Stefanie the Human

Io vs. Ryo Mizunami... Io vs. Ibuki Hoshi... ... Io vs. Hikaru Shida? It's never happened as a singles match.

I definitely agree with your thoughts about Tsukka, and that ASUKA/VENY is going to catch up with her since Tsukka's on hiatus. If Tsukka comes back though, who even knows. I'd put a shout out for Kaho Matsushita for Rookie of the Year. She's gone from "promising rookie with a lot of potential, let's see where she's at in a year" to someone who I eagerly anticipate seeing every single show. Her progress has been fantastic, and she's had so many great matches you don't expect to see out of a joshi rookie. Not only that, but her team with Asahi as Year 1 Class 9 has become one of the best on the joshi scene. Someday I'll be given a Year 1 Class 9 vs. Makoto & ASUKA match. I can dream.

This is no way to start the second half of the year. Madeline is going to sub for her on this weekend's Ice Ribbon shows. Poor Mashiro.

It'd never happen but I'd be very into an Io freelancer run. Io vs. VENY, Io vs. Rina Yamashita, Io vs. a post-hiatus Tsukasa Fujimoto (that match has to my knowledge never happened! WTF!!!), Io vs. Maya Yukihi, Io vs. Chihiro Hashimoto... I'll stop before I make myself cry.

Literally the only ones who should be deciding forgiveness for those who have committed sexual harassment/assault would be the victims of the perpetrator. Nobody ever seems to care about them, though. (And with that, I'll be checking out of this thread for my own mental health. Good going having this discussion happen on the last day of the month so it guarantees a lock.)

Considering he tried to sue his victims into silence by filing defamation lawsuits against them... yeah I don't care about the consequences he faces.

It's Rick Rubin. Some folks are being a SILLY GOOSE. lol

He deletes his tweets very often, so I'm not sure if that can be taken as a sign of anything.

Was there speculation that it wouldn't be? I don't remember one that wasn't two blocks. Wait there's 26 people in it? Holy jeez.

There's really a lot of value to that, especially if what one enjoys skews niche. And I will say, there's a major difference in how people respond when you disagree with them when it comes down to a matter of subjective view. Like... if I didn't enjoy a match or if I don't enjoy a specific wrestler's work, that's just how I feel and it's okay if you don't agree with me. (This is a general "you", by the way.) Telling me I'm wrong, or that my opinion is bad, or outright insulting me isn't really going to suddenly make me go "oh dang, you're right" and start agreeing with you. There are some folks that are outright astounded that you don't agree with their opinions and react with hostility to them, and it's like... we have a difference of opinion, chill out.

Markieff Morris got bought out by the Pistons and then went to the Lakers' championship team in 2020, so technically yes, but nobody's ever been at the stature of a John Wall and done it.

I wasn't referring to streaming services, but digital downloads themselves. Highspots' digital download limitations are frustrating, since they expire access to purchases after seven days, but that's what I pay for cloud storage for, so if I absolutely have to buy something from Highspots, I'll download it immediately and put it onto my cloud storage rather than maintain it locally. I understand why Highspots does that, since as a smaller company the server costs to offer downloads in perpetuity would be quite high, but for those without access to cloud storage it must be annoying.

I should acknowledge that my vote is a split vote, 51% Andrade/Fenix and 49% Storm/Shafir. But alas, we have no split vote tech. I just felt like I should say Storm/Shafir would have mine if it did.

Ice Ribbon's Korakuen show looked eventful as heck. We've got a new Infinity champion, as Saori Anou came out of the tournament having beaten Tae Honma and surprise finalist Yuki Mashiro to win the title. Mashiro beat Ibuki Hoshi by stealing Good Ibuning to pin her in the other semifinal. Mashiro's cheating and thievery throughout the entire tournament has been a delight. Big Dekai also kept the International Ribbon tag titles by beating Year 1 Class 9, and their next challenge is going to come from Hamuko Hoshi and Makoto at the next Korakuen on 7/31. Speaking of that, Hikaru Shida will be back on 7/31, along with Kyuri! And hey! Fancy new logo! The color variants look really good. There's a shirt with a rainbow version that's TOP NOTCH.

There are fanmade restoration projects for pretty much anything you could want, where fans take digital media and scrub the production overdub music, then redub in the original. Literally ECW's entire run has been given this restoration project. So if I want to watch the classic "Enter Sandman" ECW entrance, can I watch it? I sure can. I just need to go through an alternate channel. Bootlegs have gotten way more sophisticated and flexible thanks to digital media. But let's go back to your "historian" take, and how we bemoan lost footage. My favorite promotion of the 1990s is a joshi promotion that didn't release a ton of footage, and if it did, it was clipped. My favorite commercial tape was the first joshi tape I ever bought, and it holds sentimental value to me. But does the physical tape still exist anymore? No. It was accidentally lost in a move in 2004, and I had to buy a bootleg DVD from Jeff Lynch almost a decade later, which I then immediately ripped to digital and put in my cloud storage. No clue where that DVD he sent me is, but any time I want to call up that tape, it's sitting there on my Plex server, waiting for me. And unless my cloud storage ever fails, I don't think it's going anywhere. Now, that's just one tape. What if I wanted to watch that whole event? In the case of the tape, it was a tag team tournament that was clipped to hell. The footage obviously exists somewhere, because it was used to make that tape, it was just never released. But because Arsion is fairly obscure in 2022 compared to 1998 and hardly anyone cares about the Twinstar of Arsion 1998 league aside from me, much less knows who owns the rights to release that footage, is there any chance we'll ever see that footage released in full? Probably not. Will the clipped commercial tape ever be re-released? Extremely doubtful. THAT is the sort of stuff I worry about when it comes to history, not "oh no, the music is changed" or "this one scene is changed". Because literally 22 matches got chopped up to fit onto a one hour, 45 minute tape, and practically all of the uncut footage is either sitting on rotting master tapes or was deleted/trashed when the promotion was sold off and became A to Z, never to see the light of day. And yeah, maybe it's a niche interest that concerns an ever-decreasing amount of people over time, but we all have to have hobbies, right? If that footage was digitized and stored somewhere, even if I don't have access to it personally, as a fan of Arsion I'd feel a little bit better because at least I know it existed. ECW fans, as much as I'm sure they're cranky about music changes, can still watch ECW. I can watch crumbs of my old favorites and see them become lost to time due to the frailties of physical media and the... what was it? Whims of a media company? Sounds about right.