Bobfoc

"Imagine there's no countries" right as voting details for 26 different countries were on screen was funny.

Sadly, I don't think that UK entry sounded as good live as the recorded version did.

The train strikes thwarted my plans to go to Wembley today, but I don't think I'd be able to walk back to the station after all that anyway.

Bring back the sign.

I don't really think the UK's popularity or lack thereof in Europe has ever made a noticeable difference. If you enter a good enough song, you do well. Germany, Portugal and the Netherlands usually end up near the bottom of the leaderboard, but they all put out uncharacteristically decent songs and got a victory. Sam Ryder might well have done the same last year if it hadn't been for the war in Ukraine. As for I Wrote a Song, I think it's still better than the vast majority of UK efforts this century, but it doesn't strike me as a top candidate for the win. A top ten finish ought to be possible and should be seen as a success.

Cheapskate gaming is the way to go.

Would you hate me if I told you I got it a day early and only paid £5 after finding I had unused store credit?

That one hasn't been confirmed yet, but several people with good track records have said that it's slated for that particular week. The common rumour is that Konami will have some things to reveal.

That has to be it for Southampton. It's also funny that BBC decided not to put Match of the Day on tonight. There have been twenty-one goals in three matches today.

I played through The Quarry on Playstation Plus. It's utter B-movie rubbish, but that's largely by design. Just like Until Dawn, it's an experience in which you make seemingly arbitrary decisions that either save a Scooby gang of clots or cause them to die horrifically. The general plot is entirely predictable, thanks in no small part to the fact that it pulls many of the same clichéd tricks as Until Dawn did. As noted before, though, there's usually no reliable way to determine what outcome your choices have, which is something that makes a first playthrough more interesting. I never really gave a toss whether my characters lived or not, which is either a poor indictment of the writers' ability to engage me or a possibly dubious reflection of how successful their irritating dialogue was. What I did appreciate was that the game had far fewer walking and exploration sections than its predecessors. Games like this have long been plagued with poor controls and tedious "Click on the glowing thing and get a flippant remark" mechanics, and The Quarry only pulls them out once in a while. Naturally, appreciating a game for having less gameplay is rather a case of damning it with faint praise, but the sooner these things either stop controlling like operating a tank in quicksand or just commit to becoming interactive films, the better.

We're not far from this year's Not E3 season. Here is the list of upcoming events, according to Jeff Grubb:

The two clubs have almost always coexisted well in my lifetime. A lot of Forest fans will turn up to County matches during international breaks and Forest have organised collection buckets at home matches when County have been in dire financial peril. It saddens me when a few County fans hope Forest lose. Having two clubs that can work together in the same community is far better than stoking pointless divisions.

I'm curious about the Liverpool/Everton rivalry. I remember Tony Barrett saying that he remembers it being a friendly one, with "Are you watching, Manchester?" chants being common when both teams were doing well. It seems now, though, that both sets of fans want the other club to do badly. Did the ban for English clubs in European competitions after Heysel trigger a greater level of hostility or is it just the nature of modern football that encourages everyone to hate their city neighbours?

I'm sad to see Morecambe and Accrington go down. MK Dons also got relegated, but I'm not sad about that.

Holy balls

Bury AFC, the phoenix club of the old Football League club, will start playing at Gigg Lane next season. It's good to see that such an old stadium is being used again, and it's a good sign for Bury's road to recovery.

I hope that surgery can help her in the long term. I'm getting bad memories of Laura Robson's career, which was derailed by wrist injuries.

How much will Allardyce get paid for four matches?

I wonder if Microsoft was getting anxious to put a big game out after all the delays its games have been having. I think the last really big Microsoft-published blockbuster was Halo Infinite, which was nearly a year-and-a-half ago. Giving it the green light in this state wasn't the best idea, though. Judging from what I've heard, Redfall was originally going to be essentially Left 4 Dead with vampires. Then, midway through development, Arkane decided to expand its scope and make it an open world game. It seems that the result is something that does neither thing especially well, even setting aside the bugs that could eventually be sorted out.

I hope it will inspire some people over there, but it's far from guaranteed. There really haven't been any other mainland Europeans who have come anywhere near winning big tournaments since maybe Tony Drago, and he never really had the safety game to consistently compete with the best. There were also a couple of good Canadians and South Africans in the early 80s, but nobody really came along after that. Still, there's a good spread of nations in the professional game now, at least when compared with twenty years ago.

I think Forest and Leeds will be the two teams that go down. On paper, Everton look to have the easiest run-in, while I think Forest's poor goal difference could be decisive.

Brecel didn't win any of his matches by a margin of more than three frames. He certainly knows how to hold his nerve.

That's a result that benefits neither team much.

Selby has let Brecel off the hook in this frame. There's a big difference between 16-16 and 17-15.