A Female Student Arrives at the Imperial College is a Chinese drama-romance set in ancient times and running 30 45-minute episodes. Sang Qi (Zhao Lu Si, who I've seen in many series and I like her performances), a noble's daughter, is the first female student ever at the Imperial College and has to deal with the usual bullying for violating social norms. Two people on her side are childhood friend Zhuo Wen Yuan (Ren Hao), who is also the top student, and vice principal Yan Yun Zhi (Xu Kai Cheng), who promised Sang Qi's brother he'd help her though he does so secretly and in bullying way.

The romance is between these three. Once Sang Qi starts to realize Yan Yun Zhi is actually helping her she starts to develop an affection for him. Similarly Yan Yun Zhi interacting with Sang Qi all the time leads him to fall for her (which leads to one theme for the OPFOR -- if the people attracted to the two leads split them apart and then force them to be around them through enforced marriage love will develop because of constant close proximity). Meanwhile Zhuo Wen Yuan has always secretly loved Sang Qi so he starts competing with Yan Yun Zhi and it's kind of obvious why but Sang Qi is quite oblivious to Zhuo Wen Yuan's feelings for her.

Besides the romance the main drama is a smuggling ring that Yan Yun Zhi, helping the investigating authorities, is trying to crack. But every time he gets close the villains get away or something else happens and half of it is because Zhuo Wen Yuan's family secretly runs the smuggling ring (or they're the senior partner to the public-facing rebels who do the all the dirty work). Zhuo Wen Yuan is sort of heir presumptive so doesn't lead the ring but as the series goes on he takes more and more control bringing him into conflict with mom because he's getting distracted trying to win Sang Qi's love.

I really liked the beginning of the series which is more based in the college and college life (half way through they graduate and become junior officials). Here it shows off Sang Qi as a tough intelligent woman who cleverly avoids bullying attempt and eventually wins over at least some of the student body. Meanwhile she's also sparring with Yan Yun Zhi and although probably comes off a bit worse she holds her own. I think that kind of goes away in the second half of the series and Sang Qi is much more often a victim that needs to be rescued and I kind of disliked that part.

Also with thirty episodes and only one villain group it's always "you defeated a minor boss but there's a bigger boss next up the chain" and there's an inordinate amount of "I'm the only witness so what I say is true" even if there was another witness but he's dead now so what he said doesn't count. The last few episodes I was just waiting for it to be over.

Overall I don't regret watching this series as it's quite good at times but not consistently good to bring it above average.

The Rise of Major League Soccer: Building a Global Giant by scholars Rick Burton and Norm O'Reilly is really a book about why business people should invest in MLS either directly, partnerships, or ad support.

The authors sort of cover the history of MLS from the 1994 FIFA World Cup which was held in the USA, through the founding of the MLS in 1996, through almost folding in 2010 or so, to its partnership with Apple, Lionel Messi, and the coming World Cup in 2026.

Chapters

1. Conquering the World: The Rise of MLS
2. Soccer is Big Business: So is MLS
3. Don Garber: Growth-Oriented Leadership
4. How MLS Altered the Failure Trend in North America
5. How the 1994 FIFA World Cup Shaped MLS
6. MLS and David Beckham: Why an Englishman's Arrival Tipped the Scales
7. MLS in Miami: How Lionel Messi made Inter Miami a Global Brand
8. MLS Expansion: The When, Where, and Why of MLS Growth
9. COPA 2024, FIFA Club World Cup 2025, FIFA World Cup 2026, and the LA 2028 Summer Olympics: What They Will Mean to MLS
10. MLS: The Diversity Advantage
11. How Toronto Became an MLS Stronghold
12. Ted Lasso, Ryan Reynolds, and EA Sports F: How Celebrities and Video Games Continue Lifting MLS
13. Tech Cities, Tech Teams, Tech Stadiums: How Technology is Reshaping MLS's Relevance
14. Predicting MLS's Future

As you can see from the chapter titles this is not very chronological and is mostly about why MLS is still a growth sport that is now the 5th major sport in the USA and may possibly catch up and be top 4 or even top 3.

The chapters are short and all include one or two Expert opinions or anecdotes that run several pages. I think I read the whole thing in about six hours over three days so it was interesting enough to kind of keep at it.

Still this is not a book for fans so I wouldn't recommend it.

Vivy: Flourite Eye's Song (2021) [/] Science fiction AI robot anime story with 13 half-hour episodes. Vivy (voiced in English by Cristina Vee) is the first independent AI robot -- there are other robots and humanity depends on many many robots but they are all simpler AIs controlled by a central computer whereas Vivy can think for herself.

All she wants to do is sing and make people happy. But she meets Matsumoto (Max Mittelman), a robot from 100 years in the future when all the robots rose up and wiped out humanity. Matsumoto is tasked with stopping that and he needs Vivy's help as she's the only robot that survived 100 years. Although reluctant Vivy decides to help on and off over the next hundred years because saving humanity means she can sing to people and make them happy.

Good animation and the jumps forward in time are interesting at first since Matsumoto can tell Vivy how history is changing. Also Vivy meets more and more advanced robots who don't seem quite as human as her. Not sure I really like the ending or at least how the crisis is finally resolved.

Puzzles & Dragons Story (2023) [/] Apple Arcade. Sort of a linear story fantasy RPG. Collect characters and level them up. Each room is like three combats. Each fight is your team vs multiple monsters using a match-3 mechanism to attack and trigger your powers. Not that interesting a game without exploring, interacting with NPCs, and solving puzzles or doing quests.

Sonic Dream Team (2023) [-]. Apple Arcade. 3d adventure game where you control Sonic the Hedgehog and his friends. The levels are Sonic-like in that some parts are speed and reflexes but other parts are more platform exploration with Sonic mechanics. I found it unplayable though maybe with a controller. Good graphics though.

Napoleon Journal #17 (2000) [/] This is a special issue of the quarterly full-color magazine and is meant to introduce new people to the Age of Napoleon. A history of the age from before the fall of the Bourbons to Napoleon's second abdication with asides about science, culture, food, fashion, etc. A look at the major powers and a brief look at all of Napoleon's battles (just broken down into how many fought on each side and what their casualties were). The level of detail is less than I'd like and for the most part it glosses over battles. If it were a book I wouldn't keep it in my library and as a magazine less so but it's a good attempt for a small circulation magazine and it does have a lot of photos and illustrations... Oh actually this is the last issue of the magazine before it went under. You can order a DVD of all back issues on their web site.

Unveil: Jadewind is a Chinese historical drama running 34 45-minute episodes. Set in ancient China this is kind of like a procedural crime drama (mostly murders). Fuchang County Princess Li Pei Yi (Bai Lu) is one of the top investigators in the Palace Investigative Bureau. She is beautiful, an excellent warrior, and rather reckless as the first case shows when she uses a heart stopping pill to feign death and winds up buried alive (luckily a shallow grave and she cleverly manages to send up a signal for the rest of her team).

Early on she has to enlist the aid of the Astronomical Bureau who send deputy director Xiao Huai Jin (Wang Xing Yue) who manages to stay the rest of the series because so many clues have astronomical origins, either directly -- like knowing where the moon was at the time of a murder -- or indirectly -- like knowing that mirrors can focus dim moonlight to bright enough that it looks like a lantern.

A certain sort of romance develops between the two. But also secrets. Li Pei Yi's family was murdered fifteen years ago (the official reason is dad went mad and killed everyone then himself) and she's been looking for the real culprits since. Turns out Xiao Huai Jin knew her when she was a kid and helped her survive that night but she doesn't remember and he does. As Li Pei Yi gets closer to her family's true killers (it does seem to be layer upon layer to get to the head boss) she also starts to figure out she and Xiao Huai Jin's common past.

But although there is a romance subplot this is mostly a stylish crime solving in ancient China show with a good number of cases, each going two or three episodes and often one case leads to the next. Sets and costuming are nice and the fight sequences are well done. The crimes are quite ingenious at times and it's a good thing Li Pei Yi is great at smelling out herbs and poisons and examining bodies, whereas Xiao Huai Jin is great at looking at a scene and seeing what's out of place.

Good series and very entertaining.

NBA 2K24 Arcade Edition is I guess maybe a slightly cut-down version of NBA 2K24 for mobile devices. This is a pro basketball game based on the NBA with real player names and likenesses.

Game Modes

• Play Now - for an instant game
• My Career - create a player then go from the playgrounds to the big leagues
• The Greatest - play one of the great players or form one of the great teams
• The Association - play a full season where you can manage game strategy and trade players

Normal game play on an iPad is not easy even with UI on easy. I'm not sure I'd be good with a controller in any case. As usual you control the player with the ball and when you pass you control that player. On defense you control the closest defender and I guess you can switch to other players.

I just played The Association and played games with Simulcast which means it's an automated game and you have an overhead X's and O's view so you see these circles moving around (each circle has the player's last name, face and position) and the ball being passed and shot. More importantly perhaps you have crowd sounds and sportscaster comments (they use real sportscaster personalities and there is a lot of varied audio commentary and a lot is stitched together but you don't really notice that). It is like listening to an NBA on the radio while looking at a real-time X's and O's display.

With The Association you can play all the games, or Simulcast, or even just get the result of each game and concentrate on coaching and player personnel.

This is a fun distraction game even though mostly not my type of game.

War Machine (2026) [/] A group of Ranger-candidates on their final test (a week long mission in the wilderness) encounter an alien mecha that starts hunting them down. With no live ammo it's mostly running away and trying to stay ahead of the two-legged mech. Alan Ritchson plays the grizzled Army sergeant with a bad knee who's on his third try to join the Rangers. He's a loner but was given command of the candidates and the stress of the mission finally brings out the leader in him. The movie ends with a patriotic Starship Troopers style "let's go fight the alien invasion" which I guess sets up follow-on movies because it turns out thousands of mechs landed all over the Earth. The action is pretty good and the mech is fairly cool and quite scary in a couple of scenes when it's right there with the candidates (I guess it's a couple of stories tall).

Delicious - Miracle of Life+ (2023) [/] Sort of a Diner Dash restaurant sim plus a family story. You play mom Emily who runs a big kitchen that serves customers over-the-counter, on two dining tables, and one cooking lessons table. Customers come in and give you their orders and you tap on stuff to assemble the order, tap to deliver the order, tap to take their money, tap to clean a table. Some dishes require cooking so you tap on the stove to cook and refill up to six items. Some things require a timing thing where a meter goes back and forth and you tap to stop the meter on the green area. There is some strategy is timing such as making a counter customer wait to pay a bit so you can get two payments in a row. I've played a few levels and nothing really new in terms of gameplay.

But there is a story. Emily and her husband Patrick want to make a baby which they were having trouble with but then she becomes pregnant and so we go through that story. The game starts with a three or four minute prelude and there are often one to two minute intermissions to tell more story with the characters moving around and saying dialog (better than a wall of text). I like that the characters make comical expressions in the intermissions which gives them life.

It's a cute story well told to go along with proven gameplay.

The normal version is $15 in-app to unlock the full game. There is also a GameHouse subscription if you love their games, though it is a lot more expensive than Apple Arcade.

Disney Dreamlight Valley (2023) [-] Apple Arcade version -- the game is available on other platforms. You are sucked into a fairly land plagued by Night Thorns that rob memories. Merlin is there for the tutorial and to activate your powers that allow you to destroy Night Thorns. Do quests and free the various Disney characters... On my iPad Air M3 the game is a bit laggy and you don't any settings to reduce graphics. More annoying -- although you can customize your looks you can't customize your name so it keeps using my full name (that it got from Apple Game Center I guess). Both those things don't make it a game I want to keep playing.

La Petite Camille, Millbrae - Beef Stew with Rice Com Bo Kho [-] Got this from delivery. Soup container + small white rice container. You kind of need a bowl to mix it in. Tastes fine though a bit plain; a little light on the stew flavors. I remember the pho place near my Union City house had good beef stew pho. Would not get again if I remember... I see previously I loved the garlic noodles and with the catfish fillet it's quite good. Hopefully I remember next time.

Dear Hongrang is a South Korean drama-romance running 11 hour-long episodes.

Jae-yi (Jo Bo-ah - Tail of the Nine Tailed, 2020; Military Prosecutor Doberman, 2022; Destined With You, 2023) is the "cursed" daughter of a prominent merchant clan. Her brother Hong-rang disappeared when they were both kids and after 15 years there have been many impostors but no Hong-rang. Until one day Hong-rang (Lee Jae-wook - Alchemy of Souls, 2022/2023) appears and seems to fit all the physical marks but claims amnesia and Jae-yi instinctively knows it's not Hong-rang.

Jae-yi's adopted brother Mu-jin (Jung Ga-ram) agrees though on the other hand it's in Mu-jin's best interest that Hong-rang be fake as he would then become the heir presumptive over Mu-jin. As the three do battle socially there's also a bigger battle between Merchant head Shim Yeol-guk (Park Byung-eun), who favors Mu-jin, and his wife Min Yeon-ui (Uhm Ji-won), who favors her returned son Hong-rang and whose family owns the merchant house (Yeol-guk married into the family so even though he's the head of house he's not head of the clan).

Besides Shim Yeol-guk and Min Yeon-ui there are two other factions (with warriors and there are a lot of fights and dying in this series). Hong-rang has a secret patron with ninja-like warriors and they're set on taking over the Min Merchant house. Prince Han Pyeong (Kim Jae-wook - Her Private Life, 2019; male lead's older brother in Melo Movie, 2025) is a bit mad and obsessed with painting and has the royal army and is nominally allied with Shim Yeol-guk.

With four factions it does get confusing as to who is fighting who in a particular fight scene especially when it starts out as two factions and then a third joins in. The romance that occurs is very hurried to the point it's not as believable as usual (I guess with 11 episodes something had to be shortened). The ending is kind of a rough bloodbath and nobody wins.

Jo Bo-ah is pretty and good. The costumes are sets are good. Fight scenes are fine. Wasn't crazy about the complicated plot made worse because it's telling a story in 2/3rds the usual episodes. So overall this is not a series I recommend.

Battleground Ukraine covers the history of Ukraine from its independence in 1991 to about the end of 2023 after the war with Russia has been going on for almost two years. Author Adrian Karatnycky has been working for political think tanks and NGOs and mostly covering Ukraine since independence with lots of traveling and talking to political leaders from all sides.

Each chapter covers one presidency from Leonid Kravchuk who led the country before there was a real constitution to current president Volodymyr Zelensky who gets two chapters, one before the war and one since the war. The overall picture is a country that was divided between Ukrainian and Russian supporters with the two ethnic groups being mostly separate in the west and east of the country. Early government was full of corruption and privatization of state industries led to a powerful oligarchy who controlled large parts of the legislature by supporting their candidates. Some presidents tried to reform government and the economy with mixed success.

But all the presidents were pretty much part of the system either in the old Soviet hierarchy or new oligarchs who kind of liked government the way it was. Volodymyr Zelensky is different since he was a political comedian with a television show and large following who got elected to president by being appealing in social media and promising change. Although his presidency started fairly rocky because he didn't really have a plan and did things by feel and he found out rapid change is hard even if you get a large number of inexperienced legislatives elected on your party platform. But war changed that and he rallied the country and with something immediate and specific to focus on he's become an effective president.

Similarly Russia's actions helped unite Ukraine. First by taking Crimea and then the invasion a decade later. Part of it is absorbing Russophobe territories they increased the percentage of Ukrainianists but also showing their aggression they put the fear into the rest of the Russophobes so now the citizens have solidified into a Ukrainian people. Whether Ukraine is ultimately successful in reclaiming its lost territories or not depends a lot on Western aid and that is the ongoing story the book ends on.

I found this to be an interesting book as I knew very little about Ukraine beforehand. It's interesting how conflicting forces each corrupt have kind of cancelled out to end up with a more democratic Ukraine than you'd think. And this without Western help as we have a "you reform first then we'll help your burning country" which makes it really hard for a democracy to form.

Tehran s3 (2025) [+] Mossad agent Tamar (Niv Sultan) is stuck in Tehran and is now being hunted by both her Mossad superiors to the Iran secret police. Her only assets are Faraz (Shaun Toub), head of the secret police department hunter her but she can blackmail him, and her ability to win friends, even deep cover Mossad agent The Owl (Sasson Gabai) tasked with eliminating her. This season she has a reprieve because UN nuclear inspector Eric Peterson (Hugh Laurie) is arrested by the Iranians and Tamar discovers the Iranians have smuggled all the components to build a nuclear bomb... As usual this remains a high drama series with perhaps one too many plot twists (one of the bad guys turns out to be another undercover agent).

Hey Sensei, Don't You Know? (2019) [/] Japanese light romantic comedy based on manga. Six half-hour episodes. Mousy manga artist Hana Aoi (Fumika Baba) meets handsome hairstylist Riichi Kido (Eiji Akaso) who turns her into a beauty and then starts dating her because he likes her work ethic and personality. While her manga improves now that she has a real relationship to base it on (this is her first relationship) she has lots of insecurities about being a good girlfriend worthy of Riichi especially since popular actress Nanase Hoshino (Honoka Yahagi) is also after Riichi... I guess this is an ok series but it's very light and short and somewhat uninteresting at time but I suppose I'm not the target audience.

Hello Kitty Island Adventure (2023) [/] Kids-level exploration/interaction game. You're on a resort island with Hello Kitty and her friends. Wander around doing tasks, making friends, crafting stuff. It's described as a cozy adventure so I guess it's on easy mode. The graphics are nice and the character dialogs are fairly distinct though I didn't recognize anyone other than Hello Kitty itself. A bit too simple for me but it looks quite playable.

Bonchon, San Mateo [/] Christopher got a bunch of takeout and we ate it maybe an hour later. Wings of four flavors. Seasoned french fries. Wasn't really distinctive -- like what'd get from a buffalo wings place. They also have Korean Fried Chicken so maybe that's better.

Project Hail Mary is a science fiction film based on Andy Weir's novel (Weir also wrote The Martian).

The movie timeline pretty much starts today or very soon but it does start in media res about 5+ years later. A man wakes up with no memory in an enclosed man-made environment that turns out to be a spaceship with two other astronauts (who are both dead having died on the five year journey under induced coma).

Eventually he remembers he's Dr Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) and in flashbacks throughout the movie we learn the background plot and how he got there: The Sun is being eaten by some space amoebas (Astrophage -- sun eaters) which will cause catastrophic temperature drop on Earth in about three decades. Turns out all nearby stars are also going through this phenomena except for one, Tau Ceti, 11+ light years away. So Earth's government built a space ship (powered by astrophage which doesn't break the laws of physics but is orders of magnitude more efficient than any other Earth fuel source -- it's neat that the astrophage is jetted out the front which hits a parabolic shield that pushes the ship forward which I guess works because the astrophage is constantly accelerating, without expelling anything, once it starts so pushing out at the start is much less force than when it hits the shield).

Now Dr Grace has arrived at Tau Ceti and he finds another ship there, which then proceeds to make first contact with him (with some neat communication methods). He meets Rocky (eventually voiced via Rocky-language-to-speech synthesizer by James Ortiz), a sort of small rock-like being who is also the only survivor of his 24-being crew, here to save his world from the astrophage. Together they have to work together to figure out how the astrophage in Tau Ceti isn't eating the star...

Kind of like The Martian this is an engineering heavy film (science too I guess but there so much about building and gadgeteer-ing that it's more engineering). Unlike The Martian now we have two very different beings finding a way to both communicate and work together and become friends. I did end up with a few questions about what was going on but I guess the book would explain that better and the film is already 2-1/2 hours (it did have a somewhat Lord of the Rings endless ending that you could have cut off 30 minutes and just did a little voice-over "and then we each went home and saved out peoples").

It's a good film with lots of action parts, lots of cool science and engineering, and cute buddy comedy vibe.