SpiritOfTheForest

I know a girl whose father is an academic working at a local university. Using his academic title, his name is Professor Pain, which I think is absolutely marvellous and thus a shoe in for this thread. Like the antagonist in a Spider-Man film or something. 

St Johnstone have drawn 1-1 with Galatasaray away in Turkey. What a result that is. The craziest thing of all is that there's some minor disappointment that they didn't win it, with the Turks down to 10 men. Callum Davidson is some manager and he's got some team over in Perth. 

Regardless of what happens next week, that is one incredible result and very well deserved. Great result for Scottish football too. 

Bundesliga is a terrific league and one of the most fun to watch but I think his point is that we'll no longer be able to watch the smaller teams like Köln, Freiburg and Stuttgart. Loved the Bundesliga coverage on BT - all their football coverage actually. Still sad that they lost the rights to Scottish football because the BT treatment was quality.

Edit: Seph replied while I was typing. 

Got my first jag today and keeping the UKFF tradition alive on the continent. 

Here we have a big McNuggets, cheese and bacons fries and a Gran Crispy Bacon Chicken Sandwich. Might as well have made an effort. 

Chap, I'm led to believe this board has an ignore function you can use on my posts so you no longer have to read them and we can avoid cluttering up the board with tediously banal digs every time I make a post and you pounce on it. I suggest you use it.

Maybe one more suited for the Lame Claim To Fame thread but the younger sister of a girl I went through secondary school with won Silver in the Sailing today. A Miss Anna Burnet. Pity it was "Team GB" but I'm sure days for "Team Scotland" will come!

I'm one of those people who finds the Olympics to be a permanent annoyance because despite my giving not even a shit about it, it seems to infest innocent escapism like  Pointless and also pub quizzes with some vehemence despite me never meeting very many people who are remotely interested in it. Nothing worse than watching the Pointless final round when the couple opt to go for the fucking Olympics instead of the European capital cities that you were baying to answer! Cunts. 

Honest don't know how anyone can be surprised given the shambolic state of the last 2 years. Before a ball was kicked, I had already made peace with the fact that we were never going to get far in Europe this season. Hell, there's every chance we could get papped out by Jablonec in the Europa qualifier. 

The Celtic Board seem to have made incompetence into an art form of late. Months and months and months of faffing about with Eddie Howe only for it to collapse wasting so much valuable time. Personally I was never even that thrilled about him as an option to begin with and was much happier with Ange Postecoglou, who seemed to have achieved far more. The should have installed him in February/March when Lennon left, given him a free crack of the rest of the season and then the summer to build his squad. Instead, they opted to sign him a month before the start of competitive football and he had only a couple of weeks to perform a miracle with perhaps the worst Celtic team of my lifetime to date. Even at this early stage you can already see his frustration with the board and their penny pinching and how threadbare the squad is at the moment is actually scary. We started a Champions League Qualifying tie against a respectable opponent with an 18 year old in defence, who until last week, didn't even have a Wikipedia page, for crying out loud! How the board could bring this club from the comfortable, dominant position where we were to the bottom of the cliff we have fallen off is staggering. 

I really like Ange so far by the way. Seems to talk a lot of sense and I like his attitude "I'm not an accountant, mate". I actually feel bad for him as he has more or less been set up to fail by this board. Selling good players and replacing them with cheaper options who often turn out to be duds is not a viable strategy for success. Rodgers saw this coming three years ago and bailed. I recall him expressing frustration too. I really hope Ange does a great job but I also hope he isn't made a scape goat by some when it's clear to all where the problems lie. 

Whilst eating cheese, it is has, in my experience, usually been deemed uncouth to eat the rind at the bottom. However, I always do so and, oddly, sometimes it might be my favourite part. 

Wearing pyjamas to the shops, regardless of time of day, is shameful behaviour though. 

This past academic year, I was teaching Cambridge exam classes for the first time (I'm an English teacher). The never having done it before aside, I was a little worried because Covid has made things very different in the classroom. I wasn't allowed to have any contact with their books and so I couldn't do marking or even see their written work for myself, as would have been in the case in previous years. The exam has four parts testing the four skills in English - Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening - and I had been a bit worried about how the writing would go. The results finally came back today and I was delighted to discover that all of my students, bar one boy who failed the reading but did well on the rest, have passed! I'm absolutely delighted with them and proud of them, along with myself for managing it all okay, for a job very well done. They're a terrific group and now they all have shiny new certificates from Cambridge! 

Got the platinum in Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy this evening. I played the game when I was a kid so this was full of nostalgia for me. Even today, it's a very fun game and it provides a few hours of an enjoyable romp through a world bursting with colour and charm. I've never played Jak 2 or 3 but I don't have any real urge to do so, having heard that the series took a totally different turn and tried to be gritty instead of joyfully cartoonish.

Jak 1 is grand though. I love a good platformer and collectathon and this game has both in spades. It's quite short too - I'd recommend Precursor Legacy to anyone who's wanting a game they can play and complete over the course of a weekend. It's not too hard as well which is nice. 

I did have a bit of an issue getting the Platinum as the game seemed to run into a bug in the final cutscene and I wasn't awarded the extra item I needed and so the trophy didn't pop. I was raging but thankfully I found a fix round it. 

Ach that's gutting news. I would give it a watch every few weeks - proper comfort telly for me. I mean, it's Sunday for Christ's sake...I mean for Heaven's...I mean for goodness sake. 

Something that I don't think I saw posted here but was pretty entertaining from last week. The day before the Final, one of our newspapers, The National, posted this as its front page. 

Within hours, it went viral in Italy, trending on Twitter and so on. I even had some Italian pals who don't even like football messaging me on WhatsApp laughing about it. A little petty and childish to some I'm sure, but all in good fun and the Italians definitely got a kick out of it. And then this happened:

The man himself, flying home after winning the Euros with the trophy placed on top of this very newspaper cover. Cue it going viral again. What an absolute champion. 

One that I saw highlighted by our own Mr Lister, Metallica's "Kill 'Em All" was released closer to the Second World War than today. Christ. 

That's the Far Cry 4 Platinum now done. I mentioned previously that I remembered 4 as being more of the same as the third game but, after having revisited it 5 years later, that wasn't really fair. Yes, much of the game mechanics are similar with the outposts and radio towers and such but I loved all the extra detail in the world - the propaganda posters and, especially, the masks of Yalung and all the darkly poetic beauty in the notes left alongside. I had forgotten about how you can make pretty major decisions throughout when dealing with various leaders and even Pagan Min himself and it was a great touch letting the player decide which of the 2 strands of the rebel movement he favoured (Sabal all the way!) The whole thing felt much more fleshed out than Far Cry 3 and and the story was first class. I really like how the weapons feel in this game - I make special mention to the sniper rifle. That's got to be the most fun I've ever had in a sniper rifle in any game. 

The Platinum was by and large pretty easy to get with nothing giving me too much difficulty. Beforehand, I was a little worried about the offline trophies (god I hate offline trophies) because with an old game like this, the servers are usually pretty much deserted. I got lucky though and there were people on at the time and I found a guy on Reddit willing to help out with the quick co-op trophies. 

Shout out to Pagan Min for being another bloody amazing Far Cry character. Stole the show whenever he appeared, even when it was just over the radio, and I could listen to his wit for hours. Very different character to Vaas but similarly as captivating. 

Far Cry 4 worth a buy? I say: Definitely! For the story mode alone, and while there are a good variety of other missions, the sheer number of them can get a bit repetitive but they're all optional unless you want to get 100%. I'll have a wee break from Far Cry and play a couple of other things next and then I'm going to give 5 a go! 

Fireworks going off at my bit now, people singing in the streets, constant stream of cars driving about honking the horns.  It's absolute buzzing over here, fantastic atmosphere as you'd expect. God only knows what's going on in Rome.

Also, looking forward to see all those boozed up idiots we saw even before the game making things even worse for themselves.  Today is a good day, my friends. Going to head out now to soak up some of the atmosphere from the locals!

FORZA! FORZA! FORZA!

Over the fucking moon. The most painful way possible and the rest of the world is delighted.

It is quite funny to think that a bunch of them will get lifted and won't even be able to see the game. Saw some pictures of big queues outside pubs taken at 9.30am this morning. I'm a man to whom the combination of beers and football is one of life's great little pleasures but that's just madness. 

Neymar's a shit but this was class. Delighted for Messi. Player of my lifetime and so nice to see him finally get a major International trophy. 

"Yeah but look at the size of this place! I live in a single room above a bowling alley and below another bowling alley". 

This quote popped up on my social media yesterday and I had completely forgotten this line. I've been chuckling away at it ever since. What a fantastic mental image.

Pretty standard on the continent - big Champions League games kick off at 20.45 , obviously getting later by an hour the further East you go. Only thing I don't get is that it makes more sense to have a big game like this on a Saturday night instead of a Sunday. Not that it effects me anyway as I'm off work until October. 

I did God of War at the start of the year. Really a cracking game. The ravens didn't give me too much trouble as I used a YouTube video to find the ones that I'd missed when playing through the first time but the Valkyrie Queen was a nightmare (and I was very helpfully given some advise by people on this very forum). 

Chuffed about this! Obtained the Platinum in GTA Vice City. By and large, it was a super fun time as Vice City is a great game with a killer soundtrack but the final trophy - Take The Cannoli - is completely fucking horrendous and made a stark contrast to an otherwise wonderful game.

For those who don't know, this trophy requires you to reach the rank of Godfather which entails earning 10 million dollars and having a Criminal Rating of 1 million. However, after achieving the coveted 100% complete, my Criminal Rating was only just over 4000. To do this legitimately would probably take hundreds and hundreds of hours. As it stands, I used a workaround involving gathering 7 helicopters in close proximity and using the blow up all vehicles cheat. Over and over again. Thousands of times. Must have been typing in that fucking cheat code at least 7 or 8 hours in total, and annoyingly, some of the helicopters (which give you points when exploded) would continuously despawn after a few minutes requiring me to trek and collect more. Honestly, it's probably one of the most tedious, dull and monotonous slogs I've ever done in a game but it was all worth it to collect that sweet, sweet Plat.

It would be a very warranted and good question at this point to ask "Spirit, why the fuck would you needlessly put yourself through that?" and my answer is simply because when I had already been awarded 90% of the trophies and had only one more to get, I was determined to finish the job and get another Platinum for my collection. A touch of OCD too, I would suspect. 

A month or so back I polished off the Platinum in GTA 3 so I have San Andreas next to complete the set. Going to finish off Far Cry 4 first and maybe the first Jak and Daxter, which I downloaded after having fond memories of it from my boyhood, and then I might have to set out to becoming King not just of Liberty City and Vice City but of the entire state of San Andreas too. 

9 minutes ago, Hannibal Scorch said:

My bad. Didn’t realise there were no Scottish people who lived outside of Scotland. Like the poster commenting about the ITV coverage who is Scottish.

I watched on STV player. I said ITV as I have always thought the two channels are interchangeable, with them calling it STV in Scotland for marketing purposes or something. In any way, I assumed it was the same broadcast but it seems a strange thing to care about. 

How anyone could make the decision to put Sam Matterface and Lee Dixon on air over the much better alternative of Clive Tyldesley and Ally McCoist is baffling. 

Like yesterday, how when faced with the mouth watering prospect of a Spain - Italy semi final, somebody thought "you know what would make this even better? The voice of Danny Murphy". 

2 minutes ago, Divorced Dad said:

Kindly fuck off you miserable cunt.

All in good humour, chum. I'm annoyed but here's hoping the Italians get the job done on Sunday because if football does "come home" as some people claim, then I might not. That ITV coverage was unbearable enough, fuck knows what the media in general's going to be like tomorrow.