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Wings Over Scotland


Politicians in uniform 273

Posted on June 25, 2017 by

…are never anything to worry about.

We’re pretty sure that’s right.

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Come On Arlene 277

Posted on June 24, 2017 by

Sometimes it’s hard not to despair 299

Posted on June 23, 2017 by

We’re still on holiday, because five years of stuff like this ruins your soul:

Let’s look at the logic of that closely for just one minute, and then we’re going to go back to smashing our head off a brick wall to try to make the stupid go away.

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Where you stand 211

Posted on June 22, 2017 by

The media is aflame today with some rather woolly “news” to the effect that Theresa May might possibly, in some unspecified manner, have conceded a veto over Brexit to the Scottish Parliament.

We can see no evidence suggesting such a thing has happened or will happen, and would instead direct readers to a report published yesterday by Unlock Democracy. We strongly advise taking five minutes out of your day to read pages 26-33 of it, but if you’re really in a rush this paragraph will give you the basic conclusion:

Remember your place, lesser nations of the UK.

A fundamental difference in approach 202

Posted on June 21, 2017 by

Richard Murphy, political economy professor.

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Everybody needs a laugh sometimes 233

Posted on June 20, 2017 by

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.

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Happy Brexit Day 252

Posted on June 19, 2017 by

This map probably correlates quite closely with one of the strength of Leave vote.

It seems somehow appropriate that on the day negotiations begin (with the UK having no government, no mandate and no idea what it actually wants), large parts of the country are essentially already on fire.

Blurred lines 0

Posted on June 18, 2017 by

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.

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To nobody’s amazement 228

Posted on June 18, 2017 by

(From yesterday’s Herald.)

And remember, folks – those 12 Tory gains in Scotland were the difference between Theresa May being Prime Minister and Jeremy Corbyn leading a progressive alliance in Downing Street. That’s where Scottish Labour are at now.

The attainment gap 222

Posted on June 17, 2017 by

At the bus stop #2 324

Posted on June 16, 2017 by

An alert reader emails with a talking point:

Interesting idea, no?

The Failures 204

Posted on June 15, 2017 by

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.

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