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The Gaffer

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About The Gaffer

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    Brownsville Turnaround on the Tex-Mex Border
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    Pro Wrestling, turning a blind eye.
  • Previous Names
    Gay as FOOK

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  1. I think this has stopped getting Cody over more. He's still getting brilliant reactions on the road, but the actual in ring promos over the last 2-3 weeks on TV have had a much more routine response to my ears. Going for exchanges on Rock's level with yo momma and tiny dick barbs isn't going to do anything for his bottom line. Cody's bottom line is the fact that there's a white meat, superhero babyface over like rover in the hyper-cynical 2020s. Wrestling spent effectively an entire generation booing the heir to the throne. Then the most obvious heir to the throne ever came along and everyone decided the world's a miserable enough place as it is, so let's just actually cheer this really good guy. Kids watched during the Attitude Era, it's a total Bret Hart take. I get it. But his character should have a certain weird integrity to me. Cody's the guy that's awesome with kids. Now he's teaching them the Attitude Lite stuff. Wish they'd just move WrestleMania to this weekend and get it over with. The go home show will have funny sewage falling on Rock whilst he tries to run through a 42 minute Cody "This is your bitch fart crybaby life" segment at this rate.
  2. Pretty much just Dynamite during work, a bit of Collision and whatever the 'main' in ring promo/segment on Raw and Smackdown were on YouTube. I acquire the AEW and WWE PPVs and watch them on a morning off but usually either skim halfway through or just fob them off because waiting to see what's been posted here about it is more entertaining. I still feel invested, it's just that once that initial massive anchor wrestling has like twice a year wears off, I can't stick to actually watching the full shows. I'll see Punk coming back, or Cody finally getting the push, or whatever it is and feel as hyper-invested as ever, and then once the weeks start rolling into one another - even if the angle's being handled well - I'll just drop off again in no time at all. Wrestling's retrospective content for me and there's enough of it there that I'm sort of okay with that. It's OSW, Wrestling Bios and podcasts. Just...good fan made ones. Because I'm way over the hill with even the supposed clever carnies and their endless takes on how they'd do it, based on that one year they got that one storyline really right. I'd love to be sitting on WCW PPVs for the occasional fun watch but it's not worth maintaining an active paid sub with the evil empire over. The last time I watched week to week in full - live where I could - was 2005 which is nuts as I type it because like I said I still feel like I've been invested in the almost 20 years since then. That was the last year the 1 AM "THIS is Sky Sports" call got me excited. And it got me very excited. I was so into it, and felt like I was fighting wrestling's corner against a world that didn't understand it. Those were the days. But these are the days too. You grow up.
  3. Yeah it was a bit marmite wasn't it. I think keeping scrapping and base building an essential part of what's possible but completely divorced from any actual main quest progression/badgering should be an easy enough task to do. Treat it as a roleplay element essentially. Then again it is Bethesda we're talking about.
  4. 10 - Final Fantasy VII Nothing will ever touch it. Pretty much my favourite piece of media ever and played a genuinely massive role in shaping my child mind's imagination and sense of storytelling and emotion. A random pre-rendered backdrop of some tiny store in Junon's upper layer holds a sort of memory resonance with me that leaves most films I've watched in the dust. 9 - Metal Gear Solid I feel the most zealous on behalf of Sons of Liberty - a fucking audacious work of postmodernism that predicted and articulated on a nuts amount of how the world feels these days. But it's still just impossible to put anything above the sheer importance and mindblow of playing this first one in 1998. I'll never get over thinking it was a simple enough action game for that initial sequence in the docks. Gruff, hard nosed lines, claustrophobic atmosphere, "Escape this easy peasy bunch of cubes on the floor". No problem. Then you get the escalator up, Snake gets half his kit off, you're watching a movie for about half an hour, he immediately doesn't trust his commanding officer, and there's this Christopher Eccleston plays Vince Neil motherfucker lording all over the place in a chopper. Then ten hours follow where something incredible happens every 15 minutes or so, and in between you play as a guy who has been betrayed, left for dead and up against an infinite supply of conspiracy and genetically modified soldiers and he's having just a ball of a time. 8 - Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion It's one of those "Everyone has their favourite" series and IV hits the sweet spot for me. It's essentially my ultimate ASMR/anti-anxiety game for much of the same reasons other people think it's the most boring of the bunch. Classic European fantasy setting. Lush rolling hills, good weather, levity. It's gentle to you whilst still allowing you to role play to a decent degree, unlike in Skyrim where you almost always feel funnelled into being 'The Hero'. Chorrol is my place in videogames I actually want to live in and inhabit as an NPC. Idyllic gaming at its finest. 7 - Halo Again much like Metal Gear Solid there's individual bits of improvement and perhaps better entertainment scattered across the sequels (the whole first Halo trilogy I find hard to separate, it's all top notch stuff) but it's impossible to put any sequel over that feeling of just playing this for the first time. Not only did it look and play better than any other shooter on the market, it's probably the only time the PC was ever included in that. I remember watching it on Games Network ('member that?) on Sky Digital for a few weeks after it came out when I still didn't have an Xbox and it may as well have been an entire generation up from anything else out at the time. 6 - Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 Could have went with anything from 3 - THUG 2 here. What's with the overriding nostalgia for 2 still? The series was nothing without being able to revert off ramps to keep a combo going! At its height, it was essentially the best platformer ever created, with an insanely satisfying game loop and perfect synergy of sound and visuals. Unlike a lot of other games on the list which exist in a sort of cultural vacuum, it also directly fed off and fed back into the whole Jackass/skater zeitgeist which was huge at the time before we all obviously outgrew it. Right? 5 - TimeSplitters 2 Again all of then are close together here for me, but the first one (yes, it's got merit. Probably the fastest gameplay and best multiplayer maps of the bunch) is too bare bones whilst Future Perfect is a tad too EA-ified. The true GoldenEye/Perfect Dark successor and so synonymous with PS2 split screen carnage in the early to mid noughties. a 15" screen split in four? No problem. It's not like you could even aim properly in this game anyway. I'm still taking your head off with a shotgun from the 16th century whilst trance music pumps out. 4 - Grand Theft Auto 3 It's still this one for me, and no that's not a hipster choice! I mentioned in the electronic music thread awhile back how much I loved that eternally post-midnight, subversive early 2000s vibe. Everything felt sinister, edgy, sort of burnt out and kept awake to drum and bass. GTA III was its videogame. The first taste of the 3D GTA world - that breakthrough moment - is still where it's at for me (a theme is developing, here). Joyriding around the edges of Portland causing the motion blur and draw distance to form a sort of anarchic swirl as Rise FM blasted out? Series peak. 3 - Fallout: New Vegas Just one of the best RPGs ever made. Stuffed with insane dialogue trees, madcap characters and a one of a kind ambience. I don't think it'll be bettered within the series. Give it Fallout 4's settlement building and you have a perfect Fallout game. 2 - Doom II Would feel far too weird not having a Doom game on the list. The first two are so close together in terms of release and impact that it makes sense to just go with the one on steroids. But classic Doom as a whole is genuinely timeless, I think. It doesn't look or sound old. It just looks and sounds like Doom. The new ones are fine but the ultra-appeasement, killgorelol vibe of them is still a galaxy away from the charming meat grinder atmosphere of these old ones. 1 - Unreal Tournament 2004 As highly rated as it is, this is probably one of those left of field "Wow you must have played it loads" choices, I guess? This game was the zenith of my love affair with PC gaming when I was a teen. One of the most refined, giving games ever. Endless maps and modes. Looked great but was relatively stress free to run. I went so far as to making my own maps for it. I know they still exist in some form but god I miss arena shooters being a big time era.
  5. I'd never have said main event, but this Test look was the best he could have had. One of the worst "Gonna cut my hair and get short trunks" turns ever:
  6. I always struggle with shows where there's no real babyfaces to go for, but Aidan Gillen's character was good fun as he just came off as someone who got into this whole gangland stuff through pure accident of birth and far preferred sitting around listening to his 70s records smoking hash.
  7. 'The Miserables Fucks' has new UKFF faction written all over it.
  8. Not saying it's an incorrect take - because I'd personally rather just the straight bullseye shot of heel Roman Vs. face Cody too - but it's reflective of what a mental timeline we're in that "Hot crowd divided on their support between Cody Rhodes and uh...The Rock" can be perceived as a negative. Watching the segment, though, it was so brutally anachronistic that I'm confident it was planned as straight heel Rock and people were just popping for the occasion moreso than the content/character. It was back to the usual Gerwitz drizzling shits. "People who talk about wrestling on the internet need to pay to have sex hahaha!" The little promo after it was some good old school stuff though.
  9. Asking Google the exact years and months since my signup date was the laziest thing I've ever done with it, quite possibly. I then shouted its answer back to me in my head in a Bill Alfonso voice with the days, minutes and "Daddy-O!" added. Good craic.
  10. Got a Girl board today, in the latest episode of "Staying Off the Drink Does Weird Shit to the Gaffer." I've spent a few weeks now slowly teasing my way back into watching old skate team VHS rips on YouTube and re-falling in love with that whole mood of it all. I packed in skateboarding as a teen. Wasn't much good but I could cruise around and grind a rail like Tony Khan before a big Dynamite. Definitely was one of the many "I play Tony Hawk more than I actually skateboard" type people. I then realised I literally walk through an outdoor skatepark every day as a bridge between the street I live and the city centre (the local chemistry enthusiasts hang out there too, and it's affectionately dubbed 'The Bumhole') so I may as well just buy a board again and get into it. Found this great series as well on my voyage of rediscovery. It's relaxing to watch if you love skateboard noises, and the host seems like a stand up dude. Anyway, better get some sleep before I wake April and Phil up with fireworks tonight.
  11. People like Icke always present a sweet outer layer before you bite into the nutty middle. The first half hour of his WrestleMania length shows are almost always "You know when you think about it, love's really great and we can only really perceive a certain amount of the actual light and sound that's there" and it's like...well...yeah. Then once you're nice and settled he'll whip up a slide that shows Queen Elizabeth, Jay-Z and Jimmy Carter barbecuing human heads or whatever and get into the thick of it. I've never understood the point in giving such a crank the benefit of the doubt because you're able to take his 10% agreeable stuff and conveniently just fob off the rest of it. Story of dogma though, isn't it? His books can be a hoot. It's essentially the adorableness of someone trying to put together an interactive card for one of their grandson's birthdays by using Microsoft clipart, only applied to the world's most fucking insane takes and topics.
  12. Thought the Mone stuff was cringy in parts to be honest. I was dying for someone to interrupt her at the end when the camera just lingered. All the accoutrements, the non-stop "Waving my hands down the side of my head" dance to what's already one of the worst entrance tunes on the roster. But I was never a massive fan once the more aggressive, self aware post-NXT character came out.
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