mdh

Doing some Christmas shopping in Birmingham city centre yesterday and I would say mask compliance was anywhere between 5-10% - if anything it seems to have decreased in the past few weeks. Odd.

I’m baffled at the muted reaction on here - both “It Gets Better” and “Lifetime” are marvellous, especially the latter. I’m looking forward to the album !!

Eh, I can't seem to get into this even though I really want to like it. It wears its influences on its shoulder just a bit too much for me.

It definitely seems like it - nobody was criticising Germany a month ago when the U.K. was below 2k cases a day and Germany were still struggling. Both countries have handled the second wave in different ways but to similar effect; Germany are evidently more effective in controlling case spread yet it would be foolish not to highlight that the U.K. has acted remarkably efficiently with its vaccination programme in comparison to E.U. countries such as Germany - I would say it’s counterproductive to compare the two, especially when there are so many variables involved.

Do you ever have anything positive to say? :P

Bebe Rexha broke Spotify :cheeseblock:

Yes, I can’t imagine we’ll see much of a spike, especially with the new mask rules in place.

Surprised nobody has commented on the recent case figures. Down to around 6,000 a day now - phenomenal stuff especially considering record testing figures today (~850,000). I’m hopeful this will continue to decrease, logically you’d expect the comprehensive school testing programme to mitigate any forthcoming education-related rise in infections. A lot to be positive about going into the Spring.

Charli is wasted on these two smh

I think more people will start moving to Manchester and Birmingham post-Covid. Brum is far greener than London, is far cheaper, unrivalled nightlife and a construction boom that’s not slowing down anytime soon. Don’t know why anyone would relocate to London right now.

As a “young person” (well, 22), I can tell you that I don’t know a single person my age or younger that doesn’t want the vaccine. All the people I’ve seen not keen on the vaccine are between the age of 40 and 60. But this only represents a tiny minority of everyone I know (like 3 people lol). I can imagine take up will extremely high in the UK for all age groups.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone so pessimistic before!

Not really! I don’t particularly understand people’s issues with the idea of it.

I agree with everything you said but this is slightly misleading, we’re testing over 10x as much as we were at the peak last year, so we’re arguably in a considerably better position than we were in April. Still too early to open schools though. Give it a month.

+ hyperpop is a pain in the arse to define, its basically an umbrella term for the SOPHIE/PC music/cloud rap/internet-inspired pop/rap scene

The Not-JLS song is actually rather good

I’m hoping it’ll be a big year for dance IF we actually have a summer !!

+1 to the peeps that have no idea who Lil Tjay is :teresa:

You're getting your tables confused. The one you're talking about is the specimen date table - which logs the date in which all the positive tests were conducted. The reason the figure drops from 20k to 4k is because there tends to be a 2-3 day lag between test and report of positive case, ofc because not all tests deliver results on the same day. The table directly below records the daily recorded cases. The best way to see how many cases we're seeing is to look at the 7 day average on this. It's 28,584, but I'd expect it to look more like 20k in a couple of days. :D

This all feels so random - I haven't heard anyone talking about this song on social media or on the radio and none of my friends know who she is, I'm baffled but impressed !

Impressive figures for this Olivia Rodrigo person, I’m not going to pretend I know who she is though :lol:. Quite a nice song, she sounds like a more charismatic Tate McRae.

I think this is the song that’s made me realise that I am completely out of touch with the youth of today :,)

As I thought would happen, while Spain, the UK, and Italy are all recording falling cases Germany still seem to be increasing in daily cases. Oops

TikTok is surely the most organic way for songs to gain popularity? Unlike Spotify playlists, blogs, radio playlists and TV performances it’s completely a result of human beings finding a song that they like and showing it to others... I reckon if it was all your favourite artists who got popular from TikTok as opposed to music that’s more teen oriented/from genres you’re not a fan of you wouldn’t be mouthing off about it like you do.

Gobsmacked that Angela Merkel has given Germany "10 days to get the infection rate down" as opposed to imposing extra restrictions straight away. Has she been completely ignoring the worsening situation in France, Spain and the UK?! Makes me feel better about some of our government's decisions :')