Beech27

I'm sure New Japan would love to use Moxley in Dallas, but we have no reason to believe they're angry. He got their biggest youtube numbers by far, will elevate Umino, Juice, and whomever he has buzzworthy matches with. Money well spent, so far; and probably money well spent if it never goes beyond those items. And I haven't seen any New Japan fans grumpy about or rooting against AEW, honestly; and there are plenty of folks in this thread I recognize from my time in the Japan folder.

I think it is. If AEW wants a relationship, they have to withhold something of value for now. New Japan will decide, in time, whether TNT exposure is worth complicating their relationship with AXS, whether AEW is worth leaving ROH, what Kenny/Moxley/Jericho are worth stateside, etc. I'm more curious to see how it goes than invested in any specific outcome, to be honest.

Making me and probably several other people happy, Kojima tweeted that he wants to earn a place in next year's G1. (I mean, he probably is done, barring a rash of badly timed injuries. But I will hope.)

Dave may be the least articulate professional word-combiner I've ever read/listened to--this is where the Jack Sparrow "But you have heard of me" quip would go--so he does, in some respects, make himself an easy target. His passionate engaging with trolls also spurs things on. Mostly though I think he's a victim of his own success and commensurate stature. People can cultivate a pretty substantial online following by dunking on Dave.

Two big, protected matches, in the slots that are often quasi-spoilers. And Dallas gets Okada/Tana, which is really smart, since it probably won't draw in Japan anymore but fits as a bucket list item for American fans; and KENTA/Ibushi, who both have very high profiles in the States.

Making the finals would be a step forward. Although his loss to Naito last year was just sorta fine, losing to Naito in the finals might be better and it would certainly be bigger. He could just win too, I suppose. Part of me thinks Moxley will make the finals, because you’re only going to have him this year, so you might as well. And if that’s true, you want him to lose in the finals to someone who would really benefit. SANADA would fit that role. Mostly I like how wide open this all seems. Neither block winners nor the finals are at all clear to me; but beyond that, there will be a lot of “could go either way” matches. (Ultimately though, I think Naito takes it, defends the shot and his belt, and becomes double champ. Revenge in every step.)

I think you’re probably right. Granted they’ve basically done that recently—with the same players—but Okada is too god-tier otherwise and Suzuki should react to the G1 snub. Anyway, this lineup is great, but as a nerd who has been watching their entire relevant careers, I’d have enjoyed Kojima and Makabe getting a gold watch run.

He had quite a bit of swelling, but Charlton translated/said that he was ok. Kind of an aside: if more people watched NOAH, there would (rightly) be an uproar about Kotoge shoot headbutting until his own eyes are bloodshot. (Kenoh does them too much also.)

I don't think there's a stretch with any of these besides Janela. A really good utility infielder might be called a good hand, and both basketball and soccer players (and skateboarders, which Darby is) talk all the time about expressing themselves and entertaining fans while trying to win. Even fighters do the same. You see strikers dismiss wrestlers as boring in MMA, and all the major heavyweights now criticize the Klitchko jab and clench style.

Samoa Joe tells a similar story about Kobashi, who apparently thought he was being brought to ROH to work a 1980's style foreign heel gimmick, and feared he'd get no reaction otherwise. Anyway, Misawa was never my favorite guy in my favorite matches; but he was a guy without whom those matches could not have happened, the force to which my favorite performances reacted, or the rock they crashed themselves against. Harold Bloom has written extensively on literary influence, arguing essentially that everything is, to varying degrees, Shakespeare or not; but in either case there is influence, whether attractive or repulsive. I feel like there's a little bit of that with Misawa. So much of modern wrestling aesthetics can be traced back to his style, and so much of what is different is still different in relation to his style.

If that's true--big if!--it's obviously huge news. No one has got the broad strokes of big stories more right more often. Often enough smaller things fell by the wayside, and I get why that bothered the detractors. But there's no denying the growth made, and it would be silly to pretend he wasn't at least partly responsible.

KENTA spoke with Chris Charlton for ten minutes. Things of note: --He won't confirm any plans with New Japan or anywhere else past the G1. But he's with New Japan now because it has a global platform, and he can show the world KENTA, rather than Hideo Itami. --Nothing about NOAH specifically. --He does want to wrestle Okada at some point, mostly just because he's the champion right now. Naito, also. --He wants to kick Moxley's ass, to show that while he was "stupid Hideo Itami" and Dean Ambrose was at the top of WWE, there's no gap between them. --They weren't just trying to milk the audience; Shibata had to point for so long because he couldn't find the entrance. This is fun:

Read the whole thread, but this part... man.

Sanderson as Storm is a pretty spot on comparison. I have a friend who really likes Sanderson, who balks at my characterization of him as an "IKEA writer", no matter how many times I insist that's actually a compliment. I do find the videos of his BYU class on youtube to be very useful, and I'm buying Stormlight, so I can't be too negative. It isn't unusual, and I don't mean to imply that sales ought to be an ironclad metric of quality; I only mean that Williams has never been popular enough that one would be out of step in not being a fan. As for King: He'd have a hard time finding--much less liking--authors who sold more copies than he does; although he does like the Harry Potter and Jack Reacher books, so it's possible. To say more on some of the other writers mentioned (I've read all of them but Shea, who I'll now check out)... Jordan: I find a couple of his Conan pastiches harmless fun, but Wheel of Time actively bad. It's probably the most popular thing in fantasy that I just don't get. Other than Goodkind's books, perhaps. Rothfuss: In terms of the premise of his series, you'd be right. Special Orphaned Boy goes to magic school, seeking his destiny and revenge. The charm of it is in the execution, as Rothfuss is a very good prose stylist. Problem is, he's not much of a plotter, or even an active writer, at this point. He strikes me as a polymath who wanted to publish a novel, did, and is now caught in the maelstrom of its unexpected success. Brooks: Agreed. But when I was 8 or so, a LOTR with the serial numbers and archaic prose filed off appealed to me. Erikson: I think I'm one of an impossibly small number of people who read and merely liked the Malazan books without getting completely enveloped; I've always been told you either bounce right off, or love it beyond much else in the genre. Still, I lost track of the series after... four books, I think?, and I've been meaning to start over and finish them all. Eddison: Worm is one of the best things I've ever read. You are right there's an old-school tilt to things mentioned here, as well as a... well, genre classifications are weird and arbitrary, but let's call it heroic fantasy or sword and sorcery or pulp. In the ballpark. Which I love, and would love if more people were still writing--or at least, if more publishers were still highlighting. Single or dual POV fantasy with some thriller pacing seems to me an under-exploited market in 2019. And I do have a bit of a currency bias myself, which dictates I read a fair bit of what is published in any given year. What I like about Williams is he's still releasing books in 2019 that have an early 90s quality to them (which is my old school) that don't strike me as past their use-by date the moment they arrive on a shelf. Weeks and Sanderson are still doing that, and I'm reading them too--and there's also Abraham and Sullivan and probably a few others I haven't read (though in Abraham's case, I'm reading The Expanse)--but mostly the trend is still either grimdark or a reaction/riff on it. Sometimes I want fake elves in fake medieval Europe with a dark lord and a magic item and quests in a book I haven't read before. It's not all I want--I read and enjoyed Lonesome Dove, Middlemarch, a Biogeochemistry textbook, a pop philosophy survey, and a Jack Reacher novel right before this--and it's not all I want the genre to be, but I'd be sad if that form went away altogether.

I just don’t see where else Juice would go. AJPW and NOAH don’t pay at all and I can’t imagine WWE would pay enough to overcome the dissatisfaction he’d feel working there. It’s too soon to speculate about AEW. He says he’s very happy where he is, doing what he’s doing; and I can’t imagine New Japan or its fans feel different. Gaijin Goto is a pretty great career, if that’s what he gets. And maybe he catches a break or a wave where Goto never did.

So, how many concussions has Alexa had?

I don't think that makes you out-of-step, really. At least the impression I get is that Williams was never and is not some fantasy titan. Martin and Jordan (and Hobb and Goodkind and Brooks) wildly outsold his original trilogy and are still credited, if I can be very reductive about this, with either making mass market epic fantasy a viable genre category or making it a suitably mature (whatever we take that to mean) genre. It's really Martin's repeated reference to MST that, if I had to guess, prompted this sequel trilogy. (Which, again, is the least he can do, given the obvious extent it inspired his own work.) Nowadays, Williams sells quite a bit less than the other authors I mentioned. But he makes a steak dinner that feels to me like one of those side-of-the-road places that promises "home cooked" approximation, and then actually delivers. Pure comfort food in the way that makes you say something blandly nostalgic about how they don't make them like this anymore. Sanderson probably comes closest, but Williams is more interested in history and classic fantasy tropes, and less on (what strikes me as) gamified magic systems and worldbuilding. There are too many POV characters and sappy conversational cul-de-sacs and apostrophes for days and lore on lore on lore; I can pick out more than a few fantasy authors who do many of the things he does better, but not all at once, and not now. There's also, of course, a large element of taste. Williams' original trilogy is very concerned with Tolkien, whom I read dozens of times when I was young; he just so happened to emphasize the parts I liked and critically respond to the parts I felt uncomfortable with. At the same time, I found Brooks a Diet Rite substitute, Goodkind ideologically and artistically awful, and bounced hard off of Hobb and Jordan for various reasons. (I like ASOIAF, but it's a very different thing.) Now, at 31, I find there's a real lack of "traditional" epic fantasy that makes me feel like I did when I'd walk home from school extra fast to pull out a tattered mass market paperback, so I'm pleased an old favorite is still doing it well. (And still, in the case of Sanderson and Rothfuss, being called a favorite author by people who sell far more books.)

Good to see ZSJ defense against Yoshi-Hashi happening here, leaving open the possibility for a much bigger match at Royal Quest. Still no sign of Goto.

It looks like it's basically doubled second place already, and sits currently at 1.2 million views. I doubt there was ever any question that you'd bring in a former WWE champion who anchored their tours for years, but this is a pretty good answer nonetheless.

450 pages into Tad Williams' Witchwood Crown, the first book in his second Osten Ard trilogy, which is about how long it sometimes takes epic fantasy of this 90s flavor to fully endear itself to me. And it really has. I was curious to see if decades away would lead to a radically different reading experience, but I've been really impressed with how indulgently comfort food it feels while still polishing and updating here and there. I'm going to read the next book, which is out already, and then the third when it arrives. That means the rest of this year is going to be heavily about big fat fantasy, since I already need to finish Mark Lawrence's and Brent Weeks' series, and start Joe Abercrombie's new one. (I've also been reminded how deeply indebted to Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn ASOIAF is. Martin admits this himself, but still.)

Those are still around, though usually just used to add drama to de facto semifinals. I expect we'll get a lot of 4-5 and 5-4 records. As for the rest of the show: Dragon Lee and Ospreay are basically perfect at a style I just don't love. Will is getting there, but if he's the "next Omega" I'd prefer if some of his explosive athleticism translated to more impactful looking offense. Still, it's funny to see English language twitter gripe about his push while the Japanese fans clearly adore him. I'm happy to go along. Naito and Ibushi are basically perfect at a style I am conflicted about. The stunt show bumping can sometimes combine the worst parts of deathmatches--nothing matters as much as the tension and release of the massive bumps--and psychotic stiffness--that other stuff wasn't real violence, but this is--but the combined charisma and skill of execution somehow balances it for me, and the 2.9 opera brings me to the edge of my seat. I do hope they stay far apart for a while, though. Of course that also meant I was totally burnt before the main event started. It was fine, and Jericho's King Diamond cosplay amuses me deeply, but I like Okada's indulgent epics, and will be happy to return there.