Will

I think the majority of people are like that until they take an interest in it a bit later on. The important thinkg is to keep doing it now and maxing those benefits!

Assuming the titles are based on post counts, is there anything beyond N-Europe Forum Aficionado?

These prices are crazy, here it’s more like £15 for the worst seat at the worst cinema.

That sounds awesome! Would love to do something like that.

Ooh, what do you do?

Race time! Looking forward to this one. I have a feeling Verstappen is planning on a crash at the start.

I totally get what you mean! It’s understandable that you’d go if you’re given the tickets, I think I would too in that case. I think this is an interesting thing. I wonder if companies will start releasing things to the home market on a different schedule? If it cost £30 (for example) to do a day one rental of a film I really wanted to see I’d be very tempted.

We agreed a while ago that we’d pretty much give up on the cinema. It’s SO expensive here and honestly a horrible experience that I don’t mind waiting a few months then buying things on iTunes to watch in the comfort of home. I might go to the cinema if it was something I REALLY wanted to see, but I doubt that will happen more than once or twice a year going forward.

I’d mostly agree with you on this as long as I don’t consider convenience. Audio books allow me to ‘read’ while I run or drive. E-books let me take my whole library with me wherever I go and have access to whatever I want to read whenever I want it. To me that adds so much to the equation it’s hard for me to consider a real book nowadays.

Properly investing your money will grow much faster than the interest you’ll earn on cash. Really you should only keep your emergency savings as cash so that you can access them as soon as you need them. That’s awesome, nice work! This was the first benefit I checked with my new role and on the plus side the share scheme they have is great, on the negative side I’ve just missed enrolling in it for this year so will have to wait 12 months to get involved. A company share scheme is something everyone should check on, it’s a very easy way to invest and will almost always be advantageous to you.

I’m going to keep anything I say on the wider industry rather than specifically on Ubisoft, I just started working there on Monday and as you’d expect this has been a massive thing at the whole company. Anything I say here or in any other comments is not in any way representative of Ubisoft. I’m not at all surprised things like this are happening, and I’m 100% certain that more cases like this will come up in the near future. There are some huge issues in the industry, particularly on the development side, that make things like this almost inevitable. There is a self-fulfiling cycle of people who are attracted to the industry and the way they get rewarded (or not reprimanded) and the ways the behave in and outside of the office. A huge % of the industry is male and skewed toward the less socially aware type of person. Throw in a quite macho work culture with very hard pushing for success and profit over anything else and it’s a recipe for disaster. Even with companies working very hard to rectify the imbalances it’s going to take years to get to any sort of parity on office diversity. In a simialr vein to the discussions we’ve been having in the racism thread I think there is a lot of educating and learning going to be required by a lot of people before things even start to move towards getting better, and it will take time. The publishing side (in my experience) of the business is much better, as there are a wider set of roles that interest a wider set of people, but it’s still not perfect. There is a big party culture which can lead to problems but at least those tend to be less ‘planned’ in a sense. In conclusion, the industry has a lot of work to do on this, I don’t expect this to be the end of it by a long way.

Yeah, looks like a beautiful day at the moment for the F3. Can’t say I mind too much either, with what we had last race and the mixed up grid we should get a lot of action.

Paging the guys who have posted in here: @GenericAperson, @bob, @BowserBasher, @Julius, @Pestneb, @gaggle64, @londragon, @Goron_3, @Mandalore, @Emerald Emblem Join me and @Nicktendo and play our predictions game. We’re not particularly good so you guys can easily catch up on the score we have. Still time to play for round 2, just set your picks for: Pole - HamiltonFastest Lap - 1st - 2nd - 3rd - 4th - 5th -

Favourite Awful Game I really found this one difficult, and had to look through quite a lot to find something I thought was a good fit, eventually I found it: Sonic R on the SEGA Saturn At the time this was meant to be SEGA’s answer to Mario Kart, but my god they messed it up. Hardly any tracks, gameplay was horrendous, and it was so ambitious the Saturn could barely render the track before you’d run over it. It was bad. HOWEVER! The music was out of this world, fully produced tracks with real singing and a great beat. It’s worth suffering the game just to listen to the tracks. I think some of them have even been re-used now - well worth trying to get hold of them and have a listen.

Seems like the word is spreading! Nice to see you all - stick around for a while with us!

I remember considering switching to this when it launched. It’s a great tool. Others that I like are: You Need A Budget Every Dollar You Need A Budget seems to be the most popular, but is a paid service. Personally I used Every Dollar until I started to want to customize things and realized I could make something better for myself so I now do it all in Google Sheets. Good call, as long as you have the 0% deal running you should pay off as little as possible. For investments I’d say the most important thing is do your research on what you’re investing in, and don’t get caught up in any get rich quick looking deals. Either decide on what type of companies you want to invest in and set a plan around that, or research funds and simply put everything into one or two of them. With budgeting this is (roughly) how my monthly budget sits: Housing (35%) This includes rent and everything we MUST pay each month like electric, internet, water, phones etc. The MUST part is a little subjective, but I consider things in here to be essential. Joint Expenses (15%) This is our monthly variable expenses, food, dining out, trains, taxi etc. We will always need to spend money on them but can drastically reduce them if needed. When I wasn’t working this was about 6% and we still had some room to drop if needed. Spending Money (10%) This is free money to spend on whatever we want, 5% for me 5% for my wife. I usually spend 3/4 of mine and my wife about half, leftovers we account for and save for individual big purchases. Savings (40%) We allocate these differently dependent on current situation. At the moment it’s as follows: Emergency fund 20% Child fund 5% Personal funds 5% Christmas 10% Of that I’ll hold a certain amount in cash and the rest gets invested. The cash is available anytime we need it for emergencies, buying personal big items etc. and the investments are long term savings we don’t touch. I manage our monthly spending, saving funds, and cash flow via one combined sheet in google docs so that I know where we hold everything and what the money has been allocated to.

I still haven’t watched these despite them being on my to-watch list ever since they were released. On the plus side I’m still spoiler free so maybe now is the time.

$1.99!! I picked it up too.

I’ve only ever read biographies of wrestlers, which I don’t think you need any advice on. The Death of WCW sounds really interesting, I’d never thought to read anything on the wider industry - are there any others like that you know of?

Thing that I have on my Podcast app are: Deconstructor of Fun - games industry analysis FiveThirtyEight Politics - interesting commentary on US politics Freakonimics - weird statistical occurances My Dad Wrote A Porno - a reading of the most ridiculous porno ever Stuff You Should Know - interesting breakdowns on a variety of topics I haven’t had time to listen to many Podcasts lately so some of these will have had less updates recently. I’ve really enjoyed all of them at one point though.

It’s a shame, I love these types of threads and really enjoy it when they do come up and people discuss crazy industry stuff. Unfortunately, I’ve almost always been working in a company where it’s best just to steer away from anything industry related just in case it ever gets seen by anyone. If things like this were to come up now I’d probably get involved in the discussion.

You’re completely right. I reckon I must post an average of one topic a decade or so, definitely not enough. Will try to play my part and set myself a target of starting one topic a week.

Rokhed? Something like that I think.

I think I agree with that. I was just looking through my old posts and seems like I was most active around 2010/2011 and back then there were loads of new threads and a lot of activity. I think it was sometime after that, when I was busy with real life and not posting much, things went a bit crazy and a lot of people left. I think there is a really good group of people posting here at the moment and if we had a few more threads in general it would be a bit better for bonding with each other. I think it would be good for a few more people to come back or acquire some new members just to help things roll along a bit. It seems we’re just a bit shy of enough active members for it to feel super vibrant.

Great qualifying session! That weather really shows the top drivers from the rest. Looking forward to the race.