Casey

I’m gonna have to go back and watch Hangman/Mox. I fell asleep right at the end of Okada/Omega lol.

Real cowboys smoke Winstons.

Looks like Dustin & Sammy are wrestling twice tonight. That's wild.

I'm personally hoping for a nice little TNT run from Dustin, but I'm sure it'll be Fletcher. Cole has had terrible luck ever since Forbidden Door 2022.

Adam Cole isn't medically cleared, and they actually stripped him of the title. Dustin Rhodes versus Daniel Garcia versus Kyle Fletcher versus Sammy Guevera for the TNT title now.

From a "where does the story go/where do each wrestler go after this" perspective, my top three are Hangman/Mox, Storm/Mone & Bucks/Swerve & Ospreay. From a "this match is gonna fuck" perspective, my top three are the same. Okada/Omega will probably also be fucking awesome, but there's not much story there besides "we're fighting for a new title and we also feuded and had legendary matches almost ten years ago". Which is fine, sometimes you don't need Hangman levels of character work and story, but I love shit like that, so. Cole/Fletcher will probably be the sleeper match of the day, IMO. Women's Gauntlet is a little more interesting after last night. Men's Gauntlet is whatever, honestly. I'm fine with MJF until he starts to sniff the World title scene, then I'm not interested in him. This is purely a me thing, but my ceiling for tolerance of MJF is Unified title level. I hope we get some surprise entrants in one or both of these matches. But I still don't like the concept for some reason. I don't really care about the Tag title match. JetSpeed don't have a chance, Hurt Syndicate is okay I guess, and I'm just so completely over Christian as a heel doing this Father stuff. Let's fast forward to the E&C reunion. Opps/Death Riders isn't doing anything for me. Add in Gabe Kidd and my interest gets even lower. Zero Hour matches are just filler, besides maybe Outrunners/FTR 2. I haven't seen the Collision match, so hopefully this one is better since I'm actually watching! I'm on Twitter (yeah I know) and the online discourse of AEW fans hating Jelly Roll probably wrestling at SummerSlam (I hate it too) versus WWE fans saying what's the difference in that and the Costco Guys is funny to me. They usually specifically point to the Rizzler, which, I mean... he's a fucking kid. WWE had John Cone's kid win the Tag titles at WrestleMania and then made an action figure of him. Big Boom AJ is also a former wrestler, lmao.

I'm on S2E7 and if they can keep up this kind of quality then it has a good chance, for me, to knock off The Wire. I do like that there are shades of grey to Vic, it felt like everyone in the Wire was either good or bad with very few people walking that line. Which I like how the Shield does it, because it feels more realistic in a sense. I don't remember ever going from liking McNulty to hating him back to liking him within one episode, whereas I do that constantly with Vic. I know it still exists even today, but them doing what they're doing with Julien right now is a bold move. I feel like that's something that wouldn't even be touched today. Maybe I'm wrong, who knows.

https://shop.wwe.com/en/mens-black-solo-sikoa-my-family-tree-t-shirt/p-247714573164516076+z-98-3632352335?_ref=p-SRP:m-GRID:i-r0c1:po-1 https://www.shopaew.com/catalog/product/view/id/79456/s/mjf-thumbs-up-comfort-colors-soft-heavyweight-tee/category/5702/ Things that make you go "hmmmmm"

I'm not convinced the gauntlet battle royale is even a good idea to begin with.

As far as Jazwares goes, I contemplated only collecting the female wrestlers but I don't have the space to do that so I dropped it. But the Big Rubber Guys are fucking awesome, so AEW branded ones is really hard to pass up. Jazwares attempted it early on with the Cody, Punk & Darby figures. If the Okada is limited to 3000 then the $50 price tag makes even more sense. EDIT: actually I think you're just paying a premium for ordering it from the AEW website. I think the biggest complaint everyone has with Jazwares is that they take too long to put them out. But they're easily the best wrestling figures on the market (that are sold in major stores, anyway). I have a few Mattel & Jazwares figures of Punk and the difference in quality between the two are noticeable. They really need to make more Supreme figures.

It was yesterday lol but thanks man!

The video I saw of Okada reacting to seeing the figure showed it with a limited to 5000 sticker, so there's that at least.

AEW & Big Rubber Guys announced a partnership at Starrcast today. Haven’t announced the full lineup yet for Series 1 yet, but Toni Storm was confirmed. welp, guess I’ll collect these too.

That's MJF's ex-fiancé, actually. In other news - Jelly Roll versus Logan Paul is probably happening at SummerSlam.

A Power Rangers fan on BlueSky alerted everyone that the MMPR: The Movie Funko Pops had been restocked on their website so I waited a week, used my Disney+ Funko perk coupon, and got all six for like $80. Hell yeah. And Entertainment Earth has the CM Punk pipebomb Funko up for preorder so I grabbed that too. I’m still on the lookout for a deal on the old one he had when they first got the licensing deal with Funko, it regularly lists on eBay for hundreds of dollars. TLDR: I bought a shitload of Funko Pops for my birthday lmao

Pretty sure Hangman explicitly said his family will be there but not at the show, though.

If this was WWE, the way Swerve was looking at that chain, he'd use it to cost Hangman the title after he & Ospreay lose to the Young Bucks. Because reasons.

I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this but neither Tsushima or Yotei take place in China.

I don't think Randy Savage's Legends deal is an exclusive one. He still gets figures and merch outside of WWE. Just a week or two ago Bulletproof Studios announced officially licensed Savage ice cream bar statues of four eras of his career that come with trading cards. Major Figures are still doing Bendies and Big Rubber Guys. If I had to guess, most legends or their estate could make this deal if they really wanted to (see: Jake the Snake) but probably couldn't have figures/merch/be in video games from anything AEW related.

They moved 600+ tickets today so this is now into 23k territory.

This is probably going to end up being false, but Fightful is saying they've been told that Hirooki Goto is playing E. Honda in the Street Fighter movie.

I started NieR: Automata last night after only having played maybe two hours of it on the PS4 in 2019. Combat is slick as hell, story is weird but not Kojima weird so it's within my wheelhouse. My only complaint is it feels like it's running at 30-40 fps on my PC. I don't see any options in the settings for frames, just resolution. I didn't buy this 4060 laptop to play games that run at those frames, damnit! Overall this is gonna be fun, I think. I want to watch the anime but I might wait until I finish one playthrough of the game at least. I got it installed on my SteamDeck too so I can play it at work as well and make some extra progress. I've also been playing The Operator and Gamedec, and those are fun just because they're a change of pace. Gamedec is basically like Shadowrun or something but with very, very minimal combat and 200% more investigative work. Operator is hard to explain, but you're doing investigative work for a fictional version of the FBI/CIA through the UI of a workplace desktop computer. Finding clues in documents and footage and photographs. I like it. They were both free through Prime Gaming on Epic and GOG, so no money wasted really.

I'm still Team Darby for all of this, but wouldn't it be wild if Hangman loses, but Kingston returns in the gauntlet and wins, challenges Mox at All Out, and becomes champion? Darby versus Mox at WrestleDream to end the whole story. That seems like a very Mox thing to suggest. Ospreay & Swerve lose and are out of the main event scene for a year. Hangman needs to finally fix things with Swerve so they can both move past their issues and become the best versions of themselves. Hangman/Okada or Hangman/Omega feud for the Unified title, maybe? Ospreay & Swerve form a tag team. Darby is cemented as a main event player by beating Mox in a big program. Kingston is your World champion. Just sayin'.

glad Bryan's channel is getting some love, I've been a fan of that channel for a few years now. The concept of an ECW house show fascinates me so it's fun to actually get to see them in full, and then he has stuff like SAW or some 90s/00s Memphis wrestling, stuff I used to get on random channels as a teenager. SAW was on here at like 2am on UPN or whatever it was called, Wildside was on Saturdays I think? It's been so long. A lot of extremely weird random match-ups on his channel, too. I watched Raven & Kory Williams wrestle in front of like 12 people in a little gymnasium a few weeks back.

so according to the Dallas Morning News (lol what a weird source for this), Dustin Rhodes signed a 6 year extension last year. They say his roles are a consultant, coach, occasional wrestler and an AEW ambassador.