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Sounds like the news of Ceman's release was.... premature.

I think it's just clown makeup.

I finally got my copy of @Phil Schneider's "Way of the Blade - 100 of the Greatest Bloody Matches in Wrestling History" and it's enriching my week in ways far beyond just having 100 great matches to watch. I want to take this opportunity to give this thing, this board, the Death Valley Driver Video Review the credit that it deserves. I was a fourteen year old on-and-off-mark who decided to backyard his freshman year of high school because his friends wanted to & I had a camcorder. Not long after building a few gimmicks around the fact that I could tie a t-shirt around my face and make it look like a ninja mask / do a passable Arnold Schwarzenegger impression (voice, not physique), I got to Googling and stumbled upon the Green Board and things like Schneider's compilation tapes. It offered me so much more of a leg up than the standard Jericho/Ultimo match on KaZaA or whatever oldies the WWE DVDs of the era were offering. It offered me tome upon tome, meticulously curated lists of some of the finest human performance art ever recorded, matches and angles and talents that I would have never discovered otherwise. I was popping pimples and learning the intricacies of sexting while reading those old DVDVRs and watching those bootleg VHS. The prose, the highbrow/lowbrow mix, the FONT and PUNCTUATION~!, the DIY of it all. It elevated the artform for me to witness people speaking of it in that way. Simultaneously reverent and flippant. Simultaneously intelligent and unacademic. Esoteric and inviting, human and weird. @DEAN , @RIPPA& Co aren't my Meltzer, they're my Robert Christgau and Pauline Kael at the very least. The Bible of my preferred form of entertainment, not to get too heavy with it. I fucked college up on my first try and came back with a vengeance as an acting major. Pro wrestling was and always will be my baseline when it comes to participating in that artform. Have I ever channeled a Bill Dundee promo while performing Shakespeare? Bro, I might have, and I'm a better person for it. I had no obvious career path until I established a really solid beer program @ the corner liquor store, and I did it because I was able to pour myself into the act of curation - digging through thousands and thousands of products, figuring out which ones were worth highlighting, trying them out and publicly promoting them every Saturday for six or seven years. PIMPING. SHILLING~! Etc. I learned it here as a young man. Just like digging through stacks of VHS and letting people know when you find those killer Bobby Eaton or Yoshiaki Fujiwara matches. I took the energy I saw in those old DVDVRs and Schneider comps and I applied it to the job I had then. Now I own and manage a successful business get to do real people shit like buy a house and support my loved ones despite being an Anxious Millennial Dorkboy. I thank you all for it. Dropping $18 bucks on a Phil Schneider book in 2021 was such a "well, duh" thing to do, and flipping through the pages of this very good book is the closest I've felt in years to being that wide-eyed skinny kid who would bump off his friend's roof if it meant that I got to show him a match from the '95 Taue Miracle Run (Brian had and still has a great and safe chokeslam, ask his three-year old son). Reading through 400 pages of an intelligent and tasteful dude's good-match manifesto has really got me going. This curator shit is REAL, people! We live in a world of insane commodity surplus and daunting amounts of available content! Learn to research, learn to identify the good shit nobody knows about, and TELL THEM ABOUT IT! I'm certain the oldheads, the OG crew, realize that they really did make an eternal dent in the history of how the world understands the artform of professional wrestling. I'm not Tony Khan. But you guys should know that a bunch of non-wrestling-biz regular kids took in all that stuff you typed out in those wee small hours and cherished the hell out of it. Bravo, the fruits of your labor are gonna last a damn long time.

Just say you have to be vaccinated with proof to attend AEW shows. Let these fuckin’ morons who think it’ll turn you into Magneto or whatever just be deprived of live entertainment and whatever else. I’m so sick of catering to these nutjobs and them ruining it for everyone else that has done what they’re supposed to. Goddamn.

The forthcoming hot tag to John Silver in the Elite vs Dark Order elimination match is going to be the hottest hot tag of all time

Don't you dare correct this.

Release Vince. Big savings there. Dude hasn't drawn since the 90's.

When I did my re-watch of the Manias, I wanted to see things from matches I hadn't seen/noticed before. So, to that end, I'd never realized Paul Orndorff is the MVP of the Mania 1 main event. He has to walk a literal first-timer through a heat segment, sell for everyone, do the job, AND do a post-match angle that would eventually lead to his face turn -- all amid the absolute chaos that was that match. Oh, right, and the company's entire future depended on this match. You can see how good a professional he was, because you never doubted any of it for a second. I think that's about as good a tribute as I can say for the man. RIP Mr. #1derful.

Wrestling needs less Shawn Michaels influence. Bret Hart over Shawn Michaels by far.

Jim Cornette booked Bruiser Bedlam, for fuck's sake. Maybe watch the Dark Side of the Ring episode, and possibly grow some empathy.

I forgot what it was like for an episode of a wrestling show to be over with and think "man, I wish next week was right now". That's me with AEW on a weekly basis now.

An amazing stooge job from Paul here. RIP.

Also the Domino’s PiP add during the pizza cutter spot was just fucking tremendous

@EoaeI had no idea you worked for the UWF, very cool!

Put yourself in Tiny Khan's shoes. Rumors abound that Daniel Bryan and/or CM Punk are coming to AEW. You tease a big debut tonight... and you deliver Nick Gage, a legit out-of-left-field surprise with tons of fans and just as many haters, all of whom pop like little monkeys for his appearance. So you deliver big on the tease, while still potentially having Bryan/Punk as well. That's so genius it almost hurts.

Austin Aries: "Can I come too?" Everybody: "eww, no."

Yep. The three main matches of Summerslam feature three regulars vs two non-wrestlers who go back to their normal lives after the show and one part timer who was hot a decade or two ago, depending on how generous you're being. Nobody is a draw because Vince was tired of building draws only to have them leave, so when he needs someone to draw, he has to rely on those guys that were actually built up back in the day. What a sad, laughable mess this wresting company provider of streaming content is. Glad I stopped watching them five+ years ago and get all my schadenfreude second hand through podcasts and reading posts here.

I am here for considering 1997 as being "semi-recent"

This is the worst post.

BOOGIEDRIVE ELBOW, BITCHES.

The Tony Khan Rich kid diss is weak. This is a ‘rich kid’ spending the family money on weekly Wednesday night wrestling parties for all wrestling fans to enjoy. He’s also saved American wrestling from drowning in shit. I love benevolent rich kids like this.

"Old school fans" calling out Gage for a bank robbery is the most hypocritical shit. These dudes harken back to a time when the locker room was filled with actual murderers, child predators, rapists, domestic batterers, straight-up klansmen, and all manner of carny-ass criminals, and they're going to shit on a guy for falling into addiction and making a really bad decision one time? A guy who, by all accounts, has straightened his shit out to the best of his abilities? Yeah, I got no time for these people.

Anybody wrestling either of those dudes should consider hitting them with a jab. I hear both are super scared of a quick jab.

I didn't know I wanted Sting trading shin kicks with Orange Cassidy before doing a lazy pounding of his chest, but I sure am glad it's in my life now. I very much enjoyed that moment.

Sting beating his chest in slow motion had me laughing out loud.

Sting doing the slow motion pounding of the chest really tops that for me.

The best bad take from a WWE-programmed fan I saw was the guy who said they didn't build the main event up enough, because it just came out of nowhere; That there was no angle to build to the match. When it was pointed out that they'd been building to it for months, he said "That's not how you do it, the angles to build the TV main event should happen earlier in the same show". I'm pretty sure that AEW announcing matches a week (or more) before they happen is a pretty big factor in why the shows draw, but OK. If it's all you've ever known, you'll think it's only way to do it, I suppose.

I fucking loved this show! PROFESSIONAL WRESTLING MOTHERFUCKERS!

The part where he started sweet talking A Metal Hook is what wrestling is all about.

Ethan Page is fucking awesome.

It’s a BOY! Jasmyne and I did a gender reveal and got blue confetti. Can’t wait for him to come in November!

If Rick Knox sees this, is it like sunlight hitting a vampire?

The Dark Order just being the most realistic, wholesome and supportive group of friends to Hangman was my favourite minute of the show. They’re honestly the ultimate good guys in wrestling right now.