Dr. Gonzo

There is a belief that a lot of people will be hired back and this is a really sloppy reorganisation, with the eSports side of things at least. Idk how true it is and I’m not in the industry I just know 3 people who are. Seems like they all change jobs all the time though - but they’re all developers, not people doing the eSports shite. I don’t know if there’s more in nuance or anything in the different niches in the gaming industry. Axing the cleaning staff, many of whom were around for a very long time though, looks very poor when they’ve made record profits. Taking out the people at the lowest rung when you’re in a position to probably pay the ones who’ve been around forever (and everyone at the company)

I know someone that works at Activision (on the Blizzard side), that’s been sacked from EA (twice!) and Ubisoft. Apparently layoffs and switching jobs suddenly is pretty normal for the gaming industry. This one is kind of interesting because it’s not a lot of developers being laid off. But it’s a lot of the support staff (like the cleaners) and basically 90% of the eSports side of Blizzard has been chopped (I think right after some massive Overwatch tournament too), and a lot of their marketing consultants (if not all of them) have been chopped because they’ll probably go the EA route and hire third party marketing agencies. He’s most surprised about it being layoffs for a developer where it’s not mostly developers getting the sack. He’s honestly most surprised he’s not been sacked

Yeah he’s really been great lately and it’ll be a shame to lose what he gives to our midfield.

So there's some good news and some bad news. Bad news first: Lovren's looking unlikely to be fit by next week's CL clash with Bayern Munich. So we're looking at a CB pairing of Matip and Fabinho with big Virgil suspended. Good news: the Ox had his first training session with the first team. It wasn't a full training session, but still good news.

There’s no solo mode, so you’ll be forced to play with 2 random people. But give it a go still, it surprised me being paired with 2 people that actually played as a team and used the ping system. So far the community has been surprisingly not toxic

Yeah it's free to play like Fortnite. It's kinda like a mix between your average BR game and Overwatch/RS:Siege with the class based teamwork gameplay. The ping system it uses is fantastic though - I've never seen such cohesive team play with randoms that don't have microphones. Highly recommend it, and at the price... there's not a whole lot to lose, you'll either like it or you won't and it didn't cost anything to try.

Has anyone else been playing Apex Legends? I'm thoroughly addicted to it.

I just wanted to highlight how right you are. I like Sarri though

Rafa won La Liga twice too

Anthem looks shite tbh. Kind of generic Destiny clone - and Destiny is big with people who love Destiny, but most people I know hated the first one and never touched the second one. But then they've also loaded Anthem with microtransactions that are just as expensive as Fortnite microtransactions and even EA's new game Apex Legends (which imo is a great game - I'm a bit annoyed it likely means no Titanfall 3 - but I'm having a hell of a lot of fun with it). I think quite frankly loading a full priced game like that up with microtransactions of the same price as F2P games is outrageous. And then you also have to consider the performance of Anthem in the demo... just right before it's release, so I doubt they fix this anytime soon. But it performed terribly on my Xbox One X - not optimised at all and running at 10 frames per second or less. Honestly with Anthem... I honestly think BioWare have just made a bland game on the heels of the latest Mass Effect, which I didn't play, but sounded like another bland game. How much of that is down to EA's demands on BioWare? I have no idea - they did just twist the production of a game in development into a F2P game that's very different to what the game was intended to be. Honestly though I'm pretty pleased with the new free to play game. But Respawn games have now made 3 games and all of them have been top quality in terms of both gameplay enjoyability and performance... so maybe they're just a good developer that happens to unfortunately be owned by EA.

Yeah I’d advise to continue to not being bothered. As a “former” smoker, I’ve always thought people that started their nicotine addiction with vaping are weirdos. Maybe it’s because my gran still smokes and I grew up around it (my grandad stopped though, but their house still reeks of cigarettes) I don’t mind the smell too much. Until I leave their house and I smell myself and I smell like a billion stale cigarettes. But I can’t stand most of the flavoured vape smell. Handy tools for getting off smoking though, but I’ve found they make you more addicted to nicotine because of their high nicotine content. It just replaces the delivery device for the nicotine, and is supposedly more healthy.

Apex Legends is not Titanfall at all... but it’s a good game and I like it. It’s refreshing compared to most other BR games out right now imo - the classes work well and the pinging system is good if you’re stuck with randoms. It’s hard as fuck compared to Blackout & PUBG though.

I hope you’re right! I’m not really an optimist in anything in life but it’s nice to be pessimistic and wrong so I hope you’re right

His injury record is terrible though, unfortunately I’m not sure we’ll really be able to rely on him in the long run - both for club and country. Its a shame because he’s been a very excellent defenders this season. Miles better than Lovren and Matip imo. But we’ve got a problem in that all 3 of them are injury prone (and Lovren has the most shite immune system for a professional athlete).

New Titanfall game coming out today that's free to play. I read it doesn't have wall running... or Titans... which are pretty big parts of Titanfall. It's essentially just COD really. I had fun playing the Anthem demo... but I'm probably not going to buy that one because it reminded me a lot of Destiny and I just really wasn't that into Destiny.

Massive loss.

Lol the official scum twitter calls him JLingz , guess they know their market. I’m annoyed United have managed to turn it around; but I must say it’s hilarious that the man who looked so out of his depth at Cardiff can take Mourinho’s super expensive side and completely show up “the special one.” Not that fucking special anymore, I guess

This made my day

Yeah I know it’s not really realistic because we’d be voting for something not negotiated with the EU already. My big issue with Brexit is I think no deal is just an unacceptable option and, in my books, is just something that people who profit off economic collapse want to happen. And those who push for austerity and privitisation of industries (usually the same people though) will be happy. But for most ordinary people living ordinary lives it just makes things unnecessarily complicated. And then the alternative keeps a lot of things substantially the same by keeping us in the single market, but we’d lose our say in EU legislation that would likely still apply to it. And I’m not sure any benefit from not being in the EU would outweigh that loss to our ability to have a say in legislation. But we also had that fuckhead Farage as an MEP not taking his job seriously and just being a twat in the European Parliament, so certain areas of the country didn’t really give a shit about whether we had proper representation in the EU in any case.

To trick his brother’s wife?

The beers here don’t have enough alcohol in them unless I get shit like Heineken or Budweiser or other shit I don’t really like to drink - and those aren’t even high alcohol content beers. Baiju is what we’ve been drinking at our meetings and that’s all good for getting drunk but I’ve got to meet with people for work in the morning so I can’t really get as drunk as I’d need to be to not be pissed off at how this trip is just dragging on and on and on. The way things have been spaced out for work has just made this all the more unpleasant. It feels like it’s never ending

Yeah it’s shit

I cannot express how much I wish it were Tuesday so I could be on my flight back

Yeah if you only do business in Britain, Brexit will either have no impact to your business or maybe even a positive impact. But it's bad for British businesses that export goods and services - they don't really know where they will stand in the future and there's been no clarity for them really in the last 2 years. But one of the most prominent in the leave camp said "fuck business" so I suppose business doesn't matter... bollocks to the economy I suppose. It's also bad for foreign businesses that export to the UK for the same reasons. And it's also really awkward for the people who moved to the UK from EU member states. The referendum was stupid because it was far too vague for the general voting public. People were voting either for the status quo or a mystery option that was completely undefined. And Brexit meant different things to different people. I suppose a lot of people had a lot more faith in our political leadership than they really should have. A better option for the referendum would have been to lay out a plan for what Brexit would actually mean. And then the options would have been remain or leave under certain terms that were laid out. And then leave could have campaigned on what those terms actually were, rather than just making stuff up. Instead it was completely undefined and people made stuff up in the campaign and created illusions of what Brexit would mean.

Sweden's in the EU - maybe you mean Switzerland? Norway and Switzerland are both in the European Free Trade Association (there's 2 other countries, I forget who they are). They're part of the single market, but not part of the EU customs union. They're a bit different though. Norway is part of the European Economic Area (EEA). They adopt most EU legislation, except for the common agriculture/fisheries regulations, maybe more... I'm not sure though, maybe @Harvsky knows in more detail. They also have to pay the EU money in grants that doesn't go towards Norway at all. They get a lot of the benefits of the EU - namely the single market and are allowed to participate in certain EU programs. But they have 0 voting rights within the EU - so they have some legislation completely imposed on them... but they don't have a say in it. If that's the end result of Brexit, that's not so bad... but it does beg the question why we'd want to leave the EU, continue to pay into it, still have legislation "imposed" upon us by the EU, while losing our ability to have any say in what that legislation is. The Switzerland method is much more complicated and I'm a bit confused by it so I can't go into it with more detail. But it's unique in that the Swiss vote on whether certain EU legislation really applies to them. But the Swiss fucking love voting and referendums. I'm thoroughly opposed to the Swiss method here in Britain because I think people voting on things they don't fully understand is stupid and not the best way to run a nation (see: Brexit). It might work in some countries, but I don't think it works well with the UK (see: Brexit).