Things that happened this weekend

The Culmination of the Year of Anna Sawai

I've watched a lot of Japan-based tv this year - Shogun, Tokyo Vice, Monarch (part-time-Japan), Pachinko (Japan-adjacent). Three of those four shows include Anna Sawaii in the cast. Last night, she - along with the rest of the Shogun cast, crew and creators - won a whole bunch of hardware at the Emmys. I'm not a real subscriber to award shows, but man alive I think this is just so well deserved. Shogun is a fantastic show, and Anna Sawai (and Hiroyuki Sanada) getting a whole bunch of accolades means the universe is working correctly.

I watched more Japanese-language tv than Chinese this year. Or, let's say tv series that contain Japanese or Chinese. Warrior's last season and the Brothers Sun were solid entertaining shows, but neither touched the depth of characters that maybe any of the four aforementioned shows do.

Oh I guess I also watched American Born Chinese, which did have a couple huge swing episodes to its credit. (The whole party in heaven episode was wild, I loved it.) And, should we count 3 Body Problem as Chinese adjacent? Considering its source material, if anything it had a lot of Chinese taken out of it.

Anyway. Congratulations, Anna Sawai. I thoroughly enjoyed the year of you.

Niners vs Vikings

The Niners lost to the Vikings this weekend, which normally would make me very sad but has actually only made me slightly sad. For one, this team needs to toughen up, for real. And Brian Flores' defense hopefully did some of that.

Defensively, Fred Warner is playing pretty much on god mode. I mean, he saved the game multiple times for the team, at least giving them the opportunity to win it. Which they did not, but still. I'm biased and I've watched way more Niners football than any other team, but Fred is my DPOY candidate after week 2.

On offense, Trent Williams made a couple mistakes that we are just not accustomed to seeing. BA is almost nowhere to be seen. And obviously CMC hasn't even played a down. So, there's some catch-up work to be done. These guys need to build up to game shape still.

As sort of meh as the team performed, I think the game was lost over a series of three plays. The 4th and goal where Kyle inexplicably called that screen and almost got Van Ginkle'd, especially after seeing the Giants and Daniel Jones suffer that exact fate the week before - I mean, what the hell was that. Then the Vikings take over on downs and two plays later, our safeties are showing us that we need way way better cover safeties out there. They are both torched by JJ, not to mention one of the refs apparently. I didn't see specifically but I'm assuming it was Brown and Odum. My god I hope Sorensen makes some adjustments and/or Huff returns asap. Also, you don't know what you got till it's gone but Gipson, our best cover safety, is most definitely gone.

The Brock fumble, not good. The blocked punt, not good. The muffed punt, very bad. The special teams pox continues in its, what, 12th year? 20th? I don't even know anymore.

But there are glaring things that can and hopefully will be cleaned up. Otherwise, as noted Fred Warner has the defense in relatively good shape and the offense put up good yards, they just couldn't finish. End result: only slightly sad.