As a match its a lesson in the value of possession in the right parts of the field. They just choked the life out of the Chiefs; who were guilty of making errors at the times when they might have got themselves into the game.

Given you’ve said reactions appreciated hopefully nobody is going to be sad if they get spoiled by the Super Rugby final thoughts i’m about to share! :)

It wasn’t a close match so for neutrals (and Chiefs fans) in some ways it might not have been that good to watch. But as a Rugby fan sometimes you just have to appreciate it when a team is so on song, with the right game plan for the situation executed perfectly. The Blues were simply incredible last night the most dominant performance i’ve watched in a long time in a match against teams that ought to be fairly evenly matched.

This was a 2015 All Blacks vs France quarter final level demolition of the Chiefs who tried mightily and defended massively but just couldn’t find a way to get into, then stay in the game at all. The Blues forward pack, 1-8 and then the reserves were just relentlessly physical and didn’t let up for the whole 80 minutes. Tuipulotu was deserving MotM; but Akira Ioane was also massive in his last game for the club. Hoskins Sotutu was a bit quieter, Darry played well, Tu’ungafasi was great until he left early in the 2nd half and Riccitelli for an otherwise unheralded #2 in NZ really put his hand up to be Cody Taylor’s understudy with Taukeiaho under an injury cloud.

Some of the stats are actually kinda mind boggling. The Blues dominated possession 67%-33%, which is insane to start with, but they had 39% possession in the Chiefs 22m. Ie, the Blues had more possession attacking the Chiefs line, than the Chiefs had across the whole field. Blues only had to make 82 tackles to the Chiefs 215, and made 513 metres off 153 carries to the Chiefs 256 off 78.

The score would suggest its not worth watching but if you’ve got the time its a clinic in how to play wet weather rugby .

Patrick Tuipolotu is out for 6-7 weeks with medial ligament injury; so its going to be a young lock combination for the Blues in the semi-final. The Brumbies had scrum trouble against the Highlanders, but might find it a bit easier to compete at set piece time and at the collision without having Tuipolotu against them.

It’ll be an interesting game on Friday!

Exactly; the statement will have been reviewed by lawyers who would have suggested rewording it.

I just want to jump in here as the whole thing about the tonnes of factual errors stuff…

A lot of the allegations about the accuracy of their data basically came down to arguments about the validity of statistics garnered from testing methodology; and how Labs guy claimed their methods were super good, vs other content creators claiming their methods were better.

My opinion is that all of these benchmarking content creators who base their content on rigorous “testing” are full of their own hot air.

None of them are doing sampling and testing in volume enough to be able to point to any given number and say that it is the metric for a given model of hardware. So the value reduces to this particular device performed better or worse than these other devices at this point in time doing a comparable test on our specific hardware, with our specific software installation, using the electricity supply we have at the ambient temperatures we tested at.

Its marginally useful for a product buying general comparison - in my opinion to only a limited degree; because they just aren’t testing in enough volume to get past the lottery of tolerances this gear is released under. Anyone claiming that its the performance number to expect is just full of it. Benchmarking presents like it has scientific objectivity but there are way too many variables between any given test run that none of these folks isolate before putting their videos up.

Should LTT have been better at not putting up numbers they could have known were wrong? Sure! Should they have corrected sooner & clearer when they knew they were wrong? Absolutely! Does anybody have a perfect testing methodology that produces reliable metrics - ahhhh, im not so sure. Was it a really bitchy beat up at the time from someone with an axe to grind? In my opinion, hell yes.

You don’t put out a statement saying “This company looked at us & found this:” without running the statement by the company in question first.

Well, you can, but you’ll usually find yourself in hot water if the things you’re claiming the company found run contrary to what they actually found.

This! Would you hire a mechanic who you know does what you say but 1/3 cars they “repair” ends up breaking again 6 months later?

As noted above, I think the statement is that allegations were made and they were not ignored, and/or were addressed.

This is silly.

If it was reported, it was reported. The whole point of Roper Greyell being involved is to identify if there were events that weren’t reported, or were reported and not acted upon.

That’s not the only way to read that at all. Your interpretation is that sexual harrassment was not ignored & was addressed; but the sentence is actually that allegations were not ignored and were addressed.

Nobody trying to make money on YouTube is going to stop click bait; its a necessary evil to get your videos fed by the algorithm. It sucks, but its here to stay until the algorithm starts punishing it.

I think its worth bearing in mind that professional sports people compete injured all the time, and “career ending” can mean a lot of different things.

Eg I don’t think we’re talking never be able to walk again type of injury - but it could just be something that he will lose range of motion, or be in pain until its fixed surgically and then once fixed he won’t be in pain or will have full motion but its not safe to risk the repair from that point on.

And, of course, the whole thing could be a work :)

So, do you think that was kayfabe, or is Chuckie T actually finished? He got to say shit on TV, and had an epic final match - but if he’s not coming back as either a wrestler or manager i’m going to miss him - the Best Friends & Dark Order were both my favourite things from early days AEW outside of the Bucks, Omega, Hangman early story that culminated in the original Stadium Stampede.

I guess given the references from Kenny he’s written out until a point where he can compete in a Blood & Guts match; but if the write-out was so he could get surgery I thought the way it worked is that the timeline for recovery was pretty open ended.

“I wanna be a good boy”

From what i’ve seen of Thekla she is awesome too, so hopefully she does show up on Forbidden Door because adding more from Stardom to the women’s side of those matches will be rad.

So good.

I was flying into Brisbane Australia years ago and halfway through the immigration / customs section I saw 3-4 border control agents around this absolute giant of a man, super tanned, jacked, blonde hair. Initially I wondered if it was a drugs bust but everybody was way to jovial and chatting and only later did I realise it was Billy who I think was in town for some indie show in 'straya. He looks big on TV, even bigger IRL.

Yeah there’s a difference between having young wrestlers wrestling, and young wrestlers posing for glamour photo books & whatnot I guess.

Probably a lesson to not clap back at Tony if you’re not tippy toppy in WWE and certain in your contract though.

I think you’re expecting something that is unlikely to happen - there’s a bunch of privacy related issues, employment law restrictions etc that potentially mean they will never comment further on it.

A great many people really like OSX; its been a long time since i’ve daily driven it but there’s stuff about the way it works that feels more efficient than windows, and easier than linux. That’s not something that appeals to everyone but its obviously worked for a lot of folks.

So back in the day it was about getting to use OSX (and in other cases apps that were OSX only, or just ran better in OSX) but not having to pay so much for the hardware. That’s a calculation that to me really only made sense for desktops; as for quite a long time Apple’s laptops weren’t actually massively more expensive than a similarly spec’d windows laptop.*

Overtime i’d argue that linux desktops have caught up to a lot of what made OSX feel good; but they’re not like for like even now. Though take that with a grain of salt as I spend more time in cli/tui nowadays across my macbook, work windows laptop and various linux boxes i’ve got running :)

*The thing was that the average windows laptop was under-spec compared to a Macbook Pro so the latter always looked way more pricey.