SpiritOfTheForest

Huge thank you for this @waters44! used your advice and got a rage resurrection stone instead of a health one. I still got killed about 100 times before I went into the menus to see if there was anything else I could upgrade. Went to check the difficulty, and discovered that it never actually saved when I changed it last night. I faced her again and only one more time dying later... 

I fucking did it! The Platinum is now mine. Probably not the most sporting way of getting it, but who cares, it had stopped being fun by this point and I just wanted to finally kill her! While you can learn her attacks and how to deal with each one, they come at you so relentlessly and at random that I found it so hard to react in time and do the correct counter. Brutal boss, up there with Sephiroth in the first Kingdom Hearts in the most difficult enemy I've faced in a game but man, it feels so good when you finally rip off her wings after 2 straight days of pain.

Cracking game! I have a big stack of games that I've been accumulating for a few months so it will be on to something new tomorrow!

I've been playing God of War for the past few weeks after loving the first 2 on the PS2. The shift from Greek mythology to Norse is cool (albeit a little less original these days) and I had a blast playing through the story. Decided to go for the Platinum and there is only one enemy and trophy left standing in the way of my goal. Sigrun, the Queen of the Valkyries.

Oh my fucking life. Stayed up all night last night trying over and over again to beat this bitch and yet couldn't even get her below half of her health bar in all that time. Your reactions have to be pinpoint accurate - just a couple of mistakes and she kills you. I played the rest of the game on normal difficulty and I even ended up being a bit of a shitebag and changing the difficulty to easy for this fight and to no avail - she wrecks me every single time. Determined to get that Platinum but fuck knows how I'm going to take her down.

Anyone beat Sigrun? Any tips appreciated!

Wonderful Spanish flamenco infused prog from Sevilla. 

I've mentioned it before but seeing Right To Censor today would be interesting. They'd probably be huge babyfaces amongst many of the Twitter fandom. 

Well, 370 hours later...it is finished. Kingdom Come Deliverance is the most astoundingly immersive, beautiful, historically accurate game I've ever played. There's a post-credit scene that really brought the man feelings too. Hats off to Warhorse for a truly remarkable creation. It's all set up for a sequel so really really really hope that the rumours are true and Kingdom Come 2 is on its way.

That was just fucking magnificent from start to finish. Even the DLCs were top class. Highly recommended to anyone who likes medieval history and open-world games. 

On the bright side, we are just over a year away now from the Iron Sheik finally making his way to the ring.

Any Celtic fans here have any preference as who they want as manager for next season? A week or 2 ago I was talking to my brother about it and said I would quite like Jesse Marsch, manager of RB Salzuburg, or Carlos Carvalhal of FC Braga. I'd favour the former over the latter. He's done very good things at Salzburg, a league that could be compared as relatively similar to Scotland: got them winning their domestic title every year and has them punching well above their weight in Europe too. Sounds like a great candidate to me.  And then what do you know, in the papers today, Marsch is now being linked with the job! It's not often I get to feel relatively knowledgeable about football so I got a kick out of that. 

Of course my dream no-matter-how-unrealistic-money-is-no-option choice would be Rafa Benitez but somehow I can't quite see that happening. Eddie Howe's another name I've heard bandied around but to be honest, doesn't really fill me with much enthusiasm. Always touted as a young upcoming coach yes, but former Bournemouth manager doesn't really excite me. I'd definitely go for him over Roy Keane or Jack Ross, two other names that have been mentioned, though!

Test too. The sound he made with that Big Boot was always so oddly satisfying. 

I loved Oblivion and it blew my mind when I first played it. It was my first ever huge open-world RPG and so I'll always have a soft spot for it. I prefer the gameplay to Skyrim and all the different skills and such - Skyrim was great fun at the time but, looking back, it really is a very dumbed-down RPG. Still a fantastic game, mind. With Oblivion, the big flaw was the levelling system, with an enemy being just as challenging when you're Level 25 as he was when you were Level 5. That and the archery - I had to tone the difficulty setting right down purely because it was so immersion-breaking having to hit a bandit with 40 arrows to kill him.

I'm getting near the end of Kingdom Come: Deliverance now. Absolutely loved it; it's one my very favourite games I've ever played. I've done all the side quests and now just need to complete the A Woman's Lot DLC and then finish off the main story. 

Inevitably (since Christmas) today is the day we finally lost the title. Beyond gutted that the much savoured 10 In A Row didn't turn out but more than that, I'm disgusted by how feebly, how pathetically we capitulated. From the position Celtic were in when Brendan Rodgers left, there is no way Rangers should have been able to claw their way back, let along run absolute riot this season. As much as it's with gritted teeth, there's no escaping the fact that that Rangers side are excellent and the work Steven Gerrard has done really is astounding. Goes to show the importance of giving managers time to carefully leave their footprint. 

Can only hope this is going to rouse the Celtic board into action and end the Rangers run at 1 but with a mass exodus in pretty much every department in the football club imminent in the Summer, fuck knows how well we'll bounce back. It's been an absolutely magnificent time to be a Celtic fan over the past decade but all good things must come to an end. Here's hoping the blip is temporary and we can get back to putting that mob well and truly in their place next season.

One more thing totally unrelated to Celtic but to Scottish football in general: if you haven't already, I highly recommend you get watching A View From The Terrace every Friday night on BBC. Absolutely cracking viewing and I look forward to it every week.

Sure it will be an unpopular one but anything WWF pre-1998. As someone who discovered wrestling in the Spring/Summer of 2000, looking back at the cartoon era of chaps like Hulk Hogan, Macho Man and The Ultimate Warrior, is just the drizzling shits for me, personally. Largely due to personal nostalgia but that Attitude era will never be topped for me and the stuff that came before just seems beyond tame and embarrassing in comparison. If there was such a thing as a bedtime wrestling show, for me, it would be anything from that era. 

Maybe not the right place as the post is not about cooking concoctions I have made, but is anybody here a fan of Anthony Bourdain? Been absolutely obsessed by the chap for a while now, binging Parts Unknown on Netflix and have even bought/devoured a few of his books. What a wonderful human being and it's so sad to know that that's him away now. Annoyed at myself for not knowing who he was until he'd already left us. 

"I don't have to agree with you to like or respect you"  has become one of my favourite quotes too. 

Oh bloody hell yeah. Any male will wince watching that one. If I remember right, from the old Rise And Fall of ECW DVD, Dreamer had to go to the hospital to get a bunch of blood excavated from his testicles, which sounds almost as bad as the original cane shot.

Edge spearing/destroying Jeff Hardy from the top of a ladder was the first that immediately came to mind. Incredible visual and there's no disguising that impact. 

Mick Foley being thrown from the Hell In A Cell has to be there too. Likely one of the very first single spots any non-wrestling fan will think of if you were to ask them "tell me a famous moment you remember from pro wrestling". Again, the visual is pretty hard to top, coupled with the commentary team's reporting of the aftermath. 

I also adored the flaming table spots involving Tommy Dreamer and Bubba Ray Dudley and Edge and Mick Foley respectively and the time Samoa Joe dropped Necro Butcher squarely on his forehead on concrete in that amazing first match (still stand by that one being one of the best matches of all time).

Yep...I definitely like hardcore/deathmatch wrestling. 

Not me. The self titled, Hvis Lyset Tar Oss and Filosofem will forever be timeless classics in black metal and I adore them to this day. Many will also point to Det Som Engang Var too, but that one never gripped me as much as the others for whatever reason. More recently, The Ways of Yore has been a regular bedtime album for me since it released. 

Think of Varg personally whatever you wish but there's no denying he had an immense impact on an entire genre. I certainly never "grew out" of him.

I've often been curious to see how Right To Censor would have gone down in the present day. They would probably be enormous babyfaces in certain Twitter circles!

Rome's new album has a song that is quite clearly a nod to Springsteen. It's an absolute cracker, like the vast majority of his stuff is, and I'm always trying to get people to listen to this guy so I'll share here. 

My favourite wrestler of all time. When I first discovered wrestling in 2000 as a 10 year old, he was the coolest bastard in the world to me and that perception has never gone away. There's never been anybody better for me in managing to excel at both in-ring work, character, and generally just seeming like a cool guy to hang out with in real life. I adore the guy. (although I've never seen AEW, but from what I gather the criticism is "he got fat" - so? The guy's body can't stay 30 years old forever).

I watched a little of it last night, having not watched any WWE at all for a couple of years now. I watched Goldberg - McIntyre, which I actually thought was pretty cool, and then the women's Rumble, which I found a right chore and generally thought was garbage. At that point, I packed it in and went to bed.

I actually ended up feeling a little depressed watching much of what I saw. I couldn't help but think of my days as a pre-adolescent and as a teenager when I was completely obsessed with WWE and the Royal Rumble felt like Christmas to me. To realise now just how little a shit I gave about any of it or any of the faceless individuals being paraded one after another, was a little sad. I guess it really represents a death of a childhood interest and outgrowing it, which is never a very cheerful prospect. This was compounded by me thinking that I'd check out the men's Rumble tomorrow only to know deep down that I had very little interest in doing so. I think I need to accept that the glory years of 98-2001 were heights of pro wrestling that will never be topped for me and that I should try to keep my viewing to that era, courtesy of the Network and its fantastic archive. 

2 thoughts that came to mind during my brief foray into the event: The set up with all the screens of people's webcams looks dystopian as fuck, like something out of a sci-fi novel. It all looked a bit sinister. Also, I'm sure I read somewhere in this thread that Natalya was facing Tamina the other night for a spot in the Rumble (2 names I was familiar with and I still think Natalya's great)....and then both end up appearing in the match? If so, then what was the point? To get the #30 spot I'd guess, but I can't remember if that was specified. 

I spent much of yesterday reading about this and trying to understand it all and get my head round it. It's already been mentioned, but Robinhood really is a truly ironic name for a company involved in all of this. From what I can gather, when naming it, they must have all read the fable backwards. 

Financial markets have never been something I've been remotely interested in so it took some effort to make sense of it all but it's always pleasant to see the elites get thoroughly humiliated. 

Michael Gove once had a fleeting acting career, appearing alongside Christopher Lee in a film called A Feast At Midnight, which I enjoyed very much as a boy.

In my opinion, there's nothing wrong with including English grammar in classes for kids (pleasantly surprised to read they're doing that). I'm an English as a Foreign Language teacher, and when I was training, it was a little humiliating to realise I knew very little of the grammatical components of my own language. Furthermore, the terminology also aids when trying to learn a foreign language for yourself. I think it's a good thing that they're learning what an adverb or what the passive voice is, for example.

100% yes. Since I first began to get politically aware back in secondary school, Scottish Independence has always been my number one political ambition. Truly, I think it's just a matter of time now with all that's gone on since 2014. I still can't quite believe the result of that one. Simply can't get my head round the mentality of someone who wants their country to be run by somebody else. It's embarrassing. 

To echo the above poster, there is also a stupid misconception that a vote for independence is a vote for the SNP. "Means to an end indeed" - I dislike the SNP but have held my nose and voted for them ever since I turned 18, simply because they are clearly the fastest vehicle to independence. I can only imagine that on the event of independence, the SNP would splinter into various different parties, given that its objective had been met. Ironically, those who say they would never vote for independence because they hate the SNP, would see the back of them far far quicker if they voted for independence.

I've been living abroad for much of the past 2 years but in the event of a new Referendum, I'll by flying home immediately to vote, such is my belief in the cause. 

As somebody living in Sardinia, I have been sorely missing the myriad of takeaways easily available back home. The Chippy Tea thread is torture enough but this one has the potential to tip me right over the edge.

Luckily, I love pizza. Don't get me wrong, the food here is utterly marvelous, amongst the best I have ever tried, but Christ, I do miss a good Chinese or Indian. 

Scottish Nationalist. So you were half right.

(I don't know who that man is)

1 minute ago, Devon Malcolm said:

Of course you don't. You're a Tory.

 How dare you, Sir. I most certainly am not.