Matt D

Did heel Flair draw more than tweener Flair?

We all like the Battle of Atlantic City, right?

A couple of things to say: I feel very, very strongly in the theory of wrestling having undergone a chemical change (as opposed to a physical one) since the 80s (or maybe the late 90s, sure) and the notion that it is apples and oranges, which in my mind, makes it easier to praise both the apples and the oranges because they're different things with different goals and different success metrics. I might not spend a lot of time watching the oranges but that's a me thing. I think Johnny makes it extremely clear that we all have different situations. My kids don't watch wrestling. If they did, my situation might be different. I watch as much wrestling as I have in years and I watch as much wrestling that I haven't seen as I've watched in years, but almost 0 of it is from 2021. My hobby, and this is a hobby, is driven by two thiIngs right now: 1) the output that I create for Segunda Caida, which consists of two French shows a week and the 3 matches we find for New Footage Friday, and then the fact I have 30 mins every other night to kill on a treadmill (down 40 lbs since summer and feeling pretty good) and I've chosen to go through every match in 1989 AJPW because I'd seen very little of that. There's the social itch, sure. I hang out here and DVDVR. I'm not on twitter but I occasionally look at what people post. I read WWE results and will see some of the big PPVs with you guys barring my family responsibilities. I loosely follow AEW with a couple of threads and what Eric posts on SC (which probably gets more hits than us talking about older wrestler), but past the Dustin vs Cody match, I've never actually seen it. I'm good. I've never seen an Omega match. I'm good there too. I'm happy you guys are happy, mainly. I wish more people would be engaged with the French wrestling or follow along with us in NFF, but I've always got Phil and Eric and Jetlag. More people engaged with it would scratch an itch that doesn't quite get scratched enough but I lazily make gifs out of some of the Catch and someone posts them on twitter a lot and I like to see people's reactions. So I get little bits of the social. And I talk to a few people about what I'm watching and what they're watching online in real time. Occasionally, I do want to scratch the 2021 itch. There was a praised SEAd vs Stardom match over at DVDVR yesterday and maybe I'll check that out. That sort of thing. Right now I'm planning on watching AJPW until either Tenryu leaves or the Misawa vs Jumbo match in 90 and then I go on to something else, maybe following Hashimoto's entire career, maybe following Tenryu to the next thing, maybe 92 Memphis since I've seen 93 but not a ton of 92 TV. I don't know. I have plenty of options, but they're going to be on my terms and fit into my hobby how I want, because we have that freedom now, and my social itch is scratched enough on those terms. It's a hobby, not an obligation, even if having projects and deliverables helps give it some focus and direction and even sort of an internal reward structure, because that's how most of my hobbies go. But it's a hobby and I treat it as such.

This is all really interesting. Thanks for doing it. A lot of my recent AJPW knowledge has been very textual. And when I've gone for context, it's either been through old Observers or by swallowing down more text (as in older matches. Every bit of context always helps and there's a lot here that I think we either didn't know, or we didn't have multiple, rounded sources on. I think as a general community, we just don't understand the sumo connection except for in the broadest, most general terms. There's obviously a lot more to delve into there in how certain norms we take for granted were developed.

Yeah, I was going to suggest you drop some tidbits that we probably didn’t/couldn’t know. Sometimes it’s like a blind man touching an elephant for all the context we don’t have. But stick to what is doable and you’re comfortable with.

We'll do this BS again for Mania, you poor bastard.

Oh god, stop the quick camera cuts. Just stop hitting each other! Then it'll stop.

You get the sense Bryan wants Riddle at Mania.

Hopefully Braun's kind in how he eliminates Christian.

Bryan is 39. I looked it up before posting.

Rey's knees are only 4 years old.

Christian is immediately the best 40-something guy on the roster.

Holy shit. I was going to joke that Christian should come out when Edge was getting triple teamed at the start.

Good on Hurricane for not being on the gas.

Nice of Ali to let Dominik borrow his gear after he got eliminated.

The titantron hands going up and down for Bryan feel like a Monty Python thing.

Last time you demanded that, you got Bad Bunny. This time? The Miz.

You could tell that Edge was pretty happy to feed for Ricochet.

Who the hell gave Ziggler a belt?

Sami hyping up Orton should be a weekly act.

Sami's working a Cuban Assassin gimmick.

You just keep going on with that TNA gimmick tonight.

They have a ton of time between now and Mania right?

My mind: Hey, handcuffs. I wonder what Bossman would be doing if he was still alive. He'd be a good guy to bring back for legends things. The old guys were really pared down with all the deaths. He, I wonder why they don't use Barbarian. Hey, they should put Meng and Barbarian in the HOF.

The biggest thing on the line in this match is EverRise's shirt sales.