Craig H

I’m chalking it up to it being a PPV. If she continues to bring it on TV then I’ll be convinced she’s back.

That is now the 5th or 6th time this year alone in AEW where someone tried reversing out of a top rope rana and the other guy ends up falling on his head and I swear it happened to Danielson or Ospreay once already just a couple months ago. Maybe it’s time to tell the wrestlers to cool it on the top rope shit that’s like that.

Jumping out of giant sized Scott’s rotting skull into a Dr. Strange portal. So maybe Wong is involved in this too since he’s been involved in damn near everything else.

I’ve watched this a few times now and just noticed the “Liefeld’s Just Feet” sign. I’m dying.

I’m rock fucking hard.

Hook has gotten much bigger dudes up for suplexes than Jericho. Also, if you’re Jericho, why are you sandbagging someone who is tossing you around. Seems like a good way to risk getting dumped on your head. It’s just weird because like others pointed out, Jericho still gave Hook a lot, like letting him kick out of two Judas Effects, which I don’t think anyone has kicked out of. Then at the same time he straight up looked uncooperative. I don’t get it. Jericho doesn’t need to retire, but he does need another break. This Lionheart run ain’t doing it and he’s looking rough.

Here’s why I thought Jericho vs Hook was straight up awful, even worse than Daddy Ass vs Knife Pervert. To start, there’s simply no reason to even have this feud other than Jericho is a succubus that thinks he’s capable of getting the youngsters over. So that right there is somewhat infuriating. This was an FTR rules match, which is dumb but whatever, but it’s still a no rules match. And it was a no rules match that looked like all of the lame ass, vanilla WWE no rules matches. Cheap trash cans, cheap trash can lids, tables, dumb stuff spray painted on the plunder, kendo sticks, and so on. Like, I don’t think these guys need to go full Nick Gage, but AEW is famous for their wild brawls and this felt like something that the other company would put on. Not to mention…no one juiced? I know we got juice in the tag titles match, but it’s not like AEW hasn’t had multiple matches on one show with people bleeding. The actual moves were just…bad. Watch Hook try to suplex Jericho and then watch Swerve try to suplex Joe. Swerve only suplexed Joe once. Jericho went up like he weighed as much as Joe for EVERY suplex except the flying t-bone, which was pretty fucking cool. And if Jericho wasn’t sandbagging, then it was straight up dangerous at times where Hook doesn’t check his surroundings and nearly kills Jericho on the outside. If he’s a couple inches further in one direction, Jericho isn’t waking up. Then there’s the fake as fuck drama with Jericho doing the “I’m sorry” thing. I get that this is the most subtle heel run in history, there problem is that it just looks hokey. So I’ll admit that it’s probably not the worst match in AEW history because there race been some downright awful women’s matches in the early moneyball era of that division, but it might be the worst AEW PPV match ever. Jericho just looks washed. He looked extra bad last night and it’s pretty clear he’s cycled off of TRT or is hitting the bottle again. While Hook isn’t the greatest wrestler or anything, AEW has something with him and he has the potential to connect with younger fans in a different way than Ospreay is connecting with them. Putting him up against Jericho, doing this 50/50 shit, and having him lose to Jericho is just really bad. Or to put it another way, Hook was hot as fuck to start the year against Joe and looked like he was moving up. Now he’s in Jerichos quicksand and his ceiling is quickly becoming Sammy Guevara.

To add to the craziness, those two matches, one of them being the best match in AEW’s history and maybe in wrestling history, happened on the same show where AEW had their worst match in their history with Jericho vs Hook. Jericho needs to go away on a long vacation and transform himself again.

Ospreay vs Danielson was maybe the best match I’ve ever seen. Off the top of my head I think it was better than Okada vs Omega 2/3 falls or Bucks vs Hangman/Omega. And I started getting that feeling halfway through that match not even knowing there was a whole other half coming. And the craziest thing is that it happened on a night where Okada vs PAC fucking RULED. Dickhead Okada is just the best.

Another weird thing about rebirth is how inconsistent they are at telling you it’s a new chapter. Sometimes it will be obvious a chapter has ended and a new one begins and in the upper left hand corner it displays the chapter number and title of the chapter. Other times you just keep playing and only find out your chapter has changed when you go to save.

Jesus Christ. I finally gave up on all the extra stuff. After spending hours on all of the Gilgamesh bullshit, you get one final job quest to do, which is a brutal difficulty thing with mini games. I tried the one where you go through the 5 rounds of fights like you would in the simulator, got past the guest one easily enough, the second fight of 5 was against 8 or 10 Tonberries. Instant death. Constantly. Even with switching the team to all ranged people. Said fuck it and moved on to the point of no return. The absurd amount of mini games, side quests that get progressively more dull in later chapters, ultra annoying piloting and driving mechanics for the buggy and Tiny Bronco, and more have really soured me on the game. Some of this is self inflicted because I could have mainlined things, but for some of the extra quests and stuff there’s nothing telling you what you’re going to get so you don’t know if you’re going to get a sweet ass weapon or…an ether potion. More often than not the reward was something I had a shit ton of. I had a friend who beat it last week and he goes, “did you ever play the Kingdom Hearts games” and my heart instantly sunk. He was like, yeah, it’s that kind of Japanese video game bullshit, which is worse than Hideo Kojima’s bullshit for me. But who knows, maybe it will be so out there I’ll like it. Shouldn’t be too much longer now.

My wife and I are using “okey dokey” entirely too much.

Regarding who did it, in one of the expansions, or somewhere else, you see logs of who did what. You’re right though, it wouldn’t have been the Institute. I sunk so many hours into the game that I should remember, but it is kinda/sorta spelled out in a submarine you visit.

Finished it. Fucking loved it. More than that, holy shit, my hypothesis was right!!! This was so perfect. It basically felt like FO5. In fact, I have no idea what you even do for the next FO game with the series giving so much information in the first season. It’s just amazing how well they pulled off the humor, look, sound, and really everything about the FO universe. I don’t even know if you can call this an adaption since it’s basically a continuation of the story from the games, but it’s the best game to screen translation ever. I think even better than The Last of Us. I’m definitely going to rewatch this with my wife since she seemed sold by the first episode. There are so many Easter eggs and humorous bits that I want to remember. Finally, props to this whole cast. They’re amazing. I got a big pop out of Johnny Pemberton being in this and now, who knows, he either got the immortality serum or…the FEV. For hilarity’s sake I hope it’s the latter.

It’s honestly one of the best things about AEW where their history matters even if it takes years to get a payoff. Sometimes it would be nice if those payoffs would come sooner because not everyone watching is going to have an encyclopedic knowledge or memory of AEW’s history. Also, earlier when someone posted that Jericho trademarked “Jericho Vortex” I thought it was a joke. And then he said it. Like…Jericho is smart for wrestling. The Jericho booking vortex isn’t a good thing. He should know this. And this Lionheart shit does nothing for me. I honestly miss Judas. I didn’t think the match was that good. To be honest, Deonna has kinda sucked in AEW. Part of me wonders if she works better in a smaller pond like TNA, similar to Brian Cage. And the Mone promo wasn’t bad, but this smoke and mirrors bullshit with her only talking is death by a thousand cuts. Look, if she can’t wrestle, then there was no reason to rush her debut. That is another unforced error in a litany of them for AEW. The toothpaste is out of the tube though, it’s just what they’re doing now with her talking every week isn’t working. The other thing that really, really, really sucks is that the dream was Mone and Britt and Britt’s back sounds beyond fucked up. Second place would be Mone and our queen and savior Jayme Hayter, but she’s also on the shelf with a fucked arm. In a perfect world, this would have worked so much better if Mone could have dueling promos with Britt or have some battles with Hayter. Instead we get…this. So I get Alvarez’s frustration. It’s also hard when you watch WWE and see similar things to be frustrated about there where you have the greatness of one or two particular women’s programs and the rest is just filler. How women’s wrestling turned into a thing where the top two promotions can only afford the bandwidth to have one to two good programs each when both promotions have hours of TV is kinda bullshit. I’m not expecting either to become Stardom lite, but damn, you can do more.

Moxley challenging Hobbs in Jacksonville is a cool callback to the early days/covid days of AEW when Hobbs first hit the scene and looked to be aligning himself with Moxley.

Beanie Sigel's The Truth for Homicide.

Oh. My. God. I took a break from playing just because I felt like shit after my accident and then we went to see the eclipse and the next day we went to one of those water park hotels. The rest of the week last week was spent going to rehab and searching for a new car. So it felt nice to have a break from the game. Then I come back to it today and just when I think it can't get any more annoying, and I'm in chapter 12...

I spent so many hours replaying it when I got notified I was being layed off and basically had nothing to do for 3 months. I can't see myself sinking a ton more time into it again, but it should be good for a bunch of new players coming to it after watching the series.

It was one of those rare moments where I nearly hated the movie and thought it was the most base horseshit, but also thought Phoenix’s performance was really good. I highly doubt I’ll give the sequel the time of day.

Sliiiiight nitpick regarding Boyd Crowder being evil. I would say Boyd isn’t evil. He fell in with the wrong crowd with all of the Neo Nazi stuff, but then he cast all of that aside, which was one of Walton Goggins’ requests to keep doing the role - he didn’t want to be a racist Nazi. Now, I will say that Boyd was an outlaw and he and Raylan were two sides of the same coin. But him being an outlaw doesn’t necessarily mean he’s evil even if he killed people. I’m sure folks will disagree with that assessment, but after watching Justified 3 times through, I don’t really get the sense that Boyd is evil. And I don’t really think the Ghoul is either.

My god. Those magnificent sons of bitches did it. They really pulled this off. This is probably the best thing to hit Prime since the Boys.

It being a day later and marinating on the whole thing a bit…This was a whole lot of nothing. I take back some of my original remarks, except TK looking like a bitch. Other than that, they tried to add heat to the tag title match, which felt cold. Honestly, I totally forgot the title match was between the Bucks and FTR. However, I was in a bad car accident right at this exact time last week, Monday I drove 3 hours for the eclipse which turned into 4 hours back home, and then Tuesday and Wednesday we spent time outside Chicago going to a water park, so my memory is a bit shot. There were better and funnier ways to show that footage, yes, but at least FTR tried to make the whole thing work. The better move would for FTR and the Bucks to be a blood feud since they’ve been going at it for so long. The Bucks and Lucha Bros feuded for less time and we got a ladder match where 3 out the 4 guys nearly died and a cage match that’s one of the best cage matches in history that featured an exploding shoe. In the end, none of this matters. It’s not going to help or hurt anything. In all actuality, since Punk also can’t let anything go, this probably just gets under his skin even more unless Paul, Nick, Cody, and April tell him to just ignore something for once in his life. He seems to listen to those 4 more than anyone else. So I guess if the goal was to get under Punk’s skin by wasting a segment of live tv, then mission accomplished? And ultimately, it did take away from what was a really solid Dynamite, except this shit with Jericho and Hook that I don’t like. Can we we skip ahead and just get to Hook dumping Jericho on his head next week instead of dragging this shit out for 2 more months?

As long as ticket sales are hot there’s no need to cut off a quarter of the arena to facilitate a large tron and stage. Use the setup from Monday and make that extra money.

There’s also something kind of funny to Taz just sauntering around totally unfazed by it all. Taz is a dude who has seen some worse shit go down in ECW, WWE, and TNA. That was nothing. TK also looks like a bitch in that footage.