Craig H

I was bored while making a craft so I decided to watch Landman for whatever reason. It does feel gross because it’s not very MAGA-y, but it feels like I’m being lectured to by oil companies at times for why renewables are just as bad for the environment as oil. Aside from that, this is pretty fucking funny. Every episode that I watched, which was 4 of them, gave me a pretty big laugh. I feel really bad for the guy that plays Billy Bob’s son on the show. He is somehow uglier and more rat faced than Alfie Allen.

Well shit. I'm sold.

Sounds pretty dope. What is the story about? Typical saving the world stuff?

I'm not gonna lie...I haven't watched any videos of Clair Obscur and up until a day or two ago had no interest in it primarily because the name is incredibly dumb. That is also very dumb and vain, I understand. However, it's like the fucking thing at this moment and it's all anyone is talking about or doing videos for. One dude I relied on for Last Epoch and Path of Exile videos is now doing videos for Clair Obscur. So I guess in the simplest way possible, wtf is this game?

Oh man, now THAT would get Cena some forever heel heat - getting Vin Diesel to interfere to help Cena win a match. But there is no fucking way ol' Vin is taking the ego hit from getting booed.

It's weird you don't know given how long you've been gaming and on how many corners of the internet you're on. It's a games website. Maybe one of the best. They probably laid the foundation for independent games journalism, podcasts, and long form videos and streams. It started a couple years before my daughter was born, I think, so around 2008. The original crew was Jeff Gerstmann who was fired from Gamespot because he wouldn't change his Kane and Lynch review and then spoke out about review practices over there (under an older leadership that has been dead for a long time). Ryan Davis from Gamespot joined him. So did Vinny Caravella and Brad Shoemaker. Once Alex Navarro was done with making Rock Band games he joined the crew as well. Others came on board, content remained great, they partnered with a company called Whiskey Media to keep them going, they came close to being killed off and then Ryan Davis died and there was a massive outpouring of support which showed just how much Giant Bomb meant to so many people. The site stayed alive, it was eventually sold to Gamespot and CBS because there was new ownership there. Since then, it has been sold too many times. Brad, Vinny, and Alex all left and formed Nextlander, The last corporate owners were Fandom, who fucking suck. Jeff was looking at putting in his two weeks because he had a new kid on the way, said he needed some time off, they fired him instead, which was super shitty. From that point on the site has been jerked around in multiple directions. A week ago it looked like the site was dead on the same day Polygon was sold and essentially died. Then as of yesterday, the main guys remaining at Giant Bomb purchased the site back from Fandom and it's back to being fully independent again. Why does that matter? When so many gaming sites are dying, the good ones anyway, it started looking incredibly dark when Giant Bomb and Polygon both looked like they were done. Giant Bomb staying alive is a faint glimmer of hope for people that want to report on games, not do reviews of games and do longer videos instead to show you what you're in store for, a podcast that doesn't pull any punches when it comes to talking about the shittier aspects of the gaming industry and what everyone is playing from bigger games to independent games, etc. It's an awesome site that has never not had excellent people working there and with how bleak gaming looked over the last week or two, this makes me feel really fucking good.

I hate everything about this Cena turn. Like everything lately, started hot and not it's a wet fart. The booking in these matches is beyond fucking dumb. Tonight was even worse with every top official coming out AFTER Cena destroys the ref with a belt shot. How the fuck is that not a DQ? This shit is dumb.

Same here. Like, Casian Andor? Really? Why do we need a series just for him. And ultimately the series is more about what happens between Palpatine declaring himself emperor. Casian doesn't even need to be there, but it doesn't hurt that he's there.

Holy shit. They did it. Those crazy bastards did. Giant Bomb lives and Jeff Bakalar, Jeff Grubb, and Dan Rykert bought it. Bless those beautiful idiots.

Yeah, those two, especially Ryder, have done the equivalent of getting fired from a good paying corporate job to starting a handyman business and making more than they made behind a desk and they get to set their own schedule. If I'm either guy, I'm NEVER going back to WWE unless it's for a lot of fucking money that I would just bank into a retirement fund and only for a year.

I thought the same thing! I just figured he was hurt or something. And speaking of dope as fuck tag teams that get ZERO airtime, Silver and Reynolds are criminally under used. They're both charming as hell, their comeback/heat spot is awesome, and they work their asses off. WTF! He hasn't wrestled once this year! Is he fucking dead?

I mean in my lifetime and beyond, but I see what you mean. As for passing yards, as much as I borderline hated him this past season, I kinda hoped the Bears or Colts would have taken Riley Leonard late and then the Colts did, which was good because they need the QB work more than the Bears do funnily enough. I can't believe I'm saying something nice about Leonard, but I think his aww gee shucks golly gosh darn mormon-esque dumb as a Golden Retriever mentality may lend itself well to the NFL and a program that can mold him into a better passer. His progressions and accuracy (come on man, you threw the football at your TE's feet when he was maybe 10 yards away and wide open) were atrocious, but every game he'd do some things that looked exceptional, so there's a good QB in him somewhere, probably a good system QB.

Shit. Chicago will have a second pope before the Bears have a HoF QB.

Holy shit. Those last two episodes man...Fuck, this is the best Star Wars has ever been and kinda what I've been dying to see for so long. Mando is really fun and all and it does pull back the curtain on the ineptitudes of the New Republic which I also wanted to see, but Andor is like watching a documentary about how it really all came crashing down. And of course, everything comes crashing down because fucking bootlickers who know in their brains and in their hearts what is the right thing to do don't do it and choose to stick with a regime and a leader that they should know would dispose of them at any given second. Huh, weird, now where have I seen that before.

Going back to something above, I never saw Butch Reed outside of WEF or WCW. Are you telling me he was an even better wrestler?

The real question is Pequods or Lou Malnatis. (The answer is Pequods)

Dipped with hot peppers? Call it the baptism.

Holy fucking shit. Walton Goggins hosting SNL is blowing my fucking mind right now. Like, I'm fucking begging these writers, just work in "we dug coal together" somewhere in there.

I was bored and decided to see what has happened. My god. That last episode was so fucking cringey and baffling. Ellie’s delivery of, “I’m gonna be a dad!” made me wonder just how fucking dumb these characters are. Like, the timing of saying it, how she said it, just everything had all of the gravitas of Giovanni Ribisi in the Other Sister. Plus, WHY AREN’T THESE CHARACTERS FUCKING FILTHY?!? Neither has cleaned up or showered in over a week. They then continue HBO’s long tradition of most awkward and ill timed sex scenes. I thought back to how ironic it was for Dina to ask Ellie if she needed yeast infection medicine when they bookend the episode with Ellie’s filthy ass fingers all up inside Dina. Why is Dina so gorgeous and made up? Why does her hair look perfect? Why does Ellie have a smudge of dirt on her face in one shot and it’s gone in the next? Why do they repeat stupid shot from the game like making unnecessary noise when they think the area is clear when it’s abundantly clear that the infected are smart? It’s so frustrating to watch because all of that is juxtaposed with really beautiful moments and scenes like Ellie playing and singing Take On Me, intense moments with Isaac who is perfect, and really beautiful scenery and sets. Like, what the fuck is going on here. I’m over them going golfing at this point because of how dumb some of this other shit is. Much like we’d wonder why Vince couldn’t learn from the mistakes of WCW, why can’t Druckman and Mazin learn from the mistakes of the Walking Dead?

It's possible that someone else thought the same thing, but I thought I was pretty alone in thinking Tom Cruise basically turned himself into American Jackie Chan and was essentially going to kill himself for our entertainment. But that just doesn't involve crazy stunts, it's also how good he is at physical comedy. Both Fallout and Dead Reckoning had me laughing my ass off at times just based on Cruise's reactions to the environment around him and, again, how good he is at physical comedy. It's probably an even crazier thing to say, but I really think his work in the Mission Impossible movies from Rogue Nation forward is the best work of his career. I finally got around to watching A Few Good Men and I thought it was pretty hammy. I would rather see Cruise as Ethan Hunt stumbling around after he was just brought back to life in Rogue Nation, especially him trying to be slick by sliding over the hood of a car only to essentially tumble and eat shit. It worked even better that he had Simon Pegg to play off of in that scene and Rebecca Ferguson played a hell of a straight man for those bits. Man I fucking love the Mission Impossible movies. Except 2, which is just hilariously awful. It feels like it was made on another planet and on another timeline.

The Marina experiment needs to end. It's like a baseball team trotted out someone that sucks but they paid a lot for so they have to try and use them, except Marina probably isn't getting paid a ton.

I will say that TK is really, really, really missing the boat with Willow. She is fucking over. Give her some room to work. Again, you have 4 hours of TV a week. There is no reason why so many matches need so much time. Fuckin, uh, christ, some of these tag matches where it's one tag team vs a jobber team don't need to go through one commerical break. It's fucking dumb. You can trim down some of these other matches to get a Mercedes match and a Willow match or a Stat match or a Toni match ON THE SAME SHOW. Also, caught up in all of this, I just realized AEW has the Grizzled Young Vets and they've been nowhere to be seen. We're heating up FTR again, which is cool, but can we carve out some room to get the GYVs over or not stop start with whatever they're trying to do with "JetSpeed?"

Oh, and MJF will ultimately have to get through Lashley to get his title shot against Hangman. Hangman and MJF feels like the bigger story that’s currently simmering, but if Hanger wins the title, I don’t see him dropping it to MJF. Seems like it will wind up being a big match with a lot of history and a lot of ways to spin off MJF and Hangman afterwards. MJF to Lashley for a blowoff to their feud and Hangman to Ospreay most likely.

FTR being heated up again at the same time as this MJF and HB story made me think we’re going to get Lashley finally relenting and giving Max the thumbs up only for MJF to give him the thumbs down and his old Pinnacle running mates, FTR, beat the shit out of THB and stuff piledrive MVP. Plus you just had FTR talking about getting the tag titles back so that seems like the direction in my head maybe as soon as Beach Break.

Something else my friend and I talked about last night is how much this John Cena story fucking blows. This is going to wind just being a larger example so bear with me here…All of the Rock’s bullshit has left the station so it’s up to HHH to make this compelling. It’s pretty clear he’s struggling at the moment. Not to the point where a change is needed, but this isn’t unlike what Coach experienced. It’s like how a band’s first album is great and the follow up is often disappointing. TK, and probably HHH, had a year or two of stories completely mapped out. Everything went mostly according to plan and was great. But since then it has been a bunch of good starts that just kind of went nowhere. Look how hot the New Day were with their heel turn and now they don’t get close to the same heat. Charlotte comes back and is booked to win the Royal Rumble and then loses to Tiffy in a rough but ok match. Neither of them look any better coming out of that match though. The booking leading up to WM was a mess and despite knowing for a full year that WM would happen weeks later year, everything just dragged on and was bogged down. Cody now looks like a geek. Roman and Punk are off the reservation and once again we had a good start with Bron and Seth and then a week later the top heels are being cheered and Sami is getting lukewarm receptions. People who think Chicken Jockey is insufferable have never heard of Seth Rollins. There’s a ton more examples but I’m not going to belabor the point. HHH isn’t infallible when it comes to booking and is just as prone as TK to not knowing how to keep things compelling coming off of your hot streak. TK figured it out and HHH can too, but will HHH have the runway and latitude to get back on track working in a corporate scorpion pit?