John E. Dynamite

Jon Moxley's BattlARTS shirt.

I'm gonna very politely ask to be shoehorned into this if you're all still rockin' an odd number of participants. I found an old Google doc of good weird matches I had kicking around + I've been throwing darts at Roy Lucier's board again. This would be a healthy way to spend my time.

I once dreamed of a fighter coming out to a lavishly-produced, Frank Sinatra + Antonio Morelli Las Vegas-to-the-bone crooner cover of "Taste The Pain". That nasty discordant tritone is equally the realm of nu-metal and West Side Story, y'know. I still think of what that song's hook could be with a big, brassy band behind it, only to bring it down and swing on the verses. Dana White reads the boards. Book it.

For real, that's the only Rousey comeback I'd be curious about.

oh my lord that wasn't a choke or a neck crank, Meisha was on her MOUTH vylinz

Somebody in this audience musta sacrificed 1,000 crocodiles to Huitzilopochtli during the tailgate.

Dear God is the Spirit of Violence alive in Austin right now.

I'm actually paying attention to the Tag League off the lure of the CMLL guys and the the Yung Musks + Oiwa. Zandokan's been good for a minute. Dude doesn't even have a cagematch page, that's the state of lucha libre awareness. At least NJPW knows what's up. I got back into CMLL early last year off the strength of the Soberano vs. Templario feud and at first I thought Soberano was the rudo. Apparently he's more-or-less turned in Arena Mexico and I'm very pleased to hear it. He might be the best guy they've got.

It's good to see you talk about all this stuff, Curt, cause no small part of it is dead-on where I'm at right now. Guilt, bad psychiatrists, nasal drip nonsense... I put every aspect of my personal and professional life in the same place. I'm the center and I'm not holding. I let an addiction that I've romanticized (shit, professionalized) and a deeply negative personality define my entire adult life and I've been sitting around clueless how to act on it because all of my emotional resources either drifted away or up-and-left. And this withdrawal stuff is stupid - I don't know how to articulate the physical aspect of it properly. Psychologically is probably worse. Sober, I just stare at walls. Maybe doomscroll. With my baseline of 10 standard drinks then every game on my shelf becomes fun, every longform internet video is insightful, food tastes good, I can text people, at least. I can't regularly watch pro wrestling sober. It's why I dropped the poll I tried to keep running after DEAN passed. I'd skim IMPACT and NJPW on the DVR, indies and lucha on YouTube, figure out which AEW matches I could barely remember, and sort em all up while getting loaded every time. I stopped doing that months ago as an attempt to tone it down but it wasn't enough. To make a long story short last month I ran the biggest bender of my life and blew well past a fifth-a-day, every day for over two weeks. Called out of work. No outside contact. Some people just live like that, and there is no way I want to be that kind of person. But that's where it's been going for over half my life (and I am not that old) so I guess I'll do something about it. A much better set of professionals are in front of me then whatever the fuck I was grasping at over the summer. I have purpose and a plan. But I don't really know how I'm supposed to deal with the boredom, loneliness and anxiety. And the guilt/shame/loathing? I don't have any idea how to overcome it. But we move forward regardless.

This is exactly what The Devil would say. My casual fan people have been asking me all these questions this week and the "news cycle" as it exists has prevented me from finding much joy in engaging w/ the good ol' IWC, so I'll say this; Five consecutive singles matches from [everyone in the CC field] is balm. If there was ever a time I needed people to just shut the fuck up and pro-wrestle, it might be now. The man who inspired this thought is, of course, Rush.

I don't think there's anything to apologize for, I think the fact that they aren't interested in the veneration of the blockbuster blueprint is a huge factor in their success. They get deserved credit for not pandering to the broadest possible fanbase, and I think it starts with the fact that they have no shame in making video games that *play like video games*.

I let my morbid curiosity get the better of me and I peeked in on the show a few times. Liked most of what I saw - great Creeds showcase - but that promo was a stinker. Punk got over as a mega-babyface in WWE by being anti-authority in the Vince-dominated deep monopoly years (setting the stage for what Danielson & Becky did later). It worked, because a majority of WWE fans at the time resented the creative + corporate structure. But in 2023, they don't. The diehards think HHH is writing the great American novel. After a big return, Punk's gonna get cheered. Maybe to a point where he'll take shine away from babyfaces if he's turned heel. But if you present him as a face... does he really have a machine to rage against? I guess there's a built-in story with Heyman but he shouldn't be anywhere near Roman. Or any major singles titles, based on recent behavior and health.

There's a just-about-industry-wide problem, particularly with Western devs, that has to do with the medium's deep inferiority complex to film. The idea that movies and TV are always going to be viewed as more valid than games will, and that the best games then have to play like an "interactive movie". I think the most validating thing you can say about a game re:"Is is Art?" is that successful games have to be games. Their story can't be as successfully told through any other means. I think the fact that TLOU works so well as a television show proves the opposite point.

The reports from the arena that the crowd was by-and-large with the main event. The regular jagoffs on non-wrestling message boards and the side chat (when you don't feel like paying). The strangers I chat with about wrestlinf behind the counter at work or at a bar. The people on my social media + inbox who watch, but not religiously. When I say "perpetually online" I mean "not following every possible bit of online wrestling discourse". People who don't read dirtsheets/news sites, who don't check SquaredCircle and cagematch, who aren't part of a wrestling Dischord, who don't post somewhere like here. The majority of the audience, who never saw a Jay White match before he debuted.

A decent portion of the actual, not-terminally-online fanbase would have rejected Jay White as champion. Lord knows I'm not part of that group, but it's an issue in booking him. Because he comes off as nothing short of a world champion, except to the people who don't "get" him, which I don't "get", but here we are. He can't lose anything but the biggest matches but he can't be the top guy. Yet? If my preferred kind of wrestling doesn't have room for stapling your child's finger paintings to a person you hate's face then I am no longer myself.