Bix

Some people here are going to hate this but I was never a fan of the later Battlarts and Futen style stuff where it was just a spotfest of potato shots. To me, Battlarts was at its best when it was either shoot style matwork or guys doing regular obvious cooperative pro wrestling spots with UWF/shoot style pacing. Something like Carl Greco matches or Ishikawa-Usuda for the former and Ikeda-Otsuka or the stuff with the Michinoku Pro guys was a lot more entertaining to me than Ikeda-Ishikawa was.

Actually because of the way satellites are positioned in space you can't do this, there are a set of satellites that cover North America,another set over Europe and so on. If the WWE purchased a transponder on a satellite over a different part of the wold I could see this being used for the network if internet is not available. See, that's what I thought, and they're sharing with American channels, so...yeah.

Is Triple H officially underrated now? More so now that he appears to have come to terms with a bunch of his more annoying habits.

If that was true, the guys with backyard dishes in the '90s would've been taping Japanese TV. Or is that only on the consumer end and a pro setup picks up anything?

Except don't you still need to be in/near the US to pull the signal in if it's on a transponder shared with American cable networks?

The real X is above the head. The fake X is closer to torso level. It MIGHT be the other way around, but that's how I remember Jimmy Korderas explaining it.

Stu didn't even train a lot of his kids how to work. Frank Butcher trained Bruce (and some other guys in the territory at the time like Rick Martel), Hito and Sakurada trained Bret, and I think Owen's formal training came from some of his older brothers. Not sure about Keith.

If not Sebastian, then who?

For pretty much anything other than billing, which they can't access, @AskWWENetwork is much better than the call center. That call center, though...what the HELL? It's among the worst I've ever dealt with in every way possible.

OVERSEEEEEEEAS

Yeah, there's not much to add about the slogan, which is why I kept it pretty simple in the newsletter, but if they thought that it would signal to people what exactly the network was (streaming viewable on TVs), then...wow.

I guest co-hosted Wrestling Observer Live with Bryan tonight. We talked about what I wrote, including how PayPal loopholes allow foreigners to subscribe and anyone to cancel before the six month mark. Then a caller let us know that he shares his account with five friends and they all stream PPVs at the same time, in spite of the TOS saying it's one stream at a time and that "circumventing" the safeguards they don't actually have in place could get you cancelled and/or sued. So, let's review: EVERY SINGLE SAFEGUARD THEY HAVE IN PLACE DOESN'T WORK. Forgetting about every other issue the service has, that's really bad. I would guess these are all MLB Advanced Media's fault. What the FUCK?

I think you missed the first round of the rematch.

There are more people online all the time. There are always going to be more people wrestling that stuff. More people read about sabermetrics now than in 1999 or 1989. Hell, more read online now then read Moneyball. It doesn't mean that the revolution started today, or with Moneyball, or with Rob Neyer getting hired by ESPN (which some people point to). That's the general point. But it's not an "internet explosion" thing. It's something that's developed in last 3-5 years. Mainstream sports and pop culture sites (BR, SBN, Uproxx, Grantland, etc) doing wrestling coverage is probably part of it, but I'm not sure that explains all of it.

...you're judging it based on the PPV reviews and TV roundup? Dude...no.

Parv is absolutely right that there is a much greater quantity of people reading smarky stuff online now. People who will read stuff and comment on places that aren't WWE.com but have no desire to pay for the Network or anything like that.

Not just you. If he needs fusion, that should be it. That he's planning on retiring to a self-sustained hippie farm compound anyway within a few years makes me more comfortable with the idea of him missing out on the money.

This is a month and a half later but I'd like to see a feasible alternative to Disqus (and certainly alternative to Facebook) for comments. AVClub has seen a noticeable quality dip since all Disqus comments went "uniform" and certain articles and reviews have been overrun by trolls and brigades from other sites, as just happened with the Dinesh Disouza America docu review. Granted, "pro wresting only" is a bit more isolated than a pop cultuer site, but the last thing I want is some site vs. site "war." Baseballthinkfactory has its own commenting system and is also well-patrolled, and that leads to generally intelligent and informed discussion even in divisive threads, which is the ideal I think we want. What do you mean by when Disqus went uniform at AV Club?

It was probably Born in the USA.