Eoae

According to Meltzer, Riddle really did forget his lines and just decided to walk off. And Vince thought it was hilarious and laughed his ass off. I would have bet money on Vince blowing a gasket and booting Riddle off tv.

Paid off my mortgage today. We only had a few monthly payments left so wife and I decided to just pay the balance and be done with it. I'd probably be elated if my wife hadn't "joked" that she'll start planning the new house tomorrow. She still wants to build from scratch. i feel strange. I'm wondering if this is what it feels like to be set financially. I mean, I'm 15+ years from retirement, so anything could happen, but.... at the moment, we both have jobs that pay well and seem to be recession and pandemic-proof, decent bit in the bank, got rid of of some of our long-term debts, etc. Various factors have caused me to worry a lot about finances the past few years to the point I was having nightmares about dying young (lol, too late for that). My wife's business (edit: side business, not her day job) was failing when the pandemic started and I was sure we wouldn't be able to sell it and would take a catastrophic loss. I was wrong, fortunately. Biggest cause for optimism is that our kids are doing well and, more importantly, starting to pay their own bills. We still have one in college but all four are working their way towards self-sufficiency so they at least cost a lot less than they used to. 26 years ago, I thought I had a handle on how much it would cost to raise kids. Something else I was wrong about. So very, very wrong. Pandemic still scares me daily, but I'm hopeful things look a lot different in 6-9 months. Stress level still very high, but I assume I can manage it.

Pelle probably needs to move on. He's been popping up in my Twitter feed since he started trying to raise money for an attorney and he seems desperate to "get" Joey. He has good reason, and it's not going to bother me any to see Ryan get taken down, but I mostly feel like Pelle's not going to get out of this what he hopes and is more likely to ruin himself financially and emotionally. The stuff he's posting today make Ryan look sleazy (not news), but don't cast him or Scott in the best light either.

Yeah. I went with WWE 2K13 (your suggestion). It seems to be the early 2010's WWE game that gets talked up the most, and I figured i should give it a try since it was the last year THQ had the license. I ordered a copy over the weekend so it should be in my mailbox later in the week. I didn't realize that the X360/PS3 era WWE games had become scarce and valuable. Not many copies listed on eBay or the similar sites, and the secondhand prices were surprisingly high.

So which club is Kite Man?

So, yeah, the limited edition Minecraft Xbox One console looks tremendous close up. Even the packaging (the small boxes the controllers, cords, and paperwork come in) is appealing. May well be my favorite le console. After seeing it in person, decided to order the pink "pig" controller which was part of the promotion but sold separately and sets you back a good bit on eBay ($90-$100 for a used one, $150 plus for new in box). Got sidetracked and ended up playing Rain on Your Parade over the weekend. Highly recommended if you like whimsical indie games like Donut County and Untitled Goose Game. Basically, you play as a cartoon cloud who goes around raining on shoppers, wedding guests, farmers, etc. The early levels reminded me of Untitled Goose Game in that you basically just need to rain on people and create some good-natured mayhem to complete levels. Later levels get more creative and complicated and bring in other variables. Lot of callbacks to other games. There's a tornado level inspired by Katamari Darmacy, a stealth level modeled on Metal Gear Solid (?), an old-school Doom level (??), etc. Overall, it's a lot of fun and the level design is surprisingly varied so things never get dull.

Bray has the "it" factor most wrestlers don't have. He's decent-good on the mic and connects with a large percentage of the audience. He somehow managed to move merch even when working heel and playing bizarre characters. He's got plenty of limitations as a wrestler, but that's almost beside the point when you can talk well and have that much physical charisma. It seems reasonable to think Vince could have made him a huge, long-term star and instead turned him into something of a flash-in-the-pan. i say this as someone who has zero interest in his segments and matches, and would probably name Bray as one of his least two favorite WWE wrestlers of the past 30 years. Personally, I'm glad Vince didn't manage to turn him into the next Undertaker, but the potential was there and Vince probably has left a lot of money on the table by not using Bray better.

Scorpio Sky was a very good heel around the time he left PWG, but he mostly worked very small SoCal indies at the time and no one saw a lot of it. His feud with Brandon Gatson in Empire Wrestling Federation (circa 2008) is one of my favorite small indy feuds.

I liked season 2 and 3, but not as much as s1. Feel like s4 is getting back to the stuff that made s1 good, though Jefferson's depression and PTSD is a little too dark for my liking. Black Lightning is the only Berlanti-show I've stuck with the past several years. Tend to watch a few eps of the other shows each season, then drift away and not get back to them. I'd much prefer to see a Tobias Whale spinoff, to be honest. Is anyone following the Dominic Purcell thing? Apparently. he went on a social media bender and blasted the studio, announcing that he wasn't interested in signing a new contract for LoT in the process. Then he apparently went into damage control mode and claimed he was just making a joke at the press' expense. So, I dunno.

I think you've got me all wrong, friend. I'm much more into toe-licking than ass-kissing. Ass kissing is ok, I guess, but I'm much more a "this little piggie" type of guy.

Even after all these years, I'm terrible at games. Dunno why I don't just start most games on the easiest setting. Really, all I usually care about is advancing through the story. Never been a grinder, completist, or trophy hunter. Question: I was looking at the Sony Play at Home promotion today. How long are we allowed to keep access to the free games in the promotion? Four months? Indefinitely? I'm mildly interested in a couple of the free games included in the promotion, but I probably won't bother if Sony is going to yank the license when the promotion ends. I'm assuming that, once I download them, I'll be able to keep access for as long as the PS Network and my PS4 last. Is that correct?

I can't get into Claudio single push #13. I like Claudio quite a bit, but feel like the time for him to get over as a singles guy is long past and this push will end the same way every other attempt has. Just kinda waiting for him to stumble through a promo or suffer a minor injury and Vince will lose interest. Was mostly happy his match with Jey ended in a dq. Neither guy needs to be taking a loss right now. They had something with Jey when his program with Roman started, and they could rehab him very easily, but he's cooled off some since anyone looking to challenge Roman has to go through Jey first (and does go through Jey first). Also, as much as I like Cesaro, he's not taking the title off Roman, so a title program with him isn't going to be that interesting.

How so? He's been out injured since that time, but he was still on the payroll and was on tv basically every week.

What's the best WWE game from the PS3/Xbox 360 era? Basically, I'm looking to pick up a game with Punk on the roster (his last appearance was 2K15, I think).

I've gotten phone surveys sponsored by political groups that end like that.

I've met him in person and he comes across very well in person, but he's basically my idea of "the ugly American" and has been since at least his teens. I'm legit surprised people embraced him during his rise to fame because people in cycling/ triathlon knew him by reputation well before he became world-class. First time I ever heard of him was when a friend came back from a triathlon with a wacky story about some skinny kid who had a meltdown in the parking lot after a small race and challenged a couple pros and the the race director to a fight (after screaming obscenities at them). Realized years later the kid in the story was Lance. Armstrong became prominent around the same time Greg LeMond faded. LeMond always struck me as a great guy. Polite, well-spoken, gracious when he lost, etc. I've always been a little sad that Armstrong became the bigger star.

Edited.

More like Daniel Bryan-ing him. Joe had several injuries while in the WWE, but the last - and presumably most serious - was a concussion suffered about a year ago. Feb 2020. Ironically, he somehow suffered a head injury while filming a commercial, not in the ring. Not sure what the exact circumstances are, but there's been some talk the WWE didn't want to let him wrestle again because of CTE symptoms. There was a story on a couple websites a month or so ago that Joe wanted back in the ring, so I'm guessing that might explain his release.

I dunno what I said to make you think I was victim blaming, but that wasn't what I was going for. You seem to be making a number of erroneous assumptions about me in general, but that's not really my problem Well, since you asked so nicely, I was basically let go from a previous job because my boss and I had some fairly divisive philosophical differences and couldn't work together. No one had a bad attitude - sorry to disappoint - but we were butting heads fairly regularly about matters large and small, and neither of us had a lot of confidence in the other's judgment and vision of the future. I wasn't thrilled about it at the time, but he made the right call for the company and himself. My replacement got along much better with management and the company did quite well with him in my old role. I moved on to a similar position with another firm and have been there over 17 years (and several promotions). You're going to be disappointed, but even though being let go presented some short-term challenges for the family, we weren't bitter. Stuff happens. It was fairly obvious that butting heads wasn't going to be viable in the long-term. so something had to be done. Honestly, hindsight makes me think it's a good think I was let go. I was pushing a fairly aggressive growth strategy and the owner and other partners favored a more conservative approach. I think my approach would probably have worked out well, but experience now leads me to think it was riskier than I believed at the time. Could have turned out poorly. Anyways, I'm out. Have a good weekend. Oh, one last thing. "Something about "bootstraps"

Ollie's rage at Wally feels simultaneously realistic and manufactured.

It's almost like people can have more than one opinion on any given topic.

I don't think they've made the decision to pick up the Painkiller show yet. Not that I've seen or heard anyway. I had mixed feeling about the backdoor pilot. They definitely needed to rethink Khalil's character to make him more sympathetic and well-rounded enough to carry a show, but I was thrown by just how different the character was. The character in the pilot didn't much resemble the character in previous appearances, and I feel like the changes could be summed up as "black Oliver Queen". Khalil was your typical high school kid before Tobias got ahold of him, so I didn't quite buy him seguing (fairly easily?) to meditating millionaire with his own Batcave (and an Asian Lucius Fox; Berlanti-verse certainly loves tech geniuses who hang out in high-tech caves). I dunno. I'm probably interested enough to see more, but I was more intrigued by the creative decisions they made than actually invested in the pilot. Khalil's new status quo kinda reinforces my general criticism of the show. I thought the first season of Black Lightning was fresh and grounded and had something to say about being Black in America. I really dug the show when it was playing with the idea that Jefferson Pierce, school principal, was probably going to save more lives than Black Lightning ever could. And then they got away from that rather abruptly in season 2 and the show became about secret government groups and war with a foreign country and basically became a more standard superhero show.

Playing Dead Space. Forgot how great this series is (1 & 2 anyway). Not a huge shooter fan, but, every so often, I play Dead Space or Halo and remind myself that the 360 had some pretty great shooters (and the PS3 had Resistance and Killzone trilogies as exclusives). In the age of remasters, I'm surprised Dead Space hasn't gotten remastered, at least as a collection. That and LittleBigPlanet are the franchises I really want remastered. Hell, maybe throw Gears of War in there too (Gears 1 go an ultimate edition; 2 and 3 did not). I sort of admire Microsoft's restraint. If Halo and Gears were Sony titles, we'd be making the same jokes we make about Bethesda games.

Good luck. I don't think I'd want to go through the early years again (we had 4 kids in just under six years), but, 20+ years later, I wouldn't trade any of it. If you have a big family, have boys, lol. We had four girls. I have no idea how I survived their teen years. We wanted six kids. I can confidently say the wife and I were out of our goddamn minds when we thought that might be a good idea.

Maybe, but we don't actually know what was said to talent. We tend to make a lot of assumptions about what people in the company actually said or did when they were face-to-face based on a couple lines in the Observer that may have been reported to Dave by someone not in the room at the time. I read "budget cuts" as the sort of bland pr-speak human resource depts use when they don't want to get into specifics. I hope whoever gave talent the bad news didn't just shrug and say "budget cuts. Seeya around" but that wouldn't surprise me either. Whenever there's a purge, I always wonder how much off-camera stuff plays a factor. I assume that, at least occasionally, attitude and work habits play a factor in getting cut or not, but we'll never know how often or too what degree. I generally feel like fans think they know more about what goes on "inside the fishbowl" than they really know.