— Diablo III Lead Designer, Jay Wilson.We have a saying at Blizzard when something looks like too much work. How about we pay you? You can work on it, and every two weeks we’ll cut you a check.
— Diablo III Lead Designer, Jay Wilson.We have a saying at Blizzard when something looks like too much work. How about we pay you? You can work on it, and every two weeks we’ll cut you a check.
— “Bacon of Light offends me religiously.”I didn’t pick the most religious class and avoid every zone with boars while leveling only to have pork rubbed in my face inside my very own talent tree.
I’m glad that we’ve finally had somebody in a position of authority admit the bad news: English football is in a terrible, terrible state. Let’s forget for a moment the rich clubs, who are funded variously on the backs of their immense TV wealth or by foreign billionaires happy to run at a loss for their own amusement. These are the anomalies, and whilst each of us may secretly wish for a mysterious wealthy benefactor to come and invigorate our personal team of choice, for the majority of teams this will never happen.
The issue lies with the remainder of the football league; the bread and butter, flesh and bone and foundation of our rich footballing culture. This season has seen an unprecedented three teams in the same division docked a massive number of points as punishment for entering administration. They’re not the first, and they most certainly won’t be the last.
In the Championship, the most unimaginable riches are dangled as incentive to the clubs who can compete, and the number of clubs that have the potential to rise up into the Premier League — if only for a brief moment — is considerable. The impetus then is there for each of these clubs to speculate on the chance that they can one of the few to make it into the top flight. Their business plans are built around a gamble; by investing £5m in new squad players, they have an opportunity to have their investment returned tenfold, and more besides if they can stay up. But only three teams can be promoted each season, and so the sanity of such a business plan must be questioned.
Then there are the teams in the Premier League themselves. Faced with the Big Four consolidating their position, and the next few UEFA cup regulars investing in the hope that they can push into the unimaginable wealth of the Champions League, the remainder of the teams in the league find themselves at the mercy of Through the Looking Glass’s Red Queen: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” Failing to invest in your squad is seen as the seal of doom, and so teams spend, spend, spend to keep treading water.
Then there are the wages. Jimmy Hill is an eccentric, but as a Coventry City fan I regard him fondly. However one thing which he must surely now regret is overturning the wage cap on football players’ salaries all those years ago. We have well passed the point of obscenity. No conscientious footballer playing for a Premier League side can honestly believe that his talents demand hundreds of thousands of pounds per month of football, and yet they (and their fans) will agonise over a rise measured in tens of thousands a week. The excesses of footballers and the WAG culture they’ve propagated have to be held accountable in part for the debt-financed consumer culture in this country. (How is it the public demonise Heather Mills whilst the likes of Cheryl Cole are held up as role models?)
What solutions, then? Obviously there will be no taxpayer bailout of football clubs who are the victims of greed, just as there won’t be for the many smaller clubs who had no choice but to play along in the grand charade. What concerns me is just what will be left when the dust settles. When we’ve lost a few Newcastles and Evertons and Tottenhams to history, will Manchester United and Chelsea emerge unscathed and even richer? Or will the FA put safeguards in place to stop our national game from being exploited as a tool of the unaccountably unscrupulous first, and a cultural treasure second?
From a relatively old but contemporarily appropriate talk made at TED:
— Richard DawkinsWe have reached a truly remarkable situation, then: a grotesque mismatch between the American intelligentsia and the American electorate. A philosophical opinion about the nature of the universe, which is held by the great majority of America’s top scientists and probably by the elite intelligentsia generally, is so abhorrent to the American electorate that no candidate for popular election dare affirm it in public.
If I am right, this means that high office in the greatest country in the world is barred to the very people best qualified to hold it, unless they are prepared to lie about their beliefs: To put it bluntly, American political opportunities are loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.
— An EA moderator clearly went to the Emperor Palpatine school of diplomacy when dealing with ongoing complaints with the DRM in Spore.Please do not continue to post these threads or you account may be at risk of banning, which in some cases would mean you would need to buy a new copy to play Spore.
