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Phonechat (Giffgaff in this case) - made an annoying discovery yesterday when for the second time recently, I got cut off mid-call with a text saying that I'd run out of credit. This despite having a plan with unlimited calls and auto credit top-up. Turns out, buried deep in the small print, that "unlimited" ain't quite so unlimited. I already knew that premium-rate numbers didn't qualify, but surely a call to a mobile number beginning 07 does? Nope! There's a whole swathe of "non-mobile" 07 numbers to trick you, used by answering and forwarding services for companies. These are excluded from the unlimited tariff for Reasons, and cost a ridiculous amount per minute for more Reasons. A call to a plumber yesterday burned through my entire credit in five minutes. (Why my auto top-up didn't kick in is a mystery.) It does explain how I somehow racked up £26 of extra credit costs recently, though - I had to call the insurers after someone hit my car. Surprise surprise, their number is one excluded from the unlimited tariff. Since I don't have a landline any more (like lots of people), this is another case of lovely Britain finding new and interesting ways to rip everyone off without telling them.
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Jun 1, 2023 12:17
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I just realised that I've been confusing Kiss with Aerosmith for many years, so I couldn't name a single one of Kiss's songs.
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Jun 7, 2023 22:39
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Johnson being a rubbish British mini-Trump yet again. Trump: 31 charges under the Espionage Act. Faces jail, so his lawyers quit. Johnson: lied to Parliament. Faces suspension, so he quits.
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Jun 9, 2023 20:54
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Just realised that with Johnson quitting, Trump being indicted and Berlusconi carking it, it's the right-wing populist shithead leader version of Marry, gently caress, Kill.
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Jun 12, 2023 14:44
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Comrade Fakename posted:This interview is indeed incredible. Hit after hit after hit after hit.
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Jun 13, 2023 22:25
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sebzilla posted:Friends was filmed in front of an audience iirc It's a weird experience, though. When they're not actually shooting a scene, there's a comedian literally running around the stands trying to keep the energy level high, which must be exhausting because more time is spent not shooting than otherwise, and it's a loooooong day. The moment a scene is finished, a bell rings and the actors disappear to their dressing rooms, while the writers (who are usually lurking offstage) rush off to come up with new jokes if anything didn't hit the mark. They might do a scene four or five times with almost totally different gags each time until they get a good reaction from the audience. (There are no large flashing signs saying "LAUGH", BTW. If a joke dies, the actors and crew know it immediately.) Any footage without audience laughter either had the sound mixed down (there are mics all over the place above the audience seating) or was a reshoot on a different day. They shot extra scenes for at least two other episodes during the one I saw filmed, and I know they did reshoots for that because David Schwimmer and Matthew Perry were absent. (Memory's fuzzy, but I think they shot Perry's scenes with a double and cut in his closeups later, and Schwimmer had a subplot where he wasn't with the rest of the gang so could be filmed another day.) Humour is obviously subjective, but to me the Friends/Seinfeld/Frasier/Larry Sanders period was the high point of TV comedy and I haven't seen anything even remotely as funny since. (Certainly not Baddiel's Syndrome.  )Matt LeBlanc was by far the funniest Friends cast member IRL, incidentally.
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Jun 14, 2023 14:03
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Fatty posted:How does this work as an audience member? Surely the whole thing seems disjointed? You're seeing scenes from differently episodes entirely with no context and the episode you're actually watching may have scenes missing due to being filmed on location or actors being missing. Does the warm-up guy fill in the blanks or just read the script to you? They were also the last things shot in the day (which as I said, was looooong - shooting started about 3pm and the day I was there went on until after 11, but could sometimes run well after midnight), so everyone was tired and just wanting it to be over. Audience members can't just up and leave when they've had enough because that would involve individual people being escorted through the studio lot by security - once it starts, you're in there until the end.
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Jun 14, 2023 15:54
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Angrymog posted:I liked Drop the Dead Donkey. One of the clever things about it was how they had references to that week's news stories in it. Edit: I would have put a link, but it's been deleted from Dailymotion. Spoiler: it is literally ludicrously violent Small Strange Bird fucked around with this message at 17:21 on Jun 14, 2023 |
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Jun 14, 2023 17:17
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It's like the Burly Brawl from The Matrix Reloaded, except, well, not very burly.
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Jun 16, 2023 22:49
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It's amazing how Oceangate's safety standards amounted to "trust us, bro" and people still threw money at them.
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Jun 21, 2023 08:13
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https://twitter.com/aaronbastani/status/1671850534460858368?s=46&t=J-qAkVQ91RIQ09zcyMCwgA None of this could possibly be a group of kids taking the piss out of their gullible dumb-as-poo poo reactionary teachers, of course.
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Jun 22, 2023 13:41
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smellmycheese posted:Truly a question for the ages
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Jun 23, 2023 10:58
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I've never used a YouTube channel or subscribed to anyone, so for the most part it just echoes back to me the last few things I've watched. Which means at the moment I have Commodore 64 chiptunes, gunfights from the John Wick films and Space: 1999. (Yes, I'm very boring.) I feel pretty lucky never to have had Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan or any other poo poo like that 'recommended' to me that I can remember.
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Jun 28, 2023 20:37
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Pistol_Pete posted:I've also noticed that Twitter has become flooded with really lovely, low quality adverts. Musk scrambling for revenue from whatever sources he can find, I guess. I've also had ads for the benefits of lithium-7 over lithium-6 in boosted clean secondaries, how to spot Respirable Crystalline Silica exposure, a new confocal for time-resolved fluorescence methodologies, an explanation for heterogeneity in statin responses, and the Pratt & Whitney F135 jet engine.
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Jun 29, 2023 07:27
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I was wondering why Coutts was trending on Twitter. (Apparently you have to have assets of at least £1 million to bank there. If that's why Farage had his account closed, then lol. If it's for something involving the police, then lol and, indeed, lmao.)
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Jun 29, 2023 20:07
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Just unfollowed a former F1 driver for retweeting Great Replacement horseshit from one of Britain First's leaders, sigh. (Said driver is not European and lives in Monaco.)
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Jun 30, 2023 07:48
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Any UK goons have experience with the shitshow that is the railway booking system? I'm going up to London this Thurs and coming back Friday, booking the tickets via Trainline; I got an email saying that my return train is no longer running, but my ticket is valid for the next available train, subject to conditions. If that doesn't work, I can get a refund. Check the ticket's T&Cs, and they say: no alternate trains. No refunds. Okay, so which is true? If I take the next train, is some rear end in a top hat ticket inspector going to say nope, can't do that, here's a fine? Also, it's a ridiculous split-ticket system where my trip is broken into two each way for no goddamn reason, since I stay on the same train. WTF? God, I miss the days when it was just "go to station, buy ticket, get on next train". 
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Jul 3, 2023 11:10
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Guavanaut posted:Netflix is doing two Narnia movies, they should CGI her into that. Edit: Whitney Houston's 'I Wanna Dance With Somebody' topped the charts in 1987.
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Jul 3, 2023 19:33
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Diet Crack posted:If you enter, exit and re-enter the closet, does that make you trisexual? A Frog?
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Jul 4, 2023 11:55
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I stayed with a relative overnight and this morning saw live TV for the first time in years. It was whatever the BBC's breakfast show is called, but I had to ask her "Is this ITV?" (Yes, I'm An Old and still think of ITV as the trashy downmarket channel.) It had a story on the Liverpool woman who was randomly shot and killed by some shithead with a submachine gun, which is an objectively terrible thing. But the way it was presented was a cross between Simon Bates' Our Tune and the worst of Damian 'film a prop teddy bear in the wreckage' Day from Drop The Dead Donkey. Basically "let's get the family to pour their hearts out so we can selectively edit it for some good quotes", while taking them to Greece to 'revisit their last holiday together' - oh, and let's show a censored version of the CCTV footage of the shooting shown at the trial for the death-wankers. All with, like I said, Our Tune-style music in the background. It was both ghoulish and mawkish at the same time, and was immediately followed by chirpy presenters being happy and hyper about some loving trivial thing. Absolutely awful. So glad I don't need a TV licence any more, because I'd be pissed off about paying for that poo poo.
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Jul 7, 2023 23:38
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Darth Walrus posted:Being anti-hope is, in fact, official Labour policy:
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Jul 9, 2023 11:45
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Just realised I don't actually know who Huw Edwards is because I was thinking of box-headed newsreader Hugh Scully. Probably for the best, by the sound of it.
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Jul 9, 2023 23:02
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Mebh posted:If you have an Instagram account you already have a threads account. That's kinda the big scandal. You don't really get a choice. It's how it took off so quickly. Shadow accounts were made for every insta account that you could already follow for threads.
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Jul 11, 2023 13:51
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The Labour right are a few snakes and a lot of worms, but if you ask any of them they'd all insist they're a snake.
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Jul 20, 2023 20:57
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sebzilla posted:Reveal yourself "monstermunchman"
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Jul 26, 2023 20:52
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smellmycheese posted:Don’t think the thread covered this dismal garbage today. Can you imagine, for one moment , someone like Reeves going on holiday to a Caravan Park on the English Coast?
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Jul 27, 2023 23:00
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I just checked Mouseprice, and the one-bedroom Bournemouth flat I bought in 1993 for £36k and sold in 2011 for £90k is now valued at £180k. What the actual gently caress.
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Jul 28, 2023 11:15
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God drat, HMRC loving sucks. I'm trying to sort out an ongoing tax issue, which you'd think they'd want, but they're determined to make it as difficult as possible. "You can contact us by email or post." The one time I want to talk to someone over the phone to sort things out quickly, but nope. "Our contact details are at the top of this letter." Er, just listing the gov.uk website is not exactly useful. Do a Google search for how to contact the relevant department. Find a number. Get a recorded message saying (very quickly and without warning) that their email address is "mumblednamedotanotherlongname @ hmrc.gov.uk". Have to listen to it three times to be sure I've got it. There is no option to talk to a human; the message just ends. Send email explaining what I need. It bounces. Luckily I CC'd my accountant, and he says that "mumbledname" actually has an extra letter sneaked into it, which I couldn't tell from the mushmouth on the recording. Try again; bounce. Talk to accountant again. He sends me a contact number - which is the same one I called that gave me the email address in the first place. Does he have any way to contact them directly? He copies me in on my original email, which he forwarded - to an email address he had from prior business that's slightly different from the one given over the phone, with an extra dot-bit after "hmrc". Whether this email will be answered, or even received, who knows? So I'm literally trying to give them money, but they've made themselves uncontactable.  It's like something out of Brazil or Paranoia.
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Aug 1, 2023 18:49
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300+ new posts? What happened - did Chuck Sausage-Mitts die, Corbyn form a new party, Sunak call a snap general election? Oh. Huh.
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Aug 3, 2023 15:23
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The Daily Mail's front page posted:As eco-protesters occupy the roof of the PM's family home, what a humiliating symbol of our supine tolerance of a tiny, self-obsessed bunch of zealots who disrupt everyday life with impunity.
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Aug 4, 2023 06:53
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Google Jeb Bush posted:I will also accept government-authorized cadaver resale and processing services
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Aug 7, 2023 23:38
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Guavanaut posted:Landlords and speculators have probably done more cumulative urban property damage than any air force of mad bombers. So the developers demolished every brick of the building except the facade, then went "Oh no! That's not safe, sorry, have to knock it down before it collapses." Edit: dodgy developers usually get away with fires and the like because they can just tell the police they were somewhere else at the time and they have multiple witnesses, you can't prove anything, but occasionally they get done. Like the guys who ringed some protected trees in Sandbanks so they could rip out the dead wood and build on the site, only the judge was apparently a big believer in Tree Law and sentenced them on the probability of guilt because there was nobody else with any motive to do it. Small Strange Bird fucked around with this message at 12:15 on Aug 8, 2023 |
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Aug 8, 2023 12:09
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Oh christ, he's doing the power stance thing.
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Aug 9, 2023 23:10
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DreddyMatt posted:Seems incredibly dangerous. Gotta remain perfectly still getting sucked while someone holds a straight razor to your throat.
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Aug 11, 2023 11:39
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Microplastics posted:Starmer’s efforts to court corporate chiefs in what party insiders have called a “smoked salmon and scrambled egg” offensive. Tossed pledges and a bag of wet eggs.
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Aug 18, 2023 11:23
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Someone say "90s games magazines"? At last, a topic I can actually talk about confidently because I worked for several!  Not going to say which because doxxing is still a thing, but over eight years I was credited on at least 10 titles, probably more because I did bits of freelance that I've forgotten about.What someone said upthread about people shuffling from mag to mag is accurate. The first mag I worked on, I did one issue before it was split from multiformat into two separate single-format titles, but I was still doing the same job on both (which I used to get a nice pay rise by cornering the company boss and pointing out that my workload had doubled). After a year the teams of both mags apart from me and the editor quit en masse to join a rival startup, so it was onto a new title (which replaced an existing title for the same format, the staff of which got split up and shuffled around) which also lasted for a year before being sold to a rival, so we all took over another existing title after the previous team got one issue removed from Smiths for printing a picture of (low-res polygonal) full penetration from some German porn game. Then I had a couple of fairly secure stints (two and three years) and became an editor before going from games mags to movies, but that's another (extremely stressful) story.The reviewer-to-PR pipeline wasn't as common as you'd think - I only knew two guys who did it while I was there, but both were inveterate blaggers and bullshit artists so they were ideally suited. I'm reasonably proud to say that I never once bumped up a review score because the ad sales department said "if you give it over 90% they'll buy four pages of ads" (though they constantly tried it on), but I did end up with two software houses refusing to talk to me - one because I slated their big movie licence despite having given it a cover earlier in the year, and the other because I made a post-lunch drunken phone call starting with "Awright, you bastard, where are my competition prizes?" that was meant as a joke but apparently not taken that way. Oops...
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Aug 26, 2023 19:00
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smellmycheese posted:Pfft. You youths with your 90s games journalism. The 80s peak of CRASH and ZZAPP will never be topped. Although the legendary Edge review of Doom is probably still the funniest moment in “serious” games journalism One of them had a blow-up of their Oli head drawing on the Zzap office wall with a speech bubble that in hindsight I suspect may have been a racist comment, but who knows?
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Aug 26, 2023 20:56
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smellmycheese posted:This is an interesting, if somewhat nerdy, insight into how Keith’s Labour machine operates. When you shoot video on Pro Sony Cameras these days you have the option to shoot “log” which is essentially the same as a Raw Still picture - as in it has lots of colour depth and ISO information encoded in it but you need to process it in post production to get the colour palette and “look” that you want. If you don’t process it it just looks like a washed out grey mess. Unfortunately, because so many films have had this washed-out look on release it's become the new normal, so others then subconsciously use it as a target appearance. 
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Aug 30, 2023 08:46
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Last time I looked at the price of an official HP toner cart for my laser printer, it was something like £80. So I bought a box of five no-brand compatibles on Amazon for £30. The print quality isn't as good and they don't last as long, but for £6 a pop I don't really care!
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Aug 31, 2023 23:07
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