🇺🇸 Week Notes 079
🗓️ // Jun 28, 2026 - Jul 4, 2026
Pretty laid back week leading into the holiday break. Lots of soccer in the background with the World Cup continuing into the round of 32 and all the wild Spurs transfer spending news.
⚽️ I've been spending a lot of time at soccer practices lately between S's recent tryouts and the academy style training L's coaches have been doing with the Kraken boys and girls teams. I actually ended up taking part in the latter last night playing keeper in some drills and a little bit of midfielder in a scrimmage at the end. Watching S's practices was particularly enjoyable because of the various new to me drills they did and the caliber of players they had in the group.
⚽️ USA 2-0 Bosnia - Herzegovina was an excellent performance from the USMNT and a disappoincting one for the officials. Florian Balogun getting red-carded for a bang bang play where he unintentionally put his studs on the back of players leg/ankle after they came together should have been a yellow, but on VAR it looks a million times worse. The problem is that these foul calls don't get applied with any consistency. Messi had a very similar play earlier in the tournament and no card was given.
🤖 Anthropic made their Fable model available once again after performing whatever hoops they were required to in order to comply with the questionable order to deny access to most users. Sonata 5 also came out this week, In my experience the Sonata models have always been perfectly capable of meeting my needs, although I'm intrigued to plan out something with Fable before they switch everything to normal price. I know one guy with tokens to burn completely recreated Minecraft in Swift as an open source project.
Playing
🧙♂ Did a few more Marvel drafts this week and a couple of Marvel Jump-In events. It's a very fun set, although I'm bummed out by how short the window is before the Hobbit comes out.
🎮 Played a little bit of Starbound multiplayers with my daughters and will probably play more in the future. I've watched them play in passing here and there, but I'm definitely pretty clueless when it comes to acquiring weapons and successfully navigating these 2d worlds to find loot and do cool stuff.
Watching
📺 Star City S1E5 Dark Forest 👍👍 I'm running a couple of episodes behind on this series but loving it in general and this is a banger episode with some crazy twists as Irina closes in on the mole and then sews the seeds of his escape in crazy fashion. Definitely savoring all the episodes from here on out.
📺 Witch Watch S1 👍👍 I continue to get a lot of enjoyment out of this show, and I like savoring it and watching one or two episodes every few days. Episode 10, The Trope-tacular Student Council really took things to a completely new level of self-aware humor that I found hilarious.
📺 The Ramparts of Ice S1 👍👍 Impressively realistic look at the inner lives and relationships of a group of high school friends. Really enjoy the friendship dynamics within the main four characters as well as the supporting cast, and the complexities of friendships developing into romantic relationships. Intrigued to see how the cliffhanger ending is resolved in the second season.
Reading
📚 Signed up for the Manga Plus app Standard $2 monthly membershiip so I read all of the current series like Blue Box this week. Will probably start Dan Da Dan and Witch Watch next, although I'm definitely open to random stuff that intrigues me like Someone Hertz.
📚 Blue Box 👍👍 After catching up to the end of the anime completely binged through the whole story to get to the latest chapter early this week. Very satisfying story with some late twists that surprised me. I do really love that success and triumph in this series is not at all about winning it all in your respective sport. I'm also way more interested in Chinatsu's post-graduation path than Taiki's now; I think that could be a manga series in its own right.
📚 Someone Hertz 👍👍 Almost caught up to the present chapter now as well. This is such a cute and fun series. It makes me want to broaden my understanding of Japanese language and culture just so I can get the jokes a little better.
Listening
🎶 I've been getting a lot of enjoyment out of a Spotify playlist with all of the Japanese songs mentioned by the comedy radio show in Someone Herts. There are a few songs with a bit of English, but generally they're just catchy indie pop rock tunes that make for good upbeat background music to whatever I'm doing.
🎶 Realized that the Blue Box anime soundtrack is also quite enjoyable to listen to while I'm working or reading the manga. I'm very intrigued to explore more Japanese and amime adjacent music in the future.