JESUS CHRIST, FENTON!!





I'll probably just be stuck here cleaning house.

>>460955
Just looked it up, we're about a fortnight away from the twelfth anniversary of the Fenton video. FEEL OLD YET?

Lads, it's Poppymas.

Just decided to play lotto for the first time in years.

£10M in the jackpot this weekend.

You never know.

>>460962
You promised me you would share if you won.

>>460962>>460964
I'd be happy with a Lidl Stilton and fig bake. They're nice, but I can't justify the cost.

>>460964

Whelp... didn't win. Not even a quid.

I played five lines with lucky dips and all I got was one match each in two of those lines. Wide miss.

The jackpot is now up at £12.7M. Maybe I'll play again next time.

>>460970
>The jackpot is now up at £12.7M. Maybe I'll play again next time.
That £12.7m represents 12.7m times that people thought they would win, and were wrong. So surely you can pick better numbers than those losers.

>>460974

I actually won almost 200 quid one time a few years ago. But that was after many weeks of playing, so you couldn't really call it a profit.

The odds aren't great any way you look at it. It's several billion to one that you'll have all six matching numbers in any given draw.

>>460974
They don't give nearly that proportion of sales to the jackpot winner.

>>460975
It's 1 in 45 million. How do you reason it's regularly won if it's 1 in several billion?

Chandler is dead.
https://people.com/matthew-perry-dead-at-54-7501992

>>460977

>It's 1 in 45 million

Fine. Or that.

In any case, most people never win the jackpot. Not even after a lifetime of playing.

>>460978
First celebrity death in a while that's made me go "fucking hell".

I'm guessing it'll be like Paul from S Club where years of substance abuse fucked up his heart.

I stayed up till 2am, and now it's 1am. Remember to change your clocks when you wake up, the rest of you.

>>460978
I'm in a Facebook group for celebrity deaths and this had already been posted four times when I went to post your link. Maybe everyone else is awake now too.

>>460981
Excellent, an hour extra awake.

>>460981

I've noticed that the clock radio and the microwave's clock in the kitchen diverge wildly after some time. I set them to the correct time every six months, but tonight they were three to four minutes apart. One was slower than my radio controlled watch, the other one faster. But I guess that's alright. Some two minutes off in 180 days equals just over half a second per day. Loads of quartz wristwatches don't do better.

I've booked a week off for my birthday but I don't have much of a idea of what I'll do with my time. I'm going to go see a play on my own, get a flu jab but that's about as exciting as my life will get.

In the event of boredom I got Fallout 4 on the sale and might just playthrough that (with a day or two to get mods working). Maybe I'll spend a lot of time at the gym and working on moving up in my career. Still feels quite uneventful though when others will go on holiday or do something to talk about.

>>460983
This is /101/ worthy for me. I'll set my oven and microwave clocks with precision but give it a week or two and they'll both be out. It's annoying as they're both in the same room and for some reason these appliances makers like the clocks to be visible despite them being so obviously defective.

>>460990

>but give it a week or two and they'll both be out.

That's a bit extreme. The cheapest Chinese quartz wristwatch movements don't drift by more than about a second a day. Most appliances with built-in quartz clocks are in the 0.5 second range unless you're buying really cheap brands. Even if your two clocks drift in opposite directions, it'll be a month before they'll be a minute apart.

Which is why I love radio controlled clocks and watches. No drift, ever. They really satisfy your OCD needs.

I'm having this kind of day.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbSehcT19u0

Haven't changed the clocks in the house. Tricked the kids into going to bed an hour early. Result.

I've had KFC for tea for the first time in ages. Maybe it's just because I haven't had it in forever, but I think they might just retake the crown as best shitty fast food place.

They've started using seasoning on their chips which is a game changer, you can get a little pot of spicy pepper rice as your side instead of just gravy or sweetcorn; and perhaps most importantly their prices, which seemed expensive compared to the competition two or three years ago, are now pretty much on par with the competition and thus in comparison feel like better value overall.

Shame they only do Pepsi Max and not proper Coke, like. But nothing is ever perfect is it.

>>461011
I swear their chicken burgers have got smaller - still best value though, as you say.

>>461012
Cost of living is making chickens smaller?

>>461013
Yeah, farmers can't afford the grain, so they feed the chickens less.

Rocky caramel > Rocky > Club > KitKat > Penguin.

>>461011
You convinced me to check it out and yeah I was surprised actually. It's a lot less greasy than I remember and came in at lower calories for a 'large mighty bucket for one' than what I'd get from Maccies. If they did proper mash and some greens you'd actually be able to have an okay meal. Veg costs nothing, throw it in as a compulsory for the cattle.

It's still got the problem all KFCs have though that the backend and general management is poor. I ordered from a screen and it didn't give me a receipt and then had to wait around for longer than I would at McDonald's despite KFC being basically chicken and chips on a conveyor belt. I'd still sooner get Wendy's because of the chili side.

>>461011
Have you had the Gourmet Kings burgers and Chimichurri Loaded King Fries at Burger King?

Where can I get a decent multipack of t-shirts from? I got 7 Burton shirts for about £13 a couple of years ago and they could do with replacing. Muji doesn't do multipacks and their website is shit for filtering by size. Neither do Uniqlo and they seem to have weird proportions. I think John Lewis ones tend to have several white or faded blue ones, which I'll never wear because I tend to go for dark and earthy colours.

>>461141
Amazon do five Fruit of the Loom shirts from £11.

Visited my family, told my dad I got diagnosed with ADHD. He was very dismissive, "yet another label to add to the collection", and went on a rant about Big Pharma and how I should stop taking all my medication and go for a run every morning and I'll be "normal" within six months. He gets all his knowledge of the world from Joe Rogan guests, it's very embarassing. If an expert from the world of academia says something, he criticises them for being establishment stooges. If an "expert" is some crank that most academics in their field label as unreliable, then they must be right because they were on an episode of Joe Rogan and they're sticking it to the establishment.

Christmas songs playing in Asda. Didn't realise we're that close to the end of the year already. It gave me a profound sense of melancholy for some reason.

Made me think back to last Christmas, which was really pretty miserable, I was working and then after I finished work I ended up having a big row with the (then) girlfriend because she had drunk my beers. She bought me some more in the end, but only after I kicked off at her, and the point is I had asked her to save them specifically because I was looking forward to them when I got home from work. What even was she hoping to achieve with that?

She's going to get the fuck beaten out of her one day. I reckon it's because her dad used to beat her when she was a kid, so now she has to try provoke all the men in her life as some kind of test; she just doesn't realise one day she's going to bait the wrong bloke and end up in hospital.

So I might be lonely this Christmas, but I think I'll still be better off than tangled up with a mentalist like her.

>>461274
>she has to try provoke all the men in her life as some kind of test; she just doesn't realise one day she's going to bait the wrong bloke and end up in hospital.

Gave me a strange sense of warmth knowing that somebody else (of course it had to one of you two) has shared my pain.

I hope you have a good one this Christmas, lad. It's still a way off yet but get some beer in and order a festive Chinese. Do something for yourself without anyone else around to fuck it up for you. I'll raise a glass on the day to you and everyone else whose lives have been touched by the indomitable force of mental slags. Cheers.

The fuck off kind of bad cold I got earlier this week has now turned out to be full on covid. Positive tests and all.

First time since the start of the pandemic that I know for a fact that I've got it. All the other times, either the test was negative or I was handling it on a don't know, don't care basis.

>>461278

My sense of smell is also completely gone. I just cleaned the bathroom sink with some chlorine bleach and couldn't smell a thing.

What's the legal sitch on overtime? At my job, if we start a task or take a call, we can't leave until it's finish. Yesterday my colleague did not finish until 17:08. She asked if she could leave early the next day due to working an extra 8 minutes, but the manager said if she cares so much about working an extra 8 minutes, then all her breaks and lunches will be scrutinised and if she's even just 30 seconds late back from lunch she will be punished. I worked an extra 20 minutes yesterday to finish a task but I'm scared to ask for that time back because the management don't seem generous with that sort of thing.

>>461280
>the manager said if she cares so much about working an extra 8 minutes, then all her breaks and lunches will be scrutinised and if she's even just 30 seconds late back from lunch she will be punished
I don't know what your post was asking because I blacked out with rage reading that.

>>461280

It's a difficult one because legally, they can't force you to stay past your contracted hours- Unless you don't actually have contracted hours and instead you are just salaried on a variable time basis, like a lot of office folks seem to be.

You are well within your rights to just put tools down and fuck off a 1700 exactly, and they would be unable to punish you for it, legally. But as you are aware already, that doesn't mean they can't play the game in reverse by going full malicious compliance on you and timing your breaks and timekeeping etc to the second.

It's one of those things where in a decent workplace, both sides know it's best not to start a fight over it, and managers turn a blind eye to longer breaks or occasionally showing up late, in return for the employees don't kick off about it if they have to stay late every now and again.

There's not much you can do about it either way really, I just wouldn't put up with working somewhere like that.

Are things ever going to seem normal again? I remember the olden times, when the biggest political story of the week could be something as mundane as William Hague wearing a bad hat on a log flume. We had whole years when basically nothing seemed to happen. I'd love a bit of boredom right now.

>>461283
I'm going to suggest that your definition of "normal" is really "how things were from ~1990 to ~2007", and in that case, no, we're not going to go back to that. The sense that even if you do nothing at all, your quality of life will nevertheless increase over time, has gone and even if it comes back, we're all going to remember the gloomy generation, which we're in right now. Life might go back to that in a decade or two, but I think that for that to happen, we would first need something catastrophically exciting to excise the grimness of modern life. A world war would do it; that's what most people think of because World War II ended the Great Depression. While modern life is nowhere as bad as the Great Depression, it does feel similar in some ways, so I guess a less destructive war might be enough to reset society.

It's also worth thinking about what would need to happen to make life boring again. Climate change would need to stop being a concern. Technology is bringing this about, but not fast enough, so I think we would just need 15-20% of the human race to just die in order to save the planet, and that, I'm afraid, would be pretty exciting. People would need to go outside and talk to each other again, and I can't even imagine the sort of apocalypse that would be needed to make me talk to my neighbours. The economy would need to be on a reliably continuous upward trajectory, and maybe AI will make that happen but I doubt it, and it would still take years even if we all figured out the answer tomorrow.

Your best bet to make life seem normal, I would suggest, is to just stop watching the news. Most of it doesn't affect you. You don't need to care about the war in Ukraine any more than you cared about the Gulf War or Yugoslavia. And get off the Internet; we poison your mind and the people who are not terminally online always seem so happy and normal to me. I am confident you would be happier if you were one of them although please stay here because we need your enjoyable posts.

>>461285

The answer to all of it is in that graph where you see productivity and wages rise in lock step with each other from roughly the late 50s to the late 70s, and ever since then wages have flatlined while productivity has continued to reliably increase (albeit slower than before) year on year.

The question is what did we do to end up in that situation between the 50s and the 70s, and how do we get back there? Practically the entire first half of the 20th century had been nothing but devastation and death in the world wars, with the Great Depression sandwhiched between the two. So where did the sudden boom come from?

I have my theories of course. I am hopeful we don't have to go through another world war just to get back there, but we definitely need to move away from the unipolar geopolitical situation we've been in the last 30 years. I'm not rooting for China or Russia because I'm a hardcore Maoist or Putin stooge, but because competition is the only thing that will kick our elites out of their complacency and start developing the Western economy again.

I don't get the scene in Goldfinger where the dead girl on the bed is covered in gold paint. I mean, what for. Even if we accept that Goldfinger is a whimsical enough character who would do something like it. It's not like Connery was going to say, shod thish sod this, I'm out.

>>461289
It was an artistic choice you numpty.

>>461277

Cheers lad, likewise it's nice to know someone out there understands. In fact knowing this place I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be the very same lass. I'll pour out a toast of port irresponsibly early in the day for you mate.

>>461290

So, not a metaphor for having the old Yellow Pages logo done to her muff, then?

>>461290

Maybe it was difficult to know before there was wikipedia, but covering somebody in any kind of paint will not have the desired effect mentioned in the film. QI did a whole bit about that one time. The skin only absorbs about 1% of the body's total oxygen intake. Otherwise, even putting on a full body wetsuit could be life threatening.

A fully painted body could mess with your skin's thermal regulation, but even then, it's probably not going to kill you.

Artistic choice or not, I guess urban legends and old wives tales probably had an easier time being commonly believed fact than they do now.

>>461293
>Artistic choice or not

Maybe James Bond is a bit stupid. I mean, he's a spy not a medical professional. Just because he says in the film she died from paint suffocation doesn't mean that's how the character actually died.

>>461294

True, but with Bond's encyclopaedic knowledge in many areas of life, it's unfortunate that he would have missed that.

I'm sure fact checkers for films have their work cut out these days, because there'll always be an army of geeks on rudgwicksteamshow.co.uk who'll go "Ackhtchually...". This was obviously not the case in the early 60s.

The Internet and then especially smartphones have kind of killed off old-style pub debates where somebody would make outrageous factual claims about something after four pints and then you'd spend the rest of the night debating the veracity, and half of you would swear they'd check on their computer at home first thing. Or call their uncle or grandad who "knew about that stuff".

>>461293

I sort of assumed it was paint with some sort of heavy metals in it that would cause poisoning. I don't even know if slapping that much lead on someone would cause them to die, though.

>>461298
>The Internet and then especially smartphones have kind of killed off old-style pub debates where somebody would make outrageous factual claims about something after four pints and then you'd spend the rest of the night debating the veracity, and half of you would swear they'd check on their computer at home first thing. Or call their uncle or grandad who "knew about that stuff".

Isn't that how the Guinness book of records came about?

>>461300

I distinctly remember a time where they had a number on the beer mats you could text a question to, then presumably someone on the other end in a call centre would google (or perhaps Lycos) the answer for you.

I know I shouldn't over think Pokemon, but if Bill invented the technology to digitally store Pokemon what did they do before then?

>>461302

Intensive farming.

>>461302
Pokemon daycare and breeding, init.

>>461304
So you'd just rock up with a sack full of about 50 caught Pokemon and drop them off at the daycare?

>>461298

>The Internet and then especially smartphones have kind of killed off old-style pub debates where somebody would make outrageous factual claims about something after four pints and then you'd spend the rest of the night debating the veracity

And that's a good thing, actually. It's forced punters to up their game and move into much more abstract, philosophical debates which can't so easily be solved by a simple Google search. Pub conversation these days frequently delves into intellectual examinations of the works of Dostoyevsky, Kafka and Nietzsche, instead of just tediously going back and forth about whether the bird from Moonraker had braces or not.

>>461305
If you got the PokéDollars, sure.

>>461306

>Pub conversation these days frequently delves into intellectual examinations of the works of Dostoyevsky, Kafka and Nietzsche

I don't care about any of that after four pints.

I was trying to find some fingerless gloves, made of natural materials and in red. Anyway, that specific combination appears to be impossible don't you dare show me a maroon pair, I know what I want and I got distracted by an Etsy listing for latex gauntlets and ended up having a wank.

There's a new girl working in the chip shop. She's only a younglass, but she must be at least 6'2" and 18 stone. Every fibre of my being wanted to ask her "If I gave you everything I own, would you smother me to death with your arse?".

>>461311
I'm not good at visualising weight. Can you please post a picture of a woman with a similar frame?

>>461312
18 stone sounds like a lot, but Johnny Vegas is only 5'7" so she'll be thinner than he is here.

Going back to the productivity discussion that took place earlier in the thread, how is it the case that our inflation adjusted earnings have not improved since 2005? That seems mad to me.

Think of all of the efficiencies that offices and workplaces, in all industries, would have experienced since then, yet all of our earnings are the same? Is this CEOs siphoning off more money or something? Is it something to do with all of the non-white immigrants?

>>461312

>Can you please post a picture of a woman with a similar frame?

Not him, but maybe this will help.

I can smell fuck all. Everything smells and tastes of bland nothingness.

My current covid infection has really done a job on me.

>>461315

>Think of all of the efficiencies that offices and workplaces, in all industries, would have experienced since then, yet all of our earnings are the same?

Since 2015, the economic output per hour worked has only increased by 9.5%. The average hours worked by a full-time worker has fallen by nearly an hour per week. The proportion of workers in low-productivity industries has been growing, while the highest-productivity industries have persistent labour and skills shortages.

We have been stuck in a productivity trap since the 2008 recession. We have kept unemployment relatively low (in part due to our incredibly miserly welfare system), but most of the jobs we've created over the last 15 years have been low-skill, low-productivity and low-wage. The textbook example is car washing - the number of automated car washes has fallen, while the number of hand car wash businesses has grown. A huge proportion of the British workforce are in jobs that haven't seen any meaningful productivity increases, which is most of the reason that they haven't seen meaningful wage increases.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/labourproductivity/articles/whatistheproductivitypuzzle/2015-07-07

https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/labourproductivity/timeseries/lzvb/prdy

Crusader Kings III is about £9.40 via CD Keys whereas the Royal Edition is £36; is the additional content worth and extra £26 or so?

The estimated delivery time on my Amazon order is 10pm to midnight.

Would it be pretentious/silly to buy some books just because I've read them in the past and want them to sit on the shelf?

>>461327
It was silly to throw them away after you read them the first time if you like them so much. You might as well buy them again now.

>>461319
Just pirate it grandad/teenlad (both age groups seem equally inept when it comes to technology).

>>461329
I don't think I've pirated anything since the days of Limewire. I'm well out of the loop.

>>461330

https://libgen.rs/

Time for sodding diet. I'm taking on a distinctly Stewart Lee-esque outline and while I might not be able to do much about my hair following a similar trajectory, this I can change. Why I've started dressing a bit like him too is anyone's guess, but one thing at a time, hey.

Is it carpet-baggery to find a 17 year old attractive? There's one at my work who is quite sweet and bubbly, and I feel gross for thinking she's pretty.

>>461367
Yes, please turn yourself in at your nearest police station immediately.

Lads, I need some parenting advice.

I've just asked my son if he wants to come with his sisters to visit my parents tomorrow and he said no because he "has other plans". This is the first time he's actually had plans on the weekend because he's a massive shut in who spends most of his time in his room. What are these plans? It's a sleepover at the only girl in his friend group's house. He wasn't asking for permission, he just assumed he could go. In fact, I don't think he'd have mentioned it until he was planning on setting off tomorrow unless I asked him. There will be at least three other lads going, one of whom has a crush on him, and there will be alcohol. He's never got drunk before. I'm fairly certain he has a crush on this girl.

How do I find the right balance here? My instinctive reaction is to say he can't sleep over, but he's 17 next month and I was doing far worse than this at a younger age. I feel like saying he can hang out, they're meeting early afternoon, but can't sleep over is the right compromise although this is giving me the nagging feeling I'm making him miss out from having fun with his friends.

>>461369

If you stop him from going you are a cunt and he will hate you for it, but more than that you'll just end up making him one of those sheltered, stunted weirdos who never got the vital early experiences with women and booze that form a healthy adult relationship with them.

He's at the age you have to let him start taking adult responsibilities. Showing trust in his judgement is vital, but ensure he's also well aware you're not daft, you've been his age, you know what will likely be going on, and he will be in a world of bollocks if it turns out your trust was misplaced.

>>461370
I've no intention of saying he can't go at all, it's just the sleepover (at a girl's house) part and him not bloody asking when he's known this was planned for well over a week. I think my issue is that he should have given me more time to come round to the idea, nevermind his mum because she's out at the minute and I know she'll be less keen on the idea than I am (so I've been coaching him on how to approach it).

>>461369
If he's never drank alcohol before and is a massive shut in I doubt very much tomorrow night will descend into a bacchanalian expression of unhinged debauchery. Also won't there be adults there or at least in the vicinity, or are girl's parents out of town? If this girl is a teenager and already a homeowner then you should be trying to pair them off if anything, it's not like there are better ways to make money these days. All jokes aside, just let him stay over. What the fuck's going to happen? I guess there being one girl there is a almost a bit weird, but so what? Do you want him to go to uni only knowing the cocktail from The Big Lebowski?

>>461371

You clearly have the best of intentions but I dunno, sounds a bit weird to me because I was definitely out at house parties where all my schoolmates were getting irresponsibly drunk at that age, and I had my first girlfriend over to fingerbang while we watched 3 for £10 DVDs from HMV most weekends.

I don't know if my parents were especially liberal with me but I reckon at 16 going on 17, those really are the sorts of things he should be getting up to, or at least, it's certainly better than being a shut-in right?

>>461372
He's no idea if her parents are there or not. I've looked up the address he's given me and it's in a block of low-rise council flats, so that's all I have to go on. I think his friends have more experience of drinking than he does.

>>461373
I was doing worse from the age of 14/15 so I know he needs these formative experiences. I think I have a bit of whiplash because it feels like going from 0 to 100 moving straight from being a complete shut-in to staying overnight after drinking at a friend's house with nothing in between.

>>461368
>There will be at least three other lads going, one of whom has a crush on him
u wot m8

>>461377
His friend his gay and fancies him. I didn't think that was hard to follow.

I'm stuck after getting six right.

https://hiddenbooks.nationalbooktokens.com/?competition=20#

>>461379

I can't help I'm afraid, because I'm illiterate.

>>461379
I'm stuck on the tables; the left is probably Ben Goldacre's Bad Science but not sure on the other two

>>461381
That one is lessons in Chemistry. The one that has me most stumped is the Morris dancer.

>>461379
I got Lady Chatterley's Lover, and apparently there is a book which I've never heard of called "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow". I got two others then gave up.

>>461382
The English Patient

>>461369
Echoing otherlad, assuming his friends aren't obvious future criminals there will be a lass there and a gay lad so it's not like he's going to go out robbing old ladies.

If there's still time I'd go further and ask him if he wants you to pick up some vodka. You make him come with you and give him sage wisdom about mixing drinks, sticking the voddie in the freezer so he doesn't look a pussy etc. If you're comfortable with that then it opens up keeping an eye on him by getting 5-10 minutes to chat which at that age is really the choice you have - not if he's going to go out and get drunk but how that happens and if other older boys are buying.

I was helping out at a market today and the woman running it looked like Mistress T and it was quite distracting. Like, she properly looked like her, I wasn't just mad with horniness, not the first time I saw her anyway.

>>461386
the fact i know the exact pornstar your on about makes me very sad for the both of us

>>461386

She lives over here, doesn't she? Maybe it was her. She strikes me as someone who makes either jam or bead necklaces in her spare time.

>>461388

IIRC she's Canadian, but she has done a fair bit of work for The English Mansion.

I'm slightly worried that all three of us are familiar with her work.

>>461389

Don't worry, I only jack off to furries.

>>461387
>>461388
>>461389
Idk, she's very attractive and not exactly a run of the mill kind of porn performer, it's not that weird. It's a shame it's all humilation stuff because being called a prick and a dork doesn't really turn me on. A good job too because if it did I'd never be able to leave the house.

>>461390
Finally, some normalcy.

Can you still buy hedgehog bread or has it fallen out of fashion? I can't remember the last time I saw it.