tbarrie

MJF. The ultimate explanation will likely involve time travel or the multiverse.

Can you elaborate on what assumptions you think I'm making? I'm unclear on what you're trying to say at this point.

Okay, but did they provide any sort of explanation as to why there weren't constant double teams in Three Way Dances? Or did they just figure no one would care? You can arguably get around the problem by only booking three-way matches when all three people hate each other enough that an alliance is unlikely, no matter how strategically advantageous it would be. But modern promoters use them for things like tournament tiebreakers where that wouldn't necessarily apply. And maybe I'm being unfair. I mean, thinking about it further I do allow genre conventions to override the "humans should act like humans" rule to some extent. I'm fine with superheroes having secret identities, for example, even if the reason why they keep them a secret is sometimes shaky. I suppose the difference is that secret identities have been part of the modern superhero genre since its beginning in Action Comics #1, while three-way matches have only been a part of wrestling for what, thirty years or so? Maybe they're too recent an addition for me to just accept that wrestlers mostly stick to the spirit of the match just because.

The show will be entirely Gunther matches.

I think it is, because there's more than one way a work can be unrealistic. I have no problem with wrestling physics. I mean, I watch all sorts of genres with fantastic elements. If I can deal with superpowers and dragons and God knows what, I can certainly accept that in wrestling running into ring ropes causes you to bounce back and continue running uncontrollably. Why not? But allegedly human characters who don't act like humans are a bigger problem for me. And in an elimination-style triple threat, two competitors working together until the third is eliminated is so obviously the best strategy that pretty much every match should play out that way, which would get repetitive. And yeah, ganging up on one competitor is a pretty good strategy in a single-pin triple threat too. But in that style of match, when the alliance breaks down the third person is still in the match, which opens a lot more possibilities.

The problem with elimination three-ways is that it could never possibly work in a real sport. Though how big a problem that is for pro wrestling is debatable, of course.

Also, it's not like he's Reed's son or half-brother. There are more than enough generations between him and Nathaniel that he could easily be a black dude. (Three or four would be plenty, I would think.)

I'm turning fifty in less than two months. I don't know where that puts me on the Rippa scale, but I would like to request both Andrew Poe and Chaos remove themselves from my lawn.

I don't know. I doubt they'd want to do a triple threat semi-final for the very first Continental Classic. They need to establish how it's supposed to work for a year or two before they start messing with it. It's like - it's questionable whether having Royal Rumble co-winners was ever a good idea, but it would have been a really bad idea to do that for the inaugural Royal Rumble. I agree with all this being the most likely scenario. My expectation going into the Swerve-Moxley match was that they'd wrestle again in the semis, with whoever lost in the round robin winning then. That hasn't changed. Eddie over Swerve in the grand finals is my pick.

So thinking about how the last week of matches is likely to go, I came up with what I think is the most absurd idea for Collision: Claudio beats Danielson, Kingston beats Andrade, and Brody beats Garcia. That would put Garcia at 0 points and everybody else tied at 9. Making the whole Blue League essentially just an elaborate way to make Daniel Garcia look bad.

I can't tell if that last bit was meant to imply that things would get even better in a few weeks, or if you were listing Ospreay's current absence as another example of something gone right.

How about this scenario: Danielson beats Brody and loses to Claudio Brody loses to Danielson and Garcia Andrade loses to Kingston and Claudio Claudio beats Danielson and Andrade Garcia beats Brody and loses to Kingston Kingston beats Garcia and Andrade That puts Danielson, Andrade, Claudio, and Kingston all at 9 points. God knows how the tiebreakers will work then. But Claudio and Kingston will each have beaten two of the guys they're tied with while Danielson and Andrade will only have beaten one each, so I think maybe Claudio and Kingston advance?

I thought red neck kung fu was how Mark Briscoe murdered people. Why would he drop it when angry?

You're right. I was thinking White and Swerve would be tied with Swerve getting the tiebreak, and missed that this would put Rush even with them on points.

It's more complicated than that. If White beats Moxley and Swerve beats Rush, then Moxley, Swerve, and White all end with 12 pts. And because they went rock-paper-scissors, tiebreakers are no help in determining who advances. So presumably we'd get a triple threat instead of a singles match as the Gold League semifinals. If White beats Moxley and Rush beats Swerve, then Swerve is out and Moxley and White get a rematch in the semis, with White in first place and Moxley in second. If Moxley beats White, then Swerve is in second place whether he beats Rush or not. If Moxley and White tie and Swerve either beats or ties with Rush, then Swerve still gets second place. If Moxley and White tie and Rush beats Swerve, then it's Moxley in first place and White in second.

That would make more sense, honestly. Father going from "Synths are just tools, not people, and it's ridiculous to think otherwise!" to "Can you accept this synth as a child?" certainly didn't make much sense. Some have interpreted this as an attempt to give him more character depth, but if so it didn't land for me. And I still disagree that synths can't get fat by eating, despite the terminal explicitly stating that. But I suspect nobody wants to participate in an argument on exegesis of Bethesda games.:)

Care to tell me more about the GM Mode? I've been exclusively using Universe Mode on '22, but I turned off Rivalries entirely because the stuff the computer comes up with is so stupid. I'm asking now because '23 is currently 85% off (maybe only for people who own '22; I'm unclear on that point). Paying full price for the WWE series every year seems crazy to me - they just don't change enough year to year to justify the cost - but at under twenty bucks Canadian, I'm leaning towards trying it out.

It's a subject of debate. But in my mind, talking about "aging" as one thing is inaccurate - children growing to maturity and bodies slowly breaking down leading to inevitable death seem like different processes to me. I find it entirely plausible that the Institute couldn't duplicate the former; I find it considerably less plausible that they'd find a way a prevent the latter. And there is some clear lore that synth Shaun won't mature - some background characters at the Institute can be heard talking about how it's sad that he'll be a child forever. Which is taken literally would mean synths don't age in any sense, but of course humans use "forever" to mean "your entire life" all the time. (My dental office talks about promoting habits that will lead to teeth which last forever. This seems unlikely to literally occur.) So on the question of whether synths age in the bad sense, there's no clear answer in the game. My stance is that they do, not only because of how hard it would be to prevent that - the laws of thermodynamics are a bitch to circumvent - but because the game is clear that no medical test can distinguish a human from a Gen 3 synth. I don't see how you could make tissue that duplicates human tissue so thoroughly but that didn't age. (I also dismiss the idea that synths don't need to eat, even though there's apparently info in a terminal somewhere saying they don't.) Oh, I think you can be pretty evil in Fallout 4. You can side with the Institute, who are cartoonishly evil, or the Brotherhood, who are pretty racist. (Fantastic racists, admittedly, which is less odious than real racism. But that's a pretty low bar.) There's a fair bit of the game devoted to helping settlements, granted, but it's all completely optional. I've had playthroughs where the only settlements I controlled were ones where my PC needed a bed so she killed some settlers and took over the settlement. It's true that the dialogue trees don't give you the option to express a lack of interest in finding your son, though, so if you're playing a complete jerk who doesn't care about their kid at all you have to at least pretend. But then, the dialogue options are one of Fallout 4's biggest weak points in general.

Thanks. So where does NJPW Weak operate? Lichtenstein?

You know, it occurs to me I have no idea what a "Strong Openweight" title even is. Are Openweight titles like nuclear forces? There's a Strong one and a Weak one?

Hmm. You may have broken it, yeah. I've never tried killing that courser immediately. Well, that's the Brotherhood. When you're hunting them for sport and run into a randomly spawning group and you pick them off one by one, the rest just stand there. Even fucking Raiders are smart enough to go on high alert and (usually futilely) try to find the person responsible when one of their buddies suddenly takes a bullet in the head. But not those Brotherhood bozos. (And to be fair, I've always assumed that if I wasn't Hidden when I started killing them the rest would become hostile and start fighting back. But maybe not.)

The problem I see with that is if Bryan and Claudio finish with a match where the winner advances, and Brody King wins another match, then there's no way for Eddie Kingston to get out of the Blue League. And I still think there's a good chance Eddie's winning this thing - like I said before, wrestling bookers love dramatic come-from-behind wins. Of course, it occurs to me you might have meant Bryan vs Claudio in a match where Bryan has to win to advance, but Claudio has already been mathematically eliminated. Which could be more interesting. Would Bryan expect his stablemate to lay down for him? On the one hand, that's very much not in keeping with the Blackpool Combat Club's stated ethos. On the other hand, Bryan has totally been in dickhead mode all tournament.

Unless he wins, of course. If he already has three singles titles going for a fourth might be overkill.

Oh, definitely. And when you're building an outpost on an uninhabited planet, that arguably even makes some sense. But one of the questlines rewards you with a nice condo in New Atlantis and a decent sum of money, and you'd think you could use the latter to furnish the former. But not so much. Even in the middle of the largest city in the Settled Systems, if you don't have the skills to build the furniture you want from scratch, you're out of luck. That seems a little odd.

Well, the economy in Starfield is generally pretty weird. As I may have mentioned before, it's seemingly impossible to buy furniture. On the other hand, there's no shortage of grocery stores who will happily give you credits for a half-eaten sandwich.