Loki

I've just seen a suggestion on Reddit that McIntyre and Punk be forced into a tag team for a bit when Punk returns and I love that. I know it's a much used gimmick but the two of them coming out in their shirts dissing each other and then arguing on the apron would be fantastic. And then you can decide who to turn and how in a nice dramatic fashion during a match. It also allows Punk a soft re-entry to save his feeble body another immediate injury.

They may not be what gets people joining, but they are usually the most streamed shows and what gets people to stick around. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-04-07/these-are-the-most-popular-tv-shows-of-the-streaming-era Shows like NCIS, Grey's Anatomy, Criminal Minds, get way more streams than most original shows on these platforms. Only Stranger Things breaks the Top 10 Most Streamed since 2021. That's why there's suddenly been a glut of these old shows appearing on streaming - Criminal Minds, Law and Order, Monk, CSI have all appeared in the last 6 months. Sometimes the deals are odd too - CSI Las Vegas is Season 10 onwards! It's cheap obviously but it's also a strategy to keep people on the platform for longer periods and counter the join/leave cycle that some viewers are trying out. If I was Netflix I'd be working on producing some long-series, episodical tv shows of that nature to accompany their marquee drama shows. Is that The World Beyond? Those teen dramas can be REALLY horny for obvious reasons.

It was worse than that. He went out at the top of the show and cut the impassioned new babyface champ promo about how it had taken him 5 years of blood and sweat to achieve this most prestigious title, and how that was what AEW was all about. Except it wasn't the AEW World Title he was talking about. It wasn't even one of the myriad titles AEW promotes, it was someone else's title, won on someone else's show that AEW fans can't even watch through AEW. It was the climax to a storyline we haven't seen. Having cross-promotion stuff is fun to a point, but this seemed nuts to me, having your biggest star put over another company and title as his main goal.

It really is, we're binging that at the moment. The lost art of making 20 45-minute episodes that don't cost millions of dollars each. These old shows are often way more popular on streaming than the enormously expensive "event" shows they make.

"Who's that gutlord marching, you should cut down on your porklife mate, get some exercise!"

There are so many things to like about it. It looks gorgeous most of the time, good sound and voice acting. And I genuinely love zipping to and fro in the universe, the space craft handling and all that is lovely, and the space craft construction is fun. Despite the moaning on Reddit, there's a huge variation in worlds to see and visit, although it's also realistically full of barren rocks. But the combat is really boring and samey, and as you say the actual gameplay mechanics are so clunky and old - from loading screens to fetch-and-carry quests. And there are so many truncated game mechanics where clearly they ran out of time or decided to cut at the last minute. I think it fails in all the places Bethesda games have always failed which is frustrating. If it had been a much slimmer game, if they'd tried to do less, I think it would have been better. I've talked extensively on here about how I feel open world games have got too big to really work any more anyway. One or two games in any generation seem to nail it, everyone else falls at a hurdle. I spent a large part of my teenage years playing Elite, Elite Frontier and FFE. I am still holding out hope for a console game which gives me that experience. All I really want to do is whizz around a galaxy in a variety of spacecraft, trading and shooting. I don't even need to get out and walk around. I bought Elite Dangerous but it stopped getting updates on my Mac and I couldn't bring myself to start again on Xbox.

Roadhouse (2024) This didn't disappoint, great popcorn movie. Gyllenhaal is such a weirdo but it kind of worked here even though he doesn't strike me as a natural action star. I personally loved Conor McGregor in this, his walk was hilarious and the main fight scenes were really great. I'm a fan of Doug Liman's work - he seems to continually evolve his style and try stuff out, the camera angles in the fights felt really fresh. He's come a long way from Swingers! They almost certainly won't but there's mileage in Gyllenhaal's Dalton character, you could do a few more in the style of the episodic Reacher films. I always like the "drifter" mythos, I appreciated the fact that the script acknowledged that the story is basically a classic Western. Edit: oh and the music was great with some fantastic bands playing at the Road House.

I feel similarly about Starfield. I love the aesthetic, I love the openness of the universe and the variety of missions but have struggled to push on with it past a certain point. It's the investment in time it takes to move through missions, too much back and forth. I like playing it but don't feel compelled to go play it, if you know what I mean. On the other hand I've been playing Diablo 4 co-op with my mate, and really enjoying it. I love the old-school isometric look, reminds me of games from my youth (Immortal, Lords Of Chaos, through to Baldur's Gate) but it's absolutely gorgeous. Something about simple dungeon delving, very atmospheric. And the gameplay is kept pretty simple hack-and-slash, although there's depth in there if you want to get into crafting and the like. The sound isn't great but if you're chatting online at the same time, it doesn't matter. I think my tastes are definitely different from the mainstream now though. Yes, I want an interesting explorable world and characters but I also want to be able to play in 1-2 hour slices and move relatively quickly through the whole experience - I reckon 20-30 hours is perfect for me. Whereas of course online people are complaining about games that "only" take 150 hours of gameplay.

Cracking album though. This one always amuses me when I pull it out of the rack - The epitome of 70s soul covers.

@The Gaffer Yeah - I just mean a backlash against the generally socially progressive trend of the last few decades. And you're absolutely right about parents/relatives - even my folks, as liberal as they come, have weird red lines that seem to anger them. Gay marriage was a big one - despite having had gay friends all their lives, the access to the institution of marriage was the point at which they balked. I think a lot of that is natural inertia as you approach old age, where you become more and more disconnected from the bleeding edge of social discourse and more and more set in your ways. In that respect the older generation not understanding the younger generation is a constant throughout history, but we're definitely seeing a worldwide rise in backlash against the prevailing direction of travel. We should probably just delete the internet, it's not been a force for good.

I do wonder where this backlash against modernity will end. As easy as it is to laugh at the weirdos online, or have a chuckle at anti-vax literature, a lot of this stuff has gone from fringe conspiracy groups to mainstream political parties in probably less than a decade. And as you can see in the US it doesn't take that long to infect mainstream politics - the GOP has become the party of QAnon and anti-science, anti-woke in really only two election cycles. With the rise of far-right politics in the US and across Europe, it will surely arrive here soon in terms of mainstream political discourse - I don't mean the Lee Andersons of the world but probably the opposition Conservative party/leader post the next election. And it will bring with it other elements like anti-abortion etc. I think the next election after this will be fought on the stuff in this thread.

She's a terrible author, I think that's where a lot of this comes from. She's lazy, she steals without realising it, and in the latter stages of her career didn't have a decent editor so her books becoming rambling messes. She pretty much lifted the whole idea of Harry Potter from A Wizard of Earthsea (and then claimed she didn't, which is bollocks). And it annoys me that Potter became so much more ubiquitous than Earthsea because Le Guin is one of the greatest authors of her generation and her books are fantastically complex and deal with topics like race and sexuality in a properly mature fashion. I had to read the last two Potter novels when I was working on the games, and it was awful. They're just bad books.

It's not got that much better in the intervening years, I can tell you. Even in the last few years I have had heated conversations with co-workers about the implicit sexism of people's work, and had to advocate for a more inclusive approach. A lot of games companies are 70-90% male staffed, and so a lot of the time it's just a blindness to inbuilt biases. Like for example making the "default" skin of a female character a tiny bikini where the male default is t-shirt and shorts. Or having no female enemies to fight in a game. Or making a bunch of haunted weapons, and they're all haunted by male ghosts. That sort of thing. It's never malicious and deliberate, it's just a lack of wider thought. When you're the only woman in a meeting of 15 artists, you have to be very, very self-confident to speak out about this, so often it just passes unremarked. And the number of women in senior development positions is still far too low, so senior management meetings are often all male. It's hard to redress the balance, especially in larger companies. I've quietly managed to hire more female juniors into my departments over the years but some companies don't like the idea of positive discrimination so you can't do it overtly. Also there are so few women candidates. So I've worked with a university to set up bursaries for female students to encourage more girls to do videogame degrees, but obviously that's only going to produce a few more candidates a year. You do what you can. On the flip side, I've heard from more than one female game developer that Lara Croft inspired them to get into games. Yes, she was 50% polygon norks, but she did represent a genuine female voice and protagonist which was unusual at the time (Janus in Metroid is silent and in a power suit). Having playable, voiced female characters is fairly well established now across game franchises, and that in the long term will encourage more girls to play games, and then consider it as a career. TL:DR games dev is still a sausage fest. Still, at least people don't download hardcore porn onto their work computers any more, that was a thing when I joined the business.

It seems a bit nitpicking to critique Ripley's reign when having the belt for a year AND being part of a major faction has made Rhea Ripley into the biggest female wrestling star in the world. It's worked brilliantly, and if the sacrifice was a few extra matches with Liv or whoever it's definitely been worth it. It's a pity she's had to vacate but they had no way of predicting that. In retrospect they should have had her lose at WM but that's hindsight. This has been bugging me for a year now, but it's obviously deliberate as they've had many opportunities to rebrand it. I think it's a WWE bubble thing, those inside the company just don't see the issue.

It was a nice try but people didn't even read your initial post before kicking off. I think you can make an individual case for most people on the AEW roster. It's just the sheer quantity that is the issue. Sure, Moxley has value, but if you cut the roster by 30% then Khan would be forced to use the remaining wrestlers better. You start to understand why WWE traditionally cuts a bunch of wrestlers after Wrestlemania - you need some turnover or you'll never admit defeat, people will never get pushed out of their comfort zone and new stars won't emerge. There's whole swathes of the roster that haven't achieved much in 5 years. Private Party - couldn't tell you who is who in that team and they've been on tv since 2019. Those two brothers who both look like Action Andretti, and seem to be tagging with Action Andretti. So much dead wood that's on telly all the time. As well as thinning the roster, I'd hugely thin the belts out. Samoa Joe spent the first 12 months in AEW poncing around on ROH TV with a meaningless belt. Get rid of all the ROH belts but the World Championship (which will only appear on ROH tv), get rid of the trios title, get rid of one of the midcard belts (International, Continental, whatever they are called). I actually liked the Power Rankings and all that from earlier in AEW (/January this year), and the idea that people were moving up and moving down. You can see the attraction of the old territory system can't you. Imagine if AEW, WWE, TNA all had a core roster of 30 guys, and everyone else rotated around the majors and the indies as genuine free agents.