c4countdown

Thomas Carey

Fiona and James Burley chat a bit in today's BBC South Today at the UK Scrabble thingy. Fiona's rather rude word is visible on the TV...

Thomas Carey

Adam gillards octorun early 2011

Thomas Carey

<3 means a lot well done again jack, impressive consistency. cheers focal team! definitely one of the more memorable focal years (I've been an also ran in four out of the six focal finals I've played, and the two years I've been in hospital I've been a hair off the final, don't know what to make of ...

Thomas Carey

Slightly less traumatic way to make the news (well, the facebook reels of the local rag) this time around - the time I wore the Lidl jumper to the Aldi Christmas market #madlad https://www.facebook.com/reel/1083741992905334

Thomas Carey

and bc i might as well 2024 age grade table points events colin liv rug reading sheff oxford durham brum london bpool dublin glasgow btree mk maus 7447 11 556 667 667 833 857 500 900 500 600 667 700 fiona 5768 11 778 500 778 500 429 800 250 700 400 333 300 dan 4237 6 667 889 667 714 500 800 gevin 33...

Thomas Carey

because i said i'd do this two years ago: 2023 age grade table points events colin man rug leeds brghton dublin newc brum london bpool btree mk fiona 5409 8 857 800 800 200 667 667 600 818 maus 4431 7 786 400 600 800 500 800 545 dan 2506 6 500 500 400 333 500 273 gevin 2338 3 929 500 909 mike 1143 2...

Thomas Carey

Disagree. Old group stage was boring, often felt like a foregone conclusion. If you only have limited games why waste them on playing the same teams twice. This feels a lot more exciting to follow imo

Thomas Carey

heya - I'm an idiot and booked the wrong flight. is anyone with a car able to give me a lift from MK coachway (near M1 junction 14, a 10 min drive from the novotel) to the novotel on friday night? i'll be getting in at 19:45 but will let you know if there's any delays. will buy you a ridiculously ov...

Thomas Carey

Thomas Cappleman wrote: ↑Tue Nov 26, 2024 4:32 pm What do the double and treble mean in the badges page? Looks like I'll get the Centurion badge at the end of Sunday, unless I make any finals, and the 64champ if I win any game at all, so wondering how to get the other two.

It's just two or three of the first 3 badgers

Thomas Carey

Squeak Good points, well made - want to reiterate that I'm absolutely not saying hosts should look for bigger venues - I'm aware that finding a suitable venue is tough and will be most of the event costs, and hosts do a great job with this. I'm just saying that a max 10% increase in people in the r...

Thomas Carey

The bottom one seems to be what's done at the moment! Option 1 would be my preference, with the knowledge that I don't think any event has had more than a handful of interested signups above the 'cap'. Like, if event hosts were regularly having to turn away dozens of people then, obviously, limiting...

Thomas Carey

I mean I usually sign up early enough, doesn't really affect me personally. This is less about finding a bigger venue - most co event venues are a good size, and you don't need a massive one as Fiona says. More about squeezing an extra 3 or 4 people in over turning people away

Thomas Carey

Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but one I've felt fairly strongly about for a while. Not aimed at anyone specific, just a thing I've noticed a lot. I really don't like capping sign ups to an event. Yes, obviously, there's a limit to how many people you can fit in a room. But, when creating an event, y...

Thomas Carey

I don't think I'm allowed to run at MK now as it would tarnish my perfect points total

Thomas Carey

Copenhagen's Little Mermaid statue - it's smaller than you think it's going to be, and when I visited was surrounded by rubbish including a broken office chair and a shopping trolley - took a lot of careful camera positioning to lose the rubbish! I was there at the start of the year (feels like a l...

Thomas Carey

The Hollywood sign. Ooooh, great, letters. It's just some fucking letters on a hill Beat me to it. As for small paintings, I saw Hokusai the wave in Chicago recently which was a lot smaller than expected. Wouldn't say it was disappointing, just surprising, although with lots of people crowding aroi...

Thomas Carey

Gavin Chipper wrote: ↑Tue Nov 12, 2024 1:09 am Logan Sargeant is the first past or present F1 driver to appear as a contestant on Countdown.

https://wiki.apterous.org/Graham_Hill

This guy was in the first series I properly followed and I remember being absolutely shocked that he would prioritise a holiday over series finals haha

Thomas Carey

yeah that tracks

Thomas Carey

Has anyone identified the new football Champions League format as something that could be used at co-events. It would be hard to implement for Lincoln style events, however it could work for Bristol style events. It could be implemented very simply, for example if you have 6 games (as with most eve...

Thomas Carey

Didn't work on chrome on mobile or laptop, worked fine on edge.

What a mundane 1500th post

Thomas Carey

England (loads), Germany (loads), Scotland if it counts (Oriam and Queen's Glasgow for co events), Austria (all but Graz, there's only 4), Ireland (Knocknacarra and Cabinteely for co events), USA (Cornerstone Lakes first place two weeks ago). So 5, or 6 if you count Scotland. Doing Lithuania with Fi...

Thomas Carey

Thomas Carey

Mark Deeks wrote: ↑Mon Sep 30, 2024 9:58 pm Why are coffee machines so fucking loud?

Recently confirmed (as if there was any doubt) that I'm dating above my social class when my partner's mum was buying a coffee machine, despite already owning one, because she wanted a quieter one. They exist, but apparently not for prices under 4 digits.

Thomas Carey

Cheers. If you want to update more stuff I believe Dan and I were the only codub people and we did different ones so that's easy

Thomas Carey

It's amazing how long I can keep a saying going in my vernacular. In the 80s or 90s there was a politician called Walid Jumblatt. I've referred to my wallet as my Jumblatt ever since Edit: not only is he still alive he was still in the Lebanese Socialist Party until last year Not quite as long but ...

Thomas Carey

Round 1 1 Matt O Connor 66 - 20 Samik Sen 2 Roishin Sen 37 - 49 Gerry Tynan 3 Mike Springett 38 - 39 Damian McEvoy 4 Jonathan De Souza 68 - 10 Aideen Mooney 5 Trevor MacEoin 37 - 57 Alan O'Sullivan 6 Matthew S Rutherford 66 - 23 Roger Stevens 7 Chris Marshall 38 - 61 Thomas Carey 8 Brendan Duke 54 ...

Thomas Carey

1 Jonathan De Souza 8 7 544 2 Dan Byrom 8 6 502 3 Matt O Connor 8 6 489 4 Thomas Carey 8 5 513 5 Matthew S Rutherford 8 5 475 6 Sean De Loughry 8 5 447 7 Brendan Duke 8 5 440 8 Alan O'Sullivan 8 5 419 9 Trevor MacEoin 8 5 398 10 Gerry Tynan 8 4 474 11 Eoin Jackson 8 4 438 12 Stewart Gordon 8 4 427 1...

Thomas Carey

Yeah I like both, some are more suited to one or the other that's fine, keep both pls. We've had events that have run to time with 8 and not felt rush, we've had 6 game events that have massively overran (can't help but feel partially responsible for the last event), and anything in between. Do what...

Thomas Carey

What is superscrabble? https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/11182/super-scrabble#:~:text=The%20popular%20game%20of%20Scrabble,set%20of%20the%20original%20distribution). Scrabble, but supersized. I played a game of this against Stewart Holden once where we both achieved scores of over 1000. I played ...

Thomas Carey

Yeah - I'm very slowly getting into Scrabble. We had a tournament in Berlin recently and I was unsuccessfully trying to explain to the organiser (who was playing, and is a fun person to talk to) how absolutely batshit insane I found it, from a countdowner's perspective, that they were PAYING someone...

Thomas Carey

assuming friday and sunday events don't count, just be whatever events have had a lot - done 12 at lincoln, 7 at mk, 7 at hudds, 5 at london, 5 at blackpool so that's a 5. fairly sure won't be any higher

Thomas Carey

i love your recaps never stop

Thomas Carey

Surely they're both correct. Without looking properly I'm assuming one clue is something like 'winner of the 2024 election' Anyway, some of you will have seen this before but this segment of a NYT crossword is very good Also someone else made this which I found while trying to search for the other ...

Thomas Carey

Bradley Horrocks wrote: ↑Mon Jul 01, 2024 7:48 pm Is anyone thinking of doing the parkrun?

I will be yeah. My train gets into Durham at 7:59 so probably going straight there with maybe a little noodling around the city

Thomas Carey

I rambled about this here http://www.c4countdown.co.uk/viewtopic.php?p=200804&hilit=supernundrum#p200804 We used them a fair bit in lockdown zoom tournaments and it worked well. For the really good players, it meant buzz times separated by about 2 seconds rather than 0.2 - much less dependent on...

Thomas Carey

What up. We decided to make a countdowners 'running club' that you can put on your parkrun profile and stuff. Even if you're a member of a real club you can still add this one as a non primary one so people can see results and stuff https://www.parkrun.org.uk/groups/48972/

Thomas Carey

Would be cool to have full bracket predictions from these. A lot of the time basically everyone guesses the same winner but might think differently for some of the (on paper) closer ones

Thomas Carey

Me Dan Adam Fiona Chris for Hillsborough

Fun fact, co reading parkrun was their 625th and now this Sheffield one was their 504th. Fun for both ends of the numbers pick spectrum

Thomas Carey

Steve Hyde wrote: ↑Wed May 15, 2024 4:13 pm Has any player ever scored more than Alex Robertson (115/92% of max) while winning only one match?

My boy https://wiki.apterous.org/Jamie_Ilett-Jones

Anyone heard from him recently? He's not been to events in a while

Thomas Carey

are there multiple word game geeks or is it just jack

Thomas Carey

i loved the poeticness of both wife and husband pulling off 20+ point comebacks in the first game. this is the first time i've bothered watching countdown on a vpn since i moved abroad, congrats!

Thomas Carey

bongrace

Thomas Carey

I'm the same hosting order as Graeme, except I usually look up the maxes (jack's thing is best for this since it gives sub maxes etc) before writing the thing down, so that I can then tab back in to the timer and put the phone visible to the players as early as possible (usually 10 seconds in or so)...

Thomas Carey

The pacemakers dropped in and out (there were several laps) so it wasn't like in a proper race where they start with you and then drop out when they can't keep it going. I still don't really get why that's illegal. Obviously cars blocking wind and shoes with whatever made them illegal would invalid...

Thomas Carey

What's that whole thing about when your ear goes PING and then you're deaf for a few seconds? I assume it's just like any other random body twitch that makes a small noise, but by being somewhere inside the ear the sound is massively amplified which makes it really loud to that ear and deafens you ...

Thomas Carey

Gavin Chipper wrote: ↑Sun Feb 11, 2024 11:28 pm Kelvin Kiptum has died in a road accident. Shit. I mean, fucking hell.

These are the kinds of celebrity deaths that get me the most. I struggle to really care when someone old dies, but he had so much ahead of him

also, not the thread for it, but fuck cars

Thomas Carey

I've really enjoyed the special prizes - calendars (2018 and 2024), mugs, poster, coaster, that t shirt. But I'm lucky enough to be at a level where I was able to win one every weekend it was available (except for one or two of them where someone with a duplicate gave me a spare). I do think having ...

Thomas Carey

Yeah, I'm with Mark on wanting to keep going to the fox for at least one night each weekend, now that it's changed hands again so we aren't likely to get physically attacked by the locals anymore. But I'm a sucker for tradition, this being my 12th colin weekend (though I didn't go to the fox as a ba...

Thomas Carey

Ben Wilson wrote: ↑Thu Jan 04, 2024 10:46 pm Tom Carey just deaged, put on an American accent and beat the Tetris world record.

I'm so old

Thomas Carey

Series 44 semi-finalist David Roe brings numbers to 28 and sets a new record for most time between consecutive COLIN appearances at 14 years since he played at COLIN 2010. Only two other people have gaps of 10 years or more between appearances- can you name either of them? One of them has to be Kai...

Thomas Carey

I guess since basically every other finalist has commented i'll say some shit. All of my cons except my final game (with George) were crucials (and all of his were crucial except our game too!) Caseiform - I think this is decent but surprised people are saying it's one of the best of the day. I don'...

Thomas Carey

Squeeze me harder. I think my thing is Maus with the emoji but I've had a few variations for no good reason

Thomas Carey

Fiona T wrote: ↑Sun Oct 22, 2023 3:19 pm Well this is exciting!!

https://www.parkrun.org.uk/yarboroughleisurecentre/

Y was looking like the trickiest alphabet letter for me - York being crazy expensive! Too good an opportunity to miss for me.

Anyone wanna join me for this one?

Yes

Thomas Carey

Used to be the case. Nowadays you have MGQASHIYO and friends

Thomas Carey

Gavin Chipper wrote: ↑Tue Oct 10, 2023 4:21 pm
Thomas Carey wrote: ↑Tue Oct 10, 2023 4:18 pm Could do with some overages right about now
Would you take a 50/50 gamble where you get either some overages or a sarcoid?

Depends on the amoont

Thomas Carey

Could do with some overages right about now

Thomas Carey

I love Graeme's post and generally think jack's 'blend' post is the way to go - obviously there's no objective measure of difficulty so something you think is pretty tough one player might think is a piece of piss or vice versa but that's part of the fun. Another food for thought since someone menti...

Thomas Carey

Steve Hyde wrote: ↑Fri Sep 29, 2023 2:07 pm Apropos of nothing, what is the smallest number vowels ever picked by an Octochamp across their entire octorun? Has anyone managed a perfect 120?

And the obvious reverse question. Jonny Rawlinson maybe?

Thomas Carey

I'm most likely doing dollis hill parkrun (Gladstone apparently) because it's the nearest to my crappy budget hostel. 500 points each if nobody else joins us I guess

Who else is doing mso? I'm signed up (unless I'm not in which case Tony please yell at me)

Thomas Carey

Matt Morrison wrote: ↑Tue Aug 22, 2023 3:54 pm Isn't/wasn't Maus/Tom Carey too/as well?

Not to my knowledge but I'm weirdly pleased people thought this

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