Mario Hobb

OK, I'm wrong then. I don't recall the inner ear story until Flair told it on his podcast five or six years ago. I thought it was just Flair being Flair.

In the past five years or so, Ric's started claiming he was injured by the Ultimate Warrior and that led to him dropping the belt. According to Ric, Warrior dropped him on his head in a match shortly before the Bret match and caused an inner ear problem. Supposedly, that caused an issue with his equilibrium that lasted over a year and the office decided to get the belt off him as quickly as possible. The decision to do the switch at a house show was because Ric couldn't go at more than half-speed and the office knew the match would be terrible. FWIW, there are a lot of holes in the story. I've heard Ric tell the story several times and the details aren't consistent or don't make sense (Ric claimed that doctors didn''t know how to diagnose equilibrium problems at the time. Lol). Ric also says the injury was so bad he couldn't really go in the ring for over a year and couldn't function in daily life or drive a car, but.... he somehow managed not to take a year off. Ric was on heavily pushed for four months after he dropped the belt and doesn't appear to be impaired or going at less than half speed. If the injury was that bad, he'd have missed time or ended up in the Observer. I Ric's generally what writers call an unreliable narrator, so.....

Money. The way Meltzer told it, USA wanted to add WWE programming to offset the loss of Smackdown without actually spending the sort of money it would have taken to better Fox's offer. Slotting in NXT to replace Smackdown looked like a win for both companies (WWE had already been looking at ways to increase NXT's brand awareness, most likely by getting it on tv somewhere). I do wonder what kind of numbers they'd pull if they weren't competing with AEW. We might get some insight into that this month. If they're on Wed solely to pull viewers away from AEW, it seems counterproductive - assuming they really could get a better rating on another night. On the other hand, they might have been concerned about viewer fatigue and competition from other sports. I'm really curious about what sort of bump NXT gets the next few weeks since it won't be competing head-to-head with AEW. I'm guessing it will be less than Vince expects (though, with the pandemic, I'm amazed they've retained as much of the audience as they have. I find crowdless wrestling mostly lifeless).

Hardsuit Labs fired the lead writer and creative director on Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2. https://www.pcgamer.com/vampire-the-masquerade-bloodlines-2-fires-lead-writer-brian-mitsoda-together-with-creative-director/ Seems to be a creative decision, not some sort of misconduct allegation. Both men say they weren't told of any dissatisfaction with the project before being unexpectedly removed. So.... probably not seeing that game for quite awhile. Hopefully Hardsuit will use the extra time to work another subtitle into the name of the game. I can't imagine this being more interesting than the 2008 reboot. That was one of my favorite games of the generation, but it failed so badly Ubisoft went back to the PS2 trilogy and released a "lost story" from that continuity, then abandoned the ip for ten years.

That's more or less my take. I thought it was above average, but it has a number of elements that seem lifted from anime I thought were better. It struck me as one of the shows you like a lot until you watch the shows that "inspired" it. It's worth a watch, though. Finished Somali and the Forest Spirit last night. Really enjoyed it, with the only complaint being that it felt like it should be longer. Most of the stories are two-parters, so it doesn't seem like a lot happens before they head to the ending. I was interested in the world building, so I would have liked to see more about the conflicts between humans and non-humans and the role of golems. Still, it's my favorite anime of 2020 so far.

I appreciate Stuart Baker taking one for the team and saving the world from more Squidbillies. 2020 has been horrible enough as it is.

Rundown of what they announced (in order the games appear in video, spoilered for size):

I won't be too surprised if Vince accidentally creates a new timeline where Skynet evolved and decided to wipe out humanity after being forced to watch 3-hr. Raws for a few months.

I'd be kinda interested in Tsushima dlc because the dlc Sucker Punch did for the InFamous games was more substantial than the norm. IIRC, Festival of Blood for the PS3 was fairly long, and there was enough to First Light that it got released by Sony as a standalone edition (and even got a retail release in Europe). I buy/download most dlc, but I'm not too excited by the idea of dlc for story-driven games. Most of the time, it comes off as unnecessary. Sometimes, I feel like it weakens the story (Castlevania: Lords of Shadows, I'm looking at you). I'm guessing we won't get story dlc since the generation jump is about to happen.

Yeah, I just had no idea the DC line had contracted that much. If someone had asked me this morning how many monthlies DC was publishing, I would have guessed 50 or 60. How many books does Marvel still publish? I don't hear about much beyond the X-books, Cap, Spencer's Spidey, Aaron's Avengers. Thor, Immortal Huilk, a few others. Hickman's X-Men is the only thing I'd read lately, but I'm only keeping up with the title(s) he scripts.

Well, an elderly man in his mid 70's is still making most of the creative decisions. Vince probably couldn't relate to young people fifty years ago when he was a young person. Most stories on Vince make him out to have tunnel vision. He's completely focused on his company, to the point that he doesn't watch tv or even have many interests outside of wrestling. Message boards debate whether Vince is in touch with what current fans want out of the product. Do we really think he's more in tune with what's ""edgy" or "cool" in the mainstream. It's probably a remarkable achievement that the company doesn't come across as more out of touch than it does. I don't think Vince has a lot of young people in his inner circle and he seems to be inclined to ignore the input of his writers and management team much of the time. We could, but.... (dramatic pause) we don't need another hero.

Am I reading this right? The main DC line consists of less than a dozen and a half titles? I had no idea things were this bad. I sorta follow comics but not much. Haven't been to the lcs in several years and I don't follow industry news, aside from following CBR on Twitter. I figured the line was pared down, and read that it was going to be downsized further, but I.m still stunned. I kinda thought the number was still... 50? 70? I dunno. Whatever is was around the time of New 52. So basically, if you want to write for DC, you better want to write the Big Three or maybe GL or Flash? Is that the gist of it? That seems like a real stifling creative environment to work in. I can't imagine many projects for secondary characters are going to get the go-ahead.

Nintendo scheduled an Indie World Showcase for tomorrow @ noon (EST). https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2020/08/nintendo_indie_world_showcase_announced_for_tuesday_18th_august

There was a rumor back in the Spring that Nintendo was going to remaster 64, Super Mario Sunshine, and the Galaxy games for Switch as part of Mario's 35th anniversary, but so far that hasn't materialized. It was even rumored that the collection would be announced during last month's Nintendo Direct, but no such luck. There are a number of surprising gaps in Nintendo's Switch retro library. I'm really surprised Nintendo hasn't remastered some of the older Zelda games for Switch, particularly the N64 and GameCube titles. Twilight Princess and Wind Waker were remastered for the Wii U, and Nintendo's made an effort to get the Wii U titles to a wider audience. I used the Wii U's hard drive mostly for retro ports. Nintendo ported some interesting stuff to the Wii U Virtual Console, like the Game Boy Advance remakes/enhanced ports of some of the Mario titles and the Zelda and Metroid handheld ports. Lol, I wasn't using the hard drive space in the Wii U for anything else, so.... I think I downloaded one VC exclusive (Affordable Space Adventures), Most of the decent third-party titles got released elsewhere. Personally, I'd like to see the Majora's Mask and Ocarina of Time 3DS remakes remastered for the Switch.