Will

Enjoyed the talk, as expected Sony are going for system throughput efficiency in something that doesn't cause the crazy fan action of the PS4 lineup. You can tell it was a GDC talk and I'm surprised they didn't add any more 'public-friendly' information like some images of the machine or something. I'm sure a lot of people will feel a bit disappointed by not seeing more than this. The main thing for me was that he mentioned it was due this year, no sign of any delay.

I think it's easy to see where you're coming from, you're not sure you'll be able to buy this for a while so you've stocked up a little more than usual. But this is exactly the same as what those families are doing. You'd be amazed how much stuff a family goes through - they may not be buying any longer of a supply than you are. Unless you have some dietary requirement to drink milk regularly then you could have just gone without or bought the usual amount. Luckily here the panic buying has stopped, but we seem to be getting more and more strict on people control so it could well come back again. Luckily it seems the government is ridiculously paranoid here and all supermarkets have to keep a three month supply of everything they sell + there are emergency stockpiles held by the government so we should be OK.

The non-expert talking about what happened in Singapore and Taiwan is just plain wrong. I can't speak for Taiwan but in Singapore there wasn't a two week lock-down, everyone isn't (and wasn't) wearing masks, and the cases are still coming in thick and fast. They have done a good job of isolating people once it's confirmed that they have it, but it's not like it's some amazing case of we haven't had it. It's also much easier to control in a tiny very rich country with amazing public healthcare compared to anywhere else.

It's going to be really weird. I can't quite imagine a wrestling event without a crowd, especially something like Wrestlemania. Actually quite excited to watch such a weird event.

That's really good! Seems to me you want to be somewhere in the middle on the actions taken. Too little and the thing just goes crazy, too much and you spend too long in the compromised position. Hitting that middle part properly is the real trick - I'm glad I don't have to handle anything important like this.

I agree, it does seem totally crazy to go at it like this, especially with long-term effects unknown. The problem is until a cure/vaccine is found there is also an unknown on how long this is going to go on for. I guess there are two viable strategies: Get everyone to catch it, have a short period of no productivity and move on Contain it, have a long period of low productivity but not so much as to cause an issue The problem is if you fall in the middle of that and have just enough people catch it to bring you below a viable threshold of productivity but because of some control measures it continues for a long period of time. Singapore is exactly the same. The government is definitely doing more to contain it, though that's far easier here than it is there, at the end of the day, people want to live their lives. I'd say it's been going on for almost two months here now. If it wasn't on the news I don't think I would even know apart from the temperature checks at offices and malls. If it's controlled to the same extent in bigger countries like the UK it will be going on for the rest of the year. I'm not sure how viable that is if business is grinding to a halt.

The UK plan is an interesting one. I guess the thinking is that the people who will most likely catch it in this situation will be healthy enough to beat it without hospitalisation and once they're immune, the disease can't spread any further. Essentially let the virus burn out quickly. I guess it could work, but if it gets out of hand and they can't control it then there could be real trouble. Over here we're being hit just as much as anywhere else, and it's hotter than it will get during the European summer. I'm no scientist, but it really doesn't seem likely it is viable to survive to the summer, and the virus will go away. @Ashley - sounds like you have some interesting decisions ahead. For what it's work everyone I know that has been travelling during this thing has been covered by insurance. From what I understand it hasn't hit South America yet - is that right? If so expect all the panic buying madness to come when it does - that's been the case everywhere else in the world. If you're willing to risk it you might be able to get a lot of cheap travel while this thing is going on. Over here, I'm on my first day of working from home. Kind of feels a little late, this thing has been going on for months over here.

Update on my targets: Run 1,000km over the course of the year - Currently at just over 250km Do a 5km run in under 20 minutes - Current best 21:35 Do a 10km run in under 40 minutes - Current best 48:34 I'm well ahead on 1 and 2 and on track for 3. Haven't missed too many runs so confident I can keep bringing those times down.

I think I'll borrow that Narnia idea!

This whole thing seems to be an absolute mess. It seems they're still going ahead with the 'event' despite the F1 being cancelled. Seems to me they should have cancelled it before anyone got there, and now that everyone is there the only thing you can really protect is the fans so why not hold the event behind closed doors like Bahrain? Instead we now get no F1 but all the fans will be there for the support events - totally bonkers.

It looks like they've managed to take two of my favourite things, Mario and Lego, and make something that looks nothing like either.

This will be by far the biggest loss to any of the smaller companies heading there. Any of the industry events are just huge for finding new business as you can meet people you just wouldn't be able to usually. The loss will be bigger on the GDC side by quite some margin from E3. I really think they should take it back to what it was when it was an industry-only event. I worked two shows while I was in America, one on the Nintendo booth and the other manning the SEGA business area and attended another two for business. They were great, the booths, the opportunities, the business the random things that happen while you're there. The followingy year they made it public and it turned to crap. Everyone is 'on-show' so you can't be as free with what you're doing, places are crowded with people you don't need to meet - the whole thing became a waste of time and I never went again.

I see they didn't ban travel from the UK. Thank god for Brexit - knew it would be giving us positives before too long.

I think that's totally fair and nobody would object at all.

If you happen to be in Asia we can arrange a 2nd location and video-link to have the meetup from two locations!

I'm in Singapore and did it via the US site. The payment thing could well be true, but was very easy to get around - I did the following: Downloaded the F1TV App from the App Store Subscribed through my US Apple ID Set the VPN to US Watched F1 Making an apple ID set to US region is pretty simple and you can just buy top-up cards from Amazon to do the payment with, no need to add a credit card to the account. So far I haven't had any issues with it detecting the VPN and locking me out of any content.

I think we'll have a repeat of last year, close and exciting racing but ultimately dominated by Mercedes. By the end of the year Lewis will have broken all of Schumacher's records. I'm quite looking forward to seeing how the Ferrari battle plays out. I think Leclerc will win that and Sebastien probably retires at the end of the year. I just cancelled my TV sport package as F1 is shown through Fox here and it totally sucks. Have subscribed to F1TV and while the testing coverage was good, the quality was crappy and it dropped out a lot. That's fine when nothing is really happening but not sure I'll be too happy about it when we're mid-lap in a tight battle. Still, it should be better. It's not technically available here but no reason you can't subscribe through a VPN.

It's totally crazy. The same thing happened here a few weeks ago and now people are trying to get refunds on all the stuff they hoarded. It's quite nice seeing all of the stores and government coming out saying that these idiots caused this problem and they can deal with all the stuff they've hoarded themselves.

Yeah, I totally agree on that. It's weirder that they're not talking to you like this, so it's understandable for you to take steps to protect yourself from it. Just move on from it and be there if they ever want to reconnect.

@Julius - That really sucks. My sister had a similar thing a few years back of not being able to get some condition properly diagnosed. The main thing is to keep pushing and don't let them fob you off with being unable to sort things out. You know something is wrong so keep pushing them to figure out what it is so you can work towards getting it under control. @Animal - That also sucks. Why not just sent them a whatsapp message and find out what's up with them? Maybe you did something by accident that offended them and just need to get it sorted out, or maybe they're just crazy? Either way you may as well just have it out with them so you can move on from it.

I read it a little while back and totally agree it's well worth a read. I stopped watching for the first time around 95/96 when he was at the top of his game and by the time I picked it up again around 99 he was gone. Didn't think too much about it given how different it all became over those years, and having no interest in WCW I never really heard too much other than the headlines. I find the wrestling books super interesting as there is such insight to what was going on behind the scenes from things you didn't give much additional thought to as a kid. It's kind of crazy how messed up everything got for him at the end of his career and generally how unlucky he seemed to be, just when you think things are on the up theres some other huge personal disaster for him.

It's pretty crazy how many of them you find in pretty much perfect condition. If they'd used those boxes in the West I'm pretty sure none of them would have survived.

Had a few boxes that still hadn't been unpacked from when I moved here. Going through to try and clean up a bit and found my Saturn and GameCube collections. Thought it might be of interest so here they are: Now if only I had time to play them...

I miraculously hit my goals in 2019 by doing a crazy amount of running in November and December having fallen a long way behind due to longer than expected trips during the middle of the year. Doing this actually got me on a really good increase in both pace and stamina so this year I'm going to set more specific running goals: Run 1,000km over the course of the year. Do a 5km run in under 20 minutes. Do a 10km run in under 40 minutes. Other goals will be to do more non-running stuff but I'm not going to be too strict on that. It would just be nice to bulk up a little bit. Will aim to update here once a month to keep me honest on how things are going.

They're on pretty much all of the major platforms from what I can tell. One thing I just noticed is that it seems to be just US and Canada at the moment which kind of sucks. Given that they seemed to come out of nowhere it wouldn't surprise me if the launches in other territories suddenly show up fairly soon.