Tim Willoughby

I know it's not to everyone's tastes, but I'd be down to do a slightly more competitive MTG prerelease. Pay a bit more on top. Full day of matches cutting to top 8 draft, with a bit more prize support.

Bizarrely, aside from the 'paying a bit more' I'm describing the Invasion prerelease in 2000.

Raph seems pretty rough to play around to be fair. Hard to put people on a scary sneak in a red deck, and very punishing when he appears.

Went 3-0 with black/white sneak, winning two mirrors along the way due to having 3 one drop enablers and more removal. Only bomb was Ninja Teen, but that felt like enough.

Of the other 3-0 players, 2/3 were on black/white. Awkward...

It might sound a little high falootin’, but I’ve spent a bunch of time this week reading up on how Chehkov structured 4 act plays, while thinking about structure in Commander deck design.

Apropos of nothing, Three Sisters is a banger of a play.

For the longest time, the most baffling and frustrating thing about Kansas was that Kansas City is somehow in Missouri, not Kansas.

Congratulations Kansas, you’ve found a new way to boil my piss.

I bought a book on writing from a charity shop, and discovered the following inscription.

Dear reader, never have I been more motivated to read this cover to cover and act on what I’ve learned.

I have had Mountain Dew exactly once. On the first trip I took to the USA I got a bottle before jumping on my connecting flight.

It made me so hyper on the plane that my buddy took it off me before I was halfway through. “Never again”

Finally beat the Balatro jokerless challenge (late to the party I know). Satisfyingly difficult… especially now it’s done.

Watched about 2 minutes if the state of the union. The amount of stand up sit down clapping from Republicans feels like the most despicable leg day of all time (a rare leg day worth skipping).

I was working at Warner Bros UK and went through a tonne of BBFC reports at such time as they adjusted their rules on violence censorship - it was far from just TMNT, though the shift of the word ninja to hero in the title was maybe heavy handed.

Not saying that the censorship was perfect, but ‘easily imitatable violence’ which is more dangerous than it appears seems like a grand thing to obscure, looking back.

There were a whole bunch of weapons/forms of violence fully censored and the concern was that either people would hurt themselves trying to imitate, or accidentally do crazy harm.

If you go to hit someone with a nunchaku, and end up wrapping their neck with the chain, things go south very fast.

Very cool. Would be up for writing for this.

I genuinely don’t know if I’ve watched 10 anime in my life.

As such the ones I’ve seen don’t have any notable quality control/say that much about me.

Some Yakitate?
Some Death Note?
Some Berserk?
Some Kakegurai?
Akira
Round out with some Studio Ghibli

Almost daily I’ll look at other folk’s lists on Moxfield/Archidekt/EDHrec. Quite like using filters on EDHrec to find lists that include specific cards. Frequently driven mad trying to read people’s lists on Archidekt with hyper specific named subgroups.

Obviously getting all the illegal tariff money back to the people who were stiffed on it would be ideal, but seems very difficult.

Wild that individuals who bought things from abroad are likely stuck, while Lutnick may make a fortune on all this.

Interesting. I cannot speak to why it’s bad at things you are an expert at, but I’ve seen a lot of times that AI is bad for things you aren’t good at because you won’t recognise in those cases when it has done something wrong.

Currently my position on AI is that it might be good at low stakes tasks

Hammy is here for it

a man wearing a blue sweater is smiling while standing in front of a yellow wall . ALT: a man wearing a blue sweater is smiling while standing in front of a yellow wall .

Won a pub quiz tonight, and got through the prize tab before closing.

Still got it.

There was a wonderful production of Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Bridge Theatre London that swapped Oberon and Titania, and it felt perfectly in keeping with the rest of the story. Titania still a queen, but very much the one in control.

Weirdly for Final Fantasy I kind of wished there was one more Vivi, so that the Vivi fans could have their fave character without it always meaning I was getting bodied.

There’s probably a balance to be struck. If you’re drafting and never see any of the main cast, does that feel weird? I feel like if every combat trick etc depicts them it really isn’t the end of the world if you don’t have the dude, but this seems a challenge worth solving as it will come up again.

I interned at WB when they subtly adjusted censorship laws, and had a read through things that were cut from our films. That was an interesting few days

There is an entire generation of film and tv in the UK that more or less doesn’t depict headbutts, ear claps, butterfly knives or nunchaku.

The idea (which seems kind of sensible) was not to depict the kind of violence that is more damaging (including to the aggressor) than it looks on screen.

Cannot speak to other countries, but the UK for ages had bans on depicting nunchaku due to easily imitatable violence censorship, to the extent that the UK version of the TMNT show was called Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, and Mikey had a different weapon.

No idea if that plays into this but maybe?

Didn’t know about this version. Might have to track it down

Lots of cards in TMNT are deep cuts that I don’t recognise, but that hopefully scratch all sorts of itches for those that do, and there are some very cool cards in the mix.

Hoping that the set feels like Magic when it’s in my hands. Standard this year is going to get weird!

Dark chocolate digestives are basically perfect. Maybe it’s just the brands I’ve tried, but milk chocolate digestives might fall below plain digestives in Tim’s Giant Biscuit Ranking.

If you have manufacturer you have infinite mana and clues though?

Manufacturer/Took is interchangeable, right? Either way goes to the moon?