SirSmUgly

I feel like RZombie feels about Mark Henry except about Sheamus. I wouldn't pass the Matt D "can you empathize" test either. Beyond him being a good striker willing to give and take stiff shots, I'm not sure why people like him. I don't get it. I watch Sheamus and wish I was watching Finlay instead. That guy had a real sense of meanness that both face and heel Sheamus lacks. There's no authenticity there, no sense of seething violence brimming underneath the surface. What am I missing?

I saw the 'Taker Streak DVD recently, and I'm pretty sure 'Taker/Henry, 'Taker/Flair, and 'Taker/HHH I are all significantly better than any of the 'Taker/HBK matches or either of the last two 'Taker/HHH matches.

Yeah, and my problem with the Fall of Man is that the big dude should be decapitating guys with a clothesline and the small dude should do a chop block. What they have going now is surprisingly not impactful.

There are really only two things I want to see: Sting vs. a main eventer in an eight-minute glorified squash where Sting hits all his spots twice apiece. Bryan vs. Lesnar with Bryan winning the gold. The rest of the upper-midcard on down is so uninteresting to me at this point that I don't really care what happens. To paraphrase Jay-Z, everyone else is like a treadmill just running in place, getting nowhere fast after a whole year done passed.

Daniel Bryan is the best, man.

The Ascension sucks, but they can be salvaged if they watch a lot of Demolition and use the formula of convincing clubbering + knowing how to cut off opponents and delay the hope spot/hot tag.

I didn't watch this show, but Bryan is back, so I care again. Well, just about Bryan, but I care.

Rollins isn't a great promo, but most of his issue is the shit that the writers script for him. "Dean Ambrose is held tightly in the grip of insanity. I knew that at HELL IN A CELL, to defeat the embodiment of pure insanity, I would have to transcend insanity. What you saw last night was a man who has TRANSCENDED INSANITY. Ambrose's brutish insanity was not enough to stop SETH ROLLINS from continuing to make his way to the top of WWE!" That's a reasonable approximation of your typical Rollins promo. Like, who the fuck actually talks like that? The writers are the worst.

I had to see it spelled out before I got it, so don't feel bad. Thanks, Wikipedia!

That he was ever able to do that stuff at all flabbergasts me. Actually, Show is also very impressive for being in, what, his mid-40s and being that size and still being in quite good shape. This guy should be at the "Special Attraction" stage instead of the "gatekeeper for young guys we're pushing" stage in his career.

Speaking of the Giant, is he one of the most athletic wrestlers ever, like if we were doing a consensus top-20 most athletic list, he'd be on that list? I'm watching Uncensored '96, and he takes a crazy over-the-corner bump against Loch Ness. Every big match he has in '95 and early '96, he's doing some other crazy move or bump that is just astonishing.

FL has no state income tax either, so the NXT guys probably don't have to pay state taxes in that case based on OSJ's experience.

So yeah, my premise is wrong.

Road expenses are tax deductible so you get it back at the end of the year EN090. Look, insult my family or punch me in the dick, but call me EN090, and we're going to have to duel in the streets. Business expenses are tax-deductible, but every time I've ever read or heard a wrestler talking about salary, they always point out the road expenses that end up eating up their contracts. They could all be bad at taxes or just super-cheap like Mick Foley, though.

Maybe. I wonder how much the top NXT guys do get paid. They don't have to really leave home, which definitely helps offset road expenses. Neville's already in this year's video game too, so he'll get a little something from that (as well as whatever merch he's pushing now). I'm not so sure that what he's making now really is chicken scratch compared to what he might make as a lower-card guy on the roster. I guess the argument is that he has wider merch opportunities + the Big Four PPVs to make $$$ off of if he's on the main roster, but then again, those numbers will go down as more people move to streaming, and as CM Punk pointed out, Vince hasn't even discussed residuals from the Network with the talent. I strongly question the assumption that Neville would be so much more financially better off that it would be worth it to be on the main roster as a lower-card guy with a shitty gimmick over biding his time in NXT and waiting for someone with at least some lucidity to book him in a halfway-decent position.

Rather than being snarky anymore, I'm just going to say that their six-figure guarantee is probably really not much after expenses on the road. I can't imagine that your lower-card guys are making tons of money. Not to mention that IIRC, some of those payoff checks were in the very low five figures.

Yes, I'm sure he'll be crying all the way to the bank. Considering how lower-card guys were complaining about their WM payoffs in the past couple years, it's more like he'll be laughing all the way to the check cashing place that also gives out high-interest short-term loans.

Eh, the WWEN has backlogs of awesome wrestling AND NXT. Plus, streaming is the way of the future. I'm glad to support them on that part of their business. As soon as people with Nielsens stop watching RAW, maybe they'll fix things over there. As for me, I don't watch anything RAW related that gets put on the Network that is post-2000, so with their analytics, they know at least one first-day subscriber has little interest in RAW as it is currently. Maybe I should stop watching their PPVs as well.

Honestly, if they're going to pull stuff down that I want to be able to access, I am tempted to cancel. The only thing is that NXT and those NXT supershows are so good, and I'm pretty sure you can only see the supershows on the network.

The state of high-speed internet coverage in this country is fucking shameful, which probably mostly explains the 100K+ buys on traditional PPV. We haven't had a great national project since the Hoover Dam and the national highway system, but if we were going to do one, a national broadband project would be the ticket. It's easy as an urban warrior to forget just how many small towns and sparsely populated areas have no access to even DSL.

Show/Mayweather is probably the best example of a non-wrestling athlete being awesome in the ring. That match is awesome. I've seen clipped versions of Lawler/Kaufman and the surrounding matches as well as versions of Kaufman's Intergender Challenge, and both of those are examples of a guy who just knew how to be a slimy, infuriating piece of shit in the ring as well as on the mic.

My personal GOTY is probably Mordor, inFamous: SS, DKC: Tropical Freeze, or Child of Light. I'd have Civilization: Beyond Earth in the mix too, even though whenever I play it, I realize that I'd rather be playing Alpha Centauri/Alien Crossfire, so I boot that up instead eventually. This was a weak year for video games. I guess that's why I'm playing so much N64 lately. Speaking of the N64, I'm revisiting Super Mario 64 right now, and it aged so poorly, probably more so than any other game I can think of from that era...and it's still fun despite the somewhat broken camera system and controls. I don't think Mario ever got exploration exactly right in the way that Super Mario 64 gets it. Even back in the day when it came out...nearly twenty years ago? Man, I'm old. Anyway, even back in the day, I really thought that it was overrated because of the camera issues and some control issues, but playing now, I can see the charm and why this game is so enduring. I think these N64 3D platformers are the perfect example of why 2D platformers are just intrinsically better games, though.

Orton was briefly hot again after breaking away from the Authority, so of course they don't have him get revenge on the authority during SurSer in STL, and now they're bringing him back only to feud with the heat-sucking machine known as Kane. Weird decision here. They should just put the belt on Rollins at RR and have him beat Orton in a placeholder feud at the February PPV before going into Mania.

This show had some quality wrestling. Lynch/Bayley was really fun. Lynch went for the knee and Bayley's offense was off of knowing that Lynch would come for the knee and being prepared to counter anything Lynch would do to take out the knee. The match felt like a race to see which strategy would pay off first. That was really fun and every move made total sense. Kevin Owens speaking comes off too much like a badass to cheer against in some ways. He just shows up ready to punch enough faces to win the gold. It's hard to root against a guy with that type of character, especially when his work tends to back up his character. That's why Owens's stalling was such a smart move at the beginning of the match with Neville; we get to see a little chicken shit in him to counter the toughness inherent in his persona. Anyway, this match was awesome, too. Neville did a great job of being a damage sponge and selling those high-impact Owens moves as death (especially that hanging DDT sell). The other match was sufficient for the eventual Cass and Enzo breakup over Carmella that I have zero interest in. Lots of good stuff in promos too from Neville to Owens to Lynch to the Vaudevillains (and Regal's disgust with their batty evil laughter).

At least feeding Rusev to Reigns would help establish Reigns's bonafides as a top-level star. Feeding Rusev to Cena does nothing for anyone. If the kids need to see Cena beat someone threatening, they can just use Show again or something. It'll be new to those guys. EDIT: If it was 1987 and DVDVR were around, we'd all be bitching about Paul Orndorff not getting a run with the belt and wishing that they'd let Savage beat Rusev instead to really establish the former as a main eventer. Maybe I shouldn't speak for DVDVR...*I* would be bitching about that stuff.