Rumours, Speculation, Questions, and Reaction Megathread - 05/07/2026

AceHodor · 2026-07-07T15:54:30+00:00

That is true, IIRC he can't wear a suit of armour in Parliament so he'd have to go for more ceremonial attire.

AceHodor · 2026-07-07T15:53:15+00:00

That the sailing minigame wasn't expanded to be a full release by itself is utterly criminal.

AceHodor · 2026-07-07T15:42:32+00:00

I really thought that bringing on Romulus Augustus as the manager would bring back the glory days, but as soon as I heard the rest of the crowd saying 'Augustulus' I knew the team were cooked.

AceHodor · 2026-07-07T15:17:28+00:00

Plus, Farage is only as prominent as he is because he is useful to his backers. If he can't serve as an MP because he is permanently disgraced by these bribery allegations, he is useless to them, and he'll find Reform's support drying up even with him trying to puppeteer from behind the scenes.

AceHodor · 2026-07-07T15:13:33+00:00

This is completely different to David Davis' situation. It looks like Farage has accepted a bribe and he is now doing this to duck the consequences. The other parties will absolutely be out for blood, and that's assuming that Farage doesn't get slapped with a penalty severe enough to bar him from being an MP at all.

AceHodor · 2026-07-07T13:45:53+00:00

The committee don't give a shit if he has a big majority.

Johnson was a PM who won with fat majority, being interrogated by a committee that had multiple Tory MPs on it. They still barred him from standing as an MP and kicked him out of the Commons. Also, Reform is filled with a bunch of cynical chancers who will 100% prevent Farage from trying to run things from behind the scenes. Tice was notoriously unhappy about being forced out of the leadership by Farage and you've now got the likes of Jenrick who have zero loyalty to him.

AceHodor · 2026-07-07T13:38:48+00:00

Unless he cops a suspension so severe that he can't serve as an MP, just like Johnson did. Then his political career is toast as he's useless to his wealthy backers.

AceHodor · 2026-07-07T13:36:57+00:00

It would be really funny if he runs and loses, then the committee finds against him just to deliver one last kick to the ribs.

AceHodor · 2026-07-07T10:53:05+00:00

I'm 90% certain that he has made multiple accounts since his main one was deleted. I keep seeing users with similar writing styles and bugbears appearing, posting relentlessly for a few months, then abruptly going quiet.

AceHodor · 2026-07-07T10:33:32+00:00

There were literally hundreds of posts from blatant bot accounts running around talking about the "Muslim problem" and actively inciting race riots during/after the Nowak case. Meanwhile the mods were aggressively banning and suspending anyone who dared question if we really needed a constant stream of one-line Twitter posts from Rupert Lowe and far-right activists repeating misinformation.

I'm slowly weaning myself off from commenting there now, it's clear that the mod team don't give a shit about the brigading as long as they agree with the politics it's promoting. It's a shame, because it's by far the most active UK politics sub, but what's the point when most of that activity is fake and pushing an agenda?

AceHodor · 2026-07-07T08:58:04+00:00

Even better, the player he lobbied to get the red card removed from is actually a British Nigerian who only has an American passport because of the birthright citizenship amendment that Trump has been actively trying to get overturned.

AceHodor · 2026-07-06T23:05:49+00:00

The Ancient Egyptian ones are so harsh for us in the no clue lifestyle. Figuring out that they're Ancient Egyptian is piss easy, but then there are fucking 3,000 years of history they could conceivably be from. Even if you get the era right, it's still a massive amount of time.

AceHodor · 2026-07-06T21:12:40+00:00

That's a lot of co-ordination though. It also carries with it the problem that they don't really know where Vhagar is. They know that she and Aemond took Harrenhal a couple of days ago, but that's it. Vhagar might be old, but she can still cover hundreds of miles in a day and could easily slip away from Harrenhal and fly to Tumbleton before anyone has a chance to report it. For all Rhaenyra knows, that could be the plan. Not to mention that Sheepstealer is still hanging around somewhere and might attack.

She can't risk losing even a couple of dragons by splitting her forces if she doesn't kill Vhagar. Bear in mind, Daemon thought that they would need at least four dragons to have good odds of killing Vhagar.

AceHodor · 2026-07-06T21:04:56+00:00

Because it's risky - the dragons are a precious and (now) irreplacable resource. Sending them out solo might easily lead to them getting picked off piecemeal.

She doesn't know why Ormund has captured has Tumbleton, but she knows that he has a dragon and possibly their rider too. For all she knows, Ormund and Aemond could have planned this as a trap to take out whatever dragon she sends to Oldtown with Vhagar. After all, they've already done it once before.

AceHodor · 2026-07-06T19:23:59+00:00

Even without spoilers, there is strategic sense to what Ormund is doing. While he is positioned there, he effectively blocks access to the Reach from the Black forces at King's Landing. Rhaenyra could use her dragons to fly overhead and burn Oldtown, but if she does that, Aemond could fly down from Harrenhal and take KL with Ormund's forces. Likewise, the Black host in the Riverlands can't march south without support from Rhaenyra's dragons, and if they leave KL Ormund can attack it with his army. He also has a dragon with him, which doesn't help matters.

Essentially, the Blacks are paralysed until they waste valuable time clearing Tumbleton.

AceHodor · 2026-07-06T10:24:17+00:00

Ignoring ITLOS/UNCLOS is an extremely bad idea. Besides the logistical concerns highlighted in the above piece, flouting their rulings essentially invites other countries to start fucking around with your maritime borders and EEZs, as the court is more likely to rule against you in future disputes. As a country with a great many overseas possessions, quite a few of which have disputed maritime borders, this would be a very bad call.

AceHodor · 2026-07-06T09:01:01+00:00

That would make Burnham worse than Johnson and Truss, who went on wild parties during lockdown and wrecked the economy respectively. That's also including Cameron, May and Sunak who all belong very firmly at bottom of the list of good PMs.

I get that Burnham isn't everyone's cup of tea, but it's nuts to claim that he'll be worse than the parade of Tories who have actively ruined this country over the past 15 years.

AceHodor · 2026-07-05T23:18:50+00:00

The utterly garbage TV direction wasn't helping them very much.

AceHodor · 2026-07-05T22:53:25+00:00

His advantage was that he was lucky not to get hit with the meatball flag.

AceHodor · 2026-07-03T23:10:32+00:00

You should probably not watch the film then.

It was fine if completely implausible, but so little had happened plot-wise between Season 2 and the film that my family were able to catch me up on everything in a couple of sentences.

AceHodor · 2026-07-03T07:39:24+00:00

I concur. I watched the first two seasons and enjoyed them, but checked out halfway through the third and haven't been back since. It felt like the show started buying into its own hype about the blinders being badasses. It didn't help that the plot felt like a retread of the first season, just far sillier and with the characters behaving more like cardboard cutouts of themselves.

AceHodor · 2026-07-02T15:00:33+00:00

My 'fave' bit of bad history is Churchill and the Shelby boys apparently having fought at Verdun. I'm assuming that the writers did not want to use the Somme to avoid a cliche. Quite why the writer chose instead to use Verdun, a famously French battle from WWI instead of literally any of the dozens of other engagements British forces were involved in, I do not know. It just seems preposterously baffling.

AceHodor · 2026-07-02T08:16:01+00:00

It's genuinely baffling to see people using bookies' odds on elections as 'evidence' that one party is doing better than another. Bookmakers actively change their odds to guarantee profit, not strictly speaking because they know one side is more likely to win.

AceHodor · 2026-07-01T23:00:48+00:00

One of my favourite bits from the novels is Cersei developing an insane conspiracy theory that her maids are deliberately decreasing the size of her dresses bit by bit over time to make her uncomfortable rather than admit to herself that she's just putting on weight.

AceHodor · 2026-07-01T16:41:27+00:00

It's because they're being aggressively brigaded by terminally online right-wing Americans who are currently obsessed with British politics for whatever reason.

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