Craig H

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.

BTW, I still don't get what is up with the Rock's cadence and dialect. He's been channeling a southern slave owner for weeks now and then the newest wrinkle he threw in was weirdly pronouncing names and other words. Made me forget about HHH saying "hyperbowl."

I think that may have been the first time I heard a "THIS IS AWKWARD" chant, because yeah, that was awkward. I still liked the segment, but thought it would have been better if Cody said, sure, you can hold this title...when you beat me for it and pry it out of my cold, dead hands.

Props to Damien Priest for hustling and getting to where he’s at. I thought he looked soft as fuck coming from ROH to NXT, he had some shit gimmicks, I really doubted how much Judgment Day would work, and he made the very most of it all. And he did it all with a major transition in leadership at NXT and even more changes in leadership and ownership on the main roster.

Cena was out there more because Solo beat him and “ended his career” and Roman has beaten Cena twice.

I never hated Seth, but this gimmick is the worst. For some reason though people love it and I don’t understand why. It’s so cringe. It is weird that Seth is one of HHH’s boys and for a solid month Seth has looked like a geek, been buried by the Rock verbally, looked like the red headed step child in that tag match, and then got punked out tonight.

I’ll say this, my comment wasn’t directed at you. However, while the connection was pretty obvious to people who remember all of this shit, I’ll cut people a break if they don’t reminder everything or if they just got into this shit recently. And if you did get into recently then it makes me salty because you didn’t sit through attempt after attempt to coronate Roman in the dumbest fucking ways.

This is amazing. This place, more than any other, has shit on Seth so fucking hard for so many years and now people are calling out Seth being made to look like a goof. Look, Seth is going to be fine. Y’all will go right back to hating the dude and that’s fine too.

Night 2 was awesome. It had all of the spectacle that night 1 somehow missed. That main event was almost everything I wanted. The only thing missing was Austin. I’d love to know the reason why he said no because I can’t imagine that the Rock’s biggest rival wasn’t asked to come and even the odds. However, people asking about the Taker connection, how short are your memories? Not only did Taker and his Mickey Mouse tattoos feud with the Rock constantly, but Taker and Roman have history. Roman killed Taker at WM and handed Taker his second loss and what many thought would be Taker’s last match. Everyone that got involved in the match or came out after it was over had history with Roman. This shit ain’t hard to figure out. Anyway, only thing that left a bad taste in my mouth was Bruce, but Punk’s face made me crack up at that. This felt so special and unique. You can’t do this every year. Hell, this should only ever be done once every 5 to 10 years or never until a situation warrants it. And this situation sure as fuck warranted it. I fucking love wrestling. When it’s good there’s nothing better (except my Cubs winning it all and anything with my kids) and when it’s bad, all you want is for it to be better. Pro wrestling motherfuckers.

You listed Lucas Oil for both. The RCA/Hoosier Dome hosted WM8. That was torn down years ago. Lucas Oil was built near where the RCA Dome was. Lucas Oil is really fucking nice and holds over 70k. It’s also a retractable roof. It would be nice if WM would be there. Downtown Indy is pretty nice, Bankers Life Fieldhouse is right down the road to host SD, Raw, and the NXT PLE. Then not that it matters to WWE, but there’s a bunch of great smaller venues for indy shows like the Egyptian Room at the Old National Centre. And parking is pretty good and easy. Plus, Indy pulled off hosting a Super Bowl at Lucas Oil and it was a huge success. There was a ton of stuff to do downtown. Indy should try to pivot from hosting another Super Bowl and try to land a WM.

WTF is wrong with me. I did it. I wasted hours winning every fucking Chocobo race. It was worthless.

Airing this footage helps nothing. Like @Raziel said, just put it up on YouTube or whatever. This shit is so tribal and everyone is in their camps that it’s not going to matter to AEW or WWE fans. No one is changing flavors for this. For fucks sake, TK, you’re acting like Niners. You’re not a message board poster. There are zero internet points to be won. You’re a close enough to Chicago guy that hopefully you’ve watched the Bear. And if he hasn’t, the for the love of god someone play this clip for TK:

Yep, I caught that.

Well I didn’t have this on my bingo card.

I thought it was a good show for the most part. The worst match was Jimmy vs Jey, but I expected that. For whatever reason, WWE has never been able to pull off tag team partners having a good match against each other. We talked a bit about it in Discord, but it’s that stupid WWE style where it’s very homogenized and there’s no juice so you can’t do a blood feud. A good example is when Joe feuded with AJ Styles. After everything Joe did to AJ and his family, you’d expect those two or at least AJ to start that match looking to kill Joe and instead it starts with a respectful lock up. It’s more of an indictment of WWE’s road agents where every match is laid out the same. I took a really long break from WWE because it stunk. While the storylines have gotten better, the matches are still the same. Unless you’re exceptional and stand out as a personality, the match is just going to suffer. But sometimes that WWE style works, like with Rhea vs Becky and Sami vs Gunther. Those were excellent matches and the production for each was great. The production differences were also noticeable. It looks so improved from the Kevin Dunn days. The one bad thing was production making more and more errors as the night went on. The main event had a lot of production mistakes. Filming stuff was better, but they cut away from stuff just as it was about to happen so many times. My 13 year old daughter decided to watch most of the show with me and was into the main event. As she watched the main event, she goes, “why do they keep not showing things happening?!” She said that when Roman was about to suplex Cody off the ramp. That was maybe the third or fourth move in a row from Cody and Roman that they cut away from. The other bad part of the production was the announcing. My god. Pat was horrible. My daughter was like, “who is this guy talking? He’s so annoying and he doesn’t shut up.” I normally like Pat, but he was fucking awful. It made me think, oh, so this is how people felt about Mauro’s announcing. But everything did what it was supposed to do in the main event. The main event was the most active smoke and mirrors match ever to make it look like the Rock was very active and to ensure no one, especially the three with matches tonight, got hurt. The Rock was still stiff as a board. There is no fucking way he could work a good singles match. Him being so inflexible for the Pedigree was pretty funny. Dude doesn’t need that much muscle. But hey, all he needs to do tonight is hopefully eat a Stone Cold Stunner. Oh yeah, the crowd stuff, this is one of those things that varies from house to house. I had to switch my audio presets 4 times to find one that sounded good. Normal stereo was really bad. The sports, movie, and game modes for my tv and speakers didn’t sound much better. In all of those the announcers were so loud and you couldn’t hear the crowd at all. I finally chose this mode called “Direct” on my speaker setup and everything sounded better. The announcers weren’t as loud and the crowd and ring sounded better. The negatives though were that the sound from the crowd just seemed to go up in the air. I believe they were pretty hot, it’s just not wired for sound that well and it’s so wide open in there. I could also hear a lot of the moves being called in the ring, but hey, at least it turned down how loud Pat was. WWE need to hire someone from the NFL when they do these stadium shows. AEW too. Get someone with experience for getting crowd noise to come through on tv.

FUUUUUUCK YEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSS

Thankfully Fire Pro has the best AI you can adjust in video games.

It feels like that’s every chapter and chapter 11 is the one where it really starts piling on. Hey, you just did this thing, now there are jobs and quests EVERYWHERE!!! I'd be fine with chocobo racing at the Gold Saucer if there weren’t a million races to go through and if there AI weren’t the cheapest and most bullshit AI ever. Getting bumped by literally every other racer and knocking your speed from 10 to 0 is the new blue shell.

Vince selling off a bunch of shares makes a little more sense because only he would be this dumb to do something like that a week prior to this announcement.

Is there a place where we’re discussing how TKO and Endeavor are being sold again? This time to a company called Silver Lake(?) who will be the one to take them private.

Yeah, Dasha is the other release that sucks. She’s awesome. I don’t know why they never used her more.