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Gonna need your best Paul Stalteri as evidence of that...

Jay-Jay Okocha
Essam El-Hadary
Samuel Eto'o
Yaya Touré
Lucas Radebe

A Chris Peacock in the same year as me at school. Unknown if related to your Drew, though!

The kit release article is no longer on the club's site, so I can't find an official reference to it, but it'd be too coincidental to not be for me!

Introduce yourself with four footballers

Personal highlight from my own collection: the stitching between the stripes of Torquay's 16/17 away shirt has a double chevron to replicate the "gull" on the badge 😍

Besides a sole incident of having to "show less like this" one exclusionary post Bluesky offered up - a good 90% or more decrease to my usual daily average on X - this app has immediately given me the feeling of a much more pleasant place to frequent...

Notable personal pluses include: no (obvious) bot accounts, no omnipresent adverts, no firstnamebunchofnumbers-esque hot takes, an outstandingly consistent level of everyone's spelling and grammar, a feed that's not all gloom, and even someone actually liking something I posted.

Still struggling to find my way around Bluesky, though I'm sure I remember the same start to my use of Twitter before getting the hang of everything, but first day down and things look very positive!

"We are going up, say we are going up!"

Okay, that may have started out with general issues I have with how Twitter itself works, but the users/discussions that I saw there regularly were so depressing too. I sincerely hope the butterfly app helps me forget all that and, who knows, this tirade may not be the only thing I ever post here...

• Endless braindead comments, an overall lack of reasoning skills and reading comprehension, and banal, ubiquitous threads about the quality of British cuisine
• Young, clout-chasing football fans who are ignorant to basically anything that happens in the outside world

• Showing me the same thing that's of no relevance to me multiple times, but then refreshing when I'm reading something I *am* interested in and losing it to the void
• Gratuitous service owner content (shock, horror) which has now ramped up considerably from solely QTing "concerning" on everything

• Taking my "not interested in this post" selections to mean "show me twice the amount of this next time"
• Videos never playing past the ten-second mark
• Replies that are just reworded (or even verbatim) copies of the original post
• The aforementioned disappearing replies

So seeing as myriad people have defected to Bluesky lately instead, this seemed as good a time as any to try an alternative social medium. All I'm hoping for is that this app doesn't offer me any of the following problems that made my Twitter experience so excruciating (non-exhaustive list):

Whether my not seeing those tweets was due to them being entirely from bots, and therefore hidden/deleted, or via something akin to a shadowban on me, I don't know. But, in addition to all my other gripes with the service, that was enough.

After finding a rare discussion that I actually had some passing interest in, I wanted to see how others had replied to certain comments. However, on three occasions, opening a tweet which promised to have 30+ replies led to absolutely no further tweets being displayed.

There were/are plenty of things that got under my skin one way or another when using Twitter, not least since its ol' well-documented buyout, but the final straw for me today was the following:

I essentially never posted on Twitter but I did use it for doomscrolling on a daily basis, though I became increasingly dissociated from even doing that the more content became tedious and its functionality decreased.

Uninstalled the X app, formerly the bird app, from my phone earlier and signed-up for this butterfly app instead. Time to see what's different.