Iskaral Pust

Tokyo Vice S1 and S2 was pretty good. I just binged them over the past few weeks. I initially had low interest a year ago after watching the pilot — slow pace, lots of subtitles, awkward audience-inserts in the form of two unrelated American characters living and working in Tokyo with fluent Japanese — but was recommended to return to it by a friend after they finished S2 recently. It’s a Yakuza thriller: feuding gangsters in Tokyo abetted by corruption are opposed by crusading journalists and a few incorruptible police, all set in a culture that is stodgily centered around hierarchy, tradition and performing politeness/respect. Overall a good quality watch with well-drawn characters. I would guess the story is complete after two seasons. Rebel Moon 2 was ridiculously bad. It’s a tired retread of Seven Samurai in a Star Wars-ish setting, which sounds bad enough (did The Mandalorian’s spaghetti western in a Star Wars setting inspire this?), but the writing, direction and execution are so weak. It’s disappointing to think this is what we get for two big-budget space operas.

City and Arsenal are both in very strong form and winning comfortably (although, yes, they’ve both had a random blip in recent weeks). We’re arriving at that weird stage of the season: some teams are fighting for their lives, while others will be playing in flip-flops and imagining the beach. Also fatigue catches up with the teams who’ve been doing the Thursday-Sunday routine for EL and ECL games for the whole season, and there might be a team here or there who are deprioritizing the league now in favor of a cup.

The ‘boot room’ was a proto-DoF. It ensured a consistent style and approach across successive managers, allowed long term planning in player development and squad building, and avoided the chopping and changing in recruitment priorities that can produce a Frankenstein squad (like United’s). It wasn’t perfect but it was better than the typical approach of all-powerful individual managers and style fads. After the Souness debacle, the club tried to return to the ‘boot room’ with Roy Evans and Ronnie Moran. The biggest problem with the ‘boot room’ system was the absence of any counterbalance. Each manager was selecting and grooming their own successor, which risks blind spots and group think. If the club had any serious concerns about the outcomes — e.g. Hillsboro caused Dalgliesh to retire much earlier than planned and before he had rebuilt an aging team or groomed a successor, was Roy Evans ruthless enough or modern enough in his tactics, fitness, coaching, etc — then any intervention meant blowing up the system. It only worked so long as it was ensuring positive continuity, but wasn’t designed to deal with a need for change.

Generous of Liverpool to give their two oldest rivals the pleasure of finishing our season early. United and Everton may have been in the doldrums all season, but we’ve given them something to warm their hearts.

Jota injured again. Of course he is.

I”ll give Liverpool credit that they secured the DoF and his infrastructure before picking the new manager or deciding on players. But it does seem like they’ve moved slowly on all of this if Klopp shared his decision back in the autumn. Perhaps they assumed Alonso would come and they didn’t expect to have a wider search that’s competing with Barca and Bayern among others.

I do 500m just as a quick warm up before weightlifting. When I was rowing as the workout, not just the warmup, I would do 5k in 21-23 minutes (depending on how hard I was pushing) but my legs were like jelly after that and my heart and lungs would be heaving as I stood up to rest. I have noticed that my new rowing machine in my home gym has a different pace than the ERG I used in our condo gym a few years ago (when I did 5k in 21-23 minutes). The ERG in the condo gym was an older model with a chain cable. On a setting of 10 (out of 10), I could sprint at 1:45/500m but a long row would have a sustained pace in the 2:10/500m ballpark. My newer ERG in my home gym uses a fan blade resistance and on a setting of 13 (out of 16) I find that 2:25/500m is a brisk warm-up pace for 500m. There’s no way I could do 2:10/500m sustained for 5k on this machine. i wondered if my fitness just declined a lot in the last few years but we’ve been back in that condo building in Chicago in the last two years to visit friends and I’ve gone back into the gym and used the same old ERG machine and I still rowed at the original pace. I think there’s just a large difference in either the resistance or how the machines convert resistance into distance. They are from different manufacturers and use different mechanical designs, but different treadmills don’t produce that kind of discrepancy.

I think the players are tired again. Going deep in four competitions, with all of the injury absences, just adds up. Unfortunately it’s a familiar pattern. The team runs out of steam each season. Guardiola seems to do a better job of having his team peak in March, April, May, even if they had a rough patch sometime earlier.

Leinster just announced that they’re signing Jordie Barrett on a short term contract. It sounds like it will just be a short term coverage role while all of Leinster’s backs are called up by Ireland, and it’s a short term adventure the player wanted to try. Munster fans are up in arms about Leinster receiving disproportionate financial backing from the IRFU, although my understanding is that Leinster have much higher revenues than the other provinces because of the Aviva stadium. I’ll need to investigate this rabbit hole of Irish rugby club financing.

The team looks badly out of form. Several individual players are struggling and now it’s too many for the collective to be effective. We carried ourselves through a difficult period of absences with kids, emotion and belief, but the returning players haven’t clicked back into form yet. Klopp has been an amazing manager for this club who made us serious consistent contenders again, produced some great football to watch, instilled a great culture, and won a few trophies. But we’ve also had to endure a lot more fading into second place than actual winning of trophies over the seasons. I think City heavily outspent us domestically (unfairly and should retroactively lose those titles) and Madrid (annd Sevilla) outfoxed us in Europe. It’s been a great era, and we may struggle to be this competitive without Klopp, but it has mostly been an era of brave but one-dimensional runners-up.

Great to see Gordon and Bajcetic playing again after long term injuries. Liverpool U21 had a difficult 2-3 months after so many players got pulled into the senior squad for injury cover, so their league position belies their quality.

Leinster finally see off LaRochelle with a pretty comprehensive victory. Five tries by Leinster, even with LaRochelle’s goal-line defense stopping more. It was a big concern for Keenan to withdraw shortly before the game, leaving Frawley and Larmour as the back two, and no backfield cover on the bench. On to the semifinal.

Liverpool have struggled against the top 6 in the PL all season, and now failing badly against the first tough opponent in Europe. We’ve been good against mid-table all season, but don’t look to have any edge for the games that will decide trophies.

Most space opera movies have been varying degrees of campy, cheesy and juvenile, even the commercial hits like Flash Gordon, Avatar or Star Wars — space wizards with laser swords! The genre’s world building is necessarily shallow and ridiculous (even when there is a deep lore constructed), and that tends to be paired with juvenile wish fulfillment stories. Hard SciFi does a better job of sticking to more complex stories but even The Expanse had a cheesiness to the novels, combining a tired noir character with a horror story and an interplanetary Cold War. I watch most of the space opera movies to enjoy the creative fantasy but I’m not surprised that Hollywood is cautious about audience demand.

That’s what they’re using the burner phones for, apparently. Ticket holders register the ticket on a dedicated smart phone; not their own personal phone with all of their data and personal use. Then they just give the phone to whoever buys the ticket and get it back afterward. This limits the reselling to a casual network so that a stranger doesn’t just disappear with the phone, but it allows people to create a black market well above face value. Hospitality tickets are available from the club at a large premium, which puts an effective ceiling on the black market prices for regular tickets.