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Autumn Internationals 2024, Week Two

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The Matches This weekend mostly saw North v South (France v Japan was a rare exception) and quite a few new and old grudge matches lined up, with replays of various matches from the World Cup coming through. Ireland v New Zealand This game was a huge start to the weekend. It saw the number one v number three sides in the world facing off, but for around 100 years New Zealand never lost a game to Ireland. Over the last five years, Ireland have beaten the All Blacks no less than eight times, including a 2-1 series win in New Zealand but a quarterfinal loss in last year’s World Cup. This might not have the history of the rivalry between New Zealand and South Africa, but over the last few years it’s become just as intense. Defensively you can argue that the game lived up to expectations. There were some huge tackles, attacks were stymied, ball spilled under the weight of the tackles and so on. Both sides only scored one try. The All Blacks handled that better and played most of the game i
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Autumn Internationals 2024, Week 1.

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There were only two matches this weekend, as most northern hemisphere countries were gathering players into training camps still. England used one of their agreed training weekends to pull their squad from the premiership a week early, and faced the All Blacks, Scotland used their home-based players (so were basically Glasgow) against Fiji, who were also missing their overseas players and were basically the Drua. England v New Zealand This was an odd, but compelling game, in part because of the way it played out. In the end there were two points between the sides, with England pulling out an eight point lead with about 20 to go, but New Zealand scoring the last ten points to win. The All Blacks scored three tries and butchered four more, England only scored one - that from an interception - and didn’t really ever look like scoring any more. Even when they had a 5m scrum in the last minute it didn’t feel like they were going to score. As it was, the AB scrum shunted the English pack b
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Legend Of Vox Machina

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Somehow I didn’t review LOVM seasons 1 or 2 so I’m going to do all three seasons at once. The Legend of Vox Machina is an adaptation of campaign one of Critical Role, an Actual Play streamed D&D game with a bunch of self-proclaimed nerdy-assed voice actors that started as a birthday present for one of them, grew into a regular home game, then a steamed AP, then a creative and gaming giant in its own right. Next March will be their tenth anniversary as a streamed game. By the end of season three we’ve had 36 episodes and a bit under 18 hours of animation. We’re also, depending on how you look at it, either at episode 85 or 100 of the show. That’s over 350-400 hours of content compressed into <18 hours. There is an amount of content that’s relatively easy to put aside - shopping episodes and so forth can be rapidly discarded - but even allowing for that, there are a lot of things that are going to changed. I prefer to look at this as the history book version whereas the AP is t
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Slow Horses (season 4)

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The rejects in Slough House are back. The series continues to mix the two styles of British spy stories, Bond and le Carré, flashy and seedy. This time we have a classic trope of both genres: the long buried secret. This is nicely woven into the existing characters in a way that, in retrospect I should have seen coming but, as each twist was revealed, it felt at least surprising, sometimes shocking. It’s hard to really talk about without spoilers. It’s an adaptation of a spy novel where there’s a necessarily intricate plot to satisfy the spooks fans, but I will say that, as mentioned above, there’s some lovely character work here too. Part of that is because we have a larger cast. Even with some of the slow horses being functionally red coats, walking fatalities waiting to happen, albeit slightly more filled out than the classic Trek version - we know something about these characters rather than them being a non-speaking extra hired for the week - we have quite a number of characters
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Duolingo (for Welsh)

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I’m a qualified teacher but not a language teacher. Like most people my age I was taught languages at school, French and Latin in my case, and I’ve dabbled with other languages at various points since. I know a bit of Mandarin and some conversational Portuguese plus a smattering of Māori. Learning languages, or attempting to, is something I’ve done, on and off, over the years. Duolingo is the latest of those. In terms of my Duolingo experience I’m up to 100 days experience, so this review is based on that first three months or so. I’m aware that what it teaches changes somewhat as your experience in the language increases, but I haven’t got there yet. I’ve been learning Welsh, but as I understand it the general structure is the same for other languages. At this point, there is a very distinct approach to learning a language with Duolingo. It’s loosely conversational. You could describe it as “advanced phrase book” learning. You start off with introducing yourself, saying hi, talking
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Wynonna Earp: Vengeance (Tubi)

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Don’t worry, no spoilers! Wynonna Earp: Vengeance is a follow up movie to the TV show. It’s not a replacement for the Season 5 we were supposed to have but never got, rather it’s a sequel, stand-alone, five years later, kind of thing. I will admit, I had my doubts going into this. Wynonna Earp felt like our shit-show, but it also felt like it might be lightning in a bottle, and once it had escaped, you could never recapture it. Just putting the band back together again might not be enough. There were odd moments when I still felt that was true. Which in a 95 minute film is probably a reflection that, at some level, there were odd scenes that I thought needed a bit of work. Given I could say the same of almost any film, that’s not a bad thing to say about this one. There are many I’m far more critical of too. This one just registered a bit differently with me, because I had different expectations, and worries, compared to most films. But the things I expect from Wynonna Earp were
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Furies (Netflix)

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French TV and film, I guess like visual media from any country, has its own unique style. They tell stories in different ways, use visual metaphors differently and often have different outcomes to their stories too. If you think of big hit films like La Femme Nikita, The Fifth Element and Leon can you imagine any of them being made by an American director? It’s not just the French that do this of course, British TV is distinctly different to American TV, even when one nation remakes the other’s shows. Think of the two versions of The Office but even shows where there’s hardly any format change can have vastly different fortunes: College Bowl is an American quiz show you’ve possibly never heard of, it has run for six seasons across its initial run and two relaunches. University Challenge , the British version, is currently in its 54th season, although it has had a brief hiatus and a channel swap. Why all this preamble? Furies is similar to a number of shows and films I’ve seen bef
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