michael vaughan's barmy army!

Oh yes. The cricket since my last post has been superb, capped of course by actually getting a ticket to the Sunday of the Old Trafford test. It's a real shame that we couldn't pick up that last wicket, but them's the beats. All set up for Trent Bridge anyway. After bleating on on a forum on why I haven't got a betfair account, at the cricket someone gave me a free £5 bet for, er, betfair. Don't know whether that kicks in after you deposit or not, but I may have to take the value. Could use an account on crypto anyway.

Not much happening pokerwise, I've not been playing it much. Grabbed a 2nd/45 shortly after cashing out (cheque has now arrived and is in the bank), but apart from a 7th where I really should have killed everyone (was up to 15K in chips two tables out but pissed them all away) it's been dry. About even overall since the cashout. I was tempted to play the $2 3pm (my time) MTT today on Stars but didn't like my form after an earlier SNG.

Other things? Current hattrick season is coming to an end, looking like I'll get 7th, which is crap but I've now got a non-terrible training system in place, next targets are to improve the coach again, get a solid or better defender for cover and hopefully be able to sell one of the PM trainees near the end of next season. Target will be cup qualification, or, if they introduce level 7, avoiding the drop. I won't be worried if they do introduce a 7 and do somehow get relegated as all the new teams at the lower level will be shit and I'll probably be able to go straight back up.

The GameFAQs character battle is going on. After today I'm on 25/29 - missed Magus/Knuckles like everyone else, Ness/CJ like most people, and also Vercetti/Kefka and Vincent/Kerrigan. The only one that's likely to fuck me over is that last one, I have Dante winning the next one, which isn't looking too likely but I can't rule it out yet, as I've got Squall to win that division. Vercetti and Ness are losing next round anyway and Squall should have too much for Knuckles to handle. Aside from that, I'm still confident. My round 2 looks solid enough, and barring Squall my elite 8 is pretty much cookie-cutter. If I hit that elite 8 perfect I will probably have enough to win it should Dante pull through, and if Vincent gets to Squall but loses I should be on the leaderboard. A -6 score with a Mega Man win will get you there.

And Newgrounds had Clock Day. Over one thousand flash files submitted, some of which were very, very good, many of which were OK and would have passed regardless of Clock Day generosity, many more of which would likely have been blammed but we'd allow on Clock Day, and hundreds which, quite frankly, were taking the piss, would get a score of less than 0.10 on a normal day but were scoring more than 3.00, because people were auto-protecting everything regardless of quality. Now I'm a fan of the clocks (by clocks, I mean the original clocks and not all the wannabe morons that have signed up to NG in the last year to 18 months and simply tagged clock onto their name, I mean Void-era stuff), but when people start abusing the portal to get one frame pieces of shit through for whatever reason, there's got to be a line drawn. If everything is scoring a three whether it's a seizure-inducing B or the next clock masterpiece, and there's hundreds of the things coming in every hour, how will you tell the good from the bad? You can't. I think I saw precisely two true clocks posting something yesterday (someone posted a list of "actual" clocks that posted stuff, but I didn't recognise half of them as clocks, and many of them were definitely johnny-cum-latelies). I didn't notice any last year. Clock Day has lost its meaning, and to be honest if it descends into the same kind of anarchy that there was yesterday I'd prefer them to simply turn off the portal for 24 hours. It's kind of irrelevant if there's no clocks left. Sad, but true.