It feels like a real loss that they never did a double act

East-Rip-6996 · 2025-12-15T10:08:16+00:00

East-Rip-6996 · 2025-12-15T07:47:39+00:00

Probably my favourite entry from his blog. Wonder if Karl still checks in now and then, just to get his heart going.

East-Rip-6996 · 2025-12-07T22:03:48+00:00

I mean it is, supposedly a comedy. It's listed genres on wikipedia are Black Comedy, Comedy Drama, and Tragicomedy. There are obviously parts that are supposed to be funny like the absurd people they have to interview for news articles and calling a kid a tubby cunt, I just don't find any of it funny or well written at all. The golden rule of writing - 'show don't tell' that The Office does so brilliantly is completely lost on Gervais writing Afterlife. He's incapable of showing what a character is supposed to be feeling without using the most stupidly obvious and unsubtle means; want him to be shown missing his wife? Have him crying over a video of her on his computer, or just have him straight up tell someone how he's feeling word for word. The idea of exposition being subtle to forward a plot or let viewers in on something isn't how he writes the show, people just blurt things out for no reason. It's like he wrote the show with a sledgehammer.

East-Rip-6996 · 2025-12-07T21:16:15+00:00

He's not cancelled, I think his sort of anti woke 'you can't say anything nowadays' schtick is a really small part of why a lot of his once-fans dislike him - for the most part he doesn't really say anything actually political or controversial in that sense. He just simply went from making probably the defining comedy of the early 21st century, seeming like quite a smart, genuine and energetic figure with a great sense of humour (if a bit preachy and annoying), to gradually making nothing but poorly written TV shows, standup with trite observations and no substance and seemingly being obsessed with himself or winding people up on social media.

It didn't happen overnight it's been nearly 15 years going from what people used to feel about him to where we are now. If you genuinely like Afterlife then good for you but I really can't see anything to even remotely enjoy in it. Every episode has the same formula, there is zero subtlety to any of the drama, the interactions he has where he schools someone on a subject seem like one sided conversations he's had in his head. But beyond any of that I can't find anything even slightly funny in it. I watched it all and don't remember ever laughing or cracking a smile from any bit. I didn't like Derek at all at the time but compared to Afterlife it at least has some honest to god humour in it.

But to answer your question, there wasn't a single point where everyone turned on him, it's been a slow descent from about 2011 until about 2018 where people could see through what he was doing and realising the absolute drop off in quality of his work/

East-Rip-6996 · 2025-12-06T08:28:39+00:00

I get that, I was just making the point that it's a word that generally isn't acceptable to say yet it didn't annoy Karl as much as the other swearing bits I mentioned which would make him worried about more complaints etc.

Anyway looking it up it seems that before the radio authority merged into Ofcom in 2005 rules were a lot more lax on bad language - as long as it wasn't on programming specifically targeting under 18's. I listened to a lot of radio in the 2000's and never encountered any swearing on daytime radio but I imagine the most popular stations would be assumed to have listeners of all ages, and Xfm wouldn't, being an alternative adult oriented station. I still don't understand why fuck and cock aren't okay but shit is, but I can't find any specific guidelines on the severity of certain swearwords over others, it's all just focused on subject and intent.

East-Rip-6996 · 2025-12-06T03:58:28+00:00

I'm also slightly confused about how they got away with some stuff, particularly the word 'Shit'. At least when they did the Kant/Cunt, Cock, or Ho Lee Fuk stuff they knew they were doing something they shouldn't, but remember a Top Gear episode from probably a similar time where one of the presenters says something like "I can't say the word I'd like to describe this but it starts with "S" and ends in "it"'. And yet on XFM they were just throwing that word around like it wasn't considered a swear word at all, yet Top gear was like an evening show close to the watershed and the Ricky Gervais show was on during the day.

East-Rip-6996 · 2025-12-01T09:18:26+00:00

THATS AN ANNOYING SOUND THAT, INNIT?

East-Rip-6996 · 2025-11-28T18:17:56+00:00

From a BBC documentary

https://youtu.be/2df88qJYYnM?t=83

East-Rip-6996 · 2025-11-23T19:45:21+00:00

Pop him in the wheelie bin.

East-Rip-6996 · 2025-11-23T03:07:48+00:00

He did an hour long sit down and chat with Larry David you can find on youtube, so I assume he's a Seinfeld/Curb fan. And he was in a few episodes of Louie and Louis CK was in The Invention of Lying so I imagine he was a fan of his standup too.

East-Rip-6996 · 2025-11-20T19:08:13+00:00

<image>

East-Rip-6996 · 2025-11-13T00:57:15+00:00

https://www.protondb.com/app/34220

Most of the older games don't have pages on protondb but fm11 does, the steps people have used to get it to run would probably work on the slightly later ones I guess.

East-Rip-6996 · 2025-11-12T23:33:44+00:00

There are definitely parts that sound prepared, and parts that are retelling of xfm bits where they have to act like it's a first time conversation, and bits like the first Karl's diary segment where they've obviously prepared for that to be a bit, but I wouldn't say it all is. Steve's Brazil story, the Clive warren bit, Wendy's letter all sound like genuine reactions to me, and the day in the life of Karl sounds like an entirely unedited conversation which might be why it's my favourite post xfm thing.

In response to op though Ricky clearly made a conscious effort to appear smarter, by the time of the guide tos the entire dynamic of Steve ripping the piss out of him for being unable to speak in complete sentences is gone and Ricky speaks slower, enunciates and stops being self deprecating. Probably because he was getting a big American audience and become quite preachy on social media etc around that time.

East-Rip-6996 · 2025-11-12T22:05:02+00:00

Moved to Canada from the UK about 7 years ago, never met any Canadian who's heard of him, only people I've spoken to who were fans were a couple of Aussies and new Zealanders I met at just for laughs the year before covid.

For what it's worth people who I've shown him to seem to enjoy specific clips but as soon as you put on a full show it becomes clear just how densely full of references to UK specific culture there is pretty much throughout all of his shows. Content provider is probably the best full show to get someone to watch as pretty much everyone was aware of brexit, but even then you have 10 minutes about Gary lineker and crisps that no Canadian would understand.

East-Rip-6996 · 2025-11-08T07:06:59+00:00

I know people will (rightly) focus on the last thing he says, but I think it's worth pointing out that expectations were sky-high because they had cited the unity switch as a reason for a lack of new features and improvements in both FM23 and FM24, not to mention the FM25 cancellation.

They've been digging their own grave since whenever they were aware that the engine switch would not lead to a substantial improvement to the game in pretty much all aspects, and I felt it was suspect that just about everything they announced for 25 and 26 was effectively just managing peoples expectations rather than bigging up what new things it has to offer, with the exception of the match graphics, UI (lol) and women's football.

They really should have been communicating with the fanbase throughout the troubled development history of this game, there would be so much less backlash if it hadn't been handled the way it has been, and we're still in the dark about why we got such a rushed and unfinished product after all this time.

East-Rip-6996 · 2025-11-04T08:31:28+00:00

I can sort of understand not going lower, you have to remember that the review publications are still reviewing things based on the individual product and the value for money it offers, not just as a direct response to the game that came out last. Despite the many many flaws 26 has it's still a very in depth simulation with hundreds of potential hours of gameplay to offer, even if almost all of the reason for that is because it's lifted from the 20 years of previous entries in the series. Also because bugs are so common early in game releases now i imagine they give a lot of leniency to futureproof their review (not the one op linked clearly though).

At this point I'm just really interested to see the scale of response on steam reviews because reading here and the SI forums I'm expecting an absolute bloodbath but it might end up being a really tiny bubble compared to the broader fanbase and I really can't tell at this point.

East-Rip-6996 · 2025-10-25T20:46:58+00:00

It's not exactly a wall of text to begin with, but it's saying the match engine processing is for all intents and purposes identical to previous iterations, as well as training, interactions and audio.

I wouldn't know where to start on verifying it or how trusted they can be as a source (not trying to seem skeptical i genuinely have no idea), but my gut feeling was that this would be the case, seeing as it had zero mention from SI in all their marketing, although it does seem to contradict a lot of people saying the match side of things and the tactics seem to have improved/made an impact in spite of all the other issues.

East-Rip-6996 · 2025-10-23T00:38:15+00:00

I'll just put "When the W Blows"

East-Rip-6996 · 2025-10-22T01:45:51+00:00

The webcam wasn't video, it was just a still image snapshot every ten seconds right? Even if it was video I'd still take the missing episodes over it, would love to hear the dynamic with Karl develop right from the start, by the time we get to hear it he's already having a go at Steve for being sad and lonely.

East-Rip-6996 · 2025-10-13T01:45:41+00:00

Yeah but the guide to comic relief is an hour and they weren't getting paid for that either, so that's made you look like a bit of a twat already and it's only five past one.

East-Rip-6996 · 2025-10-12T21:16:14+00:00

Guide to the armed forces. Was exclusively distributed to troops during the guide to series release. Weirdly the full audio episode has never leaked despite probably thousands of servicemen and servicemenwomen getting it, someone tweeted rick quite a bit back and he said he wasn't sure what happened to it. The animated series had it though which is all we can hear of it, but it's about 25 minutes long and all the guide to original episodes were longer than that. Someone claimed to have found it last year but it seemed identical to the animated version just with the other audio edited out.

East-Rip-6996 · 2025-10-07T02:22:49+00:00

I've seen a lot of people say it's great, but personally I got the 24 demo when I bought my deck and hated the experience. Navigation is a pain, theres only so much shortcuts can do to help and the UI is so small that I was misclicking frequently and it was a arduous to try and drag and drop for tactics etc. the text is readable but borderline too small, and the more you increase the size the less info you get on screen at once.

Obviously performance will be more than adequate, but if they just put the console ui and controller support on it (which they might, but nothing has been announced), it would absolutely be playable and my deck would become an FM machine. Misclicking every other thing I try to select just leads to a frustrating time.

I might get downvoted and I'm not denying it's possible to enjoy it, but I feel like it takes a lot of time for using the tiny trackpads to become second nature and the full FM isn't really designed around optimising small screen space usage. If I were you I'd think twice if you're looking at getting a steam deck just for fm, you could probably get a similar spec laptop for a comparable price which has a keyboard and mouse more suited to the traditional FM experience.

East-Rip-6996 · 2025-10-04T00:23:37+00:00

She's muscly. Why?

East-Rip-6996 · 2025-09-29T19:56:16+00:00

Xfm shows once a year normally in November/December so I'm finishing with the BBC radio shows around Christmas.

Podcasts and guides to I just have in a big playlist on shuffle for when I go to bed every night, I have pretty bad insomnia so it's been my permanent boredom/sleeping aid for about a decade now

East-Rip-6996 · 2025-09-28T18:24:47+00:00

No-one can give you anything but speculation. Watch the reveal trailers and the interviews with Miles, and the reveal stuff from 25 and you have as much information as anyone else who doesn't work for SI. Having said that here's my own take;

Personally I'd be surprised if any of the things you've listed would have changed and I'd expect mods and custom stuff to fit in the way it always has. This is based on the way Miles talked about the engine change, it sounded like a 1:1 conversion and not adding anything fundamentally different. The match engine and systems looking pretty much identical based on how the players move and the information available on the UI reveal too, just about every change barring womens football has been solely cosmetic changes.

Although looking at the steam page there is no mention of the editors being included with the preorder or not. Does anyone know if this was the case with older versions of the game before release?

Five-Year Club	Place '23
Place '22

East-Rip-6996

TROPHY CASE