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Purely speculating - but if I got COVID due to my employer and had my employer handle it the way her employer did - I would want to get the fuck out as soon as possible

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Reading shit like this and, and I'm not knocking anyone who still watches for whatever reason, whether out of habit or enjoyment or what, I'm so glad I'm not enabling this shitty company anymore. It's kinda embarrassing to me, again no judgments on anyone else, that with all the scummy shit they've pulled, it was a booking decision that finally got me to wash my hands of them (to elaborate, Hell in a Cell Rollins Vs Bray is when I decided I wasn't going to watch the weekly TV anymore, and just phased down to the ppvs, with a view to stopping completely, and then firing people during the pandemic is when I finally cancelled the network). But I just want wrestling where I don't get made to feel like an idiot for buying into someone. Rusev was one of my favourite guys. The Rusev Day shirt was one of a small handful of wrestling shirts I've ever owned. I remember going to a Smackdown around the time it really got big, and that was the most popular shirt I saw. I remember that Mania when he dropped the fall to Jinder. I remember just laughing and shaking my head, because you can't believe it, but at the same time, of course you can. Just total disdain for the audience, and it finally got to be too much for me. I look at the talent there and, honestly, it just makes me sad that so many of them are wasting away.

Japan is so weird. What kind of messed-up country would elect a pro wrestler with a history of doing disturbing shit on screen to a public office?

Or out of the blue running Great American Bash over 2 nights to counter program Fyter Fest or Fight for the Fallen or whatever the hell it was. Or any other time they've counterprogrammed literally every national wrestling promotion. It's just being willfully obtuse to think there was no agenda with the move to USA or anything else they've done. It's the same playbook Vince has run for who knows how long now.

I know the Sonya Deville stalker sounds particularly disturbed, but you only have to look at the replies to any of the WWE women's social media to realise how impossible it'd be to preemptively get psychiatric help for everyone displaying signs of obsessive and creepy behaviour. Honestly, I think the sort of fan culture that has sprung up in the last ten years or so alongside Twitter, especially, is fucking alarming. There's a whole world of lunatics out there who think they're entitled to famous people's attention if they try hard enough to 'earn' it, and even if 99% of them are harmless, that leaves a scary amount who might be far from it.

Good for her, get the fuck out of there and probably be way happier.

What are the reasons for NXT going from being a one hour show on the WWE network, to being a two hour live show on actual TV, that have nothing to do with AEW?

And this is why I'm just done with WWE and even have a hard time watching NXT. I just can't with this company anymore. Knowing that this is happening to a guy that was one of my favorites to watch and Vince basically killed his passion to wrestle sucks and makes me realize that Rusev isn't the only one who received this treatment. WWE, Vince, whatever is actively killing wrestling with shit like this. It doesn't matter how many millions they're getting in TV contracts, eventually that will fade, those contracts will be less, the audience will dwindle more, because the brand fucking sucks. It sucks. I know there's a handful of you that will defend it or find something to like, and that's fine. The fact is that the WWE brand has been tainted by this stink that you're not going to get rid of without a top to bottom change. And for everyone that says, well, look at how many people go to WrestleMania each year, just realize that isn't going to last forever. It can't. Not when you do shit like that to Rusev and probably plenty of others.

How in the actual fuck is Darby Allen alive after that bump with the barrel onto the stairs?

Venomous towards the billion dollar company that shits on their own wrestlers and fans? Entirely separate discussion that has nothing to do with the optics, financials, or realities of trying to pull viewers away from AEW. I don't think I've seen anyone say, "fuck WWE, how dare they compete with AEW, WWE sucks for doing that!" The side saying that WWE was purposely trying to counterprogram and dent AEW's viewership knows perfectly well that this is a business and everyone is in it to make money. The point we're trying to make is that WWE isn't remotely innocent in the business they're doing and that has nothing to do with how anyone views their creative, handling of wrestlers, and so on.

Listen. Eivion is gonna take this to the grave. He ain't moving off it.

A friend of mine that knows I am a huge wrestling fan and have attended multiple Wrestlemania weekends and adjacent shows in recent years, asked me what the most historic wrestling moment I've witnessed live was. I didn't get to start attending live wrestling shows until the late '90s, and even up until Wrestlemania 2005, it had primarily been random RAW and Smackdown tapings that were mostly uneventful in the grand scheme of things (though I did see the Billy & Chuck "proposal" live if that counts for something), original ECW tapings in Detroit (where I did get to see the Dudley Boyz busting out the flaming table for the first time), random Michigan indies pre-2003, and super-early PWG before they truly became a big indie phenomenon. And I have been to plenty of Wrestlemanias since that have had much better bell-to-bell matches (full list is 2005, 2007, and 2015 through 2019, so sadly I didn't get to see any of the Undertaker vs HBK/HHH matches live, or Daniel Bryan winning in New Orleans), as well as plenty of moments since that could be considered "Internet cool" (the first ECW One Night Stand and Necro Butcher vs Samoa Joe the same weekend, the re-emergence of PCO at Spring Break New Orleans, NJPW/ROH being the first-non McMahon wrestling show at MSG in many decades), the only thing I could say in terms of "most historic that I have witnessed live" was this being the Wrestlemania where John Cena and Batista were officially cemented as bona fide main eventers that would be relied on and have so much of the WWE main event scene centered around them for the next decade. Sure, HHH, Taker, HBK, Randy Orton would stay in that realm, and to a lesser extent CM Punk and Jeff Hardy would emerge over the next few years, but I don't think it's unrealistic to say that for the next five years that John Cena and Batista were an easy #1 Ace and #1a Ace. And though the individual Mania matches themselves weren't super-great, and both feuds would have much better matches in the months that followed (especially the Cena/JBL I Quit match which still holds up as a spectacle to this day, I would 100% rank that as second to Cena vs Umaga as the best "Cena as fighting champion" match), I literally can't imagine what the next five years of WWE look like without Cena and Batista being anointed on that day. So I responded to "most historic" to my friend that asked the original inquiry, with Cena and Batista ascending to main event/top ace status at Wrestlemania 21. "2nd most historic" would of course, be the time I went to WCW World War III in 1998, and there was an epic off-camera struggle by arena security to contain a ten-foot-long inflatable penis being passed around the crowd in the upper deck during the DDP/Bret Hart main event.

Renee is great, and deserves something much bigger than being a backstage interviewer for a wrestling company. Best of luck to whatever the future holds for her.

I just got the four DVD comp sets I ordered from Etsy and I legit don't know which one to start first. It's like 60 fucking DVDs, too. Three of the sets are just "4 star matches and above" from 1993, 1994 and 1995 from various promotions (AJPW, NJPW, AAA, SMW, WWF, WCW, etc) and the last one is a TWENTY DISC comp of the best of All Japan in the 90s.

I looked a bit through old Observers and Meltzers analysis in the issue where he covers the title change is basically this: - they set up the title change at Summerslam with Savage selling getting his knee injured by a Flair chair-shot - Savage did not drew that well as champ - they wanted to do a Flair vs. Warrior program for the title on top and Savage vs. Ramon as secondary main event (or main event for the "other" crew) - Meltzer thought that Savage might have been on his way out (as history has shown, he was on his way out of being a fulltime wrestler for Vince) Why they immediately put the title on Bret once Warrior was gone (and it really was immediately, Warrior was at the TV taping the night before the title switch and even did house shows until early November, even though WWF in early October already knew that Warrior would be gone by the end of the year; I don't remember the details, but I think when they put the IC title on Davey Boy, they already knew that they were going to fire him two months later), is not printed in the 92 Observers. I don't remember when Flair told Vince that he wanted to go back to WCW, might have been at that point. Also they were coming back fresh from a hot European tour, with Bret emerging as their top star, which probably helped his case. Also, usually Vince knew the key matched of Mania very soon, so I am wondering at what point Vince was thinking about a Yokozuna main event push (Yokozuna debuted at the same set of tapings where Bret won the title). So maybe the initial Wrestlemania IX main event was supposed to be Flair vs. Warrior and once it became clear that Warrior was not going to be available, he was looking for an alternative and saw the agile monster Yokozuna.

Renee Young is too talented for WWE. Glad she made it out.

I'd say "attempting to murder a new brand in the cradle to protect our market share" is part of how they run their business.

Why on earth do you tell a professional baseball hitter to not hit a ball that wants to be hit into the stratosphere like that?

Yeah and he wants to become the mayor of Yokohama.

BJW board game

Vince will be running the show looking like Mumm-ra the everliving.

The scorpion being kept in the Big Japan merch store just had babies.

hopefully that heist takes place in Chicago and one of the characters has a mixed race cousin that can hook them up with some floor plans or some shit.

Deranged Psycho sounds like a CZW young boy or something.

AEW heels: $50 One Year Membership, for a regular virtual meetings (two hours long, I think) with lots of interaction. WWE Virtual Meet and Greets: $125, for a one off two minute video chat.

Bruce Hart's biggest claim to fame will always be being drunk at Canadian Stampede, wearing sunglasses and a bomber jacket, attacking Stone Cold and getting dumped over the rail.

These people are crazy. Ricky Banderas is awesome.

It's a nerve thing:

You copy and pasted an opinion that you consider fact without much to really back it up. It was one that was already argued against several times. You just happen to keep ignoring the arguments because they push other factors that make more sense. You haven't answered why WWE should have moved the show to any other day or time. I don't think everyone is a blind WWE hater, but I do think they weigh their bias against WWE highly when it comes to these situations. There are plenty of legit reasons to have issues with them. WWE moving a show from the network to tv on the same time and day they were airing it previously is not a good one. You aren't wrong per say, but I'm not sure how anyone else here is any better. None of us are really budging from our opinions on this. Except the people pushing this theory on here constantly are ones who are admittedly mad at WWE or just straight up hate it. You have all talked about this shit before so I'm not sure how you can pretend it has no bearing whatsoever on your viewpoint of the situation.

The one day where I could watch it live if I wanted to and they have a Velveteen Dream match. Nope, not doing it.

The show was already on Wednesdays. The time it started airing was basically the same time it did before. They were already talking about it moving to tv before AEW existed. Why would they move it to any other day but Wednesday or change the air time? I get you despise WWE, but not everything they do is to spite you or what you like. They do have an actual business to run however much we disagree with how they run it.

WWE: We have to tighten the financials, let's release a bunch of wrestlers and long-time staffers. Also WWE: Let's spend a shitload of money on renting out a sports arena for weeks at a time and build a smaller arena inside that bigger arena from scratch with a shitload of LED boards, all-new staging, pyro, infrastructure to handle thousands of people streaming video in through the Internet, all the works!

It's been on a downward trend for years though. I know they will blame the pandemic but it's been years and years of horrible creative decisions. I am still one of the people who find some of what they are doing enjoyable.. Probably because I've seen worse. That's not always a good thing. I'm not saying everyone should subscribe to the "I've seen worse" line of thinking but between that and the fact that I just DVR it mostly and fast-forward through what I don't want to see it helps. But the company is in serious trouble. The ratings will continue to plummet. The TV contracts will dry up. They will have to cut expenses and do more creative accounting to please their shareholders but even then it will reach a point of no return. But not all is lost. AEW has shown that other promotions can be viable in the United States and they are doing well in the right demographics so it's not like wrestling is completely dead.

Holy. Shit. Get a look at this for the WWE ThunderDome:

Right, that's kind of where I get hung up with something like that being a solution. It also edges close to "having an adequate social safety net" and I think we already know that's not happening. Why spend money to help more people when it's far cheaper to just let the occasional crazy pop off and then clean up the mess after?

This is awful. What gets me is this: we have Big Data, we have machine learning, we have algorithms to figure shit out about people and build profiles with no user intervention at all. Instead of using it to crawl our social media and other places to figure out who we're likely to vote for an how to best sell us shit, how about crawling the web to find shit like this and dispatch mental health professionals, accompanied by police (not vice versa; mental health people in charge with police solely as backup for safety) to check in on people who are going off online, seem dangerous, suicidal, etc? I know that's some big brother shit but it's not like this technology isn't being employed for other things. I don't know, man. It's just striking how this dude was going off on social media about this and nothing came of it but if he'd expressed this stuff IRL to a family member, he would have very likely qualified for an involuntary psych hold.

Please oh please oh please

"Try and shave her boots, brother!" Swinger always has the best line of the show.

Technically, wrestling adjacent, so this goes here too! Wow.

WWE: we will NOT have any more marquee names, just the BRAND! Also WWE: hey THE ROCK is coming in for an appearance! STONE COLD Appreciation Night! *GONG* OH MAH GAHD IT'S THE PHENOM!!!

you wanna speed up the game? you want playoff games to end on time? Oakland Coliseum playoff bubble hub. watch as that glorious expanse of foul territory turn 12 pitch at-bat attrition affairs into quick outs. Even YankSox games will finally fly by. Learn to hit straight, jabronies. Make Me Commissioner.

Man, I forgot how fucking awesome SUWA was. This match is fucking awesome.

Big concerts and other arena and stadium performances have already been doing the LED bracelets thing for years now. All of the bracelets are on a network where a program can change the color of bracelet, how fast the twinkle, how fast they change colors, and how fast they move through the arena. AEW was just smart enough to take that same concept and use it for their PPVs. I'm honestly surprised WWE never did that for WrestleMania. I think we must have 5 of those bracelets floating around somewhere in our house from various concerts. The big one that comes to mind was a Taylor Swift concert my wife took my daughter to.

This match was tremendous. A pretty much flawless use of ten minutes. Yes, check, Barry Windham is still one of the greatest. He's so delightfully evil and nasty, and Pillman is more than willing to take the punishment. Given the taped fist stipulation, I thought the amount of blood was just about right. Just great stuff all around.