Sherry is 1404:

The precocious lady of GATE, Sherry, who schemed to use her own pitiable plight as a method to drag Japan into a war with her primitive enemies, is the best part of the series.  The fact that she was strongly in favor of 'underage' marriage, considering herself not underage in the least, is also to her credit.  Her beauty doesn't hurt either, or the fact that her seiyuu was the divine Rina Hidaka.  Altogether, it's weird that she hadn't joined my wonderful hall of fame earlier.  Sherry gets 'You Take my Breath Away' as her personal theme, suitable since her story was a love story anyway.

Meanwhile, the college football playoff spots have all been chosen.  After Duke beat Virginia in overtime, something crazy was bound to happen, and the selection committee didn't disappoint by putting in Miami from the ACC instead of Duke, and adding in James Madison and Tulane instead of poor Notre Dame, BYU or Texas.

All in all I think the selection process was fair.  I also think the top four teams -- Indiana, Ohio State, Georgia and Texas Tech, are so much better than the remaining 8, that we didn't really need a 12-team playoff this year.  But it's still fun to get to watch more high-quality games.

Not many bowls outside of the playoff are compelling this year.  SMU vs. Arizona seems fun.  There's also Penn State vs. Clemson.  Michigan vs. Texas should be easy for Texas.  BYU vs. Georgia Tech should be easy for BYU.

Russia has lost ground in Kupiansk and other sectors, which is annoying.  The moment I think they've turned the corner, it's back to stalemate again.  There's no sense of urgency to win the war.  It's bizarre.  Nobody decided to relax and take it easy during World War II.

President Trump made a great speech about no longer wanting any immigrants from third world countries and looking for ways to deport the ones who have already come here.  That's what I've been saying all along, it's nice to be vindicated by the most powerful man in the world.  Likewise, he deplored that Europe's policies of mass immigration and low birthrates would lead to 'civilizational erasure' within 20 years.  That's a nice turn of phrase.  Of course I've been complaining about this too all along.  Blogger considers this hate speech and censors me for it, but they're not powerful enough to censor the President of the United States, so now they're in a bit of a pickle.  Why is it okay when he says it but not when I do?

China isn't paying attention to all this woke vs. populist hubbub in the West and is quietly building new thorium reactors, new fusion power reactors, vast seas of renewable energy, AI data centers and electric cars powered by all this cheap energy, hypersonic missiles that only cost $100,000 a pop and could thus be used to so saturate the battlefield that nothing can possibly stand against them in conventional war, and is basically moving into the 22nd century.  China needs to rescind its draconian 1-hour a day rule and let their people play fun video games, but other than that, they've basically shown the entire world how adults could get things done.  There are so many exciting inventions coming out of China these days that Hua Bin can spend his entire literary career documenting them, and it's always a pleasure to read.  To know that someone, somewhere, is still forwarding humanity.