Fantasy Football - October 2013/14

October started off with GW7. Suarez is most sought after, and four different people move to bring him in. Andrew and Mike (at the expense of Soldado), Paul (for Negredo), and Ross (for Rooney.) This means Ross now has both Sturridge and Suarez, and that Suarez is now more popular in our league than Sturridge, by 4 teams to 3.

Everyone in our league (except James) captained their Liverpool striker. They both played the full game and scored, but Sturridge was awarded 3bpts while Suarez was awarded none. That's an extra six-points for Jon, Ross and myself over the Suarez teams. Amalfitano came good for me again with an assist; apart from him and Yaya Toure, there were no good point-scorers from midfield for anyone in our league!

James, with Ozil as captain, lost the week. Andrew and I both won the week with 44 points; Andrew becoming the first in our league to hit 400pts overall. It was a bad week for strikers, except for Lukaku who scored his fourth goal in three games. Soldado was dropped, having not scored since GW2. Giroud hasn't scored in three weeks. Benteke is still injured. RVP played 90mins for the first time since his injury, but failed to score or assist. All of a sudden, goals from strikers seem to be drying up.

With none of the big teams keeping clean sheets either, it was only the Liverpool strikers captaincy that inflated point scores the week. That explains why James lost out so heavily. For everyone else, GW7 was evenly paced, and left our league table mostly unchanged.

With a long international break ahead, the gap before GW8 gave lots of time to tinker. I brought in Adnan Janujaz, the Man Utd teenager scored two goals in GW7 and was priced at only £4.6m. He became something of a hot property. Also popular is Lukaku, James loses Lambert for him, and also buys Januzaj. Jon decides to be rid of Soldado, for Lukaku. Meanwhile, Paul brings in Januzaj and Mata for Ben Arfa and Kasami, and Ross drops Dzeko for Benteke, who's back from injury.

The RVP situation continued to define my team. Excluding penalties, RVP hadn't scored in 14 of his last 18 league games. Worse, he now seems blighted by regular minor injuries, David Moyes once again confirming he's doubtful the Friday before a game.

GW8 was a key week as, apart from Jon and Andrew both captaining Lukaku, everyone had a unique armband choice. The clear winner was Mike with 73pts and captain Giroud winning him the week. Mike's team contains three Arsenal players and three Liverpool players, a risky strategy which pays off when those two teams play well. I came second for the week with 66pts and rose to second in the league table! That was thanks largely to Mirallas and Silva, two players I'd kept faith in over a few doubtful week. (Jon lost the week with 44pts, a tally which would have won him GW7.)

The League Table after GW8

RVP had scored a goal, which was great news, but then things took a turn for the worse again. His ongoing injury concerns continue with both groin and toe problems. He missed a midweek Champions League tie, and yet again was a doubt for the weekend.

In the mid-week transfers, I sold Jose Enrique for Vertonghen, and Jon gave up on waiting for Walcott to return from injury, upgrading to Ozil. Despite being the top point scoring midfielder in the game, Ramsey is still only owned by Paul and Mike Hackett, everyone else clearly thinking his form cannot possibly last.

GW9 and Andrew, with a team unchanged from GW7, earned 81pts. Paul also earned 81pts, and I totaled 74pts. It was another high scoring week, Mike with 55pts coming last, but a poor one for midfielders - not a single midfielder over 9.0 delivered returns beyond a clean sheet. Meanwhile, all of the popular strikers were in the goals. (Except for Benteke, who missed a penalty.) The real winner was Luis Suarez, who scored a hat-trick and 3bpts. Paul Hackett captained him, for a 34pts haul!

All said and done, October was a tremendous month for me. I won the month with 184pts, claiming second in the overall league. Andrew earned 173pts this month, and he stays top of the overall table, while James came last of the month with 127pts and stays last overall.

 

The in-form players of the month. The Suarez vs Sturridge choice was a crucial one across our league, Suarez the clear winner this month.

The Table for October.

On Zero Dark Thirty

Zero Dark Thirty is a movie almost entirely without merit. It is a slow, dull recreation of a true story which offers no commentary on the events that took place.

The facts are these. The United States of America undertook a ten year long manhunt, rooted in revenge and fear. They tortured to get names, and then captured and tortured more for more names. They eventually discovered a fortified compound, and after much deliberation, stormed the compound in the middle of the night to kill three men who were sleeping with their families whilst those at home cheered them on.

All of this is presented as distinctly unglamorous. The people undertaking the manhunt are unhappy almost all of the time, and live in constant fear and danger. Their investigation is not interesting, there are no detective leaps or great discoveries, no 'eureka!' moment or display of Sherlock Holmes level intellect. They torture people for years and methodically trace phone calls. It is not interesting to watch. There is little to no social commentary.

And I think that was the point.

The comparison that comes to my mind is between Zero Dark Thirty and Spielberg's Lincoln. Both are very long movies about key events in US History. Both share the same theme: this is how important things get done.

In Lincoln, the freedom of the slaves comes not from sweeping socioeconomic change, or from the massive war that was just fought. It comes from a dozen Democratic Congressmen who had to choose to obey or disobey party policy in one vote. That is how slavery was abolished. It wasn't all that dramatic, but in this film that's how it is done.

Both movies present that as their 'art'. This is their insight into how things really get done. What makes key events happen. And whether or not I agree (as an historian) with isolating events such as these, I think that they make for poor films. They deliberately make the incredible mundane. And as a sub-genre of Historical Drama, I find myself liking this approach less and less.

There is almost nothing to recommend about Zero Dark Thirty.

Fantasy Football - September 2013/14

GW4, and Jon Hackett plays his wildcard! After a -8pts shake up already this season, he decides to play it early and changes almost his entire squad.

I let Wanyama go and brought in Amalfitano from West Brom. The deadline day signing won me over, despite West Brom having failed to score a single goal so far. James ditched Dzeko for Benteke and Paul Hackett sold Negredo for Benteke, while Andrew dropped Kolo Toure for Distin of Everton. That turned out a smart move, Benteke scored and picked up 2bpts; also good news for Andrew, who already had Benteke as his captain, and for whom Distin picked up a clean sheet and 2bpts.

Paul Hackett wins GW4 with 60pts (and that's without 13pts from Ben Arfa who's left on the bench). He plays a 5-2-3 formation with all three of Soldado, Benteke, and RVP for great returns. Jon and Andrew both finished second with 58pts. James, Ross and Mike all had terrible weeks. For me, Giroud scored and my back four collected 3 clean sheets between them. Plus, captain RVP scored a penalty. That gave me 51pts, and moving me up to 4th in the league.

Dzeko failed to play at all last weekend, and having only scored once in the first four games I wanted to drop him from my team. Coutinho, who had looked so great in preseason, is turning out to be not so hot for fantasy football. While crucial to the way Liverpool play, he not made an assist or scored a goal yet this season, and that's not good enough for a £9.0m midfielder. Plus, he injured his shoulder against Swansea and could be out for a while. I drop Coutinho for Ben Arfa, and then it's a straight choice between Sturridge and Benteke for who to spend my money on. Both are the same price (£9.2m) and both have scored 4 goals in the first 4 weeks. But Liverpool have slightly nicer fixtures until November, and dropping Coutinho makes me want another Red to take his place, so I go with Sturridge.

In preparation for GW5, Andrew drops Dzeko for Lukaku and Ross drops Hazard for Eriksen (and £1.1m in the bank). But the big change comes from James, when he plays his wildcard!  Having been a Benteke/Soldado/Lambert team, he swaps for Benteke/Rooney/Giroud. He lets Coutinho go and spends the money on Michu, and sells his Man City assets for Ben Arfa and Moses. This doesn't immediately work out for him however. In a low scoring week, he only gets 37pts.

GW5 was full of poor results. RVP, Walcott and Silva were all late injury calls, and Benteke came off injured early in the match. Giroud failed to score or assist, as did Sturridge, as did Soldado, and Dzeko only played 17mins. Rooney scored, but the only performing striker was Lukaku in his Everton debut. He earned 7pts playing only half of the match, as he scored and picked up 2bpts. That, along with Paulinho's winning goal for Spurs, won Andrew the week.

I came second for the week and rose to third in the league overall. I had thought I was doing badly (Giroud was my captain) but Mertesacker scored and Amalfitano earned 10pts in his home debut. Owned by less than 0.1% of all Fantasy Football teams, it was great to see him come good so immediately.

The injury news created problems for almost everyone. Walcott needed a stomach operation, and as with Benteke's hip injury, they're both out for a month. Coutinho is out for similar, and both Van Persie and Silva were doubtful for GW6.

Another week, another wildcard. This time Ross throws his into the ring. He drops RVP, finding the funds for Ozil and Vidic, keeps Dzeko, and drops the injured Walcott for the in form Michu.

Out of everyone else, Mike and James swap Walcott for Ozil, Andrew swaps him for Moses. With Benteke also injured, Andrew gets in Rooney, Paul gets Lukaku and James gets Lambert; all three take a -4pts hit. The other bit of news is that Paul drops RVP - I am now the only person in the league with RVP! So I captain him, hoping to double that advantage.

Instead, I end the month with a terrible week, staying third in the table but losing all my lead over those chasing. Having captained RVP for the home game against West Brom, for which he was fit, he was rested and only earned 1pt - the worst outcome for a captain. Everyone else had good scores for their captains. Jon earned 28pts from Sturridge, while Rooney and Soldado both brought in double figures for everyone else. It was a massive disappointment for me.

Amalfitano is proving to be a great fantasy prospect, but I had put him on the bench! Thinking he'd be unlikely to earn points away at Man Utd, he only went and scored and assisted and earned 3bpts as Man Utd suffered a shock defeat. I missed out 12 points there, with Amalfitano stuck on my bench. I've also carried an injured David Silva for 3 weeks, tying up money I could have used elsewhere. GW6 is one for me to forget.

Differentials can be very important. For example, Mike is the only one in our league to have Ramsey, the star of the month; he's scored 4 goals in 3 games, his price keeps rising, and he's clearly on top form.

 

The form players for September.

All in all, a thoroughly disappointing GW6. Andrew won his second week in a row with 68 points and Jon came second with 59. Lukaku was the best player this week, earning 16 pts; Andrew and Paul are the only ones to have him selected. No-one in our league has Suarez, and Jon was the only one to captain Sturridge. I was bottom for the week.

The September table. James does terribly, despite his wildcard. Andrew and myself are the only ones to still have our wildcards.

That brings September to an end. Andrew the clear winner of the month, James the clear loser, despite playing his wildcard. I climbed to third in the table overall, even with RVP being a massive disappointment.

The league table at the end of the month.

On Crime Drama

There's a quote from the review of a bad film over on Pajiba about crime dramas which I've been thinking about today. Especially, how it relates to Breaking Bad.

"In a weird way, a lot of crime drama is aspirational: even as we rest in the knowledge that the criminals will have to pay for what they’ve done, we also know we’re being invited to participate in a voyeurism where we can imagine ourselves rich and wild, at least for the first two acts. There’s a humming thread of desire, of vicarious triumph, running through most crime stories, whether they’re lighthearted (Ocean’s 11) or gruesome (Scorsese). Just imagine what you could do with all this money or power, the film seems to say. It’s a tease, and it works, because it lets us fantasize on a subconscious level without abandoning our moral compass. Some crimes stories, though, are just the opposite: they never make those ill-gotten gains look like anything but a burden to be dealt with. Instead of asking “What would you do with all this?” they say “How would you deal with this?” It’s not that either type of film is saying crime pays; it’s that the former lets you flirt with the idea that it might, while the latter never lets you forget that nobody gets out alive." (A Single Shot Pajiba.com Review)

Fantasy Football - August 2013/14

The story of GW1 revolved around the DGW for Chelsea and Villa. Everyone in our League had captained Hazard, who played both games and was awarded an assist for an own goal in the second. The popular choice of Lukaku up front turned out a failure, Jose Mourinho only bringing him on as a sub at the end of both games. The real winner was Benteke who scored three goals and was man of the match twice. From the rest, Mignolet also turned out to be a good choice, saving a penalty to save 'Pool's clean sheet and picking up 3bpts.

Andrew won this opening week, the only person with Benteke up front, and more points coming from his three Chelsea players and Soldado. James was second with Mignolet's penalty save and goal scoring Ivanovic to thank.

My week was a disappointing one. Coleman did well for me, scoring and assisting, but I'd left Luke Shaw on the bench after a slight injury worry and that proved a grave mistake. He kept a clean sheet and made an assist for 12pts, but I saw none of it.

The story of the first round of transfers was everyone dropping Lukaku (I brought in Giroud.). Lack of game time and tough fixtures meant everyone who had him got rid. I was the only one to take a -4pts hit to transfer out Hazard, everyone else keeping him in their team and hoping he'd do well in Mondays game against Man Utd at Old Trafford. Paul Hackett used his wildcard to shake his team up, becoming our third RVP team.

As it turned out, I needn't have bothered with the extra transfer. Hazard didn't get any extra points, but neither did David Silva, so I gained nothing for my transfer except four points spent. For GW2, Andrew won again, with James a close second again. They both had Mignolet, who kept a second clean sheet. He's earned 22pts in two weeks! That's 10 more than any other GK in our league, and I've only earned 3pts off my GK pair! They also were the only two to profit from Chelsea defenders clean sheet against Man Utd - had RVP scored Ross and I would've been top with him as captain. But he didn't, and so we didn't, and it doesn't matter "what could have" in the end.

Transfers after the second week were dominated by the dropping of Hazard, as expected. James, Jon, and Andrew all took him out; I'd already gotten rid last week. Jon had some housekeeping to do, taking a -8pts hit restructuring his team, whilst Andrew got rid of Zaha for -4pts.

GW3 was a poor one for strikers, and with everyone except Andrew fielding a team of three up front, the week was won and lost on who was captained in midfield. Mike Hackett used his wildcard for GW3, and promptly won the week (with Walcott his captain). That was on the back of Man City beating Hull 2-0, with Zabaleta and Yaya Toure his stars. Jon came second, thanks largely to Zabaleta. This combined with an average week for Andrew and James to close up the middle of league table somewhat, before the long international break between GW3-4.

The extra transfers Jon and Andrew made proved somewhat fruitful. Jon swapped out Rat (who's not first choice for West Ham) for Lescott who kept a clean sheet. Hazard had no game, and Jon had no options on the bench, so Cazorla's 3pts were important, and Weimann was a holdover from the DGW in GW1 while Anelka is a popular cheap striker. The -8 points is a big hit, but all three were necessary. That's the price of starting with 4 DGW players, you'll have to swap them out at some point. Andrew transferred out Zaha (who's price is plummeting) for Paulinho, and Hazard for Toure. He then captained Toure for a 22 point haul! However, 3 of Andrew's first team picked up zero points, and none of his bench played a single minute. Saved by his Captain, indeed.

The Dream Team so far. Mignolet has been the standout player. No-one in our league started with Giroud or Sturridge.

The gap between GW3-4 also featured Transfer Deadline Day. The biggest move of the day was Arsenal bringing in Mesut Ozil from Real Madrid. Man Utd also finally signed Feliani from Everton, while Chelsea let Lukaku go on loan to the Toffees. Bale made his move to Madrid, but the Suarez and Rooney transfer rumours came to nothing in the end.

The three RVP teams sit bottom of the table. His failure to score against Chelsea and Liverpool bringing into question just how "fixture proof" he really is. Ross suffered badly from this, captaining him both those weeks, for only 6pts reward. In contrast, Andrew earned 38pts from his captain choices (Dzeko & Yaya Toure.) The importance of a scoring captain is massive, and RVP teams can be burnt twice when he has a blank week. Still, with great fixtures coming in september and october, now would be a great time for RVP to find his scoring boots.

Ross sits above me due to the Hazard/Silva -4pts transfer. The RVP teams are a clear distance behind the Non-RVP teams, but it has only been three weeks.

Defiance - Season 1 Review

Imagine, for a second, that you have a birthday party to organise. For this you’ve hired a great chef to help mark the occasion. He asks for flour, eggs, milk, and icing sugar, and you look forward to the great cake he is surely cooking up. But then, when the day of the great occasion comes, there stands the master chef studiously building a sandcastle of flour and eggs, with milk for the moat and little icing sugar guardsmen on the battlements.

It’s a different idea, that’s for sure, but all you wanted was a cake, so I’m sure you’d rightly be more than a bit disappointed.

Rockne S. O’Bannon is that kind of chef. He’s the creator of Farscape, a 1990s cult sci-fi show about an astronaut lost-in-space on the far side of the galaxy. Here, O’Bannon has been headhunted by the SyFy channel to create their big new sci-fi drama, and headline their recommitment of genre television. Instead, he’s made a frontier drama about the troubles of a small town.

Sense the disappointed already? After that exciting premiere three months ago, Defiance has settled down into a weekly rhythm of a plodding anti-climax.

The characters motivations are impossible to pin down and their personalities less even than paper-thin clichés. Logan, our protagonist, is an anti-hero in the style of Han Solo or Malcolm Reynolds but he has almost nothing to do and precious little to say. At the end of the entire series I know nothing about him – is he’s smart or funny or reckless or calculating or broodish or boorish, I couldn’t tell you. He has an adopted daughter, he was a soldier in the war, and now he’s the town “lawkeeper”. But the entire show hangs on the charisma of the lead role and Grant Bowler is so bland, and the scripts so drearily written, that his presence is a void, often devoid of the slightest importance to the story or interest to the audience.

His adopted daughter is an alien, and she’s angry at the world. There is a plot about her species having telepathic and powers of prescience, but she doesn’t react to that discovery with anything more than continued gently simmering anger at the world. She sometimes tumbles into bed with the deputy sheriff, but that isn’t a plot or part of her story – it’s just something that happens.

There are other aliens in Defiance, and although that’s the main hook for the poster, in truth it’s little more than a footnote for the actual show. Aliens showed up, and their arrival sort of ended the world-as-we-know-it. In this near future, the Humans and Alien Races live side-by-side (except where they don’t. We don’t see that.) These aliens are all mostly human, the most interesting ones being too expensive to show. Apart from some cultural differences and some casual racism they may as well all be human for the needs of the story. Their uniqueness is never explored or used as part of the narrative – the largest attraction of cult classic Farscape – and so remains only to be the thin tether keeping Defiance classified as a “science fiction” show.

For example, this is the main season long story: the town of Defiance is having an election, and the mayor may not be re-elected. Meanwhile, the son of a shady businessman is engaged to the daughter of the biggest landowner, causing mild tension. But, with Aliens.

To be perfectly clear, none of this makes this a "bad" show, and I'm actually looking forward to sitting down for season 2 next year. But I couldn't recommened anyone catching up with this show as it is. This isn’t even “bad” sci-fi, but that means it can never be “it’s so bad it’s good!” sci-fi. Terra Nova or Falling Skies are bad, but they had a charm in their awfulness – like watching a bad B-movie where you enjoy mocking the characters while you watch. Defiance doesn’t have that. It’s just dull. It’s a dull frontier western about small town politics, with weak characters.

Playing The Sims 3

As part of the current Humble Bundle, EA are giving away a whole bunch of games for less the £3. One of those is the Sims 3, and so I decided to give it a try and see how everything's changed. I haven't played a Sims game since the first one about fifteen years ago. My curiosity was up.

ORIGIN is a horrible service. The Sims 3 runs through it, and even worse, has extra hurdles to make it work elevate it to being an especially repulsive product. In order to activate the game you have to jump through three dozen hoops on the official sims website, entering your password and secutiry questions (like your former pets favourite foods), all while enerting your product code repeatedly, which you cannot even cut and paste but must type out manually into several tiny boxes.

Then ORIGIN tears apart your internet provider to download as much of the game as possible as quickly as possible, which is nice in theory but a nightmare in real life. It means you can only download games at night when no-when else wants to use the internet, because ORIGIN is hogginle all the bandwidth. And I do mean "all". It's like being on dial-up in the mid-90s; you need to be sure your mum wont want to use the phone for the next hour because you want to use the internet to download the friggin' Sims.

Then it wanted to patch itself several times, get me to log in again, and get me to sign in after I'd logged in. As an added bonus, the only way to change the graphics settings are in-game, and they require a restart after changing, of course. So, all things considered, and hour went by before I even got going.

Starting with the default couple in the default house, I then sat through the "how to move the camera" tutorial, because I thought it's be quicker to complete the thing than look around for how to turn it off.
Eventually, I was in the game. I had two sims - a husband and wife. They had a house, which I furnished with the necessities. And then we were off, finally, to play the game.

They world was their oyster.

I thought it would be a bit, ahem, off to immediately send the wife to the bookshelf to study cooking, and so instead I immediately sent the husband to the bookshelf to study cooking.

Having grown up on The Sims 1, I have a healthy understanding of how goddamn useless your sims are when they first start the game. They can just about "cook" a light salad for dinner, and half the time they manage to set the entire kitchen ablaze doing just that (Lord knows how) and that just isn't on.

So first things first, one of these two must immediately study cooking, while the other goes around going 'coo-ee' at all the new paintings and pot-plants, as Sims are want to do.

My new grown-up enlightened modern sensibilities enabled, Mr. Sim spent the rest of the day studying cooking, with no time allowed for a toilet break or a coffee break. Meanwhile, the wife got a job as a politician because that used to be an "easy" career choice, given how goddamn over-powered the 'charisma' ability is/was, for all you need to do to train that up is talk to yourself in the mirror.

And so the first day was passed, with Mr. Sim sitting in the cheapest most uncomfortable chair known to man reading how to cook, and his wife, Mrs. Sim, talking to herself in a mirror.

At 9pm they ordered pizza, talked for a bit about the tv and the weather (I think, it's hard to tell with sims) until they were happy, and sent promptly to bed.

The Sims 3 has this concept of "weekdays" and "weekends" which I find disconcerting. On weekdays you have to send your Sim to work and you get weekends off. Back in my day, your sims could just bunk off work every one day in three and there'd be no repercussions, but that allowance doesn't exist anymore.

So Mrs. Sim needed her rest in order to be ready to go to work the next morning, in her first day as an important local politician. And there in arose a problem: I had placed the bed slightly too near the wall for both Sims to get in it at once. And with Mrs. Sim asleep, Mr. Sim couldn't get to bed. Making matters worse, in order to move the bed, I'd have to wake up Mrs. Sim - not an option with work at 9am the next day.

So, I sent Mr. Sim back for a nap on the couch, and then he was to spend an all-nighter studying cooking.

Morning came, and Mrs Sim woke up. Slightly too late, I might add, to both have a shower and eat breakfast, so off she went to work. Hungry. Mr Sim then went to bed, tired and angry at the world, to sleep all day.

That evening he set the kitchen on fire trying to cook the first nice meal for the two of them, moments after the wife broke the toilet the first time she used it, and so I let them burn to death for their stupidity.

= THE END =