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With Ruby given that they separated the Squad I think there is a chance she's looking at a bit of a retooling in which case her missing a month or so while they figure it out isn't the worst thing in the world. If we get to a couple of months with nothing then I think it is safe to start asking that.

I mean, there is the concept of taking less money now to make more later... but $2.5 million each seems to be more than The Revival have ever actually appeared to be worth so I kinda question the math on that one. The Bucks probably make that money but they have basically made an art out of merch sales and self-promotion. I assume AEW shifts the math but long view The Briscoes are likely a level above the Revival in terms of (potential) value and after twenty years likely haven't sniffed anywhere near that much money. If they'd rather risk it then god bless them, but if you have a chance at life altering money for both yourselves and your family you should probably think long and hard about it.

Quick book reading question: with the recent passing of Gene Wolfe I've seen a lot of people pushing for others to read The Book of the New Sun but I've been a bit more curious about Peace due to the bits I've heard about it (plus I read TBOTNS a couple years back). I'm curious if anyone here has read it and if so if they'd consider it a worthwhile read or if it was just an earlier "lesser" work. I know very little of the genre and you folks seem to generally know what's up.

I think people are thrown off by the term "booboo face" here. I've been able to tell with solid regularity when Sasha is gonna win or lose a match beforehand for about the past half year or so based on how she comes out since I leanred to look for it, so either I'm psychic and need to work on picking lotto numbers or it is a thing. THAT SAID... she's not actually blatantly frowning/crying her way to the ring when this happens. Her... for lack of a better term "energy" is noticeably different whether she is gonna win or lose a match. If you watch her from the past several weeks on Raw in a match she or Bayley or both are gonna win she is grinning widely and bouncing a ton to her or Bayley's theme, basically she is radiating positivity. When your energy is then half that at the biggest show of the year compared to a random Raw, and her expression while not blatantly frowning is noticeably dialed down a level or two, and she's done this regularly for a while now, you kinda know what's up. I don't know if it is a sign of a bad attitude and being pissed about having to lose or just a legit weakness in her game/presentation that she is basically tipping her hand, but it is something she probably needs to work on either way. If most of us have noticed or at least heard about it I feel pretty safe in assuming she has, so even if best case it is the latter it doesn't speak well that she's seemingly not working on it at all.

Man I am so far behind, the last time I heard Punk mention Miz was in a fairly positive light. Granted it was probably a decade ago and along the lines of "I like Miz, he has a habit of accidentally rubbing people the wrong way initially that I sometimes do as well so I get him."

I may be reading too much into things, but when Sasha/Bayley lost the tag belts at Mania and Bayley lost cleanly on Raw the next night my first thought was that the shake-up is next week and they are getting split up. I get that they are friends and perhaps wanted a longer run with the belts... but what Sasha clearly seems to want in her career kinda requires her to be a solo act and I'd argue her and Bayley need a break away from each other about as much as Charlotte and Becky do. Basically for Sasha this might have actually been good news depending on how the women rosters shook out. That and most of the time WWE handles tag teams poorly, getting moved away from that is probably a blessing.

The one thing I'm lost on is why some were talking up Sasha having a good match with Rousey as some big deal that shows she should be a top star. In ring Rousey has basically been a prodigy and almost all of her matches that have been given time have been rather good, Mania might have been her worst non-squash ppv match and that was a triple threat where she got hurt midway through. I thought Sasha/Rousey was a rather good match! I also thought Rousey/Bayley, Rousey/Charlotte, Rousey/Nia, Rousey/Riott tv, hell even Rousey/Nikki and Rousey & Angle/Steph & HHH were rather good matches. Kinda wish we got Rousey/Becky...

I've been reading through Hickman's Avengers run an issue a day for the past couple weeks and while I enjoy it, I can imagine parts of it being rather slow going if you were only getting an issue a month. Also New Avengers at least early on is the much stronger of the two.

I mean, wikipedia is wikipedia but Corbin is seemingly "a former offensive lineman for the Indianapolis Colts and Arizona Cardinals of the National Football League (NFL), as well as a three-time Golden Gloves champion and former grappling champion." It doesn't make him a better pro wrestler in the least, but it's not like he's some shlub who can't believably hang with anyone.

I'm sure this has been discussed and I just missed it somewhere, but from what I can gather to buy a UFC ppv now I'd have to pay an initial $5 for a one month ESPN+ subscription on top of the actual ppv cost, but the ppvs now cost $5 less so it breaks even?

It is a regular ESPN group among some of my friends (you know a couple of them if you recall the letters WT at all...). They generally pick, you know, sensible brackets while I know nothing of college basketball so I look at a site that rates the relative strengths of every team in the country, via math convert the numbers on said site to edit point values, find edits on the steam workshop that have the appropriate number of wrestler edit points and use them in place of the actual teams in a pair of 32 team tournaments. I almost always lose, but the fun is in trying to defeat actual brackets with madness. (Sting beat Warrior in the finals this year FWIW)

Yeah, I use a Fire Pro game each year to pick my March Madness bracket and having not played my PC version since the summer (i.e. before all the DLC) it is now a monumental pain in the behind figuring out which edits I can DL and use and which I cannot.

Joe ain't gonna go 524 days without getting injured.

I think the bigger Mania issue with Angle is not his opponent but putting him in a singles match. He's done, completely. His match vs Gable was just kinda sad to watch, everything isn't even half speed and it always seems like he might get legit hurt. He probably deserves a send-off if he is really retiring, but it should probably be in some kind of tag match where he doesn't have to do much. As is I just hope it is short and heavy on smoke and mirrors (which will likely be saved for HHH/Batista).

I gotta be honest, I've seen a few of his hyped matches and I just don't get it? If I had to sum him up in a few words it'd be "dollar store NJPW ace" and they stylistically aren't my cup of tea to begin with, watching someone do something very similar but worse just strikes me as odd. I do recommend people check out more All Japan, but do so for Doering, Ishikawa, Zeus and some of the others who bring something... not completely unique, but more their own.

I think his shambling no fear of dying approach works in certain matches and against certain opponents, but it definitely isn't a 100% sure thing when you check him out. That said I like that we have a 50 year old indie Undertaker/Sabu hybrid out there as he brings something that others aren't.

Fenix has this spot where he gets his opponent in a knucklelock, jumps up onto the middle rope near the corner, pulls his opponent up onto the adjacent middle rope and then rannas them off. It is why I don't complain about the Canadian destroyer that much anymore.

I watched Devlin/WALTER the same night I watched Ospreay/WALTER and the Devlin match was leagues better. It was actually one of my favorite indie matches from last year.

I mean, Becky was walking around with a crutch and a bum leg, it's not like she got beat down at full strength. Of course I thought it was silly last week when she came out with a crutch and bum leg last week and laid out Natalya and Rousey despite Ronda ripping her crutch away and hitting her with it (which was no sold) so this is likely one of those "you will never make everyone happy" situations. Or to put it another way, if Rousey can't lay a beating on her when she's hurt and basically cheapshotted then Rousey never will.

They are well known of and I admit would be borderline because of that, but I question how much of their current work is as known. Park is probably the iffiest of the bunch but as noted I assume many haven't tracked down a Ki match in several years and he's still legit pretty great.

I don't think anyone mentioned L.A. Park. I'll do that. WALTER is a definite for me. I've been loving Low Ki in MLW but he's pretty well known, although I assume many haven't thought about him in a while. Some of the AJPW & affiliated folks need some love, although I'm not sure who is most deserving. Doering really surprised me last time I saw him, Ishikawa is prone to overkill but does some things I like, etc. Jun Kasai is a mad man yet I can't look away. I don't know if it would be fair to nominate current Great Sasuke just for his annual end of year madness, but... Barrington Hughes should be included simply because he is beautiful.

Yeah, my main thought here is that it is way too early to make a call on Daniel Bryan in this regard. Perhaps in the future he'll be fine, perhaps he'll be very much not so, and given that these polls are focusing on the whole "positive" deal that feels like kinda a big deal.

It struck me watching the end of Raw unfold that Charlotte is basically added in to ideally function as an actual heat magnet, and I can follow the logic. I think any thoughts that WWE are bothered by Becky being incredibly popular are misplaced, but her being popular in a way that damages the popularity of the people they match her up against is something they are definitely concerned with. While I think they could live with Rousey being booed at Mania I don't think they want her to be ruined as a face going forward because of this... and this is exactly where Charlotte enters. They seem to be laying this out that both Becky and Rousey feel like this is BS, which ideally lets the crowd love Becky and hopefully results in them hating Charlotte more than Rousey. Will it work? That I can't say and there are so many ways things can be screwed up but I can't argue against the logic in trying to protect Rousey in this way. She'll drop the belt at Mania and likely take the fall and the crowd will be into it and people will forget about it in several years when another Mania main event ends up as a 3 way dance that doesn't ruin the moment in the least.

Whenever a champion sets a record length or defenses streak and happens to lose it immediately after I feel it is 95% safe to assume that wasn't by accident. Perhaps before the Naito/Okada Dome match there was an internal debate as to who should win, but once that was figured out I think it is rather safe to say that the length of Okada's reign was rather set in stone. Omega seems to me to have been the only one set up to end it at that point so I'd guess that Gedo had hi penciled in for a while, but that is much more of a guess.