GoGo Yubari

the US Open Cup. It's fun!

Sure, I'm down.

I didn't realize the Green one was out too!!! (but I can't side with the team that has Incel Knight on it really)

Name is beyond generic but this looks pretty good, lived up to how interested I was in the premise. Hopefully it sticks the landing, this is exactly the kind of corners of canon I want Marvel games to play with.

fuck.

And yeah, to Ruki's point I very much intend to keep an eye out for a cheap copy of Judgment this year so I can play it next year after Yakuza 6.

Hahaha, Jesus. That fight took me an eternity, the idea of that happening to me would probably make me put the game down for a week. Overall, strong Yakuza game. Really enjoyed the baseball and pop idol side games (though in the former the power curve basically gets absolutely wrecked if you opt to take a few lessons from your old coach before actually trying the missions), thought the taxi driver one was fascinating because of just how Yakuza it is (by which I mean it pointedly rejects the idea of Crazy Taxi-style mayhem and forces you to respect the rules and regulations), didn't get that much out of hunting beyond a pretty good overarching story. Didn't love who the final enemy ended up being though I get that there's a sort of Looking forward to playing 6 but that won't be until the end of this year at the very earliest. Diving headlong into playing various FF7 things for the next couple months now.

The Foreigner is the Jackie Chan iteration of those movies.

Janet was actually on The Center Won't Hold but left the band almost immediately after they finished recording it. Like, they did one of the songs together on the Tonight Show, tickets went on sale for the tour the next morning, and then she announced she was gone by mid-afternoon. That was still enough time for me to immediately buy a ticket to the Seattle leg, though (They were okay, the replacement drummer was talented, but it kind of felt like they were blitzing through playing the set as fast as possible. The title track for that album was pretty good live?) But then yeah, the weirder part is that rather than continue down that path and try to make it work they've sort of just moved on to glossier-sounding indie rock.

I don't know if I think SK are going through the motions because I think that would have looked like them basically just repeating No Cities to Love over and over again to diminishing returns. Instead I think it's actually kind of more of a bummer because they're more or less trying something new but in a way that doesn't really work and alienated both part of their audience and also the third member of their band. I fully get Carrie and Corin's argument that the band existed pre-Janet but it's a bit like if Nirvana had lasted into the '00s and Kurt and Krist ended up alienating Dave Grohl somehow. Just doesn't feel right. "Say It Like You Mean It" is probably the closest I've come to really liking a song of theirs since 2015, though, so I guess they're getting closer to something that works for me.

That one's pretty wild. I'm assuming the awful weather had a hand to play in that. My favorite MLS own goal is probably this one from the late, lamented Chivas USA back in 2013:

Pigs(x7) is a fairly savvy choice for the promotion now effectively run by a Motorhead stan.

I enjoyed her account of having to try doing acting in front of a green screen for the first time. Have absolutely no clue what possessed anyone involved to think that Dakota Johnson, one of the most low-key, mumblecore actresses I've ever seen who has a documented record of not really hiding when she thinks she's in a bad movie, was the right choice for the leading role. That alone should probably DQ Sony from making more of these movies outside of Spider-Verse. (tbf I also listened to a podcast with Adam Scott on it from last year and him being in Madame Web came up and he had a very similar unspoken "yeah that was a paycheck and nothing more, I've already forgotten what I did on it" vibe.)

I kind of feel like "the next main villain of the MCU is going to be Kang" was actually kind of a crazy act of hubris now that we can see what a mess Marvel Studios is right now. That's a villain who is really, really hard to write a good story for and is even more in Comic Book Stuff deep waters than Thanos, and all that was before the guy they put the weight of playing all the versions of him turned out to be a bad call. I haven't seen Loki S2 yet. From S1 and Quantumania it felt like they were going to try and slow-play him in a slightly different way than Thanos, who was really really obviously strong and menacing but they just hadn't established how strong yet. With Kang it felt a little more like they were trying to sell him as someone who, while not harmless, was powerful in ways that wouldn't really make themselves obvious until you saw the full scope of what he and all his variants can do. But that's a really hard thing to sell and harder still when the franchise itself has basically zero momentum.

I do think the guy they got to play Flair did a good job at playing him off-camera, just this leering party-boy creep who is vaguely depicted as the kind of asshole you have to be to actually get to and stay at the top and basically the antithesis of Kevin. He was very bad at playing the Nature Boy persona but to be fair to him, that's on the direction as much as anything else that the "woooo" wasn't even accurate. Saw American Fiction last night. I liked it. Kind of reminded me of a Woody Allen movie and I'm in favor of people who aren't Woody Allen successfully making movies that kind of scratch that itch.

Ebon Moss-Bacharach is a great choice for Ben Grimm.

Heard "Texas Hold'em" on the radio yesterday. It's too stomp-clap for me, regrettably, honestly feels like it has as much in common with that whole folk revival from fifteen years ago as it does country. Would rather hear something more like a ballad, but maybe that doesn't go with Renaissance's whole thing since everything I heard off the first one was dance music. All for Rhiannon Giddens getting paid/getting exposure, though. Everything I've heard from her I've tended to like.

Yeah, I somehow completely missed him going full Trump until I read this very good obit that basically works to contextualize both Toby Keith's embarrassing politics and the fact that it seems like he could in fact write a very good country song regardless of that. Makes me wonder just how sincere any of it was, almost feels like he just could tell which way the wind was blowing and adjusted to that every time.

Wild that both Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson ended up outliving Toby Keith. And yeah, you know. I know he ended up pivoting a little, endorsed Obama and all that, but it's very hard for me to separate him from what an odious presence he was in the wake of 9/11. He was basically the voice of the dumbest, ugliest part of a particularly dumb, ugly moment in American history and the way he tried to make country music an inhospitable space for popular artists who felt differently, eugh. Guess we'll always have that time he inexplicably turned up at the very first TNA show and suplexed Jeff Jarrett?

Yeah, that's a shocker. I thought Comedy Central was fine with just letting the show die a slow, hostless death but getting Stewart to come back even in reduced form feels a lot more like they just had absolutely no idea what to do once Trevor Noah left and Hassan Minhaj talked himself out of being the replacement. I don't hold the reverence for him I used to when I was a teen but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't going to watch at least the first episode or two to see how he approaches it, given pretty much everything that's happened in the last nine years.

For all the talk about the food stuff in Road to Elite, I wasn't quite prepared for how hard I would laugh at seeing that they even included a dietary preference selector at the start of the mode, right below difficulty. Mostly just fucking around and looking at settings. Was interesting to see which wrestler themes for people who aren't in the game they included in the shop, wasn't expecting to see Maki Itoh's theme turn up. Got a laugh out of the fact that they couldn't shell out for either "Jane" or "Where Is My Mind?" so Orange Cassidy is back to that bad generic theme he had for his first year in AEW, not that I can really blame them (though I'm surprised they didn't just have Mikey Rukus churn out a "Jane" soundalike).

Basically the core flaw of this season, that they weren't really able to define minor characters effectively, reared its ugly head there. Pretty solid in my feeling that I'd rank the seasons as 2, 1, 5, 3, 4. Seems like Hawley has basically backpedaled away from the idea that S5 will definitely be the last one and is more like "well, I'm focusing on Alien for now" so maybe there will in fact be more.