I watched South Korea pull off a dramatic comeback win against Portugal and qualify for the round of 16. It was certainly fun to see, but realistically, Portugal had already subbed out Ronaldo and other starters because they didn't need to play hard this game -- they'd already qualified for the next round.
The same for how Cameroon upset Brazil, Brazil wasn't trying and had already qualified for the next round. Tunisia also upset France in this manner -- France wasn't trying at this point in the tourney.
What matters is what nations qualified for the next round. There were 12 white nations (Brazil is white, at least as far as their soccer team goes), 1 Arab nation (Morocco, which is at least as white as Brazil), 2 East Asian nations (yay Asians!), and dead last, 1 African nation (Senegal, which benefited from being in the same weak group as Qatar).
Lots of white nations field blacks on their teams, France most of all, but those blacks benefited from the white culture that surrounded them and are performing well above what blacks can do on their own -- as shown by the dismal result of actual black nations that tried competing this year (and every year in the World Cup, it's always the same old story.)
Even East Asians are better athletes than black Africans. The myth of black physical superiority is nowhere to be seen in the two most prestigious international sports competitions -- the World Cup and the Olympics. Obviously blacks are the best sprinters and marathon runners on Earth, but aside from those very niche fields of activities they come up short. When you start combining lots of different skills and abilities in order to win at something, blacks fall off the radar. Soccer is too complicated a sport, too cerebral, for blacks to compete. It requires more than just running.
There is truth in sport. These results are objective. No one can complain about discrimination or racism or whatever. Whatever small amount of bias a referee has in the sport of soccer has been eliminated by video replay of all contentious calls. There is no room for excuses, if you lost, it's because you suck at the game. When whites are allowed to compete evenly with blacks, Hispanics, Arabs and Asians, these are the results -- 12 slots for us, 2 for Asians, 1 for Arabs, 1 for blacks, 0 for Hispanics.
Whatever happens in the rest of the World Cup these numbers don't lie. We, white people, overwhelmingly have the best combination of brains and brawn, 75% of the world's best teams. And Asians are the second best group -- exactly what you'd expect. A world with only whites and East Asians would retain everything good about humanity both intellectually and physically, it would be a paradise. Nothing of value would be lost.
Meanwhile, yet another blu-ray release of the Kiniro Mosaic movie has come out, this time with legible English subtitles. Finally, something decent to use as an archival resource. Basically I can now watch the movie for the first time, even though it will be my third time, because for the first time I'll know what they're really saying.
I'm about halfway through the new Spice & Wolf volume, it's been decent so far. About what you'd expect from a Spice & Wolf book, which makes up for its mediocre quality by outputting so very many volumes. (There's more Spice & Wolf than Bakemonogatari, despite only being about 4 characters. . .)
I'm most of the way through my 3-star instrumental playlist, correcting scads of songs to vocal once I've heard sufficient evidence of a vocalist involved somewhere in the foreground or the background. By the time I'm done making corrections I expect there will be about the same balance of instrumentals to vocals as the previous two tiers. The 3-star music is very impressive, it feels good enough that you could mistake it for the 5-star tier if you didn't know any better. But I guess this is to be expected, since 3-stars still means the 40-60% best music out of all music worth listening to over 100 times. With such a tough selection criteria to begin with, even though this is the 'average' tier, it's actually quite elite.
I'm only a couple episodes away per series from completing my anime rewatch project, but this project can't truly be completed until Japan stops releasing new episodes of great anime, which I hope is still far from now, so it's kind of a hollow achievement even if I do reach it. Sousou no Frieren is coming out in 2023, so I can't even say that I've at least rewatched a full rankable season of every great franchise of anime until then. A 20th season of Pretty Cure has also been announced, hopefully better than Delicious has been.
After that there's still Hoshizora no Memoria, Tactics Ogre Reborn and Star Ocean 6 to play. Not to mention Crisis Core is coming out soon. >.<. And college football is about to begin its 'championship week' with USC vs. Utah hours from now. If this isn't enough entertainment check your heart rate because it might have fully stopped already.
I keep seeing new articles about how Ukraine is about to run out of arms or ammunition or people or money or electricity or whatever, but lines on a map don't lie, and the lines on the map have shown Russia retreating for the last six months or so, not Ukraine. I'd like to see the lines on the map change before I start celebrating. I want Russia to change the lines on the map and prove it's the military superpower it says it is and ought to be, considering how it performed in World War II. The only good thing about this war is that Ukraine's unwillingness to negotiate is forcing Russia to pursue a maximalist military agenda, which Russia seems otherwise unwilling to do. In a sense Zelensky is forcing Putin to do the right thing, what Putin should have done 8 years ago, which is to retake all pro-Russian territories in Ukraine and rejoin them to Mother Russia again, as they always should have been. Before the war began he was asking Ukraine to respect the Minsk accords. When this war started he was still bargaining for some independent mini-states called Donetsk and Luhansk, which obviously wouldn't be strong or wealthy enough to protect themselves from Ukraine in the future. Now we're talking about Russia stretching all the way to the Dnipro river. The longer Ukraine fights the worse the deal will become, so I hope Ukraine keeps fighting all the way to its extinction.
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