Sometimes it’s hard not to despair 299
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.
Where you stand 211
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
Richard Murphy, political economy professor.
Everybody needs a laugh sometimes 233
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.
Happy Brexit Day 252
Blurred lines 0
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.
To nobody’s amazement 228
At the bus stop #2 324
The Failures 204
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.
























