Craig H

I’ve seen a lot of folks pointing to where they live and there being more unusual instances of cancer there than in other places. Just awful. All I can think of is their kids and hopefully their kids wind up getting regular screenings for cancer and other disorders yearly. Also, I guess the other part of Curt Schilling being a dumb fuck leaking Tim’s cancer news was that at the time Tim’s wife was going through a very rough time battling pancreatic cancer.

My friend is a design manager at Insomniac and was the design manager on Spider-Man 2 and is having a real hard time seeing a lot of very talented people that worked on his team that made that game now be gone. No, hey, your last day is 30 or 60 days from now or anything like that. Just, all of you, the door is to your right, leave your badge on your way out. I wanted to ask him what their path forward is at this point, but I figure I'll wait a little bit.

Weird random thought I just had after talking with a friend about the Leftovers. Justin Theroux is so awesome in it. And then I thought…he should be in the MCU. Then I thought, should he play Doom? So I guess the question is, should Doom be played by someone ridiculously handsome or should he be played by a CHUD like Adam Driver.

On second thought after rewatching the entrance and seeing the end of the match, I think you’re right. I saw some people mention that Max’s rap got cut last week by management and this seems to be a response to that. That and Max not celebrating with the rest of the group makes me think it’s setting up the inevitable split where they hopefully take the trios titles off the Acclaimed. And I’m still stunned by how quiet and small these crowds have been. I think once it’s figured out what nights Raw and SD are going to be on, they should shuffle Collision to a different night.

Welcome to the opening of every Botchamania, Max Caster. This show was embarrassingly quiet, to the point where you could hear the ref in the ring shout when they were back from break or how many seconds until break.

Jesus. Arthur Ashe in June sounds like an awful idea. I just remember Roger Federer saying that when the roof is closed there’s hardly any air circulation and the humidity is insane. That was awhile ago, but probably not that long ago. Did they ever add actual AC to it?

This is like disgusting levels of being a company man almost to the point where it sounds like Vince groomed and brainwashed him. Here’s a better take…Instead of talking about and saying repeatedly how you love the guy and he has a hill to climb, how about, oh, I don’t know, this is fucked up, what it looks like he did was fucked up, this was not the person I knew all those years but if this is the person he is then I can’t be associated with that and it sucks because we had a great relationship but it sucks even more for the life of a woman or even multiple women that he destroyed and THEY have an uphill battle to climb. Instead it’s this apologetic bullshit about loving Vince and he’s the one with an uphill battle and blah blah blah. like, fuck off man. We’re 2 days removed from Trump comparing Navalny’s murder to his own legal troubles of his own doing. The Venn diagram here has a lot of overlap. It's cool and all that Cena did all of those Make a Wishes, but this is such a fucked up response to the situation that in hindsight makes it feel like all of that charity work was a way to cleanse himself of the disgusting shit he knew was happening for years. And it’s equally likely that isn’t the case, but there’s plenty of examples of seemingly good people doing good things to make up for the bad shit they were witness to.

We’d play Helldivers here and there on the PS4 or sometime on the PC if we wanted a change of pace. The only game I could kind of compare it to just from how different it was to everything else was Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime. The two games aren’t the same, but the style and how it played was just so different than everything else. HD1 was sort of a twin stick shooter where you get a loadout, fight hordes of aliens or cyborgs, complete objectives, die a bunch, and then try to hold out for a drop ship. HD2 goes from that top down, twin stick shooter style to one of the best and most competent 3rd person shooters I’ve ever played. The level of chaos is insane at times. My group is now playing some missions on Suicide difficulty, which is one step down from the toughest difficulty. There are 9 difficulty levels in all. Each level adds in more insanity, tougher enemies, etc. The neat thing is that at the higher difficulties, enemies don’t just become more of bullet sponge. They still die all the same. What does change are their tactics. There are way more of them and they’re smarter. Bigger bugs or robots get more agile, their patrols which you can avoid are more sensitive to your movements and can spot you and call in drop ships or more bugs rupturing from the ground, and so on. But again, killing then works the same at medium, level 3, as it would at suicide, level 8. And the sheer amount of craziness that happens at all levels is awesome. Even when we get stomped we’re not mad. We’re laughing and then trying to figure out what to do differently. It also leaves you with just tons of unique stories from your battles. Last night we saw something absolutely crazy happen. I was tiring to fight off a couple cyborgs, which are really just Terminators. These were huge terminators though with multiple rocket launchers built onto their shoulders. I threw out a beacon to call down a huge rocket strike on them, but it wasn’t a direct hit and so they’re still there. I’m hiding behind a big rock yelling out I need help and my buddy who is off in the distance to my left throws out his beacon to call down a railgun strike from our ship from up above. This is a huge fucking railgun and if it hits, it’s a one shot kill on even the biggest enemies. So in comes this huge streak of red light, but it stops and then thins out into nothing before it hits the ground. We’re like, what the fuck?! They’re still alive! What happened…oh shit! What happened was as the railgun strike is coming down, a dropship full of terminators flies in off to the right to maneuver into position. As it flew in, it flew into the path of the railgun strike and then just crashed and skidded across the ground. Mind you, all of this happens in a matter of seconds. And we lose it, bursting into laughter and excitement like little kids. It was a happy accident that fucking ruled because up to that point we had never taken down a dropship before. We came close with turret fire, but the ship survived and flew off. Thankfully, the Steelseries software on my pc and the Xbox pc software on my friends computer both captured the moment so we’re going to splice it together and throw it on YouTube. Despite the server issues which are happening only because the game was more popular than they ever imagined it would be, it’s the best $40 I’ve ever spent and even if it cost $70 it would have been worth it. We also played Remnant 2 and we’re not even looking back anymore. I just can’t believe the success of this game. This is practically a AAA game sold for $40 and because HD1 was a cult hit, people went crazy for this one. I think on day 1 they had server capacity for 250k players and thought that would be enough. They were short by 100k or more. That was last Thursday. As the weekend progressed, the amount of people trying to play the game kept causing their servers to crash so they had to implement a hard cap of 450k concurrent players leading to some queue times of 15 minutes or more. For us, most times it would take less than 5 minutes, but the longest was probably 30 minutes during the day yesterday. It looks and sounds like since we’re back to the week that they’re going to be and to quickly get some more server support pretty fast. I feel bad for all of the folks at Arrowhead Studios because they were literally working around the clock this whole weekend, but at the same time, it was for the best of reasons. That studio is minted now.

The newer Hitman trilogy are the best puzzle games ever made. There were so many missions where I, or my daughter and me, would just sit there wondering, ok, what do we do here. Ok, let's try this. And then try this. Ok, that worked, so let's try that again, but then do this other thing differently. If you were a streamer when those games came out, it was just endless content you could milk. Plus, if you had a decent following, that's just more help you could get from people.

I...don't think I liked much of the Krakoa era of the X-Men. I know dude from Comics Explained jizzed all over every single story from it, but it started with the Moira stuff and then, just like, a whole fuckton of other stuff that hasn't grabbed me, like, multiple Sinisters, white hot room stuff, etc. And then back to the Moira stuff to reset everything. It's not like I paid...well...much to read any of this, but I couldn't see myself going into my LCS to keep up with this X-Men storyline.

SRS is pretty good for the most part. The other guy that works for PWI, the one that doesn't own the site, isn't bad. The rest though? Yeesh.

I feel pretty fortunate that my closest friends are the same ones I’ve been playing games with since Goldeneye. We all got Xboxes, Halo, and would bring tvs over to a friends house to hook everything up to a LAN. And then lately it’s been Dota or Valorant or, briefly, D4, but now we have a solid 4 of us that are straight up hooked on Helldivers 2. There’s a few others who aren’t into it and that’s fine because they’re working on playing Path of Exile or FF14 or whatever. And I’m sure we’ll wind up with a group of 4 to play Last Epoch since we do crave some Diablo action that isn’t a shitshow. I’m sure we’d all play Enshrouded together if setting up a private server wasn’t a total mess. But for now, HD2 is where it’s at, although I’m kinda looking forward to Last Epoch, but I’m going to wait until a couple of us that aren’t playing HD2 get it and can vouch for it.

Man, I can’t make any excuses for Meltzer anymore. I legit may just unsubscribe from the Observer because that shit is straight up embarrassing. If you’re not aware he lied/was dumb and said at the Vegas thing for Mania that Rock and HHH filmed a segment challenging each other to a match, but they “shelved” it and it leaked. Except, none of that happened. He’s referring to the face to face HHH and the Rock had on SmackDown almost 10 years ago to tease a final match or something between them. I’m not sure what’s more embarrassing - that or the Shibata thing. But one thing is for sure, his writing and thought process are way worse now. I know the joke is that he’s on the spectrum and he might be, but he’s also in his early 60s. He should be sharper than this.

Helldivers 2 is my game of the year and it's not even close. It's going to be really tough to come out with another game that has drawn me and 3 other close friends like this game has and one of us doesn't even like shooters. Sadly though, he's all about the Automatons missions, which I fucking hate because it's just a nonstop onslaught of Terminators. What a cool, badass, motherfucker of a game. And again, ONLY 40 BUCKS. If it weren't for my daughter asking for FF7 Rebirth, I probably would have skipped out on getting that at launch just because I'm so heavily invested in this game. I'M DOING MY PART AND SPREADING DEMOCRACY! EDIT: Actually, the thing that would really solidify this as my game of the year this early in the year is if they can get cross platform progression fixed. As it is, I'm sticking with my PC for now, but playing this on my big tv was cool as fuck and I'm dying to get back to doing that.

Their pants are still their tights. You can see their knee pads. The only thing that makes a difference is keeping the blazers on, but they allow for a ton of movement.

BRING. THE. VIOLENCE.

I really love Malakai Black, but I’d rather he be Tommy End instead without the spooky perverts gimmick. I don’t dig on the supernatural shit. I really wanted Black to be a dude who eloquently talked shit and wrecked dudes and things just didn’t shake out that way. I figured he’d be this generation’s CM Punk. Aside from his NXT run, is just been nothing but spooky nonsense, most of which is his idea. The great thing is that Brody stands out so fucking much that it could just be Brody and Julia and that would be more than enough. I also think Julia is going to wind up in WWE. She’s way too young and getting better and better to not have both companies bidding for her and I think WWE would come out on top. I just get this feeling that she’ll get her bag from WWE and then eventually come back to AEW.

I thought the same thing. Just turn off the clock. I thought the change to OT was…good, but it could still be a ton better. Like others, I like college football OT the best, but even then I think they should move the starting point back. One other nitpick, after the HOF and watching a highlight video of every Devin Hester return for a TD, it made me think of how pointless kickoffs are. That return for a TD to start a SB was electrifying. It’s a weapon they shouldn’t have taken away from teams.

The one thing I keep trying to figure out at the 1:48 mark of the trailer is if that’s a Doombot.

I haven’t had a chance to look over the rules in full, but where I was watching, and there were a lot of us, we were all wondering wtf KC was doing wasting so much time at the end. We all thought that if the clock hit 0 with SF still up by 3 then that would have been the game. So is that right or would it have been like the end of OT1 and gone into OT2?

The chiefs win, Taylor Swift wins, and I win looking at all the sad ass maga snowflakes having a meltdown.

I also thought this happened in ECW with Tommy Dreamer and Brian Lee.

It's way too fast to be a sim.

Ahhh. I only watched KO vs Austin and Rhodes vs Reigns from that WM. It's possible I watched more, but I honestly don't remember. I'm pretty sure I only cared to watch those two. OH, and KO/Sami vs the Usos. I know people will say, "go watch Gunther vs whoever" but I honestly don't care. I could barely watch WWE matches then and it has only gotten a little better now. It's actually physically nauseating and almost migraine inducing to watch. I have never been motion sick so I don't know what that feels like, but whatever feeling I got from watching how WWE matches are shot and produced makes me think it's motion sickness. Since I started re-watching more over the last few months or so, it seems like it's a little better. And Roman's matches don't really necessitate a lot of quick cuts so those aren't that much of a problem. But I just remember parts of the tag match and one part in particular during KO vs Austin where Austin was throwing punches and stomping a mudhole and it was cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut on every strike and I felt myself start to feel sick. Getting old is super fun.

Also, part of me thinks the Tampa Bay Lightning hat was another dig at Punk, which if that's the case, my god, Drew is at his peak.