Technico Support

Oh man, Randy Orton's first reign, which lasted exactly one month. Green, not ready, and not at all taken seriously at that level at the time. All because Vince wanted to erase Lesnar as the longest-reigning champion.

All i know is, if I learned anything from Captain America and Indiana Jones, the guy punching a Nazi is always in the right. Like when ol' Cap punched out Hitler, there was nobody there disingenuously wringing their hands about violence coming "from all sides" or Hitler's right to assemble being infringed. Now I'm not talking about any specific incident. Just ruminating on right and wrong when it comes specifically to punching Nazis. Not that this is your particular issue, just venting about something that's been bothering me this week for some reason. Carry on, all.

I understand all that. But wrestling is not a legit sport and it's closer to acting or performance art. The Cranston analogy was intended to show the abject absurdity or the Eugene, Serena, etc stuff. I know you're a worker but somehow I doubt you're going to chase down your storyline rivals and piledrive them in the food court if you see them at the mall in order to keep the illusion alive to any marks who might spot you. It's not disrespectful of wrestling or wrestlers to suggest that keeping kayfabe -- literally pretending it's real when in public -- is a ridiculous concept in 2017.

You know, you might be somewhat right about Cass. But all these things? They're ridiculous and you'd be hard press to find a rational person who thought otherwise. Everyone knows wrestling isn't real and it looks like an absolute joke when Nick Dinsmore has to pretend to be a shoot retard in public. Bryan Cranston isn't out cooking meth because not doing so would hurt Breaking Bad DVD sales.

Yes, because someone saying something you disagree with = trolling. The go-to response of a poster who has been gotten to but can't figure out anything else to say. It's like a surly tween calling anyone with a critical opinion a "hater." Try harder; you're better than that. You're right on all counts. My feeling is that wrestling has to do something different to come kicking and screaming into this century. Kayfabe is long dead but Vince selectively acts like it's not. WWE is so awful right now because its head is a guy who vacillates between the late 70s and the late 90s. The answer is most certainly not a Russo "everybody knows this is fake bro so who cares?" approach, but it's also not "let's strictly keep kayfabe," because that just insults fans' intelligence and keeps wrestling in the same box it's always been in: "the people who like it are too dumb to realize it's fake." As I said, I don't know what it's going to look like and we'll probably have to wait until Vince shuffles off this mortal coil to find out. But wrestling is in this weird place because it started as a con and then everyone figured it out, but it still somewhat conducts itself as a con, which is ridiculous. I have no idea what the answer is but just keeping on keeping on and standing this year's Andre on a box and telling wrestlers to act like they hate each other IRL is not it.

oh noes he broke kayfabe clearly he should have stuck to his gimmick and beaten that baseball man to death

I don't know what it will look like, but it'll be fun when wrestling, and a certain strain of its fans, gets into the 21st century. Nobody is going to not buy a ticket because Cass admitted to being shorter than his billed height and Braun got his picture taken next to another tall person.

Damn. Cops are like, "sorry kid, you got what was coming to you."

Read this thread back a few pages It gets worse, not better. I stopped listening due to the show's increasing over-reliance on shtick and Prichard and Thompson "working their gimmicks."

That's the sad thing in all of this...I truly doubt he can, which is why he's in this situation in the first place.

C- post, not enough "JESUS!" Would not recommend.

Queen of the South, my guilty please chilling on Friday night with a drink show, was renewed. More work for a guy I can't help but think of as Mexican Phil Hartman.

This is like Uwe Boll talking shit on film critics. Dude, just stop. Also, this: Fuck do I hate this kind of intellectually dishonest comeback. "You can't criticize what I do because you've never done it." It's always a telltale sign of a really stupid person, someone with no other defense, or just a flat out asshole. Or possibly a combination of the three.

WWE Creative couldn't reignite a pile of sticks and tinder if you spotted them a tank of lighter fluid and three blowtorches. I mean come on. Most people thought Bayley was a can't miss prospect -- "the female Cena," everyone said -- and look where we are now. The writing for her was so bad that she's getting booed. It's gotten so bad that we've come all the way around to questioning whether she was ever really good or if was just "NXT smoke and mirrors." Which is funny because wrestling is supposed to be about a combination of talent and smoke and mirrors. That's WWE creative. It runs talent into the ground and pushes everyone, save a select few who are either Vince's favorites (Cena, Roman) or just too damn good to be kept back (Styles), to the middle. They do this over and over until you wonder why you liked a certain wrestler in the first place. So back to the Hardys. Even if they'd come in with the Broken gimmick on day 1, creative would have gotten involved and pissed it all away in short order. Partly because they can't help but step on their own dicks over and over for all eternity, and partly because they just can't abide seeing something they didn't create get over. Or it would have been a constant fight over the direction of the characters until Matt got fired again.

Well of course they're loyal to WWE and Braun. One Braun meal pays 3 Jimmy's employees' salaries for a month. Kevin Dunn is the gross little nerd sidekick to the bully that you see in teen movies -- emboldened by proximity to the bully and just happy he's not the target for once.

Well come on. You have to believe in yourself or nobody else will. Fans aren't going to lay their money down for Mike Half Decent or Mike Passable.

I read that script, too. It's amazing to me that someone in Hollywood, in this age of lazily taking advantage of a baked-in audience, and creating a "shared universe" for everything, thought the best approach to Prometheus was to remove anything that made it an overt prequel to Alien. And they brought in Lindelof, who I'm convinced literally can only orgasm when writing an awful plot twist or never-to-be-revealed mystery.

That and the "device in his baggy pants" were all mentioned in the 1bob column I referenced. Seems we all read the same article in at least two different places somewhere in the early 2000s.

I remember reading the exact same thing on 1wrestling's Q&A column back in the day, so either the site ripped off the magazine or vise versa.

Thing is, that's apparently what he believes is entertaining and what the audience wants. So back to my wrestling analogy, he's just getting all his shit in. It's gone from a passable podcast to a collection of tropes.

Whatcha doin', Bob? Oh, just catching up with Mark Henry's kids online

Seriously. The time jump between seasons, one character being dead, and all the various changes are a little too much ("wait how the fuck is Shaky tying a tie? Oh, okay"). If they go more than half the season without revealing at least something, it's going to suck. This is Ray Donovan, not Lost.

LOL! Yes, please let your friend know that they'll probably enjoy this if they liked Prometheus. Very very mild spoliers So yeah, it's got all the huge import and world building of Prometheus if that's your friend's jam (it's not mine) and not as much dumb shit.

I finally got around to watching Alien: Covenant. Damning with faint praise, it was better than Prometheus (or, as I told a coworker, slamming my balls in his office door would be better than Prometheus). I'll say it was pretty average. Inoffensive, but nothing to write home about. The two things I dislike: Let's ignore all the other bullshit and just focus on Alien and Aliens. Great, simple movies. Now these new films are building this massive, important mythology there where it's unnecessary. i feel like it's a matter of just making "bigger" films because they can't make better films. Also, I'm frustrated by the xenomorphs' constantly shifting effectiveness. In the first film, one Alien wiped out a whole crew. In the second, waves of Aliens were disposable cannon fodder. I used to hand wave it as, "well, we're talking inexperienced space miners vs actual Marines." But this film featured nigh bulletproof Aliens absolutely wrecking shop. So it just feels like Aliens vary in ability based on what the script needs from them. Which is inconsistent and shitty.

Exactly. It's like Hollywood Asshole #3542 skimmed the Cliffs Notes and said "so it's a sci fi/fantasy with a kid in it? Shit, I can work with that! Somebody bring me my dystopian YA fiction template!"