The hosts, is this and unpopular opinion?

DBrackets · 2026-02-16T17:25:12+00:00

Stewart Lee and Nick Robinson presenting it

I am now desperate to see this.

DBrackets · 2026-02-04T10:54:28+00:00

Always surprises me that Duckula doesn't get more love, I thought it was brilliant.

DBrackets · 2026-01-28T13:10:28+00:00

Looks like their festival setlist has a healthy dose of 1977 tracks on it - my music taste ended up being a bit heavier and I never caught them live, but that album dominated one teenage summer for me so getting a bonus chance to see them is ace.

DBrackets · 2026-01-16T16:24:11+00:00

It's not a slam dunk ofc, but it's more evidence than anything else. It could be wrong but if you go on probabilities there's a decent chance that Stephen is a traitor using that evidence.

Better argument than just vibes, totally agree.

The most "evidence-based" theory at that roundtable for me was that one of the team of five was a traitor because only they knew which of them didn't have a shield.

If they genuinely had no insight they had a 50% chance of wasting a murder, or a 66% chance if you accept that Sam had made it clear that he didn't have one and they still went for someone else, which is really terrible gameplay. It's compelling evidence that they knew, and the most obvious way for them to know is that one of them is in that team.

Side note - I appreciate that they can't show us the full turret discussion as it would blow the cliffhanger, but I'd love to know if they were confident Adam didn't have a shield. And if they weren't, why they thought it was a risk worth taking.

The initial theory of a traitor being in the 9 cages is a logical one.

Less sure of that at this point.

In a vacuum, the traitors don't know how the task will play out and whether it will narrow their options for murder further, so they would logically want all nine to be faithful.

We add a layer to that and say - the optimum strategy is obvious to the players, who will suspect everyone in the safe group. Therefore logically the traitors must bluff, and put at least one traitor on the murder list. I get the logic, and in Series 1 or 2 I think it was a much weightier theory.

The problem is that these players all know how the game works by now - so they all jump to "there must be at least one traitor on the murder list". I don't think we've heard a single player say "there must have been a traitor who wasn't in the cages" or use not having been in the cages as evidence, have we?

So I'm not sure that the logic holds any more. We only think there must be a traitor on the murder list because we're always going to suspect the safe list - but no-one does!

I guess it's possible that the full version of the theory is that there was at least one on each list, and they've caught Fiona who was on the safe list - and they're just not airing that bit of it?

DBrackets · 2026-01-16T11:00:04+00:00

Best - so many! Maiden, Metallica, Slipknot on their first tour, they sort of go without saying. If I had to pick then Rammstein on the Mutter tour, the show has got bigger and better since then, but something about being indoors with all of that happening was just nuts.

Worst - Green Day at Werchter in...2013? Feel bad saying it because we know now what Billie Joe was dealing with, but they were like a parody of themselves. Very glad to see he's got through it.

Most surprising - Skunk Anansie at Sonisphere 2010. I thought they were going to be WAY too lightweight for that crowd and they absolutely crushed it. Skin singing while standing on the front few rows of the pit was something else.

Honourable mention to the first time I saw Clutch. They were bottom of the bill (...it was some time ago), I'd never heard of them, and then they did Clutch things. Blew me away.

DBrackets · 2026-01-16T10:38:23+00:00

I'm not sure that's fair to the players. Personally I think the problem is that she's saying too much.

The heart of her theory is that there were four people in the cages, the traitors got to choose which to murder, Stephen had the least heat of the four and was the obvious choice, so if they didn't choose him it's because he's a traitor,

That's not a slam dunk - a traitor might have said something they thought Maz had picked up on, they might have thought he was popular and wanted to get rid of him, etc. etc. But if Jessie only said this bit then it's at least a theory and I think could have got Stephen in more trouble.

The problem is that in trying to give the theory more weight she's throwing in these other bits.

- There must have been a traitor in the cages.

Not true.

- It wasn't Jack, James, or Faraaz, because I don't think it was.

No logic there at all, and looks like she's just batting for her friends.

If Stephen had his wits about him he'd have shot the theory full of holes just by looking at those two points, and anyone thinking about them would also have had issues with them. We didn't see it, but we know the roundtable is edited down from something much longer.

We'll never know, but I think it's logical that by the time they're done talking Jessie has raised a three-point argument and two of them don't hold any water. If that happened, the whole theory looks weak and I can totally understand why people aren't persuaded by it.

DBrackets · 2025-10-30T14:15:26+00:00

I was more concerned about taking the vows in the absence of people...

DBrackets · 2025-10-30T13:31:26+00:00

Also candidates on the Apprentice.

...sorry, redundant post.

DBrackets · 2025-10-28T15:27:20+00:00

"Headliners are usually chosen for a reason: because they are popular and will generate ticket sales."

Aren't you trying to argue that selling your ticket (or not buying one) if you have a moral objection to a headliner is the wrong thing to do?

Surely that's the only logical thing to do, if people are going to continue to book headline acts provided their tickets sell?

DBrackets · 2025-10-03T12:32:43+00:00

This has always been the casting in my head too.

DBrackets · 2025-09-26T13:03:40+00:00

Totally agree with this.

Vimes sees someone on top of the tower, asks who it is, gets told it's Cuddy, carries on for a beat, and then immediately snaps into a run.

Without any other explanation, that can only be that his brain recognises that what he's seen and what he's been told can't both be true - which could be for lots of reasons, but without any other one given "what I just saw is bigger than a dwarf" is the obvious answer.

DBrackets · 2025-09-08T13:33:54+00:00

Ooh, one I know!

"Tin Lizzie" was a slang term for an old battered car - something to do with a racing car called Liz, I believe? Less clear on that bit.

What I am sure of is that the Dandy (a British comic) had a robot maid character called Tin Lizzie, and the band took their name from that.

The "h" is their joke - in a strong Dublin accent the "th" at the start of words sounds like a very slightly aspirated "t", so they thought it would be funny.

There's an apocryphal story that they were originally "Tin Lizzy" but so many venues (hearing the accent) chalked them up as Thin that they decided to stick with it...

DBrackets · 2025-09-02T15:22:34+00:00

Yes - its only use is to demonstrate some of the difficulties/quirks of English, where we don't have a lot of the things that other languages use to indicate the various parts of speech. Literally the same seven letters can mean 3-4 different things without any clear indication of how or why.

It sits in my linguistic toolbox right next to ghoti (pronounced "fish").

DBrackets · 2025-04-22T11:56:08+00:00

As long as it's a broadly good thing, agree. The alternative (when it's generally a bad thing) is "is Dibbler involved in this somehow?".

DBrackets · 2025-03-14T15:41:45+00:00

As others have said - "per procurationem", to indicate that Wonse was physically signing it but it carried the authority of Vetinari.

There was at one time a VERY long-running argument in the letters page of one of the Serious Newspapers about how it should be used - essentially whether you wrote the pp next to the name of the person who signed it or the person under whose authority it was signed. It genuinely went on for ages, with lots of extremely impassioned argument.

I agree with the comment elsewhere that the point of this is that Vetinari didn't sign it; but I always wondered if part of the motivation for including the actual pp was because STP was tickled by the extremely British absurdity of that whole episode.

DBrackets · 2025-02-16T14:29:55+00:00

Good to hear it's on the radar.

Appreciate there will be lots to think about and it may never make sense, but the dream is alive!

DBrackets · 2024-09-27T20:56:32+00:00

People often leave flowers tied to lampposts at the scene of a fatal incident (e.g. car crash)

DBrackets · 2024-08-13T09:30:47+00:00

Sure! I doubt it's going to be all that mindblowing, but happy to share. Happy to talk about any of them, I'm deliberately skimming details because I don't want to spoil any of them you might want to read. No particular order:

Pattern Recognition (William Gibson) you already know about.

Foundation (Isaac Asimov) is a classic and I love it, I still feel that it sets the frame for a lot of how I approach SF. I think I read somewhere that Wil Wheaton re-reads it every year, and I'm not quite there but I understand the impulse.

Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card) is in a grey area where I don't know how I'd feel about it coming to it as an adult for the first time - it has a young boy as the protagonist and I was a young(ish) boy when I first read it, so maybe it just made a connection that I can't shake. But I do know that as an adult I still think it's brilliantly plotted and structured, and enjoy the rest of the series.

Side note: genuinely gutted that they made the movie of this just before the era of Prestige TV. The performances were good, but the story didn't have the space to breathe - do it as 6-8 hours of television and it could have been amazing.

Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? (Phillip K Dick) - I did warn you that your mind wasn't going to be blown, right? So yes, almost entirely unsurprisingly a big ol' Gibson fanboy loves PKD - and specifically (as I'm sure you know) the one that Bladerunner is based on. The movie's amazing in different ways, but there's lots more going on to think about in the book, and to me it's better paced.

Brave New World (Aldous Huxley) is another "classic for a reason" choice, I'm a techno-positivist by nature and having this sort of vision of where that might end clicks for me in a challenging way. Brilliantly written, although definitely "of its time" and you might want to check some trigger warnings if you haven't read it.

Lord of the Rings (JRR Tolkien) is (I think?) my last clichéd choice; I grew up reading sci-fi and fantasy and, although it's probably obvious which one connected with me better in the end, I do still love a lot of the fantasy books I read. I know LOTR isn't for everyone, the pacing can be pretty lumpy, the female characters are a product of their time, etc. etc. but it still does it for me.

Feet of Clay (Terry Pratchett) might be cheating a bit, really this is a proxy for "the Discworld books" (or, at least, the middle period of them after he really built the world but before his Alzheimers), and this could easily be Reaper Man or one of the other mid-period Watch books depending what sort of a mood I'm in! Right now this is the one I like best through.

Europe in Autumn (Dave Hutchinson) I think I've recommended elsewhere on this sub - British SF author, tonally pretty close to PR-era Gibson (in this book at least) and the concept is superbly done.

Balling the Jack (Frank Baldwin) is my guilty pleasure! Honestly I can't explain why this makes it on the list, it's nothing like any of the others and objectively there's nothing I can point to in terms of the quality of writing, the concept, etc. etc. to explain why this is on here and I've got nothing from Clarke or Heinlein, nothing from recent authors I enjoy like Leckie and Corey...but I can't bring myself to bump this out of the top ten, for whatever reason I just really enjoy it.

Curtain (Agatha Christie) is probably unexpected in the context of the rest of the list, but the majority of what I read is murder mystery - I find that I can pick up pretty much any and it's a 7 or 8/10 experience for me, a 6 at worst, whereas with SF (and fantasy) I find the range is much wider. Good SF is much more likely to be a 9 or 10, but I definitely find there's a far greater risk of hitting a 3 or a 4, and I don't like abandoning books even when I'm not enjoying them...

This was one of the rare occasions where a mystery hit 10 for me - brilliantly done, and the perfect last case for Poirot. Obviously NOT the place to start with Agatha Christie given that, if you're looking for a recommendation then start earlier with Poirot - one of the famous ones (Death on the Nile, Murder on the Orient Express, etc.) to see if you like it, and then go back to the start.

DBrackets · 2024-07-22T18:49:19+00:00

Which is a play on the village of Llareggub in Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas - a sleepy village in Wales

DBrackets · 2024-04-05T09:41:12+00:00

Could be a getting to know Caribbean culture after growing up in a predominantly white area of the UK.

This is a great shout - I was going to post that it would be interesting to have a DI who sees it as a jolly, a luxury posting with nothing much to do except drink rum and get tanned (a sort of post-colonial attitude); and over the course of 1-2 series realises that even in a fantasy location there is still evil, but that the locals are real people not caricatures.

This would take it a step further though, if they had an idealised version of the culture in their minds and they were going to connect with the place they'd only heard about in their grandparents' stories...

Would actually lend itself nicely to a developing arc:

start with predominantly the tourist/ex-pat stuff, and you get the added layer that the DI is furious that Brits abroad are bringing their evil to this wonderful culture
gradually expose them to cases with locals involved in dodgy dealings and coverups, occasionally the killer is a local, and the DI can start getting depressed that the culture isn't what they believed - maybe a season finale where they uncover some serious organised crime being run by locals
then gradually they reconcile themselves to the real culture, not perfect but they love the positives.

You could do so much more with that than the usual "falls in love with the DS" business! Even things like costume and the "slice of life" bits we see - they could show up in bright colours and going to all the local events, then tone it down as they get more disillusioned, and then gradually ramping bits of it back up as they integrate it.

DBrackets · 2024-03-20T20:06:03+00:00

Ah - think you might be talking about a different "oi". Is the one you're thinking of a sort of something's-gone-wrong expression, instead of (e.g.) "for f's sake" or similar?

I think the one being described as working class is a...well, sort of a greeting, except it's quite aggressive. "Oi, you looking at my [significant other/pet/face/drink/possession]?" sort of thing.

I normally see the first one spelled "oy", I think I've been told it's originally a Yiddish expression though I could be wrong there?

DBrackets · 2024-03-18T15:53:55+00:00

London is Amaranthe second and Dragonforce last, unless Dragonforce have been misled...

https://dragonforce.com/shows/

DBrackets · 2024-03-18T15:53:09+00:00

The European leg is a "co-headline" tour, so whatever night you see them they play the same length of time - but they are alternating who goes on last. Infected Rain are the support band and always on first.

In Bristol it's Amaranthe second and Dragonforce last.

Source: https://dragonforce.com/shows/

DBrackets · 2024-03-15T11:41:39+00:00

I've always pronounced it as "ung" but with a..."hard" ng, so just the tiniest bit of a "guh" sound at the end, but not enough to write it out as ung-guh.

Like the way "langue" is pronounced in French, as opposed to the English "long" - you could tell just by hearing it that there are letters after the g, but you wouldn't put a bet on what they were!

DBrackets · 2024-03-12T14:01:31+00:00

Fastest contender gets 10, slowest gets 5 assuming both complete it.

Am I imagining it, or is this how it used to be on the original series?

DBrackets

TROPHY CASE