A fundamental difference in approach 202
Richard Murphy, political economy professor.
Richard Murphy, political economy professor.
Brexit is already a shambles. Everyone south of Manchester is unhappy because it’s too suffocatingly hot to move, and everyone north of Manchester is unhappy because they’ve not got the sunshine. We could all, for various reasons, do with a chuckle.
So without further ado, readers, enjoy the “clueless metropolitan hacksplaining” hit of the summer: Kezia Dugdale, Comeback Queen.
Vote for the funniest line below.
There's nothing about Ramboat (Genera, free, iOS and Android) that isn't interesting. The game itself is a short, punchy and fun pure arcade shooter that most obviously channels Metal Slug and Irem's much-underrated In The Hunt. Indeed, it's basically a very clever adaptation of the latter game for one-thumb control, but presented with all the beautifully-detailed character of the former.
But this isn't the article I've been meaning to write for years about the fascinating and often incredibly elegant and even revolutionary ways that developers have rejigged every traditional game genre for touchscreen devices in order to avoid going down the horribly unsatisfactory route of the "virtual d-pad".
Because the other most intriguing aspect of modern gaming*, particularly on mobile formats, is the monetisation of it. And in the case of Ramboat, the opportunity for an experiment presented itself.
The SNP were there for the taking in last week’s general election. Across the country they typically lost something around 10,000 votes per seat compared to the 2015 tsunami, and the vast majority of those seats formerly belonged to Scottish Labour.
Yet while Labour did take back six seats of the 41 they lost two years ago (most of them by wafer-thin margins), they fell short in dozens of others despite the huge scale of the SNP’s losses.
And the reason is that, even riding the coat-tails of the Jeremy Corbyn bounce, Kezia Dugdale’s northern regional branch office delivered a showing that was at best barely any better than the 2015 catastrophe, and in many cases actually worse.
We’re still on a break, really, but it’s a rotten dreich day today and we’re waiting in for a parcel, and we completed all our domestic administrative tasks yesterday, so just to kill a bit of time we number-crunched all the seats where Labour came second.
The results, if you’re Kezia Dugdale, should be dismally sobering.
We know that people like to chat generally about issues of the day (and more) in the comments, so while we’re taking a break we’ll probably put up stuff like this now and again just so that we don’t end up with a single post with thousands of comments in it. (And so you know we haven’t been killed by bears.)
They probably won’t all be about politics. Call them conversation starters.
We’re going to take our own advice, chill out for a few days and enjoy the show as the No Surrender Tories desperately try to Frankenstein some sort of hilarious government together. There’s nothing much anyone can do to advance the cause of independence right now, there’s no urgent crisis in need of addressing, everybody’s pretty frazzled and crotchety, and a wee bit of downtime is probably the best thing for everyone.
It seems a better plan, at any rate, than running around panicking, screaming that SOMETHING MUST BE DONE IMMEDIATELY! or that nothing must be done ever again, that we must either declare UDI or give up on what many of us have believed in our whole lives and settle meekly for 2017’s feeble equivalent of The Vow – a shoddy, snivelling “soft Brexit” that’s not going to happen and would be awful even if it did.
Independence will still be here next week, folks. It’s not going anyplace. Obviously if anything dramatic should happen we’ll be on it, but otherwise we’ve got some movies and books and games and stuff to catch up on, and we recommend that you all do the same. Recharge your batteries. Smell the flowers. It’s been a long five years, frankly.
The Scottish Liberal Democrats have been a drastically reduced force in Westminster politics ever since they were all but wiped out (along with most of their UK colleagues) in the 2015 election. But there were still sizeable areas of the country where they retained a strong presence, even when they’d lost their seats.
That changed dramatically last Thursday.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.