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Aye, and Reform have failed in a couple of seats (e.g. Barnsley North) they were tipped to win, including by the exit polls. On the other hand, at the moment they're all predicting Farage to win Clacton.

I just finished Perfume by Patrick Süskind. Highly recommended.

+1. Wicked little book.

Any other recommendations of his, or similar?

I'm still catching up with more recent Alan Garner work, but have you ever read anything by Robert Holdstock? Start with Mythago Wood. If you like it, there's more.

Sony have made this difficult. They did make a mini wired gamepad for the PS4, but not for the PS5. You can use PS4 controllers on the PS5 but only for PS4 games.

Spaceships in the Disney Star Wars universe are stolen more often (and more easily) that bicyles in London.

It's fast and took me about 2 minutes to set up. It will happily print stuff from my phone

Aye, same experience with the M15w, which I only bought on a personal recommendation. HP were so shit in the SOHO product space for so long that I wouldn't have trusted them to have gotten it back together, otherwise. So if this one packs up, I will be looking at whatever is their latest equivalent.

I don't pay much attention to them but I think the issue is that they mostly offer clapter rather than real wit.

HP Laserjet Pro M15w. Matches your spec, very reliable and I've found it trivially easy to set up with desktops, laptops, tablets and phones. Currys are currently selling the 300DW for £80 less than Amazon are selling the M15w, but the M15w is a lot smaller. 13.6"w , 7.5"d, 6.3"h - you can put it on a shallow bookshelf.

Interview with one of Sunak's most credible opponents.

It is, but I think I'm two episodes behind, now. Not feeling up to Trumpian satire on the TV screen while it's resurfacing in the real world.

Sane parts of the U.S. : Mayday! Mayday!

U.K. : This is the United Kingdom, we're on our way.

U.S. : Um, false alarm, somebody lit a cigarette under a smoke sensor. Nothing to see here.

Definitely up for that. I see a lot of shout outs in the Youtube comments to "Shadow of the vampire", the first time Willem Dafoe was a Nosferatu film; well worth a watch if any horror fans on here haven't seen it.

I think it's the best of the Disney SW shows after Andor.

Aye, although that still leaves a lot of room to not be as good as Andor. Still, I finished each episode interested to see the next one, which was never true of Ahsoka and stopped being true of The Mandalorian.

There's a string of false equivalences here.

to oppose everything that challenges the status quo and keeps us locked in a two party system that isn't working

Reform UK isn't "everything that challenges the status quo". Opposing it doesn't even mean opposing its entire manifesto; if somebody finds its anti-immigrant and anti-"woke" culture war policies repellent, Reform UK's position on reforming the House of Lords is irrelevant.

a lot of people seem to be against people having views different from thiers

Alternatively,a lot of people with a range of views of their own are unified in objecting to one specific viewpoint, because it's repellent enough for a lot of people to be disgusted by it. A lot of people hating Reform UK's position isn't authoritarianism.

I get the bashing of Tice and Farage as they are a negative influence on politics

You can't separate Reform UK from them. It has one MP (and only that one for the last three months), so the words and antics of the leadership are most of what amounts to substance for the party.

Why would anyone in their right mind even want to try Cordyceps gummies?

So who/what is going to cause true debate in Parliament

Populism isn't true debate, it's the opposite. It's the appeal to (and manipulation of) raw emotion and base instinct. It disdains actual debate, saying that there are "typical people" out there whom political debate is ignoring and whom the populist doesn't have to define.

your little dog-whistle echo-chamber

Do you even understand the term dog-whistle? A dog whistle is, for example, Farage saying Sunak "doesn't understand our culture", letting the racists know he's saying Sunak is the wrong colour/religion to be properly British without quite saying it out loud. Dog whistles are what Farage and his ilk use to let some people know he considers them those "typical people". I think the people disagreeing with you here have been fairly explicit about why, not hiding behind code words.

I read the Hal Moore/Joe Galloway account of the battle of Ia Drang immediately before reading Chickenhawk. Moore was all "The best of the best of the best"; while Mason was "Two of our pilots never flew a single mission but logged hundreds of combat hours for themselves, while our CO was so dangerously incompetent that at one point he had to hide in his tent while a fellow pilot took potshots at him with a pistol, and I barely remember Ia Drang because I'd been flying 10 or more hours a day for the week leading up to it and most of the way through." Quite the contrast.

Such a media storm being whipped up.

It was a leaf blower.

if not the LD’s then the Greens maybe?

The Greens aren't going to win enough votes and Aggi is correct. If former Tory voters can't find a mainstream party to shelter in, they're likely to be hoovered up by the lunatic fringe.

I guess we should move the discussion to the Neanderthal thread.

I think you are also aware that effective refutation usually involves some reference to research, or secondary sources?

Well, that would have been a more reasonable response to Oliver than "You didn't write a book", but intellectual arguments against the book, such as Oliver made, aren't unreasonable. If they're not present, people are just playing a "the books I read are better than the book you read" dick-sizing game. "These aren't arguments you can confidently make about the way Neanderthals thought, given the lack of evidence" is a reasonable argument. "Here's the evidence you missed that does validate the argument and this is why it's important" would be a reasonable response. "You didn't write a book" isn't.

Can they really be this incompetent?

Yes. Sunak only ever looked competent in the context of the other freaks who were all that was left (and willing to serve) after Johnson's coup. He had to present himself as more reasonable than Liz Truss after replacing her, but his politics and attitude have always been pretty close to hers.

Human beings (and the press in particular) have this tendency to show respect to people who achieve positions in a hierarchy no matter how unsuitable they are. Jacob Rees Mogg was an eccentric fringe politician till Johnson gave him a job, suddenly he was an elder statesman of the Tory party; so it goes. But the decades-long fight over Europe in the Tory party only left the weirdo freaks standing. They've always been weirdo freaks and they're in charge.

Waitrose, it's expensive AND good quality.

It's an ARPG, but not a behemoth like Odyssey, let alone Valhalla. There are a lot of similarities with both old school and more recent AC, thematically and mechanics-wise. On the whole, I'd say Guerilla Games are a bit better at story-telling than Ubisoft, even if the plots aren't as ambitious in terms of multi-level narrative. It's closer to Origins than the Ezio series; stealth is very much encouraged, combat is much more weighted to archery and traps than melee, but there are skill trees, enemies with weak spots and so on. You can sneak through most of it, but there are a couple of boss fights.

Another comparison would be with Talos Principle. Not the puzzle solving, but the achingly sad messages from a time when humanity was facing apocalypse.

Baltic Tribes is intense. The "Free with ads" category in Amazon Prime is mostly dross, but that isn't. I wasn't stoned while watching it but it felt as if I had been.