CAREBEAR LUVVA

I know he's a big lad but it's a bit rude of them to call him "seat filler".

A gift from Tesco this weekend, as I got a bag of these in my delivery even though I didn't order them. Slightly too salty, so munching the whole bag in one go was a bit of a challenge (still managed it like), but the flavour was nice and strong and they had a really satisfying crunch. 7 out of 10.

I'm about halfway through the main story of Spider-Man 2, and bugger me it really is an effing marvellous game. The set pieces have been outstanding, the story and characters are well-written and believable, it looks fantastic, the combat and gadgets are all fun and easy to use, and there's plenty to do outside of the main missions. Really just tremendous stuff all round.

I watched one of Leah's mucky videos once, purely out of ghoulish curiosity (I'm a full homosexual so it honestly wasn't for any other reason). It was at least 20 years ago but I'll never forget the image of her with all jitler swinging off her chin and knockers as she says "very nice, thank you" in the sort of way that one might offer insincere pleasantries to a waiter who's just served you a not so pleasant dinner but you're too timid to complain about it.

Oh yeah, Shahbaz was an awful character. Possibly the first contestant that made the public start to question whether he might genuinely be mentally ill, and whether he should even have been allowed to take part in the first place.

1 hour ago, Hannibal Scorch said:

But they already announced her already. They already showed her on TV. They could have waited until Raw 2 days later, or promoted her coming to Smackdown or as almost every star of the last decade is going to be on it, NXT. If anything that makes it even worse to blow it on a pre show that even people watching the PPV often skip.

Swap "announce" for "promote" then. Regardless of whether she's appeared on TV already or not, it makes perfect sense to have her appear absolutely everywhere if they're wanting to give the impression that she's a big deal.

21 hours ago, Hannibal Scorch said:

BomberPat is right. Her big reveal was during the bloody pre-show. Yeah they repeated it on the card but why not, you know, DO IT DURING THE FUCKING SHOW IF YOUR GOING TO REPEAT THE FOOTAGE ANYWAY?!?

The pre-show was free to watch without a Peacock/Network subscription. There'll probably be plenty of people who only watch that, and not the actual PPV, so it makes sense to announce their latest big name to as many viewers as possible.

The squeaky finger sound is normal, especially with brand new acoustic strings. If you lift your finger further off the strings when you move your hand along the neck, it'll make less noise. The vibrating is likely to do with finger placement - you want to be pressing nice and firmly just behind the fret. Your low E (referred to as the bottom string, rather than the top) definitely isn't tuned properly - it should sound lower than the string that's next to it. Tune that string down until you get to the next E (if you haven't got a tuner handy, there's a free app called GuitarTuna which does the job nicely), and it should sound loads better.

You seem to be doing pretty well for half an hour's work. A lad I'm currently working with claims to have been teaching himself guitar for three years, but he's not able to play a simple pattern of three chords without forgetting either the rhythm or which chord comes next. I've no idea what I'm supposed to do with him.

As good as fight night was, the best bit of Big Brother 5 was Marco running over to his mum after his eviction interview, baseball sliding into her and knocking her flat on her arse.

The "reimagined" Toxic Avenger had its premiere at a film festival last week. The handful of reviews that appeared online are unanimously positive, and this trailer which appeared online today (the first footage to be released to the public) seems to back up everything they're saying about how the new version captures the campy daftness of the original. Very much looking forward to this, although there's no release date (apart from a couple of festival screenings) so fuck knows when anyone might actually get to see it.

@SuperBacon Spar, you say? Most of the ones round here were attached to petrol stations and turned into McColl's or Londises ages ago, but there's still a fairly big standalone one on the other side of town. I'll pay a visit while I'm out and about tomorrow!

10 minutes ago, DavidB6937 said:

Is there another one coming out before that or did I imagine that?

Like A Dragon Gaiden is out in November, then Infinite Wealth is out next January.

5 hours ago, RedRooster said:

I can't wait to see what they add to it. 

In two words, not much.

Finished the main story on Starfield this afternoon. It's really really dull. Quite literally just collect a bunch of artifacts - none of which really have any especially different quests or anything linked to them, it's just "go here, shoot a few lads and pick the thing up" - then stick them all together and make a decision at the end about what you want to do with them. The storyline that goes along with it isn't much cop either - the characters are fairly dull, and the story isn't especially unique or interesting. Meh. There's also a bunch of slightly supernatural powers you can acquire, but all you do is enter a temple, fly around a little room touching a few sparkly things, then walk into a portal. Every single time. You're never even given any actual uses for any of the powers either, so I never bothered using them and quickly forgot I'd even acquired them.

I checked the achievements list when I'd finished the story, to see if it hinted at any other quests that I might have missed. There are 4 or 5 achievements linked to a questline that it turns out I can't even access because of some sort of bug that prevented one of the early missions from triggering. The internet reckons it's one of the better questlines in the game, too. Add it to the half a dozen quests I'd already picked up that bugged out and wouldn't let me finish (doors not opening, items that I couldn't hand over to the right person for no reason at all, stupid things like that). That sort of thing is probably to be expected, given Bethesda's history of buggy games (particularly within the first few weeks of release), but it doesn't stop it from being really annoying. Overall, 6 out of 10 at best.

I'm about 12 hours into Starfield - it's exactly what Mass Effect crossed with Fallout would be like, except with clunky menus and a ridiculously low encumbrance limit so you spend half your time trying to find terminals/vendors to sell stuff to. It's a solid 7 out of 10 so far. The writing's pretty decent, there's some good characters, and the gameplay's fun enough to want to keep going, but there's not really anything especially noteworthy about it.

Nah, they'll be too busy testing the save bug to make sure it's been fixed properly.

16 minutes ago, jazzygeofferz said:

That sounds cool. There's that Warhammer 40K DLC on the way was well. 

You inadvertently got a scoop there. I re-read the email and noticed the news is under embargo until 2pm today so thought I'd better edit my post just in case!

1 hour ago, jazzygeofferz said:

Have they patched it as well to fix the save glitch? 

If you start a new game, you won't have any save issues after the update, but they haven't fixed it for anyone who's already mid-game. Apparently they've solved the problem but couldn't get it into yesterday's update, so it'll be sorted in the next one. 

Also it seems there are only three new bonus jobs in the update, not six. I appear to have just missed a few new additions at some point, so I thought all the new ones I saw yesterday had only just been added.

The latest free Powerwash Simulator DLC is out today. Six bonus jobs!

If anyone's got any leads on getting hold of Mountain Dew Voltage (or Code Red) in the UK, do please hook us up. It's been an absolute bugger to find since it got banned over here (something to do with one of the ingredients). A couple of places continued to sell it for a while afterwards, then it disappeared completely. It turns up now and again on various websites but it's always out of stock, as if they just haven't taken it off their database or something.

Fucking hell. As a full-on homosexual I look at arses on the internet fairly regularly, but Amazon has never recommended anything like that to me. Whatever you've been watching late at night must be really fucking hardcore.

41 minutes ago, FelatioLips said:

Unfortunately it’s Edinburgh Fringe so every hotel is price gouged to fuck. We were looking at I think £200+ for a single night in a Travel Lodge so we’re staying in Newcastle instead and making the 2 hour or so drive up. A pain but a 4-5 hour round trip is much easier on our wallets and we can spend what we save on decent food and board games in Newcastle.

Yeah, I've paid a bit over the odds for the place where I'm staying but I figured I haven't had a proper holiday for several years so I'd push the boat out a bit on this trip. A bit of info in case it might turn out to be useful - apparently car parking near the Edinburgh O2 is a bit of a nightmare, but there's a big Asda next to the venue where you can park all night for like 4 quid or something.

Please report back after Devo! I almost bought a ticket a few weeks ago when I was looking for an excuse to go on some sort of road trip, but opted for Amyl and the Sniffers in the same venue about a week later (partly because I've seen Devo before but not AATS, and partly because hotels seemed to be cheaper the following week).

I've not bothered going to many gigs since about 2008, after working in music for ages and getting a bit fed up of things. The enthusiasm seems to be coming back quite a bit though, and out of my current top 5 favourite bands I've either seen them all over the last couple of weeks or will be seeing them in the next few months (including the Pixies playing my actual all-time favourite album in full). It's been quite nice to rediscover the joys of live music, even though I'm now old and achey so tend to stand at the back with all the other old farts where it tends to be a bit easier to find something solid to lean against.

Saw The Hives twice today (well, yesterday now), in a fairly small nightclub (just over 900 people, one of the door staff said) in Kingston upon Thames, of all places. For one reason or another I haven't seen them live since 2002 despite them being one of my favourite bands over the last two decades, so it felt like today had been a long time coming. Tremendous stuff indeed. Crazy how they're in their mid-40s but could give most 20-somethings a run for their money in terms of stage presence, energy, engaging an audience, and just generally doing the whole "rock and roll show" really fucking well. Also enjoyed the hearse parked outside to commemorate their "mentor" Randy Fitzsimmons, whose recent death was the catalyst for their new album. Proper love how they've had this completely made up character for their entire career and they're still kayfabing it to this extent. Silly bunch of sods. They're the greatest.