There is a very good footballer named Anwar El Ghazi who had his contract flat-out terminated by Mainz because he said that Israel should stop carpet bombing children. Lazio might be able to pick this "canceled" guy up on a free transfer as a result.

Remember: Mainz is a German club-- that country is up there with luminaries such as England and New Zealand in the "most dystopian" category. I guess you can't have an opinion and a job at the same time in Germany. In any event, one club's loss is another club's treasure.

In other Lazio-related news, there were reports that Sergej drove all the way to the airport in Saudi Arabia, hugged his former teammates, and talked to both Lotito and Sarri: "Get me out of here, I want to come back!" Now today I'm reading that the reports were sensationalized.


Cool Car

Lots of interesting stuff from this article. It brings to mind how far backwards cars have gone in terms of gas mileage: the model discussed in the article got fifty miles per gallon on the highway. Not only that, but it was a manual transmission, didn't have any annoying computerized nonsense, cost only three grand-- twelve grand in today's Monopoly money-- and it looked awesome too!

Even the commercial embedded in the article is hilarious: why can't they make advertising like that anymore? I guess the blue-haired mob on The Twatter would say the guy suffers from the Toxico Masculinitos or some such nonsense. Blackrock would pull the advertising agency's funding, Wells Fargo would debank them, and Creepy Joe would call them "white supremacists" at his next press conference, as written right there on the notecard handed to him by his staffer.

It's also worth noting that the article mentions the average cost of a new home in the USSA: over four hundred grand. "Average" anything can be misleading because it's including one hundred square foot million dollar WEF crates in New York City or California-nia-- but even in my rural area practically in the middle of nowhere, the houses are pretty much all over three hundred grand.


Upcoming Games

My son and I each re-subscribed to Game Pass on PC for one month to "rent" Palworld so we could try it out. I made a quick video showing off how your Pokemon Pals automatically help out around your base. Minecraft aside I'm not generally a big fan of these janky "survival" games-- it's not really "my genre", frankly-- but I'm having a lot of fun with this one. The "technology"-oriented progression system is well paced.

I'm not sure what kinds of legs this game will have though: right now it's basically one hundred percent banking on the aforementioned progression system-- it's not like a voxel title such as Minecraft, where you have digital Legos and can build anything: the construction and exploration aspects of Palworld don't seem particularly interesting.

All of that said, this game is the equivalent of Minecraft in alpha, way back in 2009, when that title had like four block types. I can't even imagine what Palworld will be like in a year, two years, three years, and so forth. I did some quick napkin math: at twenty seven dollars per pop, five million sales, thirty percent cut to Gabe, forty percent to the extortion racket called the "government", that still leaves them with a cool fifty seven million bucks to pour into the game's further development.

Setting aside Palworld, I have "Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth" coming in the mail for PlayStation 5 on Friday. I'm also still trying to wrap up "Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising" on Steam Deck. And I bought a really awesome custom hint guide for the original "Phantasy Star" along with the apparently amazing Switch port of that title -- I am going to play through that game for the first time ever.

Shifting away from Western triple-A games and towards double-A titles-- particularly those made in Japan-- has given me renewed interest in the hobby.