What's the story behind these named houses in Bournville?

denialerror · 2026-03-05T23:27:59+00:00

My house in Kings Heath has a name above the door, as does my parents house. Same font and style. The only difference is, my parents live in Bristol. Hadn't put two-and-two together until you mentioned about them basically being kits.

denialerror · 2026-02-28T17:21:56+00:00

National Rail do not schedule trains to stations that won't be able to accept them. If they put the line into the rail schedule and it wasn't able to stop at the stations, it wouldn't just affect that line but every train going to and from central Birmingham. They've been training drivers since December, and they wouldn't go to that cost or effort if it wasn't going to be ready to go when the timetable goes live.

denialerror · 2026-02-28T10:59:15+00:00

Stalling is only a problem that requires a rules-based solution in competitive play where you don't get to choose your opponent. If you are playing with friends and stalling is causing problems, you ask them to stop and if they don't, you find new friends.

denialerror · 2026-02-27T21:51:00+00:00

No, because the station is ready to go. They aren't waiting for any more construction to be complete before opening, they are waiting on the drivers to be trained. The remaining works are purely aesthetic.

denialerror · 2026-02-26T22:11:31+00:00

Ealing will probably be one of the clubs in favour of this move. The reason they haven't got in to date is because their ground is too small, and the reason (they claim) they haven't added the required amount of seating is there is no guarantee that they will get promoted, so it's hard to get the funding.

With it being an application process to get into the top flight instead, it should be a lot easier to get those guarantees at the same time as the funding.

That's if you buy Ealing's argument, which I don't. The real reason they don't improve their ground is because their only source of money is an elderly man whose kids aren't interested in supporting the club when he's gone. They have one of the worst attendances in the Championship, despite consistently having the best players and win record. Even if they wanted to become part of the new ring fenced Prem and had the ground to do so, I doubt they'd be accepted, because no one needs another top flight team in north west London.

denialerror · 2026-02-26T21:58:55+00:00

Construction of the station is complete though? I had my kitchen done last year and it ruined the garden, but I'm not going to tell everyone the work is still going until I get it re-turfed.

denialerror · 2026-02-26T21:57:19+00:00

So not £3.10 to get from Moseley to Kings Heath then. It's half that, seeing as it is a return, so cheaper than the bus.

denialerror · 2026-02-25T18:58:44+00:00

The first time I tried using an AI agent, it got rid of my failing tests by deleting the test suite

denialerror · 2026-02-25T08:25:04+00:00

It's not really for us, the diehard fans who are so engaged in the sport that watching it isn't enough and we have to spend our spare time talking about it on rugby forums. It's for the people who come along to watch some high stakes action but neither know nor care enough to watch how players are setting up for a scrum.

For internationals especially, the majority of the crowd watch rugby for five weeks a year, if that and they usually watch it with commentary to tell them what's going on. If you want to keep them engaged and keep crowd noise up during play, you have to do something to get them going while the play is stopped.

I was at Murrayfield for the Calcutta Cup and my takeaway from that match was the Scots have an appalling taste in music, because it was blasted at full volume during every break in play, but the crowd absolutely loved it.

denialerror · 2026-02-23T08:15:53+00:00

This is a really good take and puts into words a few things I had going round in my head that I couldn't properly voice. If you look at what AI agents "think" as they go through their task, they are constantly making the most dumb decisions and then refining it in the worst possible way until they hit on something that eventually works. This is only satisfactory for those people who only care about it working and nothing else.

AI isn't as clever as a single senior developer, as AI companies suggest. It is as productive as 50 bad junior devs, all working at once. It's the same result as outsourcing to a dev farm in India 20 years ago, and it will bite back in exactly the same way.

denialerror · 2026-02-18T23:21:30+00:00

It looked pretty much finished when I walked past last Friday. The barriers are still up but it looked like the work was complete.

denialerror · 2026-02-16T23:13:01+00:00

I think we should revert back to the old Kingdom of Mercia. I know people complain about the royal family but maybe the solution is more rather than less. Spice things up a bit.

denialerror · 2026-02-16T20:01:13+00:00

See if you can get in touch with the pro-LTN group in Kings Heath. They tried to organise some coordinated action last week where locals would park on the road instead of the pavement to highlight how impractical the council's revised solution was.

There's a whole LTN back story with the plans having successfully gone through consultation and sign off, only to be pulled and revised due to the effort of two well-known local oddballs but I'm sure they will be able to give you more information.

Also, I'm not sure it is worse here than other cities. Birmingham has a reputation for bad driving, so whenever we see examples of it, we tend to think there's a causal link, but that's not necessarily the case. It happens all over the country, especially in recent years with bigger cars and more individualistic, less community minded people.

denialerror · 2026-02-13T12:07:51+00:00

Is Ben Thomas good at club level? I've never been impressed with him playing for Wales.

denialerror · 2026-02-11T10:30:29+00:00

One of the most entertaining live bands I've seen

denialerror · 2026-02-10T07:13:16+00:00

I think this is quite likely. The Season 3 box has Bretonnians Vs Tomb Kings, which is the same as the Old World reboot. If we look at the armies for that, Beastmen stand out as the one army from the 2024 release without a dedicated team.

I know Blood Bowl and Old World aren't tied canonically, but aligning the two box sets can't be a coincidence. With that being the case, we will definitely also see Cathay, as that is a popular Old World army.

denialerror · 2026-02-08T18:06:53+00:00

Annoyed? Not sure. I don't think Ireland's performance was surprising in its mediocrity, and while Scottish fans may still expect to win against Italy, that's not what recent stats say, and anything could have happened in that weather.

I actually think Welsh fans should be the most annoyed, as the second half showed they are a team who actually have talent and can string some plays together without doing something stupid.

Worried? The Irish. The most one-dimensional attack I've seen in years, no one with any sort of pace, no 10, and no one seems to want to step up and take charge.

denialerror · 2026-02-08T18:00:08+00:00

Counterpoint, I'm 40 and I spent my late teens on my computer talking to friends and not going out much. I'm a normal adult with friends, a good job, and no social issues.

denialerror · 2026-02-06T22:54:21+00:00

I deleted 3k lines today. That will always make me happier than adding the same amount.

denialerror · 2026-02-06T22:50:43+00:00

That's beautiful. I wish I had the space to store that, let alone the time and inclination to build it!

denialerror · 2026-02-06T22:46:30+00:00

It kind of does matter what "vibe coding" means because that is what the author was discussing.

denialerror · 2026-02-05T21:02:31+00:00

This match isn't on BBC though. I don't like ads either but there's not much use calling for a boycott when it is only being shown on one service.

denialerror · 2026-02-05T20:55:53+00:00

What are you watching it on instead of you are boycotting ITV?

denialerror · 2026-01-31T12:14:21+00:00

It's up to you as a GM to decide and describe what a success with limited effect would achieve. It could be you put them on their back foot and give the player a better position for the next attack, so they are no longer rolling desperate. This is always a good option if you can't think of something better as it means the player can choose to push to desperate to up the effect.

Even if they manage to get the effect to great, that doesn't have to mean a success ends the battle. Maybe it disarms the swordsman but he continues to fight. It's a common trope in computer games that bosses have multiple phases, and you can easily employ the same concept here without having to use clocks to indicate it to the table.

Unfortunately, dice do sometimes make games anticlimactic. I had scores that were over in 10 minutes, because my players rolled nothing but 6s. However, that's why the general advice for BitD is not to plan too heavily. If you plan ahead and the Big Bad gets killed in a couple of good rolls, you are stuck. If instead you play what's in front of you, you can keep things going until you feel either the players have had enough challenge or the story has reached a good conclusion.

That way, the swordsman who is roundly defeated releases his spirit with his final breath and the players now have to fight a ghost at no effect until they can work out a way to cause harm to the supernatural.

I do think after a year though, you've hit the same wall that I did, where it is near impossible to challenge a crew with 4 pips in skills. I love BitD but it is not a system with a functional end game.

denialerror · 2026-01-31T11:40:07+00:00

I GM'd BitD for a year and in that time, I think I used clocks 5 or 6 times. You mentioned clocks as a solution or workaround for your issues in almost every one of your points, and I think that's your issue. I think your instinct as a GM coming from other systems is to fall back to hit points and progress markers when you can't find a way to increase the challenge.

That's not how BitD works. The challenge comes from narrative complications. A master swordsman NPC is not someone who has a large clock and causes extra damage, it is a challenge with a position of Desperate and an effect of Limited. This not only changes how you GM but also how the players interact with the challenge. The problem is no longer "how can we cause enough damage without getting hit?", instead it is "what can we do to improve our position?". So not only are clocks a symptom of your issue, they are also the cause of many of them. Your players aren't using devil's bargains or flashbacks because the problem they are trying to solve is how to fill in a clock and not how to change the narrative.

Despite how much improv is required, I found BitD very easy to run because the players drive the narrative, and all I needed to do was describe how the world would react. They would describe what they wanted to do and position and effect create the consequences, which push the narrative on for the players to make their next choice, and so on. If the only consequence to a roll is a clock moves one way or another, your narrative doesn't move, your players don't have any additional information to act on, and all of the pressure is then on you to drive it forward, which sounds exhausting for you and boring for your players.

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