Matt D

I feel kind of bad because I didn't believe him when he kept saying he was dying in the last year.

I have a pretty good handle on pop culture, etc, but is there any other industry where one major company puts on a huge event and there are dozens of parasitical (symbiotic at best) feeder events that pop up around it from other companies? Are there a bunch of sister cons the same weekend of the San Diego Comic Con? Are there a bunch of other football games (not signings or whatever but actual games) around the Superbowl? Another film festival that attaches itself to Cannes without permission?

They got rid of him because creative had nothing for him. They brought him back because creative had something for him.

Ok, rolling the dice tomorrow for everyone.

If so, it is their fault for putting them together so much.

There is a big difference between taking initiative and risks to get over and doing something after asking permission multiple times and being told no.

At least he didn't concuss Bryan on the way out.

Me too. Just ordered it. There's so much for me to learn here. I've seen so many of these matches but lack a lot of context. Looking forward to it.

The idea that you can't get over while only taking 20% of a match is ridiculous though.

It's honestly shocking to me that they're not just having Rousey steamroll everyone. Instead, they're protecting her and everyone else on the roster by portraying her as almost superhuman in one aspect of the game, but actually inexperienced and vulnerable in a lot of others. The commentary was overbearing as always but pointing out the fact she's not used to fighting people twice her size or that she's never taken a powerbomb before really helped things. It's making matches far more compelling than you'd ever expect them to be, because it's not just balanced but it's also telling a story that has rarely been told in these rings at least. Suddenly, a single flying body press means more than twenty dives might in a different match. It even makes some of the physical awkwardness forgivable. I really, really hope that in the eventual Alexa match, they have Alexa cheating left and right and Ronda vulnerable because she's never encountered someone doing that quite in that manner. There are a lot of possibilities if they're willing to really commit in this direction. Also, it's going to go a long way to allow her to be a sympathetic babyface instead of having the crowds turn against her.

One of these days I'll actually see a Rousey match.

I wasn't able to watch, but you guys were all over the place tonight. There goes our hivemind cred.

92 WCW.

Can I make a Nailz joke?

Did Terrible have more or less defenses/year than Brock?

Crazy double turn?

I can kind of see the Shakespearean ideal being that Gargano went so far into Ciampa's world that he lost himself utterly and became the monster he was trying to fight, especially with that last submission, and as such lost because he ultimately deserved to lose. He no longer had the higher moral ground and fate turned against him. I dunno though. It's a long bridge to cross. I need to double back to the opening two matches later.

If you're losing Beast....

I've only seen Black vs Lars but I liked it a lot. I liked how hard it was for Black to hurt Lars. I liked all of the big power reversal/transitions. The jaw/knee stuff worked well without seeming overwrought. Even the whiffed Black Mass was instantly forgivable as it a) protected the hold and was followed immediately by color that built into the jaw incident. I liked it.

Then he dropped it and came back to it a few other convenient times. In and of itself, that might not have bugged me or even been a plus but in a match where they were running the leg experiment, it was jarring.

I thought it was flawed but fun. Here's what I said in the Meltzer thread. "The idea that the Bucks' match was 4.5 stars speaks to the inflation as much as anything else, maybe because we have so many other 4.5 star matches to compare it to. It was a fun little thought experiment of a match: "What if you tack on hyper-focused limb selling to a standard sort of YB NJPW match?" but it wasn't any sort of organic selling that drove the spots; instead the spots drove the selling. The back selling was far more inconsistent and never, to me, felt earned. The timing on the mid-match hot tag was hardly maximized and the work that he had to do for it involved a lot of standing around a waiting for people to get into their places. Again, fun thought experiment and solid effort but 4.5 stars apparently don't buy you what they once did." There were moments where they used the leg selling as an excuse to not sell other things as well. The cart was driving the horse which made it all seemed way more staged and contrived than any tag match I'm going to rate highly can be. I did love the moment when Sanada kicked the leg out on the apron though. That was great.

Pro-Shot with Tony. Great VQ too.

Transmet mattered a lot to me when I was ~20 or so and I think it was prescient in a lot of ways like the best cyberpunk is, but I'm not sure I'd want to revisit it now. I'm not who I was sixteen or seventeen years ago and the world isn't what it was then either. It did have a big influence on me at the time though.