Craig H

Honestly, MJF vs Wardlow should get the Lesnar vs Cena from Summerslam treatment. Actually, a better comp would be Lesnar vs Rock because in that loss Rock was able to get some shit in. My other hope is that for the entrance we get Wardlow coming out to War Pigs even TK can buy it for cheap enough and this time he snaps out of the handcuffs instead of waiting to be uncuffed. Best match will probably be Hangman vs Punk. Neither guy seems capable of having anything less than a really good match at this point in their careers. Probably double juice too. I'm also looking forward to the 10 man tag just because I love a good wild brawl. Hardys vs Bucks shouldn't go more than 10 minutes. I'd also like to see a face win the Owen on both the men's and women's sides. Too many matches.

At first I thought that Bale got ultra skinny again for this role, but he really looks about as skinny as he was in Ford vs Ferrari. Probably just the makeup making him look more gaunt than he really is. Also surprised at the short runtime. MCU movies had this trajectory of getting longer and longer and now they're getting shorter and shorter.

Hah. I've seen so many reactions like the one above or like mine where all you can really muster is a "holy shit" or "WTF." It's the next day and I'm still stunned. When Howard enters and the candle flickers I thought it was Lalo then. Then when it flickers a second time, shit turned into a horror movie and those final five minutes were some of the most intense and gripping in the history of BB and BCS. At this point I think it's a pretty easy call to say BCS has surpassed BB. Maybe not in terms of popularity, but definitely in terms of quality. It's going to suck when this is all done because I'm just going to want more from that whole universe, but it's better to go out on a high instead of milking something to the point where it's like the Walking Dead and it's nothing but diminishing returns or worse.

V Rising continues to...ahem...consume my life. I only meant to spend 30 minutes in game just gathering materials like wood, stone, and copper to keep working on my castle and keep adding structures to it. Next thing I knew two hours went by. I never played Valheim or any other survival-ish games, but this one is really addictive. I think it honestly may be the vampire aspect and all of the mechanics that go along with that that keep me coming back. I have my nice little plot of land for where I'm building my castle and nearby there's a couple players who have made these cathedral looking palaces. It's also just fun to group up with 2 or 3 friends and head out, explore, fuck around with enemies, and quickly and easily trade materials with your friends. There are some downsides to the game that primarily have to do with it being in early access. For instance, we're on a PVE server, so no one should be able to fuck with us if we're logged off. My one friend is positive that before logging off the other night, he put himself in his coffin, which basically protects you from any and all attacks and sunlight damage when you're away from the game. He logged on last night and was dead, someone presumably dragged his dead corpse away from his startup castle, looted it, and looted his storage boxes in his base, so he was back to square one. It's possible he forget to put himself in his coffin before logging out, but even then, it's a PVE server so you shouldn't be able to loot another players body or their base. That stuff is strictly for PVP servers. And that has honestly been the biggest issue any of us have had with the game. It runs super smoothly for early access and I'm shocked at the amount of content in the game. In other news, up until installing V Rising the other day, it had been almost a year since I did anything with my Steam account. I noticed that Gloomhaven hit full release all the way back in October, which means you can now play the whole entire campaign, all nearly 250 campaign scenarios, with up to four friends. That is fucking awesome and I went ahead and bought copies of it for a few of my friends. They also just released the Jaws of the Lion DLC, which is basically just the full Gloomhaven Jaws of the Lion board game. Then that lead me to check out the progress on Baldur's Gate 3 since I bought that in early access too and man, that game still needs a lot of work. The camera in it is still all weird. Divinity Original Sin 2 is still a better D&D experience, but if they can just iron out some of the glaring issues with Baldur's Gate 3, then it will be just as good.

Holy shit

I was going to say...There's a bunch of people on this very board in the AEW threads who care too much about Tay's personal life.

Still trying to figure out if I should buy WWE 2K22 or not. I think the one thing holding me back is that one of the modes is only for a year and isn't a continuous thing. Plus, it looks like I missed out on the sale on the Xbox and PS5 where it was $45. I'm sure there will be a summer sale on one or both soon where it will be the same price or cheaper.

How could I forget Patrick Wisdom or even David Bote. On the one hand, looking at what's going on with Baez and Bryant, it made sense in hindsight to get rid of them, along with Rizzo. The problem is that all of it was half-assed. They still got basically nothing for Darvish, they didn't want to trade away other pieces of the core team like Willson or Hendricks when they could have, and the returns on the other players didn't even come remotely close to reloading the team to set them up for a new window of contention. Oh well. I'm a Cubs fan. I'm used to this team being utter shit, but this is starting to look worse than when the Tribune/Zell owned the team. Maybe the Ricketts will sell the team to help fund their shithead brother's run at the presidency? Just wishful thinking on my part.

I'm sure it's on an ancient indian burial ground.

lolololol go ahead and look up the repugnant shit Mark Henry used to spout off about shooting on wrestlers in the ring because they basically weren't company men. I believe it was him and Bully Ray on Busted Open and multiple times they would talk about the cruel shit they'd do to wrestlers in the ring and in the back to essentially get them to fall in line.

What's up with AMC doing these midseason breaks?

Hooooo boy, I fell down the V Rising rabbit hole and it is freaking awesome. Out of everyone on this board, I think @J.T.might get the biggest kick out of it. Right now it's in early access on Steam for $20. It's a kinda/sorta MMO that is more on the survival side of things. You join a server and you can join a server with friends. Servers are currently capped at 40 players. Your character is a vampire that awakens with it's powers greatly diminished. Within an hour though, you're acquiring materials to craft weapons and armor to making chopping down trees and breaking up rocks go faster. In the game world, which is fairly large, you wind up fighting all sorts of creatures and humans. The variety of enemies is pretty deep from what I could tell in my handful of hours with it. It does have a top down view so it's Diablo-esque, but it's also a skill shot game. WASD controls your movement while your mouse controls your attacks with the left click and right click moves the camera around. Then there are all the number keys and a few letter keys that let you select items or abilities. The one cool twist to this is that since you are a vampire, you need to feed and the sun is fucking deadly. As far as feeding goes, once you get any enemy down low enough, you can feed on them to fill up your blood pool. That also gives you passive buffs based on what you're feeding off of. There was a moose a fed off of that gave me a movement speed buff while a bear I fed off of gave me resistance to sunlight. The game also has a day and night cycle where like I said, the sun will start to kill you if you're not hiding in shadow. Plus, as the day progresses, the angle of the sunlight moves. It's really damn cool. Then there's one of the coolest parts to the game. With all of the resources you acquire, you build a castle for yourself and that part is very intuitive and easy to use. You start out simple with wooden walls, but the higher level you get, the more complex you can make your castle. There is an energy requirement for the castle though, which is based on enemies you kill. Basically, anything you kill gives you these blood orbs that you feed into your castle that makes it impervious from outsiders for a set amount of time. It's an engine to keep you coming back to play the game so this creation of yours doesn't get fucked with or overrun with vampire hunters, beasts, etc. It doesn't take much to keep it protected. After maybe 10 minutes of killing mobs I had enough blood orbs to protect my home for at least a day and a half and the higher level you get, the more blood orbs you can pump into your home so it's protected for weeks or even a month, which lessens the amount of grind there is so it doesn't feel like such a chore. Plus, if you're on a server with friends, you can enter each others homes, use each others sawmills or workbenches or blood presses or whatever and since it's MMO-esque, you can see the homes everyone else has built on your server. The servers being capped at 40 players lessens the amount of space these places will take up and that blood orb mechanic to keep your home protected is also a way to get rid of homes from folks that have simply stepped away from the game. It's all very brilliant and I haven't played anything quite like this. For $20, it feels like a steal. I can't recommend it enough and I'm hoping it eventually makes its way to consoles too.

Reminds me of the Sherlock BBC series, but even then those episodes were all around 90 minutes I think and definitely nothing close to 2 hours and 30 minutes. Whatever though. I'm here for it all.

Yeah, I thought about that too and I'm hoping the last paycheck Voight gets is from that Ray Donovan movie. I think Hunt wouldn't even buy that Phelps is alive, but I keep thinking we'll get some kind of return from a past villain. It sucks that they murked Henry Cavill's character because that would be a neat return. I'm fucking stoked though. M:I has surpassed basically every other movie series for me. Every movie winds up being better than the next, whereas the Fast series has been just a bunch of diminishing returns with each new movie and it gets less and less fun.

Barry last night had maybe one of the funniest/darkest segments in the history of the show with Barry describing what he could do to the head of the Banshe channel. I was laughing my ass off. It was so fucked up and I want to know what the process was like to write that dialogue. Finally got around to watching the Atlanta finale and, man, I know reviews for it were positive, but I hated this season. I watch Atlanta for the goings on with Ern, Al, and Darius and whatever weird hijinks they get themselves into while Ern is always teetering on getting fired by Al. This season was just fucking weird. Just a lot of social commentary and the finale being all about Van and a seemingly flash forward of Van now having a French accent and wanting to move to France was just whatever. If Van were wanting to move to Germany then I would at least buy that, but France? It was just weird for the sake of being weird. The only good part of the finale was the amazing cameo with that guy playing himself. The rest though? I just don't care about Van in this series and never really have. I believe that they shot seasons 3 and 4 back to back with 4 being the final season so I'm hoping that season 4 will have the group out of Europe and the series gets back to normal, as weird as its normal usually is, and less of whatever the fuck this season was, which I think I can only describe as experimental.

The last two movies have been more serialized showing a connection throughout the movies. I did have this really crazy, wacky idea that we would wind up seeing Jon Voight's character alive and well, but that would be a bridge way too far.

The Cubs just might be able to make the Reds not look like the worst team in baseball over these next four games. I have faith that my shitty team is up to the task. Man, and now I'm wondering if I can even know who all is on the team now. There's Willson, Suzuki, Nico, Happ, Hendricks, Stroman, Frank, uhhh...umm...Oh, Heyward. Off the top of my head I can only think of 8 active players. Looks at roster... Holy shit. Drew Smyly? Clint Frazier? Andrelton Simmons? Now, I could swear that ownership and Jed both said the team would be competitive. I'm sure they wouldn't be lying.

Oceans 8 was………fine? I guess? You’re not going to get another good Oceans movie unless you get Clooney, Pitt, and Damon being joined by 8 new people. Or 7 if we include Cheadle.

Probably could have just left it at that. Still not digging that he’s in the new Top Gun.

I miss when Chris Pratt was just Andy Dwyer and Peter Quill, which was just a less dumb Andy Dwyer.

So did Dax.

Loved this Dynamite, except for all of the promos. Hangman vs Takeshita fucking ruled even if it was a little too Kings Road/headdroppy for my liking. Jesus. Takeshita is going to be a huge star. The face off with Punk and Hangman at the end was great too. The build to their world title match feels awesome and like something out of UFC. Fenix vs Kyle wound up being better than I imagined. Lots of submission work from both guys and all building towards who would make the bigger mistake and get caught. I'm not a JoMo fan, so as long as he isn't signed long term and this was a one shot for him then I'm fine with it. The roster is bloated enough already and I'm not super thrilled with the Owen having zero AEW original talent on the men's side of things. Joe continues to look really good wrestling a style that should get him through the next few years. All of the stuff with Jurrassic Express, Hobbs and Starks, and Lee and Swerve is great. Loving the subtle continued fuckery with Christian and Jungle Boy. Christian keeps setting Jungle Boy up to fail and I'm here for it. First Starks got me by calling Lee "Rex from Toy Story" and then Swerve killed me saying Starks looked like a bar of soap with a pearl necklace. Can we just let Starks and Swerve talk shit at each other every week? Look, Britt vs Maki Itoh wasn't a classic or anything, but all it had to be was entertaining and it at least was that. The one thing I don't like with Itoh is the same thing I didn't like about Emi and that's having a singing or singer gimmick. I know the background to it and all, but it doesn't work with American audiences. It's just confusing. When Itoh makes appearances there, I wish they'd lean more into her being vulgar and trying to censor her. Um, what else...The weekly Jericho Town Hall was fine, I suppose. It was all about showing why people shouldn't automatically think Eddie, Santana, Ortiz, and BCC are going to win and exposing all of their glaring weaknesses. Really dug Jericho bringing up old shit between Eddie and Bryan because I forgot all about that. Eddie being like, "yeah? So? I do think that" was pretty funny to me. Oh, I fucking can't stand Jeff Hardy. I don't think I've ever been a Jeff fan and think his style has always sucked. And now he's just more dangerous because he can't protect himself on the bumps he's taking. Cole I do like a lot, but that match should have been Cole vs Darby instead of Cole vs Jeff. I still don't quite get why Jeff didn't give Darby the rub last week. Match was good between Jeff and Cole, if a little rushed.

I still don't understand WTF they're doing by trying to position Sammy as a face and having Scorp go right back to being a heel. That is just fucking dumb, TNA level bullshit.

Regarding AEW vs NHL, I already knew about the ad rates and that's mainly the only difference. It's fucking dumb, for WWE and AEW, that in 2022 it's still looked at in such a weird way that they don't get close to the same ad rates as other shows. In WWE's case, while their viewership has dropped, their demo is still great and their live event business for PPVs and what not is still good. Shit, they rake in money for WM, Saudi shows, and a bunch of other shit. In AEW's case, they're consistently growing, even if they hit a bump in the road the last few weeks due to the playoffs, their PPV business is solid, and so is their live gate business. You see all of those people on camera side for both companies? The ones sitting in the front rows? Yeah...Those people aren't driving beat up 1992 Toyota Corollas to the show. They're flying in and driving nice rental vehicles or they're driving to the show in something much nicer. Most of those people likely aren't living in shanties or dumps. It's all fucking dumb.

It is amazing how much of a dirt cheap bargain Warner Discovery is getting for airing AEW content and yet they shoveled out money for NHL, which doesn't draw nearly as well and doesn't hit the demo nearly as well. I like the NHL a lot, even if the Hawks suck and had a bunch of scumbags there, but it seems like it would make more sense to throw your weight behind NBA, AEW, and NHL in that order.