The World’s Game | More TK #6

There’s a particular quality to North American football and its insane, inscrutable, sometimes-watchable, and occasionally very cringe tendencies. It is a named phenomenon, even a newsletter, that I am attributing to the GOAT of soccer coverage on this continent, @mattdoyle.bsky.social (subscribe to Tactics Free Zone btw).

It’s been a special kind of special, then, to watch the rest of the world succumb to the temptations of CONCACAF psychosis—Germany experiencing a genuine cupset against a nation twelve times smaller by population and 116 times smaller by GDP; Ecuador basically forgetting how to play soccer against tournament co-hosts Mexico and then suffering a stupid ninety-fifth minute red card on their way to the airport. Even the Netherlands-Morocco clash had shades of this egregious mental anguish—Morocco, temporarily downgraded from villain status after stealing AFCON 2025 from Senegal in an email; the Netherlands playing significantly worse than usual; both teams reaching the penalty shootout and turning into this meme:

How can you not love it? How can you not spend every day watching, listening, and drinking in this spectacle? Why would you want to do anything else?

The Watchlist

2026 FIFA World Cup

Like I said above, I have basically done nothing but watch soccer for the last two weeks. I’ve mostly stuck with the Peacock Telemundo stream, because Spanish commentary, plus I have no allegiance to Fox due to their continued employment of Alexi Lalas (among their many evils). I did appreciate Fox One’s baked-in multiview function during the final days of the group stage, which allowed me to basically Ludovico Technique the final few days of pre-knockout matches.

Perfect Blue (1998)

It’s hard to find a place to begin when discussing this film, if only because it covers so much ground in a pretty sparse runtime. David Ehrlich called it “a searing illustration of a future in which self-identity would become its own kind of public bloodsport” in a 2022 Indiewire listicle, and that’s effectively the most clear description of its priorities—it’s a film that, despite being released smack in the middle of Web 1.0, might as well have been about the kind of parasocial hangers-on and context-collapse obsessives that we get in our present TikTok era. Moreover, it’s so aware of the effects of derealization, especially among celebrities, especially among celebrities in this sort of nascent, trashy stage of their public lives, right when they’ve garnered a lot of attention, but before they’ve been insulated from a lot of day-to-day struggles by money and fame—one can very easily imagine the 2026 versions of of this movie being about, like, a Twitch streamer, or some other flavor of niche internet microcelebrity. What’s crazy is that Perfect Blue isn’t even Kon’s best film, and I’d even go so far as to say that it’s not his best film about these themes.

Supergirl (2026)

I think anyone who’s genuinely pressed about this movie should get their heads checked. Is that a little harsh? Maybe! But so are all of you about this perfectly fine movie! It’s not great, to be sure, but acting like it’s some grand crime against cinema is an overreach of the highest order, as is blaming the movie’s drop off on one misguided needle drop. Millie Alcock is really good!! I like the bits where David Corenswet pops back up! Jason Momoa is lost in another movie, but that’s probably because he’s playing fucking LOBO, who, according to sources close to the matter (my friend Nick who knows a lot more about comics than me) is an idiot joke character from before even the 90s explosion of grimdark edgelord failson characters. It’s the dictionary definition of a gentleman’s six, and it feels wild to ask it to be anything else.

Writing soundtrack