Eoae

Meltzer thinks Vince wants wants Big E on a separate show from Kofi and Xavier so fans take him more seriously as a singles wrestler. Basically, Dave thinks Vince thinks New Day will "drag him down" (meaning Big E). Dave doesn't agree. He thinks Big E can elevate Kofi & Xavier. I don't necessarily think you need to split them up to get Big E over as a singles wrestler, but i don't think it's a bad idea either. It's possible fans will just chant "New Day' at Big E if they're on the same show or that the writers will run out of ideas if Big E's push struggles and lazily throw him back in six-mans with Kofi/Xavier. If they're committed to a Big E singles run, I think it's worth finding out what they've got in him without New Day constantly in the background. Dave thinks Becky and Seth will go to Raw since Charlotte changed brands. He's speculating Seth will be one of Big E's first feuds.

?? What’s this about?

I’m assuming she was in character when she posted that. I’m already over the “edgy” swearing and sexed-up skits and ass shots.

Did I read that only half of each roster is eligible to be drafted? That's an... interesting... change. Did they specify who decides which roster members to protect and which to make eligible to be drafted? Coin flip? Guess a number? I'm assuming we're not supposed to believe that an actual person (network exec?) selected half the roster to be protected and somehow decided to leave both Roman Reigns and Big E - the heavyweight champions - unprotected. I mean, in kayfabe terms, that's sort of idiotic. Smackdown could have protected Big E or Roman, then used their first pick to draft the other. Then, they could have used their first pick to draft the other. A worked draft is really a sort of ridiculous proposition. I know the idea is that we're going to tune in to see who is changing shows (lol), but the reality is that not that much changes and the draft picks tend to be nonsensical. Who chooses not to protect your champions and biggest draws? Or passes on pretty much everyone to draft 44-year-old Jeff Hardy? (To be fair to Hardy, he's still over and probably sells merch. I'd take him long before a lot of the midcarders who have gotten drafted inexplicably high in past years.) Didn't watch much of the show. Tuned in, caught Carmella putting on her mask, and thought "Right, this is enough of tihs for tonight". Is the mask possessed or something? It does not at all look like something that's going to protect Carmella's face, but it did seem to give her superpowers since she beat down Liv in like 30 seconds after putting it on. Or maybe they used up most of their match time struggling to get the mask on and had to go straight to the finish. Whichever. I guess they want Karrion Kross to not stand out so much in his gimp mask.

So you don't lose your top draws (and belts) to the other brand? Makes sense to me. I'm more perplexed why someone would use one of their draft picks on Jeff Hardy?

I’m wondering if the original plan was to wrap the run at 99 or 100 instead of 74. With the twins and three Harry’s in play, I feell like you could have gotten 24 more issues out of the overarching story.

Final Fantasy Origin: Stranger of Paradise got a new trailer and a release date at the Tokyo Games Show. Release date is March 18, 2022. Trailer's aren't grabbing my interest yet, but .... I like Final Fantasy, I like Soulslikes, and I like Team Ninja both with and without Itagaki. Nioh 1/2 are probably my favorite 3D Soulslikes not directed by Miyazaki, so I'm guessing the actual game will be quite good. Squeenix also announced a new game from Hiroyuki Ito. He hasn't directed a game since FF XII but has a new game called Dungeon Encounters. It's some sort of minimalist dungeon crawler. Not really the sort of "big" game you might expect from him.

Probably. Bleeding Cool has an article addressing that question, and says the long game was always to undo Sins Past and partially address One More Day by giving Mephisto a stronger motivation to undo the Parker's marriage (the fan rumor is that editorial changed Spencer's ending). BC does say that Spencer left the book sooner than he expected and that's why some of the early clues don't add up and the reveal of the twins and AI Harry seems abrupt. Apparently some arcs were cut out/compressed and the twins and AI would have been hinted at well before the eleventh hour with the truth being wound out much more slowly. Interestingly, BC compares Spencer's exit to King's Batman run. I'm not sure how to take that, though. King was basically fired from the main book unexpectedly, so I'm wondering if Rich is hinting that Spencer was fired once Marvel got wind of his Substack deal? I'm not sure that's what Rich is implying but it seems possible.

As a fan of later-era FMW - yes, I'm the guy that liked the sports entertainment era - I was kind of disappointed that they glossed over the later years. Hayabusa got some coverage, but the post-Onita era mostly got summed up as "they leaned into sports entertainment" with a negative quote from Onita and a couple shorts clips. Team No Respect deserved better, lol. They covered FMW history pretty well until Onita left, then pivoted to talking about Arai, the Yakuza, and the financial problems - without saying much about how the financial problems came about beyond blaming Arai for borrowing from the Yakuza. My guess is that they wanted Onita's cooperation and it's hard to go into the downfall without mentioning Onita periodically returning to loot the piggy bank. IIRC, someone appealed to him to help the family after Arai's death (the Yakuza came after the family to get their money back and basically took the family''s home and whatever they had) and he refused. Enjoyed the episode very much. Haven't been a fan of the "tabloid tv" approach of most episodes this season. I was a huge FMW fan 15 years ago but I didn't really get into the promotion until the Funk Masters of Wrestling. Bahu's site was fascinating back in the day. I probably should look into his Youtube series. Did think last night's episode was far to kind to Onita, though. Ricky Fuji looking like like the wizened master in a 70's martial arts movie was something. Didn't quite expect Fuji to age quite that way.

No complaints here. NFL is sooo much better booked than WWE or AEW. It's going to be great when the finish to the Pats-Bucs game is Brady running in a qb sneak to take the lead after Gronk pulls out a pair of brass knux and ko's the defender.

Another national tv game that comes down to the wire? NFL is over-delivering this year.

The story needed at least one more Harry Osborn. Three is never enough. Not sure I agree that the Harry reveal and the twins stuff should have both happened 25 issues ago, but, yeah, it definitely does feel like the story was drawn out far too long for no particular reason. Far too much was crammed into the last handful of issues. I think the story would have been stronger if they hadn't tried to shoehorn AI Harry in at the last moment. You could probably still get to the twins retcon some other way and post-OMD Harry would have sat better with me if he had a supernatural explanation instead of being yet another clone. The core story of Kindred as a creature from Hell worked for me and I liked that the explanation wasn't simply "OMD had Peter inadvertently screw over Harry", though, as I said before, how many separate deals with the devil do you need in the same story? The shoehorned-in clones, retcons, and Mysterio involvement didn't work for me well. It was weak storytelling to hand-wave away events we previously saw with "Mysterio did hocus pocus" Still not a bad run. Certainly stronger than the back half of Slott's run.

Thought this ep was a mess in a lot of ways. Wasn't sure what the point of view was supposed to be and who was supposed to be the sympathetic figure here. A lot of the stories told make Kanyon out to be erratic or worse. It's said in passing that Kanyon was bipolar but that's not put over strongly and leaves me with more questions than answers. Was he really bipolar or did he just tell someone that? Was he getting help? I have a lot of sympathy for him if he was in treatment and properly medicated. Not very sympathetic if he was refusing help. Then there's the stuff with the WWE. It's really hard to no what to believe when it comes to the company. Vince doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt, but the flimmakers don't even seem certain if the company knew Kanyon as gay. Kanyon apparently told Mitchell he thought they knew, but the doc doesn't make it clear what that is based on. Just a feeling? And why the hell did Kanyon agree to the Boy George stuff? He probably didn't expect the stiff beating UT gave him, but he had to know that skit wasn't going anywhere good. And the whole thing is so demeaning. I can't imagine I would ever agree to something like that. I would guess he was afraid for his job, but, again, I'm filling in a lot of blanks instead of the doc suggesting some reasons. I'm guessing no one knew Kanyon that well? Either he was so closeted no one knew much about what was going on in his head or his erratic behavior pushed people away. I kinda wonder what he was like in the locker room? Vandenberg called him an unreliable narrator and made him out to be a danger to be around. I can easily imagine him burying himself with Vince and the talent if he was pulling the stuff he pulled on Vandenberg in the locker room. Or maybe not? Again, lots of questions, no answers. Didn't feel like this episode got to know its subject well or had much of a point of view. I feel like Kanyon was probably just self-destructive, but the episode didn't shed much more light on Kanyon than that (or even reinforce that idea).

Monster week for me. Going to end up buying 8-12 games. Next week packed too. Currently playing G-Darius HD and it's fast becoming one of my favorite shmups. Forgot how much I enjoyed this game 20 years ago. It's been a great year for shmups. Ports of two Saturn Cotton games are dropping today and we've gotten ports of two Cave classics - Mushihimesama and Espagaluda II - this summer, with DoDonPachi Resurrection and a Deathsmiles compilation on the way. Also a number of interesting indies out this week. First couple reviews of the Eternal Cylinder were good and the demo was strange and fascinating (from a developer that does strange, fascinating games). A Juggler's Tale is beautiful and the demo was fun. Death's Gambit: Afterlife drops today too. i liked the original game more than most people so I'm good with a revised version that has about twice the content. Anyone play Chernobylite yet? It's been on PC for awhile. A little on the fence about it, but it looks nice and reminds me of the sort of offbeat "outside the box" shooters I enjoyed on PS3 but don't see as often on PS4.

If nothing else, it's a lot more feel-good when Uncle Arn talks about murdering people than when Bill Goldberg does it.

I can't wait until Kyrie has a epithany and realizes Allah is actually just hunky dory with getting jabbed if it means you continue to get paid. I"m sure he'll hold a press conference and try to tell me about it. Or at least tell me about as best he can giving one-word answers and generally acting surly.

My firm's vaccine mandate takes effect tomorrow. Ultimately, the malcontents represent a very tiny minority and the number of people willing to give up their jobs will be something like 1% of all employees, if that. That said, the bitching from the anti-vaxxers is the absolute worst. One employee thought a woman was going to throw a chair at her for reminding the person about the upcoming deadline. Another made a friend of mine in HR cry. He probably wishes he hadn't done that. Guy looked like he might cry after I chatted with him a bit. i did enjoy him pompously telling me that no one was going to fire him tomorrow because liberals talked a good game but didn't have the stomach to make the hard decisions because they were too worried about making everyone feel special. I mean, I'm not a liberal. And I'd have to try hard to care less about whether he feels special or not. He was right that no one is going to fire him tomorrow. He didn't make it that far. Just a lot of ridiculous personal attacks and childish acting out. Over what should be a fairly easy choice to take an hour, get a shot, and forget about it. I'm a cynic. I mostly expect people to be stupid, selfish, and hypocritical. I'm still disappointed by the anti-vaxxers. This week can't end soon enough. It's a shame all we can do to the anti-vaxxers is fire them.

That's not part of Stern's job, though. He probably barely knew who Chris Kanyon was.

Brewers setup man Devin Williams got a little too drunk after the Brewers clinched Sunday and punched a wall, breaking his hand. Expected to miss all of postseason. This is probably one of those things that makes being GM of a professional sports team less fulfilling than you would expect.

Bloomberg News reported that at least 11 developers have/had 4K Switch development kits. Article says Nintendo was asking studios to make higher resolution games, speculates that Nintendo killed or postponed plans for Switch Pro due to...? Chip shortage, I guess, but I'm not sure it makes sense to kill the Pro and launch the OLED during the same chip shortage. Nintendo is denying the report and reiterating what they said in July about not having any other models except the OLED in development.

At some point, subscribers need to actually be watching your product or else they'll be former subscribers at some point down the road. For the moment, yeah, Peacock is mostly interested in how many subscribers WWE is estimated to be bringing in. But at some point, they're going to have to sit down and figure out how heavily they want to promote WWE programming, how much they want to spend when it comes time to renew the contract, etc. Then, Peacock most likely will care how many people are actually watching WWE programming, how many WWE fans keep renewing their Peacock subscriptions, etc. Just glancing at the number of subscribers you have right this minute and calling it a day is a pretty simplistic way to at things. Then again, networks are starved for weekly live programming, so maybe Peacock won't care much. I mostly think that explains the exorbitant jumps in rights fees over the past few years despite declining ratings.

I thought the same thing, but according to Metlzer, the 90-way no-complete clause is company option. Talent don't have the choice to decline it.

Yes, they're planning to add games to the service sometime in 2022.

When they released Bray Wyatt, they told Alexa to stop using Bray's moves and no-selling. Presumably, that has something to do with why they're allegedly taking Alexa off tv for awhile to be repackaged. Does Alexa still get "Bray" chants from crowds?

I actually thought the last couple seasons were better than most of the middle years (after season 8 or 10). The last cast (Anthony Anderson, Jeremy Sisto, Alana de la Graza, Linus Roache) had a decent bit of chemistry and the writing picked up the last couple years. I'll at least give it a chance. Watched NCIS: Hawaii pilot a bit ago and liked it quite a bit. Initial impression is that it will be a fair improvement on NCIS: New Orleans (not that's much of an accomplishment, imo).