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Is it the sport she likes or the player? — Sorairo Utility — First Impressions

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This too is yuri:

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Minami, a first year high school girl has a very relatable problem: the gacha game she put all her time and money in is ending service. Now what’s she gonna do? Her friend Izumi suggests it’s a good thing, now she can actually do something you can only do in high school, like join a school club or do a part time job or find a boyfriend. That youth stuff, eh? Not something she seems overtly interested in (especially the last item, considering her reaction to that female golfer later on in the episode). But when Izumi suggest it might unlock a hidden talent, she gets fired up and starts trying every club in school, failing miserably with all. Once she broadens her quest to outside of school, she runs into an old man with back problems, who asks her to bring his golf bag to the nearby driving range where she sees the golf girl from the video and the rest is history…

Minami declaring she is going to look for her special extraordinary something while her friend looks on bemused

An enjoyable first episode which doesn’t spent too much time yet on explaining golf to the viewer. Minami with her desire to do something special and extraordinary but failure at achieving anything is extremely relatable. The way Minami is looking for something to be obsessed with and how she thinks golf might be it, is something I recognise. I like her friend Izumi too, a good foil for her enthusiasm, as well as Akane, the golf girl we see in the video, who ends up taking Minami under her wing.

The animation is fluid and good looking in the right places, with the actual golf playing receiving the most care; it’s also not afraid to get a bit ugly and off model when necessary, like when Minami goes into one of her rants. I already liked the original OVA when it came out in 2022, which was just three high school girls playing golf and hoped it would be a series someday. So far I’m glad I got my wish.

From Ecuador to Ya Boy Kongming

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Back in 1997, German electronica producers group Sash! released this banger:

Then in 2013, Hungarian DJ Jolly-Bulikirály would use its melody as the base for his party anthem Bulikirály, a song about how nice it is to party and dance and drink a lot.

Finally, in 2022 P. A. Works made an anime series, PariPi Kongming/Ya Boy Kongming about a mythical Chinese warlord who is reincarnated in modern Shibuya to become an EDM producer. For its opening it took the Japanese version of Bulikirály, Chiki Chiki Bam Bam and it slapped:

That’s how international anime is these days, that you can have the Japanese version of a Hungarian song the melody of which was created by a German DJ group as the opening for a series about a Chinese warlord becoming an EDM producer for a Japanese singer. Bonus: that time Jon Richardson made a terrible pun about Sash! and Ecuador on * out of 10 Cats.

How can you be anything if you can’t be yourself?

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If you have ten spare minutes, this extract from the 1977 queer documentary Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives featuring theatrical actress Pat Bond is well worth watching:

Pat Bond tells about how she joined the army during World War II because she was in love with a girl who wouldn’t fall in love with her, how widespread gay and lesbian soldiers actually were at the time, semi-tolerated when the army still needed them. She also talks about what happened when they weren’t needed anymore, the witch hunts that kicked everybody suspected of being queer out with a dishonourable discharge. She also tells about having to fit into a certain role even as a lesbian, that you had to be either butch or femme and how that was both a comfort (as long as you knew the rules you could act the part) and how she never felt herself fitting in her role. Slightly nostalgic as well for when being lesbian meant being part of an incrowd, different from the norm, something she felt had disappeared with the greater openness of the seventies. But she wouldn’t go back: “how can you be anything if you can’t be yourself”?

Prescient too in worrying that the new tolerance might not last. With the twin disasters of the AIDS epidemic and the Reagan presidency only few years away, it’s hard not to look at her worries as prophetic. The eighties really did saw a backlash against queer rights.

‘A Poxy Little Motoring show’

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The end of Top Gear / The Grand Tour after twentytwo years did hit me harder than I expected.

By far the most rightwing media I regularly enjoyed, knowning full well that Clarkson especially is a reactionary knobhead and despite having no interest whatsoever in cars, for years Top Gear was the highlight of Sunday night television viewing. It was one of the things that both Sandra and I liked, even if she had even less interest in motoring than I had. The Grand Tour was never quite the same but was good fun as well, though you could feel the end was near once they stopped doing regular shows. The specials were still good, but also without the leavings of the normal shows, a bit like eating only your pudding and not the meat.

Still, watching this last episode and especially the last scene it was a reminder of everything that made the Top Gear trio so great together. Despite everything I’ll miss it.