I noticed this on my watch through and thought it would be good to go back and capture it.

This phrase is it:

“It’s a good for nothing battle, that’s true. But even so, there’s no point in losing.”

Here’s the complete sequence from season 1 episode 21:

　司令官のヤン・ウェンリー

　間も無く戦いが始まる 　碌でもない戦いだが

　それだけに勝たなくては意味がない

　勝つための算段はしてあるから、無理せず気楽にやってくれ

　かかっているのは、たかだか国家の存亡だ

　個人の自由と権利に比べれば、大した価値のあるものじゃあない。

　それではみんな。 　そろそろ始めるとしようか？

Sports and Health

#

It was a year where I didn’t seriously injure myself and could continuously practice sports. That’s already a huge improvement.

I started going to the gym regularly in the evenings after the kids are sleeping. After some initial hesitance I started doing barbell exercises. The goal is to squat and deadlift at least my bodyweight of 75kg. I’m inching this up very slowly and am currently at 40kg.

Going to the gym is made possible by my Fitbod subscription. Exercising regularly is much easier, if I don’t have to think or plan what I’m going to do. That means either a human or an app should tell me what I need to do. Given that the gym is paid for by my work, I can justify the steep monthly cost of Fitbod (here’s a 14-day guest pass).

I’m doing winter cycling on the trainers at the gym while I debate whether I should get one for at home. That makes me one of those crazy people who wears a chamois to the gym.

It was a great year for cycling. I bought a proper road bike, the Bianchi 2024 Sprint ICR and I managed to join group rides (mostly those of the MAAP LAB Berlin) more or less weekly without having a single mechanical or crash. knocks on wood

But then during a solo ride in the last week of the year I managed to slip and fall over. More than the minor damage to my knee and my carbon frame, it was my ego that was bruised.

Studies

#

I read a bunch of papers (one write-up) around LLMs and found the field to be overhyped. I don’t think that single percentage point increases in performance and conversions of BFS algorithms into LLM prompts are worth writing up. Things are moving so quickly that you can’t sit around waiting for breakthroughs to make their way into the literature.

Learning Japanese continues and I’m now at Wanikani level 22. I’m not sure what my next goal is going to be. After my trip to Japan my motivation is somewhat on the rocks.

The main problem is that once you start studying Japanese, you cannot stop. I’m not stopping, but I’m dialing it down to maintenance mode.

Books

#

I already posted about how bad of a year 2025 was for reading. Not sure whether I’ll find the time to do better next year.

Movies and TV

#

I’ve moved the tracking of everything that I watch over to Trakt saying goodbye to Letterboxd.

Just like with fitness, I need an app that will tell me exactly what I need to do right now. Without it, I’ll very easily lose track of this. Trakt is excellent at this and offers it in the free version. I pay for premium to get some of the more advanced list management versions.

The movies I watched in 2025:

• Wicked
• Moana 2
• Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
• Lilo & Stitch
• KPop Demon Hunters
• Encanto
• The Greatest Showman

Trakt tells me that’s 901 minutes spent on movies.

Wicked was lovely on the big screen. Of the kids movies I watched: KPop Demon Hunters is impeccable, Moana 2 was unnecessary, Encanto was strangely forgettable, Lilo & Stitch not as bad as I would expect. The Greatest Showman may be flawed but it is full of bangers.

The tv series I watched in 2025:

• Bluey S3
• The Wheel of Time S2
• The Bear S1+S2+S3+S4
• Neon Genesis Evangelion
• Dennou Coil
• Asura
• Cyberpunk Edge Runners
• Legend of the Galactic Heroes S1
• Heated Rivalry S1
• Kaiju No.8 S1

All of these were spectacular and interesting in their own way. The Bear really meshes with so many things I like and like to do. Asura is effectively just a very long Kore-eda movie. LotGH is peak.

Trakt tells me that this is 4567 minutes spent on episodes. It’s clear who’s the winner here.

Games

#

I don’t really track this anymore, but what I can note are the following.

Expedition 33 was a highlight. I saw it on Tiktok and immediately knew I had to experience it. Not having a console I played it via cloud gaming on my Macbook.

Playing a parry/dodge game over a cloud setup is pure masochism, but with difficulty set to easy, it was kind of doable. The gameplay loop is satisfying but after a while the level design formula gets a bit tedious. What stood out were the music¹, the writing and the major set pieces in the boss battles and in the environment.

Critical Role started their campaign 4 and having followed the online RPG scene through Tiktok clips for a while now, I decided to see what the fuss was about. The first episode together with the rest of the ouverture is spectacular. It’s a narrative victory of setup, emotions, reveals and backstabbing. I’m not sure if they’ll stick the landing, but for now I’m very much bought in.

I’ll have to delve into what makes this worthwhile. For now I can point to two things. There is an element of let’s play parasociality that you have with any game stream or impro podcast. Add to that a very meticulously brewed high fantasy setting that’s better than what we get on television: open ended runtime, infinite production values, no cancellation after one or two seasons.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown was discounted and became the game we played during the Christmas break. I led exploring the city on Mount Qaf with my kids on a lower difficulty following right on my heels.

It’s a great game where the platform mechanics continue to layer on top of each other together with some very nasty puzzles bordering on the outright sadistic. I’m super proud to see the grit and skill my kids have shown because easy only affects combat, not the platforming.

Persia provides a vast and mostly unknown to us landscape of culture, artifacts and mythology to serve as backdrop for this game. A lot of it is undoubtedly historically not accurate, but that does not make it any less nice to look at.

Podcasts

#

The two podcasts I listen to most consistently are Ones and Tooze and Past Present Future. Those are both remnants of my Talking Politics period². Maybe I should add Helen Thompson’s podcast as well and have a full lid?

Other than that I semi-regularly listen to:

• The Adam Friedland show
• The Catskills Podcast
• Cortex
• Developer Voices
• Escape Collective (only during the Tour)
• Feminist Shelf Control
• KALT’ın Podacst’ı
• Oxide and Friends
• Podcast Filosofie
• De Shitshow
• Stavy’s World
• Vergecast

I more or less stopped listening to Trashfuture finding the jokes and the commentary repetitive and boring.

Travel

#

It was a much better year for travel than most years before this.

London was a work trip in spring and it was one of my best London trips ever. I stayed in Chelsea, I cycled everywhere, drank lots of great coffee, ate a ton of great food, went to a club, went to a play on the West End. I did so much and there’s so much left to do. I don’t know what took me so long to appreciate London like this.

Iceland was the first trip we took our kids on a plane and then round tripped the island on our way to the family horse farm. Iceland is lovely but empty. Not sure what would make me go back there other than to visit family or if I could do some hard hiking/cycling/riding.

Japan drove me crazy with reports from everybody and their mother visiting so I had to go. After missing the summer window, I booked for November not knowing that that’s one of the best months to visit Japan. I walked the Ise-ji for a large chunk and then I ran around Tokyo for a couple of days. It was even better than all the social media.

Iceland and Japan in the same year is low-key ridiculous but this was also the year at work where I get 20 consecutive extra holidays.

End

#

Lots more things to cover that happened in 2025 but for now this will have to be it. Despite some marked down periods, all in all it was a good year. On to a much better 2026.

(This update has been delayed for a week because I fell quite ill just as the new year came around.)

I was somewhat excited to watch this anime series. It’s only 12 episodes for its first season so it was over pretty quickly.

It was fun and well done but too short to be satisfying or really have an impact. I may need to skip unfinished anime adaptations ¹ entirely given there’s so much old catalog I could be watching instead. Also now I understand how people get into reading the manga’s while they wait for the adaptations to catch up.

The Kaiju No 8 story is—how could it be any different with such a name—a standard monster beat ’em up. The characters are a bunch of young kids. Things escalate steadily with increasingly powerful and shadowy monsters attacking them. The suits and the group dynamics are somewhat reminiscent of Attack on Titan. As a standard shonen monster beat ’em up anime, it’s fine.

It’s just that there’s nothing in the story that sets it apart, there are no deeper themes that are explored, no interesting motivations, no moral or emotional payoffs worth talking about and no standout characters with staying power. I don’t think I’ll remember much about this show six months from now.

Jujutsu Kaisen

#

I couldn’t help but compare it to JJK which knocks every one of those dimensions out of the park. I never got around to writing a proper review for its S2 other than this:

The long awaited Hidden Inventory and Shibuya Incident arcs turned into a treat to watch despite the continuously escalating power levels and its sprawling cast of characters and villains. — 2023 year in review

S2 was such a phase shift for JJK moving from low stakes happy go-lucky teen show to massively hard bouts of apocalyptic fighting and loss (Nanami…). So many of the characters (“My Brother!”) in JJK have depth and huge fan popularity (Panda-kun, the guy who speaks in Onigiri). Just go on TikTok and see all the Shibuya incident foreshadowing, the Satoru Gojo montages and the number of ships that are doing the rounds.

But not to worry. This is probably just one shit year in a sequence of many more shit years to come. No sign of anything getting better in our near future and lots of trends pointing downward. Does it have to be like this? Not in any way but the majority of people are stupid and we all suffer together.

ACL

I had messed up my knee in late summer of 2022 during a climbing accident and after a bit of stalling figured out that having my ACL reconstructed would be a good idea.

The surgery was scheduled for February 23rd of 2023. That made a lot of the beginning of the year waiting to go into surgery which was followed by getting the surgery (a supremely weird experience), then recuperating from it at home for a couple of weeks and going back to work while doing physical therapy.

The chronology as far as I could piece it together:

• Feb 23rd, surgery
• Feb 25th, dismissed from the Charité
• Feb 27th, first outing
• March 9th, half weight bearing
• March 12th, 90 degree flexion
• April 10th, walking without crutches
• April 15th, cycled on the Christiania to get coffee
• June 16th, hospital check-up and cleared for cycling
• June 18th, first time road cycling

I got around mostly using ride shares during the first part which was fine. Turns out that I spent €474,55 on cab rides. A fair bit of that was thankfully reimbursed by my saved up mobility budget. I stopped taking cabs and started cycling on the electric Christiania on April 15th and then had my first outing on the road bike on June 18th.

During one of my final check-ups I told my physician at the hospital that if I didn’t rationally knew I had knee surgery, a lot of the time I couldn’t remember it. There was no noticeable difference anymore.

Of course there are still lots of situations where I notice it. The difference in strength between the two legs is still there and catching up very slowly. But that things are more or less back to normal is exactly what was promised.

I’m cleared to boulder again from around Easter if I choose to ever practice that sport again.

Kids

School

The kids started their school year with the German event they call the Einschülung, something that I disagree but I have no shortage of things that I disagree with about the German school ‘system’. That’s for another blog post.

The concept of the school and how classes are setup is very cool and the teachers are young and engaged. If everything worked the way it should, things would be amazing. The only issue is that most of the time there are staff shortages that fully destabilize whatever plans or schedules had been drafted. Those shortages stem from the deep dysfunction of the Berlin civil service and mostly because of a lack of funding for the schools that need it the most.

I’m not sure what we’re going to do there but for now we’re going to see if things look up in the second half of the year.

Let it be clear that Germany is a country that in no way values kids and their education.

Father

Related to our kids going to school, on their first school day morning my dad passed away suddenly in Amsterdam. We knew he was sick but we had no idea that things would progress this quickly.

The funeral was of course in Turkey so I took a flight to Amsterdam to be with my family and see him off and then flew to Turkey with my mother to do the burial in our village. It was the first time I was back in Turkey since 2015.

That was a difficult thing to do and after that everything is different.

Holidays

I heard the news about my dad’s illness on our holiday in the Alps this year. Our first family holiday in a long time and otherwise a resounding success.

After all the affairs were wrapped up we went to Amsterdam for a week during the fall break to keep my mother company and to have the kids experience a bit of the Netherlands again. It was good to be back and to see people we hadn’t seen in a long time.

Studies

I’ve continued the trend of unapologetically self-studying things that I fancy. I can recommend it.

Abstract Algebra

To continue to study category theory I diagnosed a gap I had on basic abstract algebra and tried to close it. I didn’t finish either of the textbooks (Fraleigh and Galian) because it seems that text books are bad for self-studying people.

I worked through a couple of YouTube lecture series on the topic which gave me much more value.

Sheaf Theory

Then I continued on and off in Sheaf Theory Through Examples which is a very mixed book. It’s nowhere near as good as Fong and Spivak’s book and now nearing the end it is getting very obtuse and inaccessible. I’ll finish this and then move on to Bartosz Milewski.

Japanese

I kept studying Japanese for most of the year and on a whim I registered for the December JLPT. During registration I had a choice where I could either go for the safe but relatively irrelevant N5 level or stretch myself and go for N4.

I picked N4 and that turned out to be a lot tougher than expected. I had to push very hard on both vocabulary and grammar to get to a point where I even felt it was worth going to Düsseldorf to take the test. The 1-2 months before the test I was cramming flash cards throughout the day and studying most evenings.

The test itself in Düsseldorf was even harder than I expected and I think that it’s unlikely that I passed it, but who knows… Results are due end of January.

Even if I don’t get the certificate, stretching myself to N4 has made me study much much harder than I would ever have otherwise and I’ve advanced quite a bit. Also I got a quick trip to Düsseldorf out of it where I could eat Asian food at a level and authenticity that’s impossible to get in Berlin.

Cultural

With everything else that was going on, I didn’t have anything significant happen here. No time, no energy, no relevance.

I don’t really know how other people manage to binge dozens of crappy Netflix shows. I can’t really imagine spending entire evenings watching television. Do people do this still?

There are lots of good shows still that I would like to watch (The Last of Us, The Bear, Succession, etc.) but there’s just no time.

Books

I only read 15 books this year with Galian, Genki and the sheaf theory book—none of which are listed below—sucking up most of my reading time.

Cold Enough for Snow was a nice book and it also happened to be the only piece of fiction I read this year. The rest of the books above are all highly situational and none of them are particularly interesting or made a lasting impact.

Video

I watched six movies this year. The only notable one was Heat which I first saw as a teenager in the City cinema in Amsterdam.

When it comes to television things look slightly better:

• The Sandman: We did not finish it but enjoyed the episodes that we watched.
• Spy x Family S1: Exactly the light-hearted fun anime that I needed to watch. Nothing serious here but a fun conceit well executed.
• Tour de France Unchained: An epic dramatization of the world’s biggest cycling event that is a must watch if you’re even slightly interested in the sport.
• The Witcher S3: Nothing of note happened in this season but it was still kinda fun to watch I guess.
• Attack of Titan S4P2: It was good to watch the ending of this epic series but after such a long wait it was kinda hard to pick up the relatively complex storyline.
• Death Note: An anime classic that I started which is well executed but tough as nails and not at all compelling.
• Jujutsu Kaisen S2: The long awaited Hidden Inventory and Shibuya Incident arcs turned into a treat to watch despite the continuously escalating power levels and its sprawling cast of characters and villains.

Games

During my recovery from surgery I started and finished Breath of the Wild. The irony of having had a climbing accident and making Link free-climb epic cliffs on Hyrule was not lost on me.

That was the year. Let’s see what the new one does.

When I got there Friday night hoping to see “Adrift in Tokyo” and “The Strange Saga of Hiroshi the Freeloading Sex Machine”. Unfortunately the first was totally sold out (Friday night, figure), so instead I bought a passepartout and got my tickets for the rest of the weekend.

I ended up seeing these six movies and I was amazed at the overall quality. Is Japanese cinema this good or did I have a lucky pick?

1. Afro Samurai turned out to be a great anime blending various cultural and historic elements with humor, classic anime action and beautiful animation sequences. Recommended if you can look beyond its initial flat gangsta surface.
2. Funuke, show some love you losers! was a great funny and blunt family drama with some strange dynamics in a family where both of the parents die in a crash and their daughter comes back home to the country. Each family member has to deal with their own past and with the others. Alternatingly very funny, dramatic and uncomfortable. Highly recommended.
3. Tokyo Gore Police is a horrible movie both in its premise as in its execution. I won’t bore you with the details but the movie shocks as it should and is pretty funny at that. Funnier still were the people in the audience who did not make it through the movie when certain breaking points in them and in the characters in the movie had been reached. I wouldn’t recommend it, others would.
4. What the snow brings is a beautiful film about a family reunion ¹ at a draft horse racing stable in Hokkaido. The landscapes are stunning and the treatment of the characters and their histories is subtle but all the more heavy hitting for it. Slow pace but highly recommended.
5. A Gentle Breeze in the Village (official site) is even better, beautifully filmed set in the Japanese country side details the lives of a small group of children and their school. A new boy arrives from Tokyo and Soyo falls in love with him. Slow coming of age movie with a lot of telling clos-ups of the ground and feet (you have to see it). Highly recommended.
6. Sword of the Stranger (official site) is a simple and predictable story about a young boy hunted by bad guys and a stranger who finds him and helps him. What makes this movie great is the fantastic execution in characters, story, action scenes and overall animation. Classic, highly recommended.

Like I said I saw so many good movies ² but because of their very limited releases most people I know will never get the opportunity to see any of them. The Camera Japan festival is touring through the Netherlands in the following weeks so let my list be a guide and catch a couple of these movies: 26/9 — 28/9 in Kriterion, Amsterdam and a more limited set in various other cities.