Klopp Says Goodbye to Liverpool

Well, not quite yet. But he's announced when he will, so we're talking about it now.

Jürgen Klopp's announcement that he'll be leaving Liverpool at the end of this season has been the big news in the (English) football world, and rightly so. He's been one of the most successful managers of the past decade, having won every major trophy with Liverpool except the Europa League, and has been consistently up there in the top spots with Pep Guardiola's Manchester City.

When he arrived at Liverpool in 2015, he was coming off a successful few years with Borussia Dortmund, in which he'd turned them into regular challengers for the Bundesliga title. He'd also previously managed Mainz, during which time he'd guided them to the top tier. When he arrived, he was the subject of many adoring profiles that talked about his innovative gegenpressing approach and his "heavy metal football", which came from the fact that this is apparently the type of music he listens to.

He did make an immediate impact, though, which justified all the love. He led Liverpool to the Europa League Final and the League Cup Final in his first season in charge, then the Champions League Final in 2018, and finally won the Champions League the following season. Liverpool took off like a thoroughbred in the 2019-20 season, winning the Premier League at the earliest point in the season, with seven games to spare (although, thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, this was also the latest league win in history, in June). 

At the moment, Klopp is Liverpool's fourth-most successful manager in history, in terms of trophies won. He has seven trophies, compared with 20 for Bob Paisley, 11 for Bill Shankley and 10 for Kenny Dalglish (9 in his first spell as Liverpool manager and 1 in his second). One of Shankley's trophies was the old Second Division, which Klopp never managed in, and Klopp also never won the second-tier European cup, but remains the only Liverpool manager so far to win the Club World Cup. Also in contrast to Paisley, Shankley and Dalglish, Klopp never won the league more than once.

He's also the fourth-longest serving manager, in terms of games played, with 467. By this metric, he lies behind Bill Shankly, with 766 between 1959 and 1974; Tom Watson, who managed for 742 matches between 1896 and 1915; and Bob Paisley, who was in charge for 535 matches between 1974 and 1983. Klopp also has the second-highest win percentage of any Liverpool manager, with 60.81%, lying only behind Kenny Dalglish's first stint, which yielded a win percentage of 60.91%. Even legends like Shankley and Paisley only got 51.98% and 57.57%, respectively.

All of these stats mean Klopp can genuinely be considered one of Liverpool's greatest managers. Indeed, he's unlucky to have been in charge at the same time as Pep Guardiola's stint in Manchester - Liverpool twice came second after Manchester City by a single point, including the 2018-19 season, in which Liverpool won the most points ever for a side that didn't finish as champions.

That said, for all the excitement around his time at the Kop, Klopp's Liverpool has sometimes seemed oddly fragile. One glaring example is the 2018 Champions League Final, which they lost to Real Madrid on the back of two insane goals by Gareth Bale (and some pretty dodgy goalkeeping by Loris Karius). And after their title-winning season, the perfectly oiled machine seemed to develop a stutter, as injuries to key players like defender Virgil van Dijk weakened them, as well as rumors of conflict between Mohammed Salah and Sadio Mane, who were at the time Liverpool's best players and leading scorers. In 2023, Liverpool came fifth, missing out on Champions League qualification.

This isn't to say he's bad - just that, for all that he created a genuinely great attacking team, it took a while for his side to gel, and once they won the Premier League and the Champions League, there wasn't really anywhere else for them to go. Again, contrast that with Manchester City, which has won the league every year since 2018 (apart from the year Liverpool won it); though it's also fair to say that this season City's looked a bit off the pace, too, possibly given that they won the league, FA Cup and Champions League last season.

As far as his successor, the talk at the moment is all about Xabi Alonso, whose Bayer Leverkusen is top of the Bundesliga and mounting the first proper challenge to Bayern Munich in over a decade. His qualification for the Liverpool job seems to be his status as a Liverpool legend, but as they said on the Football Weekly podcast today, he'd make a better case for his selection if he holds on to win the German league.

This is a delicate time for Liverpool, in which the wrong managerial selection could send them spinning into chaos for years. One good example is Manchester United, which still hasn't recovered from hiring David Moyes to succeed Sir Alex Ferguson, or more appropriately, from precipitously firing Moyes ten months into the season and then scrambling to recreate Ferguson's dynasty from day one.

Another good example is Liverpool itself, which took about 30 years to recover from Dalglish's resignation in February of 1991. While the team won trophies between Dalglish and Klopp, including most famously the Champions League in 2005, the league title eluded them until Klopp's side in 2019-20.

Looking at that list of managers between Dalglish and Klopp, there's no evidence of panicky decision-making by the boards, apart from that ill-considered stint for Roy Hodgson in 2010-11. But somewhere in the executive boardroom there was a dysfunction that didn't allow them to choose a manager to properly compete with Ferguson's Manchester United in the 1990s, or Jose Mourinho's (or rather Roman Abramovich's) Chelsea in the 2000s. The worry is that this transition from the Klopp era to whatever comes next could herald another set of wilderness years.

On the other hand, Klopp was selected by the owners wanted a manager borne out by the stats, not by his status as a club legend or as an up-and-coming young British manager. Their analysis team is very different from the one that hired Klopp in 2015, but one hopes that the owners keep those stats in mind, rather than chasing someone with a little buzz because he's a former player.

In any case, it's clear that Klopp is leaving Liverpool in better condition than when he found it. It'll be interesting to see who follows him, but it'll be equally interesting to see where Klopp ends up managing next. He's said he won't manage in England again, so that could mean Spain or Italy, in the best case. Worst case is that he goes to Saudi Arabia or even just Paris St-Germain, though you wonder how he'd square that with his politics, which have always been pleasingly leftwing.

Wherever he goes, I'll be looking out for Klopp in his next role. I've never been a Liverpool fan, but it's always been fun watching them while he was in charge. With luck he'll bring his heavy-metal ethos to another storied club and turn that into a magnet for trophies and great players as well.

Finally Back at the Gym

In the latest of my occasional series on "things I couldn't do during the pandemic", I'm ready to wax poetic about going back to the gym. This isn't actually that new for me, since I started going back in August, but it's now pretty much re-established in my life/routine. I'm broadly quite happy with it, though with a few caveats.

I wrote about it in my post from July 2020, in which I talked about a bunch of things that I missed doing. There are a couple still on the list, but those tend to involve flights to Britain, which I'm kinda ready to do but haven't accomplished yet. Of the ones that I had access to here in the Bay Area, going to the gym was pretty much the last hurdle.

This is for obvious reasons: it's a big, enclosed space with a large number of people gathering together and exhaling at one another. The gym was a disease incubator even before the damn pandemic, so it's not surprising that 24 Hour Fitness shut down completely for most of 2020, even to the point of not charging for the monthly membership. They did almost go out of business, and my local gym not only laid off my trainer, but also consolidated with the site nearby (which it had been planning to do already), so it's clear that this decision cost them something.

When they reopened in 2021, I wasn't quite ready to go back in person, even notwithstanding the fact that I was living with someone who wasn't vaccinated against Covid. I had some training sessions left over from before the start of the pandemic, so I burned those off by doing virtual sessions on FaceTime, and when I ran out of those, I suspended my membership.

The trouble with not going to the gym, however, is that there are parts of the year when it'd be really nice to be able to work out indoors. Cold isn't too much of an issue here in the Bay Area, but when we get a rainy winter, it's nice to run without worrying about slipping in puddles or soggy leaves.

The increasingly long and hot summers are more of an issue, especially if we were to have another year like 2020 when the late summer heatwave was paired with dangerously high levels of air pollution caused by wildfires in Northern California. The air quality in the years since then hasn't been as bad, at least not here, but that still left large stretches where the temperature and the humidity were high enough to make running outside a slog.

So last summer I ventured back in. As I said, my club moved to a smaller location, but one that was essentially next door, so my trip to the new gym is pretty much the same. During the summer I was even still parking in the same parking structure. I'll go back to that when it's light enough in the evenings to not get run over by idiots as I walk to and from the gym, but for the winter I'm parking a little closer.

I've focused mainly on the treadmill, and on keeping up my running mileage. I've always had more tolerance for running on treadmills, in part because I amuse myself by keeping an eye on things like speed, incline, distance and calories burned, but I've also started wearing my Beats Fit Pro earbuds when I run, so that I can listen to music or keep up with my never-ending backlog of podcasts.

As an aside, I've discovered that Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men is remarkably well-suited to running on a treadmill for 30-40 minutes. Go figure.

The other reason I focus on the section with the cardio machines is that I can pretty much always find a treadmill to run on, or failing that, an elliptical or even an exercise bike. The weight section is always too crowded, though, and so, while I try to do a machine chest press or lat pulldown, it's kind of rare that those machines are available. Which doesn't matter because I've picked up some adjustable weights and resistance bands, and can always rely on the good old bodyweight exercises to do my strength training.

I did, however, also sign up for a few sessions with a trainer. Mainly I wanted to pick up some functional mobility tips and have some accountability for my diet and exercise, but I don't know if I'll continue with it long-term. Still, it was a fixture of my pre-pandemic gym-going, so it's nice to be back to that as well.

As far as Covid precautions, I'll admit I'm relatively lax. I see a few people wearing masks on the treadmills, but I'm not one of them. As I said, it's a place where there's a lot of people breathing out, but the cardio section feels unpopulated enough that I don't feel as much anxiety about it. It also helps that I haven't encountered anybody that was hacking up a storm, the way I used to back before 2020, so that's set my mind at ease.

Plus, I'm up to date on my Covid boosters (for what that's worth, since they don't really stop you catching it, they just stop you dying from it), and I practice good masking etiquette and hygiene everywhere else. The fact that the weight section is always crowded is another blessing in disguise, Covid-wise, because that's probably the dirtier part of the gym. I always make sure to wipe down the machines I use and wash my hands after I've finished my session, which is hygiene theater to a point, but is probably helping to reduce the amount of crap I wipe into my eyes and nose and mouth.

Still, I have no illusions that it's a relatively risky thing to do, especially when cases surge in the winter. I'll look forward to going back to running outside again in a few weeks, although I'll probably have to keep going to the gym when it's too hot to run outside. I'll also revisit the concept if I do catch Covid from there, but again, I'm also heartened by the fact that the strains are less dangerous than they used to be.

Overall, this is probably the sign that, for me at least, the pandemic is over. I accept we haven't been in a state of emergency for a while, and I've modified my behavior accordingly since 2021. I've grown more comfortable with more and more things I used to do, and I'm also lucky to live in a place where the majority of people take it seriously, so vaccinations are common and so are masks. I'm still wearing masks at the grocery store and the doctor's office, and I'm keeping up with my boosters, so some behavior from 2020 persists.

Overall, though, 2020 and its attendant horrors grow ever more remote, and I'm happy about that. I never had much time for the "just gotta live my LIIIIIFFFEEE" crowd, especially when the Delta variant was raging, but it is good to be able to do stuff outside the house again.

And if there is another big pandemic, at least I won't have to worry about one thing: I'm keeping a pretty damn good stock of toilet paper in my special Covid-hoard.

RIP Franz Beckenbauer

The big news in football this week was the passing of legendary German sweeper Franz Beckenbauer, at the age of 78. Much was made of the fact that he was one of only three men to win the World Cup as both a player and a manager, as well as the fact that another of those men, Brazil's Mario Zagallo, also died this week. That leaves Didier Deschamps, who accomplished the feat with France, as the only man still living who's managed it, though the question is whether he can be the first World Cup-winning player to win it more than once as a manager...

Another point that came up in the various testimonials to Beckenbauer on the podcasts I listen to was that he's one of those players that you heard about, but didn't really ever get to see in action. Beckenbauer's heyday was Euro 1972 and the 1974 World Cup, both of which West Germany won under his tutelage, but there's little good YouTube footage of those tournaments, so it's hard to get a sense of how great he was.

This is a problem with all players before about 2006 - even someone like Matt LeTissier, who does have some good reels of famous goals from the 90s, is ill-served by poor-quality transfers to digital. Of course, YouTube highlights aren't always the best way to see players at the peak of their powers, but it seems a shame to lose documentary evidence of them, especially since all that seems to exist of the 1930s World Cups is the odd picture here and there.

On the more negative side, there was also a lot of talk on the podcasts about Beckenbauer's involvement in some of the shadier aspects of winning the 2006 World Cup for Germany. This is too bad on several fronts: on the one hand, it's unfortunate that part of his legacy is tarnished that way, and on the other, that tournament is considered the first great coming-out party for Germany as it is now, dynamic and open and friendly, and so it's equally a shame that an event that brought so much joy to so many people is tarnished that way.

But then, there was also the absurd side, as I learned on Football Weekly. He apparently chose a phone number consisting of all 6'es after appearing on an ad for O2, and this led to him getting a bunch of calls from men who thought they were calling a sex line. Of course, as the host of FW, Max Rushden, said, imagine calling a phone sex line only to find yourself talking to one of German football's greatest players?

I think the most interesting thing I learned, though, was how Beckenbauer seems to have embodied the new (West) Germany. He was born in 1945, amid the wreckage of the Second World War, and his fortunes followed those of his country, so that he came of age as it became one of the richest countries in Europe, and as Bayern Munich became one of Europe's elite too. He was considered a national hero, and despite the damage to his reputation from those FIFA issues mentioned above, it's sad to see him leave the stage.

Revisiting the X-Men Movie Universe

With a few days to kill at the end of the year, I decided to have another look at the X-Men movies, starting with the first one from 2000. I'd been thinking about it for a while, especially now that I'm reading an issue of X-Men per day on the Marvel app, but I'd kept putting it off, in part because a few of them were only available to rent and I wasn't sure I'd be able to finish them in the time before they expired.

When I did decide to do it, I figured on sticking with the main X-Men movies, so the first three from 2000-06, then the four reboot films starting with First Class, and ending with Logan. I briefly considered watching New Mutants, the Deadpool movies and the first two Wolverine movies, but decided that Logan was the only spin-off movie to watch because it acts as a sort of capstone to the entire mini-universe. 

That, and I couldn't bring myself to watch X-Men Origins: Wolverine again.

As I was watching, it also struck me that I haven't rewatched most of these films since I first saw them. Indeed, I know for sure I've watched the first one more than once (but I don't recall watching it since about 2001), and I think I watched Days of Future Past twice. I also watched The Wolverine a second time last year, which, while an okay film, didn't feel like something I wanted to revisit so soon.

I'd also never seen First Class in its entirety, apart from a stint on a plane, so there were large sections I didn't recall. I'd also only seen Apocalypse on a plane, but all I remember being censored from that was Psylocke's cleavage.

My main takeaway is that the movies benefited from some excellent casting, but weren't always particularly well-written. Some of it is the problem of introducing and managing too many characters, but it also comes down to an imperfect grasp of some of the source material. The movies that were strongest - First Class, Days of Future Past and Logan - all had strong relationships at their core, while the weakest seemed to be more an attempt to throw as many characters and images at the audience as possible.

X-Men (2000) is a good example. Rogue (Anna Paquin) is meant to be our gateway in as she gets initiated into the mansion, but Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) steals the show. As a result, the other three main X-Men - Cyclops (James Marsden), Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) and Storm (Halle Berry) - get very short shrift. Storm, in particular, disappears apart from delivering one of the worst lines in movie history. Even Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) get a little lost in the whole business, despite being dream casting for those two characters.

The movie also feels very dated. The other bad guys get very little time to establish themselves, apart from Mystique (Rebecca Romijn), about whom more anon. The camera work is very static, apart from one bit at the end that evokes the Matrix, so there isn't much jumping around, and the little that there is looks cheap.

On the other hand, it was a bit of a shot in the arm for the characters, especially in the comics. I'd stopped reading the books by then, but it was all recognizable to someone who knew the basic story and knew to look for Easter eggs like Kitty Pryde and Colossus. Around the time this movie came out, the X-Books were all rebooted to have the characters wearing black leather, so that they'd look like the movies. It also let Marvel streamline the stories a bit, rather than the bloat that had taken over when I started reading them in 1991.

The second movie, X2 (2003) was a little better than I remembered. I was one of those rare people who didn't particularly like it, but rewatching it more than 20 years later, it's hard to remember what I objected to back then. I think part of it was the seeming death of Jean Grey at the end, but what made me appreciate it more this time was reading about its source material, the graphic novel God Loves, Man Kills. On the negative side, many of the characters from the first movie (mostly Storm and Rogue) were sidelined even more, in favor of Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming), who I normally like but didn't quite land here.

X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) is generally held to be the worst of the trilogy, and it is, but I also didn't hate it as much as I remember hating it back in the day. A lot of it looks pretty dodgy, and it sidelines Rogue so much that she takes the mutant vaccine and gives up her powers. Elliott Page does a good turn as Kitty Pryde, and it was nice to see Leech onscreen, even if they didn't keep him green, like in the comics. But my favorite part of the movie comes early on, when a younger Xavier and Magneto go visit Jean's parents.

It's the first time we get to see Stewart and McKellen together onscreen as anything other than adversaries, and their dynamic is delightful. It's not hard to get a sense of them as a couple, in part because Magneto is delightfully catty. But apart from the homoerotic subtext, which is rife in Bryan Singer's X-Men, the idea that they once worked together is core to the conflict between them, so it was nice to see that firsthand.

After that misfire, they decided to reboot the films entirely and explore that relationship between Xavier and Magneto in First Class (2011). They recast them with James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender, respectively, and heavily played up the friendship/boyfriendship as the core of the movie. And it finally works!

It's super fun getting to see Xavier as a groovy scientist who uses his knowledge of genetics to chat up ladies, at the same time that Magneto's rampaging through ex-Nazis in his search for Kevin Bacon. Because the movie's all about getting the X-Men together, it also introduces us to the characters in more organic ways, like discovering that one of the scientists working at the CIA is actually a mutant himself, and the montage where McAvoy and Fassbender go looking together for the other mutants they've identified. The cameo where Wolverine tells them to go fuck themselves is also delightful.

That relationship remains at the heart of the next movie, Days of Future Past (2014), but here I should acknowledge that the third pole of the triangle is Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique. She does a good job of bouncing between their two philosophies in these two films, showing that she herself is looking for her own path in life. She also does a great job of making the character her own, while also paying tribute to Rebecca Romijn's portrayal, which was very far from the comics but worked brilliantly because of it. In fact, I think Mystique in the movies is one of my favorite things about this movie universe, because she's so striking.

The other thing that makes Days of Future Past work, for me, is that instead of building a whole new team in 1973 the filmmakers use it as a bridge to the previous trilogy, bringing Stewart and McKellen and Berry and Jackman, among others, back to reprise their roles. The bit in the future where a dying Magneto tells Xavier that he regrets spending so much time fighting is both touching and a good counterpoint to the relationship between their younger selves.

Apocalypse (2016) and Dark Phoenix (2019) are less successful, in my opinion, because they lose sight of this relationship between Xavier, Magneto and Mystique. Mystique is pretty established as a good guy by now, which takes away much of the tension around her character, and she doesn't have much to do by the time the Phoenix kills her in the final movie. Magneto has a bit of an arc in Apocalypse, as we see his new family in Poland killed by anti-mutant sentiment, but I think it would have been more interesting to see his philosophy contrasted with that of Apocalypse (a kind of mis-used Oscar Isaac).

One thing that I think these two movies do relatively well, though, is the relationship between Cyclops and Jean Grey, now recast with Tye Sheridan and Sophie Turner. Rewatching the original trilogy, it struck me that Marsden and Janssen had no real chemistry together, and there's nothing to show why they're together; Cyclops is just a bit of a dick because he sees that Wolverine has designs on his lady. In Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix, we get to see them bond over being the freaks at their respective schools, and the two actors have better chemistry together. It's just too bad that they ruin that chemistry by killing Jean off again.

And finally, there's Logan. It came out in 2017, so chronologically isn't the final X-Men movie, but it works as such because we finally lay to rest both Wolverine and Xavier (although a version of Xavier turns up again in the second Doctor Strange movie, and Wolverine's apparently coming back for the next Deadpool movie). Like the other good films on this list, it has strong relationships at its core: Xavier is a good father figure for Logan, who in turn works well as a reluctant father figure for Laura (Dafne Keen). It also helps that Keen is a good enough actress, even at 11, to hold her own with Stewart and Jackman.

The movie takes a lot of things about Wolverine and Xavier to their logical extremes, most notably the violence that Logan's claws inflict on just about everybody, and so it's pretty brutal to watch. But it's nice that it has lower stakes, and it's paced well, so that among the violent sequences you get some nice, quiet moments where the characters can experience joy together, after all these years.

Overall the X-Men movies suffered from some variable quality, to put it kindly, so it's not surprising that they aren't as big a deal as the MCU or the Spider-Man movies. However, on balance they do a nice job of showcasing Marvel's flagship team, and when they're at their best, they beat pretty much any MCU film for quality - unfortunately, as I say, not enough of them reach that level of quality.

Apparently Marvel is working out how to bring them into the MCU, which I'm kind of excited about but also makes me nervous. I've said before that I think they sit uncomfortably in the wider Marvel universe - partly because I don't want to know that all my other favorite heroes turn out to be anti-mutant bigots, but also that the X-Men mythos are large enough that you don't really need to have them mingle with the Avengers and such. It's also hard to see how they fit into the wider crossovers, since the X-Men work best when you can do the soap opera and emphasize the differences between Xavier and Magneto.

That said, I'm curious what an MCU version of the X-Men will look like. At the very least, if they get a feature film or two, maybe we can mine some other good stories from the characters. Here's hoping it won't be too long.

2023 in Review: Separating the Macro from the Micro

Coming into the final weekend of 2023, it seems like a good time to look back on the whole year and what I got up to. There were highs and lows in my own life, while the wider world just seemed to get more chaotic and unpleasant. The trick, as ever, is separating those two facets from each other and recognizing when things have gone well for me.

Taking each of my personal categories one by one, I can say that writing was a mixed bag but probably a little negative overall. I spent a lot of time revising some short stories and a novel, but didn't write anything new or send (almost anything) out for submission. With regard to the novel revisions, I do think that I made some good progress and I should be set up for making some agent submissions in the new year. Also, I hope that having something out on submission makes it easier for me to move ahead to the next project to write - I just wish I could get the balance of writing, revising and submitting stories right.

On the dating front, 2022 was positive just from the perspective of getting out there again, but 2023 was much better, and indeed has to rank higher than any year of my dating life other than 2019, when I met my ex (2020 and 2021 don't count, because I was in a relationship and because the pandemic kept us at home). The process, at least in the first half - or three quarters - of the year, was as enervating and soul-crushing as usual, especially when one date unmatched me on Hinge the same afternoon that we met. But I wasn't exactly surprised at that, or even particularly sad. On the other hand, I had some very good dates later in the year and moved out of my comfort zone, so that has to rank as a positive.

With regard to health and fitness, another mixed bag. I seem to have gained all the weight that I didn't gain during the pandemic, which was negative. I also seem to have plateaued with what I could achieve in my workouts at home - possibly because I've gotten jaded/lazy, or maybe I just got too habituated to the workouts I was doing. I have, however, started going back to the gym, and may start working with a personal trainer again in the new year.

On the money front, things went on as normal. I think I've generally eaten through the pandemic bonus that came from not paying for the gym, the cleaners or traveling, but the point of money is to use it for things that are important, not to hoard it. Also, no matter what I spent on, I still managed to put away decent amounts into my various retirement accounts, so at least that's going well. As always, I'm hoping to build on that in 2024.

For the category that I variously call "life" or "other", I think I did a good job of getting out of the house. I had a good trip to Italy in February, experiencing skiing in the Alps and enjoying life in Turin outside of the summer/fall months when I usually go. I also spent a nice time with my mom in Rome, and then had a fun couple of days to myself in Munich, making for my first trip without family since Stockholm in 2019. I also managed to get out to a good number of cultural events, both online and in person. Regrettably, I didn't do much decluttering, so once again I have to defer that goal to the coming year.

Work had its ups and downs, as always. I started to learn a new topic, and found ways to marry it to the subjects I know more about, so hopefully that synthesis will help in coming years. I think that's all I want to say about that subject.

Overall, then, my own year was probably decent, if not great. I didn't make as much progress as I'd have liked in some of the more important areas, but I am happy about coming further out of my pandemic-related torpor. I wouldn't say it exactly held me back in 2022, but nevertheless it's been important to start living a little more normally again, although I've continued wearing a mask in many indoor and crowded places, and I've kept up with my Covid boosters.

Looking at the world more widely, it's hard to be as optimistic. Politics has just gotten more chaotic and unpleasant worldwide, but especially in the four countries that are my heart's home: the US, the UK, Italy and Germany. The far right is a problem in each, though to varying degrees, but it's surely not overstating things to say that if the US votes in Trump again in 2024, the world as a whole is going to get less safe.

One positive is that the Dobbs decision from last year, which ended the federal right to abortions and devolved it to the states, seems to have galvanized the progressive side of the electorate. However, that doesn't really let the Democratic establishment off the hook for 50 years of ignoring the right's increasing attacks on the right to abortion, culminating in Dobbs; it's also an open question as to whether Democratic voters will continue to mobilize around that topic, or if too many are being turned off by the situation in Israel and Gaza.

I've long argued that there wasn't a single cause for Trump winning the 2016 election, but the most fundamental was that Democrats just couldn't be bothered to turn up, whether for the primaries or the general. 2020 was a different beast, because we'd seen what a Trump presidency entailed (including bungling the pandemic response), and turnout in the primaries was up again. The danger here is that Democrats once again are too jaded to go out and vote when we get to November - whether because they think President Biden is too old, too establishment or they're unhappy with his handling of Israel and Gaza. But because there's no Democratic primary this time, we won't know that before the fall.

Culturally, the biggest story was Twitter. It struck me the other day that Elon Musk has managed to worm his way into everyone's heads the same way Trump did when he was "president" - it's become impossible not to think about him at least once a day (if you'd managed to avoid it until now, sorry). I've had to institute a rule with myself not to click on every story relating one of his outrages, but I've found it harder to keep from clicking on every story about what's going wrong at Twitter. It's also top of mind for me now, because I was forced to update the app recently and it became clear how insulated I'd been from its suckiness as "X". Leaving aside bugs and whatever, it's just no longer enjoyable to surf Twitter - which doesn't stop me from doomscrolling a few times a week.

I could go on, but it boils down this: you know we're fucked when the only sane-looking social media platform is Facebook.

At the macro level, 2024 is probably going to be at least as grim as... well, every year since 2016, really. But this is going to be the year when the criminal cases against Trump (hopefully) really get going, which is going to galvanize the worst of his supporters (btw, I'm not saying he shouldn't stand trial, but I'm acknowledging that this state of affairs is somewhere short of great). The election itself will also be bad: if he wins, that's bad enough, but if he loses, then his supporters are going to go crazy again and we'll have years, probably decades, of these jerks insisting that the election was stolen.

This will also be against the backdrop of increasing global temperatures and wilder weather, plus the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza. There's also going to be some other damn-fool thing happening somewhere, which will destabilize the world even more. It could be the UK's general election, but I expect it'll be the collapse of the ruling coalition in Germany and potentially greater inroads for the far right there.  It's clear that far right parties are going to keep coming closer in election after election in Europe, and eventually one is going to attract enough of a majority to actually form a government, unlike in Poland and the Netherlands so far. It'll also be interesting to see what happens in Russia, China, India and Brazil.

I don't mean to get too pessimistic, but it's clear that people aren't going to get sensible overnight. The wave of rightwing populism sweeping the world is caused in large part by anger against the self-satisfaction and complacency of the elites on both right and left, and those elites haven't measurably changed how they do things since 2016. Until they do, Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen, Georgia Meloni, Javier Milei, Narendra Modi, and above all Trump, aren't going anywhere.

What I Watched and Read and Listened to in 2023

It's Christmas, so the year is basically in the can. I'm going to do a more comprehensive post later on how my year went, but here I wanted to consider books and movies and TV and all kinds of other art I experienced this year. Because the pandemic is influencing my decisions less and less (though I still take certain precautions), it meant I could also start experiencing movies in theaters again, as I wrote in an earlier blog this summer.

I also indulged my geeky/obsessive side more this year by keeping a spreadsheet not only of books I read, which I do every year, but also one each for movies and TV shows. I've always been curious about how much TV I watched, and because I was still quite locked down in 2022 I was watching more movies than usual, so I wanted to see just how much I was watching, and where I was watching them.

The short answer is that HBO Max, and subsequently Max, was where I watched the overwhelming majority of my movies in 2023, and I suspect it's also where I watched most movies in 2022. This is partly skewed by all the DC-related movies I watched, which accounted for almost half of everything I watched on that streamer. But Max also remains one of the best places to see older movies, including from before the 1960s, as well as generally decent films from the past decade or so. At the start of the year I was getting it from a friend, but when he decided to cancel his subscription it was a no-brainer for me to set up my own subscription (and I shared my credential with him, since that seemed only fair).

Overall I watched a decent number of 2023 movies, including some finally back in theaters. Realistically I could have gone back earlier, but it always felt like a hassle to pay $20 to watch a movie with a mask on and having to share a bathroom. Still, it was nice to see something when it came out, rather than waiting months for it to come to Max or Peacock.

Some favorites that I saw this year were Barbie, Oppenheimer, Asteroid City and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, with special honorable mentions for Maestro, Super Mario Bros and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. There's not much to say about Barbenheimer that hasn't already been said, apart from marveling at this cultural moment where the two biggest films of the year were a feminist deconstruction of a children's toy, scheduled against a dense, dour biopic of a mid-century physicist. Without pretending either is high-brow, it's heartening to see that people still enjoy smart movies.

Asteroid City is probably the movie that haunted me the most in 2023. I'll have to do a blog about Wes Anderson at some point, but this movie showed how he's much more than just the meticulously designed camera tableaux that everybody imitated for their generative AI pastiches of his work. I'm not entirely sure I understood it all, and I had to watch a couple of YouTube discussions to get a better sense of it, but it certainly worked as a meditation on the pandemic and its dislocations. It doesn't rank as highly for me in his oeuvre as Grand Budapest Hotel, Rushmore or Royal Tenenbaums, but it's a worthy addition.

Super Mario Bros and D&D were both surprisingly better than I'd expected. To put it another way, I had higher hopes for D&D, which it met, and lower hopes for Mario, which it exceeded. Chris Pratt remains my least favorite Hollywood Chris (and coincidentally, Pine is probably my favorite), but Mario was entertaining enough and made enough cute references to impress me that I was finally seeing a beloved character onscreen. Maestro, meanwhile, was anchored by Bradley Cooper's great performance and also his clear love of both cinematic language and Bernstein's music.

TV was more of a mixed bag, especially the shows that came out this year. First off, there wasn't a single streaming service that dominated like in my movie watching. Disney Plus probably accounted for more TV shows than any other streamer, but it was fairly close. I don't buy into the doom and gloom surrounding the MCU at the moment, but it was notable that Secret Invasion was a pretty spectacular misfire. On the Star Wars side, season 3 of the Mandalorian and season 1 of Ahsoka were okay but never scaled the heights of last year's Andor.

Some favorites were the latest seasons of Picard, Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks, which all traded in varying degrees on heavy nostalgia and in-universe references. Picard was so good that it almost made me mad, considering how inessential it made the previous two seasons, but it was good to see the old gang back together. SNW and Lower Decks, meanwhile, just went from strength to strength, with SNW in particular showcasing a range of genres that you really never get in Trek.

Succession's final season was pretty compelling too. For me the high point (SPOILERS!) was the episode where Logan died, and it was fascinating seeing how that event shone new light on certain characters. For instance, when Kerry showed up at the memorial and was kicked out by Marcia, it was oddly illuminating that Roman was the one who comforted Kerry and treated her kindly. The finale was a bit of a letdown for me, though.

I've also talked about how much I loved Slow Horses, and that's inspired me to start reading the full book series. But some MVPs that held my attention this year were Fargo and the Expanse. I started watching Fargo via Netflix's DVD.com, RIP, and just adored the first two seasons in particular. Season 3 had some high points but wasn't quite as successful, though still better than a lot of other stuff. I have yet to watch the fourth season, as that wasn't available on DVD.com, but I'm hoping to catch that and season 5 in the near future.

Meanwhile, the Expanse got better with each season. I originally watched the first two seasons on Netflix, pre-pandemic, back when SyFy was airing it; they were faithful recreations of the books, but the interest was more in seeing characters and plot lines foreshadowed or appearing earlier than in the books; it suffered a little from the same syndrome as the first season of Game of Thrones, where the world was well-realized but thinly populated. However, the show really came to life in season 4, when they went to Ilus, and I'm now midway through season 5. I'm preemptively a little sad about season 6, because it's a short one and it's clear they won't be able to fully tackle the Laconian invasion from the last few books.

Another honorable mention was the Last of Us. I had the great pleasure of watching the show at the same time that I was playing the game, so that an hour or two per week let me keep up with the show. I also thought the show was paced brilliantly, giving us digressions like Bill and Frank or Ellie's backstory at the exact right times. It also did a great job of conveying the same emotions in certain scenes as in the game, like when Ellie sees the wild giraffes toward the end. I've never played Part II, but I'll be interested to see how the second season of the show goes.

Speaking of games, Last of Us dominated the early part of my game-playing in 2023, but when I finished that I started up another one that I hadn't touched since I got it, Dragon Age: Inquisition. It's been fun to play that and to look at all the resources on the web that have sprung up over the ten years since it came out. It's a very complex game, though, and sometimes I'm in more of a mood for something easy, that I can boot up and start without worrying about updates and cutscenes.

Super Mario Wonder, on the Switch, filled that niche for me. The learning curve is simple if you've ever played a Mario game before, but it also does a nice job of adding new elements. Whereas The Last of Us or Dragon Age are sprawling games with lots of areas to explore, it's easy to get through a lot of Super Mario Wonder's levels quickly and soon you find yourself ready to beat the game. I'm hoping to finish Inquisition this coming year and also Wonder, and to take on more of my immense backlog of Switch games.

In terms of books, I didn't read a lot of recent stuff, but I did enjoy Annalee Newitz's The Terraformers - even if it's not quite as mind bending as Autonomous was, their books are always reliably entertaining. I also bade farewell to Genevieve Colman's Invisible Library series, which came to a satisfying end, and in the new year I'll be starting on her next book, Scarlet, featuring vampires during the French Revolution. Wes Chu's War Arts Saga also made its way onto my Kindle app, and I'm looking forward to continuing that one as well.

Special mention also goes to Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club. I ran out of books to read while in Munich, so I found it at an English-language bookshop near the university, and tore through it (luckily I finished it after I got home). I'd been hearing about it for a while, because I follow Osman's agent on Twitter, so I got to see for myself how enjoyable it is. It's an odd, but pleasing, counterpoint to Mick Herron's Slow Horses books, and I'm finishing the rest of the series soon. Just a shame Osman didn't start his series back in 2010, like Herron did, because I'd love to have a big backlog to catch up with.

In terms of listening, I continued my British bands project, and quite enjoyed Erasure's back catalog. In new stuff, I discovered Olivia Rodrigo because I go to the gym again, and Get Him Back! is a fun companion song to Kelly Clarkson's Since U Been Gone.

And finishing up with comics, I already mentioned my new subscription to Marvel Unlimited in my last post. It was prompted by my discovery of Comics Conspiracy in Sunnyvale, and my subsequent spending of crap tons of money on old Excalibur, X-Factor and Vertigo collections. I'm still in the early phases of the Uncanny X-Men, but as the year goes on I hope to branch out into more recent books, though for this year I'm probably not going to focus on Spider-Man or the Avengers yet. 

For 2024, I haven't decided if I'm going to keep tracking movies and TV shows, or if I'll add music, podcasts or video games to my spreadsheet, but overall, I've been taking in a lot of stories and stuff for the past two years. In the coming year, I want to spend less time consuming art and more time making it - but I'll have more to say in my final summing-up post.

Thoughts on Marvel Unlimited

Despite my high-minded protestations that I don't really "do" Black Friday or Cyber Monday, this year I snagged some "deals" on the types of things that I usually buy compulsively. One was a set of fancy underwear that usually gets recommended by Wirecutter, another was a set of fancy notebooks from Field Notes (also inspired by some research on Wirecutter, and now among the 113 fancy notebooks I own, but so it goes).

The final one, which wasn't strictly a Cyber Monday deal because they seem to offer it to everyone who signs up for the first time, was a $19 discount off a year's subscription to Marvel Unlimited, Marvel Comics' digital comics archive. I've gone on a bit of a buying spree this year, having discovered a comic shop in Sunnyvale, but I'd been meaning to check out digital comics for a while. I could have chosen DC Universe Infinite, but I've been buying and reading more Marvel comics lately, so I decided to check out Unlimited instead... or rather, first, since I'll probably try out the DC one at some point soon.

As I said, I've been interested in digital comics for a while, especially since a coworker at a previous job told me about Marvel's subscription service. One of the things he mentioned was being able to go straight to crossover issues, which struck me as a good feature.

Alas, I haven't discovered that feature in Marvel Unlimited. It may be available only in the web version, or it may be available only in DC's app, or I may even have misunderstood what he was saying. On the other hand, when I have gone looking for a specific issue because it crossed over with something else I was reading, it's been quite easy to find. That's important because the archive on Marvel Unlimited is over 30,000 issues, most stretching back to the early 1960s but in the case of Captain America Comics, going all the way back to 1941.

So in this post I'm going to talk about my experience with the app so far. Overall, it's totally worth it, even if you pay the full $69 for a yearly subscription, but there are a few snags that are worth highlighting.

Starting with the positives, the first one is that huge archive. Assuming there are exactly 30,000 comics available (it's actually somewhere over 31,000, but bear with me), you'd have to read about 83 issues per day over 365 days to get through the full archive. That may or may not be feasible because, assuming 10-15 minutes to read each issue, it'd probably take between 13 and 21 hours per day to maintain that pace. For early issues written by Stan Lee or Roy Thomas (or indeed later issues written by Chris Claremont) you might need more minutes per book, because they're somewhat verbose.

Take that thought experiment for what it's worth, but the point is that there's almost everything you could think of if you're a Marvel Zombie. There are some gaps here and there, but as far as I can tell, none are particularly important, unless you're a fan of Alpha Flight or want to catch up on non-Marvel properties like Rom the Spaceknight or GI Joe (which was actually a pretty decent comic). The MAX line, for "mature readers", is also missing, but those books never really fulfilled their promise to compete with DC's Vertigo, so it's not the biggest loss. Big-name characters like the X-Men are pretty well-represented, as I found when I counted out the entire run of Uncanny X-Men from 1963 to 2011.

There are gaps in secondary series even in that family of books, like issues 51-54 and 55-59 of the original run of X-Factor, or a bunch of later issues of the original run of Excalibur. From what I understand, those gaps are because those issues have never been collected anywhere, but Marvel is constantly adding new issues to the archive. Most are actual new issues, as it adds books 3 months after physical publication, but some are also older, such as those Excalibur back-issues I mentioned.

The comics themselves look pretty good, at least on my iPad. My reading so far has focused on stuff from the early 60s (Uncanny X-Men) and from the mid- to late 80s (X-Factor, Excalibur and various books that cross over with them). The scans are smooth and high-quality, so you don't get that dot effect in the old issues from 1963; in a couple of Thor issues from 1988 or so, the colors seem to have been remastered via computer, so they look a lot fuller than they probably would have on newsstands at the time. The X-Factor issues that tie into those Thor books don't seem to have had the same remastering, but they still look pretty great.

In terms of quality they remind me of the Epic Collections I started buying in recent months, although for the X-Factor and Excalibur collections, the bulk of the coloring remasters seems to have been saved for the covers, which do look amazing. When I compare prices, I'll be comparing to these versions, instead of the hardcover Masterworks collections or the black-and-white Essentials.

As far as value for money, I was looking up the costs of physical collections of these same books, and I think I've already more than broken even. Volume 1 of the Epic Collection of Uncanny X-Men, which includes issues 1-23, costs $50, so it's taken me less than a month of reading one issue per day to just about break even on Uncanny alone. However, in that time I've also read the equivalent of Volume 2 of the X-Factor Epic Collection, which probably costs between $35 and $50... or it would if it were available anywhere, which it isn't.

If I manage to read all the books I've saved to my library in this coming year, I'll probably save the equivalent of around $1,000 in trade paperback collections. This is on top of the fact that not all collections are in print all at the same time, as mentioned - there may be gaps in some series, but the archive is still more complete than what Marvel makes available in print.

There are some negatives, though. The first is more a problem with Marvel's way of doing things, namely the way they restart series multiple times to get more "collector's item" first issues out there. There seem to be a lot of Daredevil series, for instance, so it can require the Wikipedia page to determine which series to read in which order.

The app is a little buggy, and comics don't always load when I tap on them, so that I either have to wait a long time or quit the app and open it again. One time an issue got stuck transitioning between two pages, so I had to quit out again. However, it's never lost my place in a given issue or series, so that's already a plus.

As I mentioned, I read the comics on my iPad. I prefer to read them in full page mode, with the screen depicting a single page of a print issue, but you can also set a book to "Smart Panel" mode, which shows one main panel at a time and includes transitions. Smart Panel is not a bad way to read a book, because it makes the images larger and guides you through them without your eyes skipping forward or back as you read, but it's tough to get out of the mode when you choose it. Full page mode is the default setting on the iPad, but Smart Panel is the default on the web version, and I never figured out how to transition to full page mode.

Speaking of the web version, it doesn't synch with my iPad, so (unless I'm missing something) I can't pick up my library on other devices. The search function is also a lot worse on the web than on iPad - on the app, I can search for a specific issue and it'll come up, but on the web there's a lot more wading through long lists of issues. This is a big problem when looking through a series like Fantastic Four, which ran to hundreds of issues.

These problems with the web version don't affect me as long as I have my iPad and an internet connection, but I feel like there's more tinkering I should do on the web. At the very least, though, it's disappointing that logging in with one credential on my laptop or tablet doesn't show me my library.

Overall, though, it's been a good investment and a fun way to delve deep into the X-Men archives. If I stick with one issue of Uncanny per day, I'll only get to about #365, so sometime in the 90s, and it won't give me time to catch up with the other characters I want to follow, like Spider-Man, Daredevil, the Avengers or the Fantastic Four, unless I keep my subscription for the next ten years or so. But as I said, sticking with the X-Men family of books and the stuff I've saved to my library, I'll save hundreds of dollars compared with buying at the store.

Of course, that's only saving me money on Marvel books. DC has a longer history of packaging storylines for collections, and has recently been collecting entire runs in one or two volumes, so unless I also get a DC subscription, that comics budget is likely to go to Volume 2 of the Dennis O'Neil/Denys Cowan Question series, among others.

Still, I like having the majority of the Marvel Universe at my fingertips, and I'm enjoying reading these old comics in a format that makes the art and lettering look great, even for older books. If you're at all a fan of Marvel's big-name characters, you should definitely get this subscription. Even at the full price of $10 per month, it's an amazing value.