for the 20th anniversary called Owen Hart's Final Day. It includes contributions from lots of big names, plus also the fan with whom Owen spent that final day. According to him, Owen definitely didn't want to do the stunt, and it took a phone call from Vince McMahon ordering him to do it if he wanted to keep his job to get him to that arena. It's hard for me to think of anything like this panning out if Bret is in the company at the time.

(You should do yourself a favour and give the documentary a go when you've got a spare hour.)

On 5/9/2020 at 10:29 PM, PowerButchi said:

That's my son! 

He must be about 20 by now. Didn't he have a fit mam or was that just something we all implied? 

He looked north of 20 back then!

26 minutes ago, PowerButchi said:

Is that around the same time Pat made some fucking odd post comparing Chest to a Llama in the hate thread? 

That was a few months later, yep:

And since that's a mention of a hate thread, it helps me shoehorn in probably my favourite "worst of the UKFF", @Allstar69. I didn't dislike him at all but he really got on a lot of people's nerves with his terrible attempts at writing an inability to understand what was going on around him. He had a spectacular, self-inflicted end to his UKFF career via an assault in a hate thread on an idiot, which he then dolted up to a banning.