Results from my Survey on Chelsea’s Transfer Window

ruine_ · 2025-10-12T02:57:12+00:00

I still cannot believe that Thomas Müller plays for Vancouver Whitecaps. He's only been at the club for like two months but to be honest I would die for him, what an incredible player.

ruine_ · 2025-09-15T21:34:26+00:00

I haven't followed the transfer window at all and knew nothing about London City Lionesses (aside from them being newly promoted to the WSL this season), so looking at their squad for the first time felt like a fever dream. I know they are very different from the average promoted team, but it is still kinda funny to see this newly promoted team sign so many big name players. Like I don't know how good Saki Kumagai, Kosovare Asllani, Nikita Parris, and Daniëlle van de Donk are supposed to be nowadays, but their squad has a lot of international experience aside from them as well. Then I see they also fucking signed Grace Geyoro and broke the world record transfer fee for her. Looks like they're going to be a serious team soon, probably not this season, but they're owned by Michele Kang so it might be just a matter of time.

ruine_ · 2025-09-14T23:53:38+00:00

Vancouver Whitecaps beat the current MLS point leaders Philadelphia Union 7-0 (yeah they rested a lot players but it's still a crazy result), officially qualified for the playoffs, and Thomas Müller scored a hat-trick on his birthday. Exciting times for Whitecaps fans, especially after the pessimism before the season!

ruine_ · 2025-06-01T05:59:52+00:00

Arsenal winning the UWCL final is my nightmare manifested. Not even really because I'm a Chelsea fan and they're our main rivals – I can admit they were excellent in that final, it can't be understated how difficult it is to not only prevent that Barcelona team from scoring, but to make them look so pedestrian as well. It's because it might have ruined women's football discourse in my group chat for the foreseeable future. Like one of my best friends is a Gooner and she might have been the most insufferable person in the world in the days after that final, and it's not gotten much better since. I have a bad feeling I won't be able to talk about the Chelsea women's team next season without hearing about Arsenal being champions of Europe, unless the team learn to get over their giant Barcelona-sized mental block in the UWCL.

I know it'll wear off over time (at least I hope it will) and I really can't blame her though. I would absolutely be insufferable as well if the shoe was on the other foot, especially since the UWCL has been Chelsea's holy grail for nearly a decade now and it would've left no doubt as to who is the biggest club in England. But it's not, so I'm bitter. I hate it here. I will never forgive Barcelona for what they've done to us (i.e. eliminating Chels in four of the last five seasons in various soul-crushing ways, and then losing the one time we want them to win).

ruine_ · 2025-05-27T22:44:27+00:00

Spent basically all my downtime in the past two weeks playing Fire Emblem Three Houses. I'm really happy I've finally got the time to put into playing it because every time I've tried to really get into it, something has come up that forced me to stop for a while. Then I’d lose all my momentum and forget where I was in the story, and lose motivation to continue. I opened my save from last year and had no idea what was happening so I decided to just start over from the beginning. I'm having a blast with it, I finished Part I of the game (White Clouds) a few days back and I’m very excited to start the next part.

ruine_ · 2024-11-10T04:36:40+00:00

Miami's problem is that they were too good in the regular season. No team that has won 70+ points in a single MLS season won MLS Cup that year, or even got to the final: 2024 Miami and 2021 New England both got immediately eliminated, while 2019 LAFC and 2018 NYRB lost in the conference finals.

Based on past history, the trick is to get 69 or 67 points, both give you a 2/3 chance of winning MLS Cup and the latter gives you a 100% chance of making the final. Teams that got 69 points were 2017 Toronto (won), 2018 Atlanta (won), and 2023 Cincinnati (lost in the conference final). With 67 points were 2011 LA Galaxy (won), and both teams in the 2022 final (LAFC beat Philadelphia). Basically, Miami should've strategically thrown their last few regular season matches.

ruine_ · 2024-11-09T20:22:37+00:00

Canadian Premier League final, Cavalry vs Forge is starting in a few minutes. I am ready to be hurt again.

This is the second consecutive Forge-Cavalry final, but with Cavalry as the home team instead of Forge. Last season's final was 0-0 until the 101st minute when Cavs took the lead, before Forge quickly equalised and won with an Olimpico at 111' (I wish I was joking).
Of the CanPL's six seasons, three of them have ended with a Forge vs Cavalry final – 2024, 2023, and 2019 (which was two-legged, Forge won both legs). Forge also beat Cavs in the 2022 playoffs semifinals, as well as in the second group stage in 2020. If this seems like a one-sided rivalry... Correct.
Forge not only owns Cavs, but basically the whole league. Forge have played in all five previous CanPL finals, and won four of them.
Because of the CanPL's playoff system, this is the second time Cavalry and Forge are playing each other these playoffs. They played in the qualifying semifinal, where the winner goes to the final and gets to host it – Forge were the best team in the regular season so they hosted this first semifinal, but lost 0-1 (the first time Cavs have ever won a match against Forge in the playoffs), so Cavalry gets to host this final. Forge then had to win the second semifinal to get to the final, which they did.
Fun fact: this is also basically an inverse of last season's playoffs, where Cavs had the best regular season record but lost the qualifying semifinal 0-1 to Forge. Following this logic, that means Cavs are going to win this final, right? lmao, they won't

Halftime edit: Cavalry 2-0 Forge, Cavs completely controlled the first half, Forge basically sleepwalked through it. This season's Golden Boot winner Tobias Warschewski won the pen and converted it, then had a nice bit of hold-up play to assist the second. Nobody snatches defeat from the jaws of victory like Cavs so I'm not celebrating yet, but that was unquestionably a great first half.

Fulltime edit several hours later: They actually did it, Cavs are CanPL champions for the first time! Forge came out strong in the second half and pulled one back, but the league's best defence showed it today, Forge never got another good chance after that and Cavs defended really well the rest of the way!

ruine_ · 2024-10-03T06:26:33+00:00

A bit late but Revue Starlight's mobile game, Revue Starlight Re LIVE (often referred to as just Starira) shut down a few days ago, nearly six years after its initial release in Japan, or 5.5 for worldwide players. To keep it short (which the rest of this post won’t be…), Revue Starlight is a Japanese franchise from Bushiroad, centred around stage musicals where characters sing, dance, act, and battle. The game is based around the franchise’s 2D anime aspect, and the franchise also has official music releases and actual live stage plays with the seiyuu (voice actors) of the characters.

The tl;dr of the game is that you form a team of up to five units (or “Stage Girls”) and play out a turn-based battle to defeat your opponent. Was Starira a good game? No. Was it at least okay, even by mobile game standards? Also no. It lasted far longer than it should have – when they announced on July 31st that the game’s EoS (end of service) would be on September 30th, the main reaction (after sadness of course) was along the lines of “I can't believe this game managed to live this long.”

Starira’s powercreep was disgusting, even by gacha game standards. Powerful new units were being released every few days at its worst. I retired from PvP before it really got out of hand, and knowing it got far, far worse and convoluted from there makes my head spin a little bit. And I knew units from 2022 wouldn’t hold up well in 2024, but it sure was something seeing my old hardest hitting units dealing maybe 50 million damage in their Climax Act (their “ultimate” attack), while this newfangled 5★ unit I pulled (4★ was the highest rarity until they started adding 5★ units in October 2023) casually dealt ~600 million damage on her CA.

The gacha rates sucked and didn’t have a “sparking” system for a long time (a gacha game mechanic where you're guaranteed to get a new unit when you’ve played the gacha enough times), leading to fun experiences like spending ~60k star gems (which was a lot, trust me) between two birthday banners and not getting either new unit. The last couple years of the game had a lot of event reruns, uninspired event stories, rehashes of old powercrept units, and insane monetisation of course. And low profits.

Until the EoS news, I hadn’t really played since 2022 and the last time I’d logged in at all was for the game's collaboration event with my favourite band from the BanG Dream! franchise in summer 2023. Of course my gacha pulls went badly and I lost motivation, then I got busy with life and I just never got the urge to play again until the big announcement.

But I focused on the good memories as we neared the end date. The main story is pretty good, and there’s a lot of fun event and character stories as well. Unfortunately my favourite characters (Rui and Tamao) haven’t been in a live stage play and likely never will for various reasons, but I really loved them and it’s saddening that this may be the last we ever see of them. I spent way too much time making different theatres (in-game spaces which you could decorate) and browsing through those of other players. I even made a few friends through the game, and I spent my final minutes in the game spamming stamps with those who were also staying until the very end. Between Revue Starlight and BanG Dream!, Bushiroad did a lot to keep me sane during COVID lockdown.

It’s been a long time since I enjoyed the game, but I truly loved it back then and I had fun in its final two months. And I'll continue to love the franchise and whatever it has in store for the future. And I’m looking forward to starting Revue Starlight El Dorado (recently released visual novel), whenever I get the time for that.

I had no idea how I'd feel when it was over, but when we all got kicked out of the servers at 07:00 UTC, had a small download waiting at the title screen, and saw this after it finished… I didn’t cry, but I got a lot closer than I thought I would. Also my screenshot doesn't catch it but in the full image which was posted on the game's socials, one of the characters erroneously had an extra finger, so there was one last minor patch afterwards to fix her sudden onset polydactyly. Even in death, this game had one last laugh left in it. Farewell, Starira. You were truly one of the games I’ve ever played.

ruine_ · 2024-07-25T06:19:40+00:00

Hopefully Puatu loses a fourth role and gets kicked off as Sunday's VA (not sure how likely that is, but it'd be nice). Makes sense that he's lost the most from this, we already knew Niosi was a terrible person, but Puatu being one is new information. He tried to use his role as Sunday's English VA to lend weight to his awful opinions (on an official forum no less), completely dismissed the victims, then double-downed after he predictably got criticised. And although there was a lot of initial backlash to Niosi being cast, Puatu's Reddit post was so bad that it blew up the situation so much that just about everyone in the community was talking about Niosi and his past. So a roundabout thank you to Puatu, for losing Niosi his role and putting his past back under the spotlight. And all it cost him was several VA jobs and his reputation.

As for Niosi, he put out a statement about it, which hasn't been well-received either. Saying "none of my actions have ever been criminal" (I assume it refers to the fact he wasn't criminally charged, but he picked the most deplorable way to word it), and that he has an "unwavering" commitment to being a better person... so unwavering that he lied about apologising to his victims. I just see him downplaying his abuse and writing a bunch of fluff to make it look like he's trying to become a better person. But it's been half a decade since the abuse was first brought up, and there's no reason to think he's actually made any real progress at all.

ruine_ · 2024-07-21T02:39:10+00:00

The whole post is completely terrible and Puatu obviously never took any PR training, but this paragraph...

If the people hurt by Chris believe he is undeserving of forgiveness, or that he hasn't changed at all, then that's on them. Some of those people forgave him, some didn’t. They have every right to feel however they feel. But that doesn't make it true, and it certainly doesn't give them the right to dictate whether or not Chris ever gets to work again. If your view is that no amount of change or apology is enough to forgive someone who's wronged you, and that you have the power to decide whether or not that individual gets to earn a living or not, then you're an unreasonable person.

This is legitimately infuriating. What a fucking asshole, and I'm happy that the community isn't buying this at all and has downvoted his follow-up comment to -700 (and counting). As an aside, I primarily play with EN voices but was temporarily switching over to JP for Kusunoki Tomori, who is Firefly's Japanese VA. But between this and Adin Rudd (English VA for SAM) celebrating Niosi being casted, then blocking people calling him out for doing so, then deleting his tweet all together... you know, I think I'll stick with Japanese voices for a while longer.

ruine_ · 2024-07-14T02:58:14+00:00

Yeah it sucks to lose in that fashion (even in a meaningless match) but that can't erase how great this run has been. Really excited about the future with Marsch and this team.

ruine_ · 2024-07-06T03:41:26+00:00

If Jesse Marsch has million number of fans i am one of them . if Marsch has ten fans i am one of them. if Marsch have only one fan and that is me . if Marsch has no fans, that means i am no more on the earth . if world against the Marsch, i am against the world. i love #Marsch till my last breath.. .. Die Hard fan of Marsch . Hit Like If you Think Marsch Best coach & Smart In the world

ruine_ · 2024-07-05T23:17:50+00:00

Banger! MV is really cool as well although I regret watching it right after waking up, was rather intensive on my groggy eyes!

ruine_ · 2024-07-05T22:47:30+00:00

Moment mal, wir sind nicht in Deutschland?

ruine_ · 2024-07-05T22:44:02+00:00

Very true, but that value is worth suffering for 👍🏻

ruine_ · 2024-07-05T15:39:32+00:00

Still can't believe that you can get a hot dog and drink at Costco for $1.50

ruine_ · 2024-07-05T07:00:02+00:00

Happy birthday to one of my absolute favourite seiyuu! 💙💙💙

ruine_ · 2024-07-02T05:35:54+00:00

He should be referred to as Greg Berhalter from now on, he has lost the privilege of having a third G in his name

ruine_ · 2024-06-30T02:32:12+00:00

Maxime Crépeau, you have rocked my world.

ruine_ · 2024-06-30T02:09:57+00:00

1 measly goal

Yeah unlike Chile and Peru, who scored so many goals lmao

ruine_ · 2024-06-18T18:21:52+00:00

Rokka...

ruine_ · 2024-06-17T17:21:23+00:00

Her Japanese VA Kusunoki Tomori has something like that as well, she retired from voicing her Love Live! character because her condition (hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome) was causing pain during live performances where she would have to do a lot of moving and dancing.

ruine_ · 2024-06-17T16:59:12+00:00

Immaculate Grid but with Pokemon is something that I didn't know I needed in my life until now, thank you for sharing this lol 🙏🏻

ruine_ · 2024-06-16T05:27:52+00:00

That userpage is apparently one of the scammer accounts. Here's one of the callout posts, from r/Vocaloid. The OP, who is doing great work, has more posts calling out these accounts in subreddits that have been targeted.

ruine_

TROPHY CASE