While there have been a few years since something truly great, I was used to the Romanian women’s handball teams obtaining much better results than Romanians usually tend to obtain in sports, and I was actually expecting them to really push this season, seeing as, at least as far as I know, the Romanian Women’s Handball National League attracts and keeps so many great players by offering the highest salaries in the world, yet many teams are funded by local authorities and the new regulations aimed at reducing the deficit will drastically limit the available funds, so we may be looking at a collapse as of next year.
However, what’s been going on so far in the Champions’ League is quite disappointing, especially when it comes to CSM Bucuresti. Those budget restrictions will hit them hard, Cristina Neagu won’t be playing that much longer, and I’d have also expected them to want to avenge what happened last season, when they were expected to obtain a great result and seemed to confirm that good form up to the end of the group phase, when they somehow “managed” to lose first place, setting themselves up for a tougher duel in the quarter-finals, which they lost. Instead, however, while expert commentators were so far saying that they shouldn’t finish lower than third in that group even if they’d try, so the question seemed to only be whether they’ll be among the top two and go straight to the quarter-finals again, at this point they definitely seem to “manage” to be lower than third, losing three of the five matches played so far. And what’s worse is that they’re not playing like a team that is capable of great results, but more like one in crisis, the players making way too many mistakes and bad decisions and rushing far too much and in inappropriate moments.
And it’s not like Rapid is likely to do what CSM doesn’t. That amazing second match against Krim from last season was a really nice surprise, winning by the exact score needed to advance when any sort of hopes of such a result would have seemed entirely unreasonable before the match, so both teams reached the quarter-finals, but this season they seem to have just collapsed, doing poorly in the championship as well, so just making it past the group stage would be a good enough result, with no expectations of having any sort of chance against one of the clearly better teams that they’ll then face, even if that would end up being CSM… Though at least that would ensure that one of them will once again be in the quarter-finals, which is otherwise unlikely, considering the powerful teams that are in Rapid’s group and which are therefore CSM’s other potential opponents in the at this point very probable scenario that they won’t manage to grab one of the first two places and once again skip straight to the quarter-finals.
While the matter was pretty widely reported here, mainly in relation to the fact that restricting cash payments quite severely is part of a package of measures that our government is pushing through, it seems difficult to find articles in English, on sites that don’t restrict access, that mention an opinion submitted by the European Central Bank regarding an initiative intended to clarify the legal tender status of Euro banknotes and coins, in which the ECB stresses the importance of the continued availability of cash payments and actually requests a ban on “no cash” policies. I found one, but if you’re interested you should probably at least skim the actual opinion, even if it’s annoyingly only available as a PDF, not a plain page…
Of course, there’s also the ECB’s page about the role of cash, which does a really good job of briefly and accurately explaining the benefits of sticking to cash and therefore should be taken as a statement of the institution’s position on the matter, but such a formal and firm opinion expressed just these days makes things even clearer and is something of a relief, considering how things are going from this point of view.
Unfortunately, however, that same opinion stresses that the regulations only apply to places where the Euro is used, so it doesn’t directly help us over here, or for example those in Sweden, which was quite determined to become a cashless society, and even less so those in the United Kingdom, where I keep seeing that access to cash is becoming more and more of a problem in plenty of areas. But, again, having such an institution clearly specify such a stance, and such a request, at the present time, not simply referring to past statements, can apply some pressure on those who push things in that particular wrong direction, and perhaps relieve some of the pressure felt by those who, for any or all of those listed reasons, choose to stick to cash.
I wonder how much farther behind I’m going to fall even when it comes to the posts about runs, since today, on my birthday, I ran the marathon, badly, rounding up a really bad year for my runs, and what seems to be the last edition of Carrefour’s campaign that offers fruits and vegetables in exchange for recyclables will start in Bucharest on Tuesday, and the first two locations, on October 17-19 and 21-23, are the farthest ones, so the question for next week is how will I manage to post something, anything, even such pointless posts as this one… And I’m out of free “slots” for personal posts as well, so I may well need to resort to some of those old book reviews…
I did raise an eyebrow as soon as I saw that this week’s snooker tournament takes place in Wuhan, but I remembered that there had recently been another one in China and I didn’t know whether any had taken place there last year, so it was only today, when I happened to hear that this is the first edition of the Wuhan Open and it’s the first ranking event taking place in China since 2019, since the Shanghai Masters was a non-ranking event, that it struck me how fitting this is. Admittedly, I didn’t really look into it, but a quick search indicates that my impression is correct and the popularity of snooker has indeed been increasing in recent years, and I do believe that the fact that it took one of the shortest breaks caused by the lockdowns has a lot to do with that. I’m quite sure that it was the first live sport to return on Eurosport, so many other people, at least in Europe, probably ended up doing the same thing I did, watching it because it was the only option, ending up getting at least somewhat interested in it as a result and then continuing to watch, at least occasionally, even after everything else returned as well.
Sure, it’s far from one of the most popular sports in the world, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’d end up in a position that might allow it to challenge the top ten, nor if the Chinese authorities chose to do things like this in order to send a message that China is once again open and safe, nor if some part of the reason why World Snooker and WPBSA gave their seal of approval to the idea was the knowledge that the sport ended up being one of the “winners” of the COVID-19 pandemic. Obviously, the thought of any conspiracies or the use of strong-arm tactics is completely ridiculous, though people tend to latch on to them so quickly that I find myself needing to specify that I’m not referring to anything of the sort, and this perspective might not have even been explicitly mentioned in any official discussions, but I’m just saying that the thought was probably at least at the back of the minds of those involved. And, even if it wasn’t, that it remains a rather uncomfortably fitting choice…
I had created a new version of the Games Played list some time ago and it was uploaded, but not linked, even though it was quite functional, since I had also made a script that changed the old ratings to the new ones that I had decided to use and so far there were no titles listed that required other changes. But, seeing as I really had to write this week’s two posts and a Sunday update was out of the question, since I’ll be walking most of the route of the marathon, this evening I decided to activate this new version and write this post to announce it. The old version is also still here and functional for the moment, but now it is the one that’s not otherwise linked to, except in this post, and it doesn’t contain the new updates, since in the new version I also added the games which I had finished since the previous update, except the last one, Hero of the Kingdom II, which I only plan to add after writing the review.
The problem now is that, since I now switched to HonestGamers for my reviews and finally managed to write the one for King of Dragon Pass, that one’s only available there while the list still creates the link to where it should be on MobyGames, which will only display the rating. But even if I had time to do it, and figured out how to avoid any errors, I couldn’t make the change, since plenty of my existing reviews aren’t yet on HonestGamers as well, and at least one probably won’t be, since it’s too outdated to post anywhere now. And that one creates a serious problem, but I guess I’ll cross that bridge when I’ll come to it.
The first problem I have now is that the new rating system allows for much more accurate ratings and I’m making no use of it except for these new additions. I reduced the number, creating the “artistic aspects” rating by averaging the previous acting, graphics and sound / music ratings, and eliminating the AI rating, but I switched from the whole star ratings used by MobyGames to a numeric rating, out of ten, with half points also possible. Or at least half points, because that’s what I want, though I could theoretically use tenths. But since the current ratings are just the result of using that script, with the exception of that “artistic aspects” rating they’re still essentially using the old whole star system, only doubling the numbers. And that AI rating should probably also have an impact on the gameplay rating, but I had likely taken it into consideration when giving that gameplay rating so far, so I’m uncertain what to do with it. But the basic fact is that I really should revisit the ratings and make some changes… But I’ve been saying that I should have revisited the notes originally posted on IGN ever since switching to MobyGames, and that was at the start of 2010, so I may well never do this either… Though I should at least get around to adding the missing ratings, since there are a number of games that didn’t have a story / presentation rating on MobyGames and pretty much any game should have what I now call an atmosphere / story rating.
