He did a great job with Burnley getting promoted from the Championship. But then they got immediately relegated from the Premier League, finishing 19th out of 20 (in a season where two of their relegation rivals took points deductions) and looking pretty out of their league most of the season. He’s falling upwards.

I’ve found it useful for TTRPGs too. Art generators are certainly helpful for character portraits, I also find ChatGPT can be useful for lots of other things. I’ve had pretty mediocre results trying to get it to generate a whole adventure but if you give it tight enough parameters then it can flesh out content for you - ranging from NPC name ideas, to ideas for custom magic items, to whole sections of dialogue.

You can give it a plot hook you have in mind and ask it to generate ideas for a three-act structure and encounter summary to go with it (helpful when brainstorming the party’s next adventure), or you can give it an overview of an encounter you have in mind and ask it to flesh out the encounter - GPT4 is reasonably good at a lot of this, I just wouldn’t ask it to go the whole way from start to finish in adventure design as it starts to introduce inconsistencies.

You also need to be ready to take what it gives you as a starting point for editing rather than a finished product. For example, if I ask it to come up with scene descriptions in D&D then it has a disproportionate tendency to come up with things that are ‘bioluminescent’ - little tells like that which show it’s AI generated.

Overall - you can use it as a tool for a busy DM that can free you up to focus on the more important aspects of designing your adventure. But you need to remember it’s just a tool, don’t think you can outsource the whole thing to it and remember it’s only as helpful as how you try to use it.

The reason the board have given is - if true - a very reasonable reason to fire a CEO. The job of the board is to oversee, scrutinise and challenge the management, and if the management were lying to or withholding information from the board then that’s an obvious reason for the management to go.

American corporate governance standards are really hit-and-miss, and in a lot of these tech firms you often end up with situations of CEOs doubling up as chairs of their boards - e.g. Musk, Zuckerberg , Bezos -something that structurally neuters the ability of the board to do its basic job of challenging the CEO! So when I see an American board standing up to a CEO that’s trying to evade scrutiny, I feel that’s something that should be applauded.

I mean, they’re obviously not going to, so I guess Zuckerberg better go dust off what I can only assume is his comically large chequebook…

Oh that’s very interesting. The script was actually written for it to be Kirk/Spock/McCoy rather than Kirk/Scotty/Chekov, but Nimoy and Kelley both said no because they were happy with where TUC left things for the TOS crew - which is why (for example) Chekov ends up running sickbay despite no evidence before of him having any medical training.

I’d never heard they had a version claiming Uhura would be there too.

My recollection from interviews is that Dan Harmon and the cast found Chevy just didn’t get the show at all when they were making it. A huge amount of Community’s humour is a mix of meta humour and pop culture references. In the same way that Pierce claimed to never understand what Abed was talking about, Chevy didn’t understand most of what Community was on about - his frame of reference for what is funny hadn’t moved on in decades.

Even though he’s famously a dick, when he says he didn’t think Community was funny, he might actually be telling the truth - not just being petty.

GotG3 is definitely worth seeing. Doctor Strange 2 and Ant-Man 3 were pretty missable.

I think the lesson I’ve taken from this is that the massive multiversal stakes of the latter two - which I assume Marvel thought necessary to try to top what they’d already done with Thanos - just don’t really work. They can’t top Thanos eradicating half of the universe, and they shouldn’t try.

Whereas GotG3 was pretty low stakes by comparison, but as those stakes related to a specific character we had come to care about then it just worked so much better.

Arrested Development, I admit, took me a few episodes.

Arrested Development took everyone a few episodes. Much of the humour is about riffing on repeated jokes set up in previous episodes - you’ve got to get through a few episodes first for these to start to click.

That’s partly why it was never successful when broadcast. It’s a show that should have been binge-watched but was released on broadcast TV, an episode a week, but tellingly it only took off in popularity with the DVD release (and later on streaming).

How is it ‘scripting’ when most of the games have tonnes of injury time? This is how they’re applying the injury time consistently to address the problem of time wasting etc at World Cups. They’ve been very transparent about this.

They’re taking the same approach in Premier League and EFL games this season. Sheffield Wednesday vs Southampton the other week had 15 minutes of injury time too.

Just accept you made a ludicrous argument and were wrong.

Those are the rules. 10+ minutes of injury time were pretty common at the men’s World Cup last year, even without interruptions for head injuries.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/63710986

It sounds like you may have really wanted England to lose and so you’re interpreting things through that lens.

Do you have to be a public figure to get on the ‘hostile’ list or are they accepting open applications? I’d like to join too please.

Only one game in and he’s already broken Alan Shearer’s Bundesliga scoring record!

Great pass, cool finish. It’s gone from Kane and Sonny, to Kane and Sané…

They mean that the three Spider-Man films have effectively become an origin trilogy for the Spider-Man that exists at the end of the movie - no more Avenger buddies, no more Stark tech, more of a solo friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.

‘It ends at the beginning’ is a bit of a confusing way of expressing that - and I don’t think this was the intention of the trilogy when they set out - but I do think where No Way Home left things will make for a more interesting premise for Spider-Man 4. The MCU has done enormous galactic stakes to death - they can’t beat Thanos destroying half of all life in the universe (as Ant-Man 3 showed - it just doesn’t work). The only way to progress is to go back to a small scale and more personal stories and stakes, and Spider-Man 4 will be a great opportunity to get that right.

I might be misremembering but I didn’t think they brought in Martin Sheen as a late addition. They always wanted the president to be in it and to be played by a big name actor (several were considered - I remember reading that Sidney Poitier and Alan Alda were others) but the original idea was that he’d be a distant figure, included as a recurring character who might only appear every few episodes. Sheen’s casting as Bartlet wasn’t inconsistent with Sam being the central character. The show was meant to be about the White House staffers and the way Bartlet was treated in the pilot (talked about a lot but only appearing in that one scene at the end) was meant to be the norm.

The change was the decision to then promote Bartlet to a main character who appeared in every (or nearly every) episode and effectively become the nearest thing to a ‘main’ character for much of the its run.

Well done to Apple for telling their customers they won’t get viruses…

Since MI:3 (the point when they finally introduced some more settled and recurring characters - Benji and Julia in that one, followed by Brand in the next, followed by Ilsa) they’ve been consistently the best action movie franchise going. I far prefer MI to Bond or F&F.

I agree in that the stakes for 3 are incredibly low. It starts trying to save Rocket’s life, but that’s nowhere near the same level as playing keep away with an Infinity Stone, or stopping a mad god from destroying the universe.

I enjoyed it a lot (probably more than 2 but less than 1), and for me the smaller stakes were one of the reasons why it worked.

Marvel have done the huge stakes already and it’s hard to top what they’ve already done - Thanos eradicating half of the universe. Much of what hasn’t quite worked in Phase 4 so far is that they’ve been trying to do exactly that though - it’s no longer about saving the universe, now it’s about saving the multiverse, and after a while the stakes get so big as to be meaningless. When you’ve already done the massive stakes, bringing it back to a smaller scale and more personal stories about beloved characters seems like a smart way of reconnecting with audiences without trying to top the untoppable - at least for a while.

I cared about the stakes in this film far more than I cared about the massive multiversal stakes in Ant-Man 3.

I can see the narrative opportunity for that, but I think doing a 2nd movie that doesn’t include both the stars would feel like a missed opportunity.

But Henry Cavill has been in every episode that has aired. He’s been replaced for the fourth season - so do you mean you stopped watching while Henry Cavill was still on it, or did you hypothetically stop watching the season that hasn’t yet been filmed?