u/EnglishAex

Would Sydney FC be crazy to take a look at Danny Ings?

The 34-year-old is now a free agent after leaving Sheffield United, and while there's no denying his goalscoring numbers have dropped off in recent years, he'd still arrive with a level of pedigree rarely seen in the A-League.

The question is whether he'd be another Adam Le Fondre-style signing who dominates the competition, or whether he'd follow the Charlie Austin path and struggle to make the impact expected?

Even at this stage of his career, you'd think Ings' finishing instincts and football IQ would make him highly competitive in the A-League.

If Sydney FC are looking for a marquee striker, is Danny Ings worth the gamble, or is his best football behind him?

Interested to hear what you guys think.

With Alexis Sánchez now a free agent after leaving Sevilla, would Sydney FC be crazy to look at him as a marquee signing?

The Chilean legend turns 38 in December, but he still played regularly in La Liga last season. For Sevilla in 2025-26 he made 28 league appearances, scoring 4 goals and providing 2 assists in 1,299 minutes.

Across all competitions he finished with 4 goals and 2 assists while often being used as an impact substitute rather than a guaranteed starter but I still reckon he could do a great job in the a-league PLUS he’d be use to the heat!

Thoughts?

How are you feeling about this news?

Nicknamed the ‘SENSU NOS’, this 38mm mechanical timepiece features a power reserve complication and a beautifully executed guilloché dial. It is also the first Kurono watch to use an in-house modified movement based on new-old-stock (NOS) calibres sourced from Citizen Japan.

In 2022, Kurono acquired the remaining inventory of Citizen’s discontinued Premium Automatic Cal. 9134 movement. The calibre was subsequently redesignated as the Cal. 9134PWT, reflecting Kurono’s in-house timekeeping modifications and the removal of the original date mechanism.

These changes were made to fulfil Hajime Asaoka’s vision of a classically clean dial, allowing the intricate guilloché pattern to take centre stage without the visual distraction of a date window.

Apparently she’s also sober too? It’s hard not to think that she must have played a huge part in his recovery / renaissance.

Having someone on your corner away from the spotlight, in those darkest of days must have been such support for him.

It wasn’t always smooth sailing apparently but they seem on a far happier and different path together these days which is so nice to see.

Shot by photographer Joseph Cultice. Fun act, he also did the photography for Smells Like Children, front and back cover of The Long Hard Road Out of Hell, and the music video for Apple of Sodom.

Give him a follow: https://www.instagram.com/joeycultice

The response from the gallery:

We are pleased to inform you that fine art prints https://www.art-icon.org/gallery on Hahnemühle semi-gloss paper are available for purchase in the following sizes:

• Small (35 × 35 cm) - €2,500 + VAT ( 7 + 3 )
• Medium (60 × 60 cm) - €4,000 + VAT
• Large (100 × 100 cm) - €7,000 + VAT

The prints are signed on a separate label that is attached to each print.

How do you feel about those prices?

Anyone else find drawing / doodling in a dot grid easier than a blank page?

It almost feels like the dots remove some of my mental load without making the page feel restrictive like lined paper.

Curious if there’s an actual reason for this, or if it’s just a psychological thing. Does anyone else find their sketches, notes, diagrams, or random doodles come out better on dot grid paper than on a blank page?

Some updates from our former players
https://newcastlejetsfc.com.au/news/newcastle-jets-sign-experienced-a-league-forward/

Unconfirmed but apparently Joe isn't heading to Perth now
https://www.reddit.com/r/Aleague/comments/1uk6y75/seems_like_joe_lolleys_potential_move_to/

I’m not a developer, but I’ve always believed the best way to understand new technology is to experiment with it.

So I used AI to build Ghist - a privacy-first disposable email tool designed to protect your real inbox from spam, tracking, and digital clutter.

What started as a small experiment turned into a much bigger lesson in curiosity, trial and error, and what building with AI actually looks like when you’re learning as you go.

Read my story below and if you’ve been experimenting with AI yourself, I’d love to hear what you’re building!

This is my story (thanks in advance for reading!)

A rare and unusual photo taken during the High End of Low era. But that's all I know.

Given the timing and the styling, it was almost certainly created for promotional use press materials or potential liner-note and website imagery but I'm not sure?

Originally taken by Bishop Takes Queen LLC.

Latest artworks from the Chapter 2 box set, when you look at these portraits and paintings, what do you see / feel?

Hunted down and finally found the elusive Grand Seiko SBGA445 Taisetsu 🌨️

I know the Shunbun gets most of the attention, but there’s something about the Taisetsu that just hits differently. If you know, you know 😏

Most blue watch hands are painted, lacquered, or chemically treated.

Nothing wrong with that, but it usually looks like colour added to a part.

Grand Seiko’s blued hands are different. At the famous GS Shiojiri facility, only a small number of craftspeople, often essentially one main specialist plus apprentices, spend their whole day just bluing hands.

The blue comes from heating polished steel until it reaches the exact shade they want, and they do it one hand at a time, by eye.

What I find interesting is that this is a deeply inefficient way to make a tiny component most people will never think about.

The margin for error is small, conditions change, and consistency depends on experience rather than pure automation.

That’s what makes it feel so Grand Seiko to me. Not “handmade” in a romantic sense, but highly controlled human skill applied to something most brands would industrialise without a second thought.

If almost nobody notices true heat-blued hands in daily wear, why do you think Grand Seiko still insists on doing it this way?

On most watches, blue hands are either painted, lacquered, or the result of some coating/chemical treatment.

Nothing wrong with that, but you kind of know what you’re looking at: colour applied to a part.

On a Grand Seiko, that blue is baked into the metal itself.

You start with a perfectly polished steel hand. As you heat it, a microscopic oxide layer forms on the surface, and as that layer thickens the colour walks through a spectrum straw, brown, purple and then, for a brief window, that deep, clean blue everyone obsesses over.

Miss that window and you’re into muddy grey or odd violet. There’s no “set it to 240°C for three minutes and walk away.” It doesn’t work like that.

Most sane manufacturers batch this stuff. Tray of hands, into an oven, out they come: hopefully pretty similar.

Grand Seiko literally does it one hand at a time on a hot plate which just blows my mind.

There’s a specialist standing over the plate, hands laid out, watching the colour creep across each one. No timer. No sensor. Just experience.

They’re looking for that exact moment when the steel hits the house shade of blue, and they pull it off by eye.

The crazy part is the margin for error. The difference between “perfect GS blue” and “bit too grey” is tiny. Room temperature, humidity, thickness of the hand, batch of steel all of it changes how long it takes.

So instead of trying to eliminate all that variability with machines, they just lean into it and train a human being to ride the chaos.

One of my favourite little Grand Seiko facts is that there are people whose whole day is basically: blue the hands.

That’s it. That’s the job.

Do it long enough and you develop this sixth sense for how the steel is going to behave today. You know when you can push a little further, you know when you need to bail early, you can see the “right” blue before someone else would even notice the shift.

It’s not romantic handcraft in the “rustic artisan in a cabin” way. It’s more like industrial skill min-maxed to a slightly unreasonable degree.

And it quietly explains why Grand Seiko’s blued hands are so consistent from piece to piece. Same people, same philosophy, same obsession, every day.

I will say the blue is weirdly shy though.

Straight on, under some light, it almost goes black. Tilt your wrist and suddenly it flares bright, almost electric.

Against those dials snow textures (like my SBGA445), linen, sunburst, whatever and the mirror-flat Zaratsu polished cases, that small burst of blue becomes the visual anchor of the whole design.

Painted blue tends to look like colour on top of metal. Heat‑blued steel looks like the metal *is* that colour. It has depth.

There’s an almost liquid quality to it when you catch it at the right angle, especially when you move between daylight and warm indoor light.

Most brands would sand that away. Use a coating, batch the process, accept a few imperfect hands and call it a day.

The number of buyers who will ever know or care about true heat‑blued steel is tiny.

Grand Seiko does it anyway which is wild.

The blue is just the smallest, clearest example of that mindset.

It’s the little “unnecessary” details like this that make Grand Seiko such a dangerous brand for people like us 🤭

You go in thinking “nice dial,” and before you know it you’re zooming in on a seconds hand wondering who, exactly, spent their day nudging it from purple to blue while you were at work.

So the question is, love the blue or leave the blue which camp are you in?