Just got an email to say that the alterations to Victoria Park have been approved after a "consulation". The press release says it will make the park "safer and more accessible for all" without any elucidation of why a useless contraflow cycle lane will make us safer, and how a loss of parking spaces will make it more accessible for wheelchair users who presumably mostly have to drive to the park to enjoy it.

Nor does it mention the price tag.

I never thought I'd be the type of person to be infuriated by these kinds of schemes. I cycle regularly. I try to minimise my car use. I'm in favour of anti-car and pro-green, pro-pedestrian and pro-public transport policies. But the trouble is that all I see here is box checking: thousands and thousands of pounds spent just so the council can say "we've got X miles of cycle lane!" without any thought as to how useful those cycle lanes actually are.

Why on earth do we need a contraflow cycle lane in the park? Where's the demand? Who's going to use it? How much is it going to cost? Why couldn't we have actually useful cycle lanes along weston park, or the lower bristol road instead?

I assume that the roadworks along Green Park Road and Charles Street are also adding a cycle lane: that's what it looks like. That is, perhaps, at least a bit more useful but it's not felt like an unsafe place to cycle to me (as a cyclist) because the traffic isn't fast, and it looks like it's going to cause a horrific bottleneck for traffic coming over Midland Bridge. Has no thought been given to the knock-on effects of any of this at all?

When I challenged the stall holder that his game was rigged he shrugged and said "you can't win the Maul".

First playthrough, avoiding spoilers, trying to role play and let things happen rather than go for predetermined outcomes.

Just did the Tiefling party scene in act 1, and I started chatting to folk like I usually do, not realising I'd get special conversation options for the party.

Stopped by La'zael second and ... she was just there, boobs out for the world to see. And then she practically threw herself at me.

I was planning to romance Shadowheart like the tedious cishet dullard that I am so I turned La'zael down. But I really wasn't expecting unprompted Githyanki porn right there!

Playing on PS5.

I'd persuaded the Tieflings to leave and had to free her from the cage. Couldn't seem to "reach" the trapdoor to attack it so I used the "move to" option.

My entire party walked off screen and the game seemed to freeze. A few seconds later, the camera switched to my existing party standing around the chest outside the chapel ruins.

When I went back to the place where Lae’zel was, the cage was open but there was no sign of Lae'zel. I got no dialogue options, nothing.

Is this supposed to happen, or is it a bug? Any way I can now find Lae’zel? I assume I should able to recruit her?

For the longest time I've wanted to be able to filter games on BGG by whether or not they're available on BGA. Eventually, I got fed up and wrote my own. It currently obtains a list of playable titles on BGA, enriches it with some BGG data and outputs the results as a CSV.

https://preview.redd.it/nxxprd36xtfh1.png?width=561&format=png&auto=webp&s=6fa3c201da912909ad058f0432ec1120db3d16e3

As you can see it currently just has rank, rating, year and whether or not it's in my collection.

I'm not sure quite yet whether I'll do anything with this other than just keep it for personal use: I'd need to tell BGG that I'm changing the use for my API key if so. But out of curiosity, what other fields of BGG data or other features would you find useful if you were to have access to this?

I'm looking to get a new pair of earbuds mostly for listening to music at home. Background noise isn't a problem, so I have absolutely zero interest in ANC or a lot of other peripheral features, unless they relate to fine-tuning the sound output. Fit is a concern as I find it can be a bit of a problem with earbuds but mostly I just want the best sound quality I can get for a vaguely sensible amount of money.

Doing some research I've narrowed it down to the following candidates:

- Sony WF-1000XM5: Currently £150. I'm very tempted by these given this brand is almost always the top recommendation from hifi sites but this is a bit more than I was hoping to spend, and I've been put off by relatively poor reviews on Amazon complaining about connectivity and poor working life.

- Nothing Ear. £65. Not the (a) or (3) models. These also look very tempting as they've got some good reviews on the big sites, plus a friend of mine who works in audio recommended them, and most of the user review complaints are about the ANC which isn't a big deal to me.

- EarFun Pro 4+. £70. Another pair that get a good balance of recommendations on both user reviews and pro review sites but I know zilch about the brand.

- OnePlus Nord Buds 4 Pro. £80. These don't seem to get a lot of love from professional reviewers but everday users seem to love them. One thing that concerns me is that I've read they're bass heavy, which might explain their popularity but it's not what I want: I'm after a balanced sound.

- Cambridge Audio Melomania A100. £80. These don't seem to be very popular but I've heard good things, and I'm a bit biased by the fact that the best speakers I ever owned were from Cambridge Audio, but I'm concerned by user reviews complaining about connection issues.

Would welcome any thoughts, help, or comparisons on these at all, if people have them? I've tried to trawl reviews but I find some of the descriptors in terms of sound ("warm", "deep", "crystal" etc) confusing.

I run a small "new releases" board games newsletter that's been going for a few years, so I keep a close eye on the release schedules, especially from major publishers. We're six months into 2026 and I've been shocked by the dearth of interesting-looking new games that have come out: I had a month in which there was nothing I felt like recommending for the first time ever since I started doing the newsletter, and then I had a second similar month. The first two times this has happened, both in the same year.

BGG isn't the most reliable source for release year data but it's the only one we've got. So by way of example, if you search on 2026 releases with a minimum of 250 ratings and order by average rating (not BGG rating, so no smoothing to favour bigger games), you get this top 15 list:

1. Lands of Evershade
2. Arkham Horror: The Card Game
3. Nippon: Zaibatsu
4. Everdell Emerland
5. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers – Trick-Taking Game
6. Cozy Stickerville
7. Realm of Reckoning
8. Lairs
9. World Order
10. Moytura
11. Container
12. Labyrinth: Chronicles
13. Frosted Blooms
14. Soothsayers
15. Got Five!

By my count, six of those are essentially re-releases or new editions of older games. Another couple are "big" KS campaign games that tend to get over-rated by people who've sunk a lot of money into them. Most of the rest I've never heard of. There are a couple of games that made a bit of a critical splash - Dark Pact and Carnuta - in the 15-20 slots.

Cosy Stickerville is there which is up for the SdJ of course but I think it's quite telling that this is the first year of that award I can remember where the other two candidates don't have English editions yet. I don't think that's a coincidence.

It's made me think about what might have caused this dearth of good releases, and I came up with a few candidates. One is the increasing conglomeration of everything under what's essentially one publisher with commercial priorities. The second is the uncertain economic outlook which may be dissuading publishers from taking risks or putting out bigger releases. The third is a long-tail knock-on effect of the increasing kickstarter-isation of board game releases reliant on FOMO marketing. It could well be a black spot combination of all three.

Does anyone else feel this way, or is this just an artefact of the reviewers I follow, and/or the BGG subculture? And if this is a real thing, what do we think is the cause?

Today, I finished Gravity's Rainbow. It's taken me six months, including a break halfway through to read something a bit more approachable. Here are some thoughts.

THE GOOD

The humour

I initially struggled with the way the book would veer, without warning, off of relatively realistic and sometimes quite sombre historical subject matter into absolute absurdity but once I'd gotten used to it, these excursions into the ridiculous became one of mt favourite things about the book. Particular highlights include the custard pie fight with Major Marvy, retreiving the hash block (particularly the Mickey Rooney episode) and the ... toiletship. But there's just so much fun and so much imagination in almost all these episodes that I couldn't help but end up loving them.

The prose

The only Pynchon I'd read previously was The Crying of Lot 49 which I absolutely loved, but when I mentioned this to an acquantance who has a PhD in Pynchon together with the fact I'd once read Ulysses for "fun", he suggested I dive right in to Gravity's Rainbow. Now I mention this because although I really enjoyed Lot 49, it gave me no sense of Pynchon as a master prose stylist like Joyce was. And while he can't match Joyce's mastery, which is deployed throughout Ulysses, there are very many moments where he manages to go toe-to-toe. I wish now that I'd taken note of some favourites, but that's just not how I roll with novels, especially on a first read.

The last 100 pages

I'm not trying to show off here and say how I breezed through a bit of the novel that's notoriously difficult (see "THE BAD", below): I understood very little of what I was reading. But, perhaps powered on by the sense that I was on the home straight I just surfed through it at speed and enjoyed the sheer creativity of it. And perhaps precisely because I stopped trying to follow the "story" such as it is towards the end, I felt more able to pick out the bigger themes in this section: the way elites closed ranks after the relative egalatarianism of the war to stymie the possibilities of social equality and liberalism, together with some clarity on the sex/death duality that pervades the entire novel.

The overwhelming scope and ambition

When I read Ulysses (I keep making the comparison as the two novels are often famously mentioned together as among the most difficult/rewarding in English) it seemed to me that the novel's broad preoccupations were fairly obvious. The relationship between father and son, the everyday parallels with the heroic narratives of the Odyssey, the tension between Irish Nationalism and cultural identity, the overwhelming power of guilt and remorse. The difficulty is that these themes are everywhere, often in relatively obscure form, that require close attention to tease out and weave together. GR, by contrast, feels like it's attempting to cover the entire cultural transition from the relatively stuffy 40's to the freewheeling 60's via the vehicle of the war and the philosophical movements of the 50's, together with the foibles of the human condition that leave us weak to the draw of sex and money. It's just vast, and I remain in awe of quite how ambitious Pynchon was in trying to do this.

THE BAD

The overwhelming scope and ambition

Most novels have a goal, or a handful of goals, and they stick to those and explore them as richly as possible. While I admire Pynchon's ambition here, I'm not sure it's actually done the novel any favours: just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. The scope of the books themes are so vast that the whole feels messy and unfocussed, bits of comprehension floating in the soup of prose for readers to do with as they will. I can imagine why some people might see this as a strength, but it didn't work for me. It felt overwhelming.

The narrative

GR is an "easier" read than Ulysses in terms of digesting the prose and broadly following the story, but Pynchon has crammed that story with so many people, places and things that there came a point where I gave up trying to tie it all together. I mean, does a novel really need 400 characters, many of whom are mentioned briefly early on and briefly again later on and you're expeted to remember who they are after a gap of several hundred pages so they can fulfil quite an important plot point? I couldn't do it, for sure. As a result, there were long passages of the book where I failed to properly follow what was going on, started to skim-read, and a lot of stuff went over my head. I began to feel at one point like I should've been taking notes and I'm still not sure how anyone can realistically approach digesting the story without them. It's just too much and (in my admitted ignorance) I'm not convinced that the novel wouldn't have been better without some of them.

Slothrop the paedophile

I get that a book like this doesn't need a "protagonist" in the traditional sense, and I get that Slothrop sleeping with Bianca is symbolic of his brief assimilation into the evils of elitism, but at that point I stopped caring about what was going to happen to him. It was just a repulsive scene, and its inclusion spoiled the book. I don't care about the supposed argument that Bianca is actually 16/17, it's clearly stated that Slothrop believes her to be much younger.

Sez

I've no idea why this annoyed me so much, but it really did. It felt so completely pointless, unlike many of the novel's other inventions and affectations which generally seemed to be there for some reason or other. I almost stopped reading at "Slothropian Episodic Zone".

So there we are. I have no regrets about reading it but, I must say, I haven't found it's left me wanting to read more Pynchon or to re-read GR itself. I'd like to return to Ulysses one day because it felt coherent enough that a second visit might uncover more of its riches. Because of the issues I encountered with the scope and narrative of the novel, GR doesn't feel that way: I feel like it's likely to be equally confusing and overwhelming a second time through.

But you never know.

Looking for some recommendations on earbuds for home listening. I'm primarily interested in audio quality and, to a lesser extent, fit: all other considerations are secondary although if the buds are usable for jogging and/or calls that's a bonus, but I can always use cheap alternatives for those.

I was initially looking at high-end pairs but all the recommended models like the Technics AZ-100 and Sony WF-1000XM6 seemed to have a lot of reviews criticising connectivity, fit and charging, which really put me off: you want something perfectly functional at that price point.

Dropping down to mid-range there seems to be an overwhelming about of choice. A friend of mine who works in a/v tech recommended the Cambridge Audio Melomania A100 but although I do trust his expertise ... absolutely no-one else seems to recommend them and the user reviews are so-so, which put me off those.

The EarFun Air Pro 4+ look pretty good but when I started looking at reviews of competitors I got really confused by the descriptions of different sound "feels". I'm not used to thinking about sound in terms of "warm" or "rich" and I'm not really sure what they mean or what I want. So I'm posting here for further advice, please?

Budget and location:

I'm in the UK. Happy to spend around £100, or a bit more if there's something really worthwhile.

Source/Amp:

A Google Pixel 8a

How the gear will be used:

Almost entirely for home listening in quiet rooms. I do not need ANC. I do also use earbuds for jogging and calls, so a pair that's good for those is a bonus, but I have a cheap pair that's adequate for these tasks: sound quality is the absolute priority for a new pair.

Preferred tonal balance:

Balanced. I'm a bit confused by some reviews that describe sound as "warm", "tingling" or "rich". I find it hard to imagine sound in these terms, I'm not really sure what they mean.

Preferred music genres:

Rock, alternative/indie rock, art/prog rock, folk/acoustic, electronica, reggae.

Past gear experience:

I've owned a bunch of cheap earbuds, which are fine. Galaxy Buds Pro seemed to have a good sound quality but I found them uncomfortable. The best speakers I've ever had were Cambridge Audio: I forget the model this was years ago and the thing I liked best about them was the detail. They let me pick out layers and effects in songs that I'd literally never heard before.

I'm a developer working at a large IT company, and we're due to have a very large number of new staff join us over the next few weeks from other branches of the organisation. I've been asked to draw up a plan to onboard them and get them productive as fast as possible.

We currently use a wiki to hold most of our documentation, but it's badly structured and out of date. I'd planned to stick with the wiki but create a new subsection for this purpose. I was thinking of a headline structure a bit like this:

• Start here
• Development Practices
• Development Processes
• Architecture
• Specific "how to" Guides

But I'm not wedded to either that structure or to the relying on the wiki.

Has anyone had any experience of approaches that work for this kind of mass-training/mass-oboarding scenario?

I recently went back to Bloodborne after a long absence and decided to try and 100% it, including the DLC. I'm now at the last boss, and have all the achievements bar the two ending ones - "Honoring Wishes" and "Yharnam Sunrise". I'm going to do Honoring Wishes this time and save Yharnam Sunrise for a third playthrough, because I like the idea of my hunter finally waking having achieved everything there is to do in Yharnam.

After trailing through all the chalice dungeons, I don't think there's anything else I particularly need to see or do in the game but I just thought I'd ask: are there any fun little extras that players often tend to miss? I was surprised that I didn't have the saw hunter badge after two playthroughs, for example, until I needed it to purchase something from the bath messengers. I've been through all the optional areas as far as I know, otherwise I wouldn't have gained their achievements.

One thing I haven't done much of is scouring dungeons for blood gems. I have no idea how good my gems are and I have very few cursed ones. Given that I'm near a lot of softcaps I can imagine these might be pretty important for a third playthrough. I'm not on PS+ so I can't use glyphs but is it worthwhile me generating some cursed dungeons, or is there anywhere good to farm gems in the cursed and defiled chalice?

A couple of months back I got some carbon plate daily trainers - Puma Deviate Nitro 3's - at a truly phenomenal discount. I found them very weird to run in at first, but advice seemed to be to use them as part of a rotation and gradually get used to the way they work different muscle groups. So I stuck to 5k for a few runs until they felt more comfortable.

The first time I tried to use them on a longer run, I began to feel a dull ache in a thin strip of muscle up the outside-back of both calves. This started way before I got to 5k but it was just uncomfortable rather than painful - it was more like a tightness - so I just ignored it. When I got to 5.5k one leg suddenly just went. Putting any weight on it resulted in a sharp, shooting pain just up that thin strip. The other leg seemed fine.

I presume the carbon shoes are responsible: if so, should I just give them up as a bad job and not risk them again, or is there anything else I can do to build up to using them?

A couple of months back I got some carbon plate daily trainers at a truly phenomenal discount. I found them very weird to run in at first, but advice seemed to be to use them as part of a rotation and gradually get used to the way they work different muscle groups. So I stuck to 5k for a few runs until they felt more comfortable.

The first time I tried to use them on a longer run, I began to feel a dull ache in a thin strip of muscle up the outside-back of both calves. This started way before I got to 5k but it was just uncomfortable rather than painful - it was more like a tightness - so I just ignored it. When I got to 5.5k one leg suddenly just went. Putting any weight on it resulted in a sharp, shooting pain just up that thin strip. The other leg seemed fine.

I initially thought this was cramp as it eased quite a bit very rapidly, and I was able to limp home without much difficulty, but it persisted overnight. I limped for several days before I was able to walk normally. I found out the hard way that it seemed to be exacerbated badly by my going down steep slopes: I got back to the limping stage twice just by traversing steep downhill paths.

That last happened 4 days ago and I'm able to move pretty much normally now, but I can still feel a slight tightness there at the fullness of my stride, or when I go down stairs.

So, some questions:

1. what have I actually injured here, as in which muscle and what did I do to it?

2. I presume the carbon shoes are responsible: if so, should I just give them up as a bad job and not risk them again, or is there anything I can do to build up to using them?

3. Should this happen again, is there anything else I can do to speed my recovery?

4. Two weeks after the injury, and 4 days after the last setback, with that slight tightness still there, am I safe to try running again now, or should I continue to rest it?

I'm currently in NG+ and I'm backtracking through some areas I already completed looking for loot.

I've been back into the Forbidden Woods and fought the two back to back giant viper nests in the area with the red glow. I thought this was where the Deep Sea Rune with 20% frenzy resistance was supposed to be. But it wasn't there: there was a twin blood stone chunk on the body instead.

I don't have the rune in my inventory. Is there anywhere else it could be? Or am I looking in the wrong place still?

EDIT: I'm definitely in the right place and it is indeed near the burning horse. Still no rune. Can anything else happen to them?!

I've been running to the same playlists for over three years now, and I could really use some new music.

While my general listening is pretty varied, when I run I want something that delivers beats and energy. My existing playlists are largely:

- 90s style electronica: Orbital, Underworld, Spooky, Leftfield, 808 State, Aphex Twin etc

- Upbeat electro-pop: Robyn, Chvrches, Little Boots, Erasure, Brat-era Charli XCX, Human League etc

Lay the beats on me!