Craig H

Moxley challenging Hobbs in Jacksonville is a cool callback to the early days/covid days of AEW when Hobbs first hit the scene and looked to be aligning himself with Moxley.

Beanie Sigel's The Truth for Homicide.

Oh. My. God. I took a break from playing just because I felt like shit after my accident and then we went to see the eclipse and the next day we went to one of those water park hotels. The rest of the week last week was spent going to rehab and searching for a new car. So it felt nice to have a break from the game. Then I come back to it today and just when I think it can't get any more annoying, and I'm in chapter 12...

I spent so many hours replaying it when I got notified I was being layed off and basically had nothing to do for 3 months. I can't see myself sinking a ton more time into it again, but it should be good for a bunch of new players coming to it after watching the series.

It was one of those rare moments where I nearly hated the movie and thought it was the most base horseshit, but also thought Phoenix’s performance was really good. I highly doubt I’ll give the sequel the time of day.

Sliiiiight nitpick regarding Boyd Crowder being evil. I would say Boyd isn’t evil. He fell in with the wrong crowd with all of the Neo Nazi stuff, but then he cast all of that aside, which was one of Walton Goggins’ requests to keep doing the role - he didn’t want to be a racist Nazi. Now, I will say that Boyd was an outlaw and he and Raylan were two sides of the same coin. But him being an outlaw doesn’t necessarily mean he’s evil even if he killed people. I’m sure folks will disagree with that assessment, but after watching Justified 3 times through, I don’t really get the sense that Boyd is evil. And I don’t really think the Ghoul is either.

My god. Those magnificent sons of bitches did it. They really pulled this off. This is probably the best thing to hit Prime since the Boys.

It being a day later and marinating on the whole thing a bit…This was a whole lot of nothing. I take back some of my original remarks, except TK looking like a bitch. Other than that, they tried to add heat to the tag title match, which felt cold. Honestly, I totally forgot the title match was between the Bucks and FTR. However, I was in a bad car accident right at this exact time last week, Monday I drove 3 hours for the eclipse which turned into 4 hours back home, and then Tuesday and Wednesday we spent time outside Chicago going to a water park, so my memory is a bit shot. There were better and funnier ways to show that footage, yes, but at least FTR tried to make the whole thing work. The better move would for FTR and the Bucks to be a blood feud since they’ve been going at it for so long. The Bucks and Lucha Bros feuded for less time and we got a ladder match where 3 out the 4 guys nearly died and a cage match that’s one of the best cage matches in history that featured an exploding shoe. In the end, none of this matters. It’s not going to help or hurt anything. In all actuality, since Punk also can’t let anything go, this probably just gets under his skin even more unless Paul, Nick, Cody, and April tell him to just ignore something for once in his life. He seems to listen to those 4 more than anyone else. So I guess if the goal was to get under Punk’s skin by wasting a segment of live tv, then mission accomplished? And ultimately, it did take away from what was a really solid Dynamite, except this shit with Jericho and Hook that I don’t like. Can we we skip ahead and just get to Hook dumping Jericho on his head next week instead of dragging this shit out for 2 more months?

As long as ticket sales are hot there’s no need to cut off a quarter of the arena to facilitate a large tron and stage. Use the setup from Monday and make that extra money.

There’s also something kind of funny to Taz just sauntering around totally unfazed by it all. Taz is a dude who has seen some worse shit go down in ECW, WWE, and TNA. That was nothing. TK also looks like a bitch in that footage.

Man…showing that video did exactly what I thought it would do, which was nothing good. It basically proved Punk was right about, well, everything. And TK and/or the Bucks wanting to show the footage just shows how fucking shook they are and how rent free Punk lives in their heads. Trying to spin the incident as the reason why the Bucks lost to FTR is fucking laughable. I gave a perfectly good way to use that footage by saying Nick and Matt are sick of all the violence backstage, creating a workplace safety video that uses that footage, and then Nick saying that he’s so pissed he’s fining both guys only for Matt to correct him and say neither guy is in AEW. That would have been a funny, almost DX-esque use of the footage. Instead in went over like a fart in church. Again…UNFORCED ERRORS…Come on guys. Pull your heads out of your asses.

Couple other things…I LOVED the tiny set. Hey, if you’re going to draw enough fans so you don’t need a giant tron to block a quarter of the seating then go for it. It looks fucking cool. It looks big league. Second, after the last two nights, to again steal a line from Moneyball, how can you not be romantic about Pro Wrestling?

I don’t do Twitter so I had no idea.

Ok, I think my friend and I workshopped a way to make showing the ball In footage work. Like some folks here said, have the Bucks do commentary over the footage. Go one step further though. Have the Bucks talk about how they’ve seen a lot of stuff going on that’s against the rules and they’re really going to start laying the hammer down. Just so everyone can be on the same page, they’re going to show a mandatory workplace safety video for what not to do. Then they show the footage and do commentary over it. Once it’s done, Nick, the hothead of the group, talks about how disgusted he is to watch to coworkers endangering the lives of themselves and others, I mean, this is a wrestling company, who does that?!?! And Nick says he is forced to fine Phil Brooks and Jack Perry one million dollars each. Matt then is like, uh, we already fired one of them and the other one we exiled to Japan… I think that would be funny and clever enough to make showing the footage work in a way to prove Punk is full of shit while still making their characters look like dicks. Hell, work in a shot at FTR too.

I rewatched the opening segment again because I first watched it on the YTTV app on my phone since my wife and daughter were watching ratings juggernaut Spring Baking Championship. The first time I watched it I thought it was interesting, a little weird, but good. On rewatch, it’s great. And not great because it’s awkward. I get the criticism that the Rock seemed out of it, but on rewatch, the Rock is playing a version of himself that is far darker and even more sinister than he’s ever been. Like, I’m talking he destroyed Roman when they got to the back after the match and what he gave Cody could be anything from Roman’s ear, a tooth he knocked out of Roman’s mouth, or more likely, a ceremonial bead from the necklace the tribal chief wears. The “don’t you break my heart again” line applies to making the Rock beat the shit out of his own family and blood because Roman lost to Cody. More than anything, more than Roman, the Rock sounded like the real mob boss, the real head of the table. Roman has been playing a young guy who was cocky and thought he was untouchable and while he’s menacing, he ain’t the seasoned boss he thinks he is. The Rock is that motherfucker coming out of the darkness to see how this young punk is running things and the young punk doesn’t know that the real boss, his own blood, has a gun pointed to the back of his head the whole time. It also sets up a fuckton of storytelling options. That’s the beauty of all of this. HHH hasn’t pigeonholed himself into one single story with one single ending. He has a larger story with so many options and a handful of very satisfying outcomes, any of which can be used based on injuries, if someone gets ultra hot and a title change is warranted, or whatever. The rest of Raw was…whatever. Just like AEW, I’ll cut WWE a break following a big show because folks need a break. You can’t hit a dong every time you step up to the plate. That said, there was still stuff I liked a lot. Truth cracked me up, Drew continues to be the hero we deserve but not the one we need right now, calling Priest what he did made it feel like Drew reads the board and saw @Dolfan in NYC call Priest “bisexual Undertaker,” and the finish with Punk looking like he was having some of the most fun of his life was great. Jey vs Cody doesn’t do much for me. I think I’d like to see Cody vs a monster like Reed, but we’ll probably still get that at some point. Or maybe Sami beats Gable and then Reed murders Sami afterward.