BomberPat

The woman who invented the Mandela Effect - who was a credulous paranormal "ghosthunter" type - believed it and insists it was a really widespread belief, with people being convinced that they remember seeing a big state funeral in the 1980s. There's two points I always bring up to counter that - one is that I doubt you'll find a single person in South Africa with that false belief (and probably not in the UK either), and the other is that you'd hardly expect a political prisoner to have been given a big public state funeral!

I will say that the only surprise in the results for Wrestledream was that I figured the Trios champions would retain, and certainly didn't expect it would come down to Bandido beating Swerve clean - if I had to guess, I would have thought Hangman and Swerve being too focused on each other would cost one of their respective teams the match, and while that was a story running through the match, it didn't really play into the finish at all. My assumption when Swerve & New Level won the Trios belts was that it would eventually get to Kenny Omega & The Young Bucks vs. Swerve & The New Level for the Trios belts, which would be a massive match. I wonder if them dropping the Trios titles is a move towards setting up New Level vs. Young Bucks as a tag title match, which would be arguably even bigger for being more focused, though I'd have thought Kenny Omega would want to be part of the mix against Austin Creed at some point too. Particularly with FTR and the Motor City Machine Guns tied up in a Best of 5, keeping the Bucks busy with New Level means having two really big tag programmes running alongside each other.

every train should have a clear indication in every carriage of what carriage number it is. I used to get horrendous anxiety being sat on a train listening to announcements telling you that the next station had a short platform so you couldn't alight if you're in the first three carriages, or worse, that the train was splitting at this station and the front X carriages would go one way and the back Y carriages would go another. Tell me which bloody carriage this is, then!

Much like the Headhunters, Brian Lee as Underfaker is a surprisingly core part of my first bit of wrestling fandom. My earliest memories of "The Undertaker" were of him being managed by the Million Dollar Man, that was the first time I remember seeing Dibiase too. That must have been 1994, and must have been Brian Lee that I saw as The Undertaker and just never questioned it for years.

that QR code thing was for Bray Wyatt, wasn't it? I think what took me out of it more than anything was imagining the work the Bray Wyatt character would have had to do to make it happen, getting annoyed that he'd used his monthly allowance of free QR codes and debating whether he's going to pay up for the full package on bit.ly, then spider-walking backwards into the production truck to sneak them into a live broadcast - all for none of it to ever lead to anything or even get mentioned when he actually returned. STORY. CINEMA. ETC. As for WrestleDream, I've not watched all of it yet, still have Mox/Davis and the main event to go - had the results spoiled, so will just get to them when I have time. AEW have fallen into a comfortable pattern of having reliably great pay-per-views - pretty much every month there's at least one, usually more, matches to absolutely rave about, though on something of a B-PPV like this one you're kind of left wishing there was something else, something to hook you to watch Dynamite or keep you guessing. I always think we were kind of spoiled by the unpredictability of early AEW, this sense that anything could happen and anyone could show up, that there's still a part of me that feels disappointed when a show doesn't have some big mad surprise, and that's no fault of AEW's. I agree about Andrade being too gimmicky; he's an incredible wrestler, but the catchphrase stuff needs to be toned down. He could still be a cool ladies' man without having to do the exact same bits in every match - once he'd been jumped from behind by people in the crowd while posing for a selfie, that spot should be done, because short of using it to actually debut a new character it's been exhausted. A friend of mine got really annoyed at All In that Andrade does the trouser removal bit, but wears complicated trousers rather than easy tearaways, so I got a big pop out of him being cut off because he was struggling to get his trousers off over his kneepads. Which, again, should be a sensible point to end that gimmick and move on. It all feels very WWE to have something fun get over organically, and then insist on doing it again in every single match.

I have a lot of nostalgia for Dizzy, but it's hard to argue with merritt k's description: The thing with nostalgia reboots is that it's never enough to just make the same thing again, because gaming moves on so quickly - not talking in terms of graphics or new features, but just basic quality of life improvements. The secret is to try and find a way to capture the feeling of playing the original game, but with all the tweaks and fixes that modern gaming allows for, because if you make a game that plays and controls exactly like a game from the '80s in 2026 it's going to be a frustrating experience, and it doesn't have the excuse of actually being from the '80s to justify it, nor do people have warm memories of having played it before to make up for it. I don't think there's much of a market at all for a new Dizzy game that doesn't at least try and modernise rather than rehash, I don't have any faith in the Oliver Twins to know how to modernise it without losing its charm, and the AI use only serves to prove that and reduce the size of the already small target demographic.

I think part of the problem with Copeland's return from retirement is that different people seem to have different ideas of what Edge or Adam Copeland was or should be; I always complain about "super serious hard man" Copeland, because to me his best work was always as a slightly comedic heel, and even at the height of the Rated R-Superstar stuff he was never booked to be this unbeatable bad-ass. Yet every time I saw him during his WWE comeback, he was sitting in a dark room cutting a promo about how "fun time's over, it's time to get serious" - you're already too serious, how much more fucking serious can you get? That gets compounded by stuff like The Grit Couple, by the feud with Moxley in AEW presenting him as so hardcore and dangerous that he might have Moxley beat on both counts, and WWE booking "Brood Edge" as if it's his version of Demon Finn Balor, a scarier, powered up version of Edge, rather than a midcard gimmick that he did for less than a year. That presentation, across both promotions, was just all over the place, and it arguably stood out more in AEW where there's far less of a culture of babyfaces presenting themselves as tough guys and the most important person in the room. But I think time in general will be kinder to Copeland's AEW run than we were in the moment - reduced to the highlights, it will look great. "Fuck you" from Christian - in fact, pretty much any of their interactions - and the majority of their tag team run, with a few singles highlights in the mix, will look pretty good in retrospect, particularly if they nail the retirement. I just struggle to really imagine a match or angle that I'd be desperate to see Cope in as part of that retirement run, as I don't really have any desire to see him in the World Title picture, and in a straightforward singles match he can't hold his own against most of AEW's top guys and for the one he would potentially work well with, I don't trust his or MJF's instincts to work a good programme together. The best use of him is smoke and mirrors hardcore matches where they can disguise a lot of his flaws and weaknesses with brawling and weapon spots, or as part of a tag team, and with Christian presumably on the shelf indefinitely, I don't see either of those being the route they take.

Speaking of retirement runs, it's hard to muster much enthusiasm for Adam Copeland's. There's nobody in AEW I'm crying out to see him in a singles match with, and dreading that it's going to be lots of super-serious hard man RESPECT THIS BUSINESS stuff, which is the absolute worst version of Cope. I assume the intention was for it to be a Cope & Cage joint retirement run, and Christian's injury has forced their hand, but a reunion with Christian and matches with FTR and the Young Bucks were the big dream matches for Cope in AEW, and we've already done all that. It's not like there's a litany of people from his past to bring in for him to work with either, with them all either retired, working elsewhere, or not really relevant on a major stage like AEW.

yeah, Jericho is basically doing a midcard Cody-verse. His stuff never intersects with what anyone else is doing, outside of something like the Casino Gauntlet at All In, and after his feud with Ciampa, Ciampa basically moved on and never mentioned it again. They're just weird little self-contained stories, and I don't think anyone is particularly suffering or gaining anything from working with him at this stage, though Nick Wayne might actually benefit - what remains to be seen is what the direction for him is when the feud's over, and whether we just look back on it as another "Chris Jericho loses to Action Andretti" deal.

it always comes down to people never really grasping how to play the game - there was a point on yesterday's episode where Maya said that she was struggling because she was "two down". But for a Traitor at this point in the game, that's completely irrelevant - they get to recruit replacements for those people and literally nobody is raising her name, she's playing an absolute blinder, but she's talking about doing it badly because Richard and Hannah got voted out. I doubt any of the celebrities are going to turn down being recruited, so she can afford to just keep losing a Traitor every week and recruiting a new one and still make it to the end.

I really disliked that show, just nothing to change my opinion on the pointlessness of the qualifiers, and most of the matches themselves weren't good enough to make up for it. Shocked by how bad Christian's injury sounded, hopefully he can recover fully from that. I assume the plan was for a Cage and Copeland tag team retirement run next year, and they have pivoted to a Cope retirement run leaving things open-ended for Christian. I was excited to see the Motor City Machine Guns actually show up, and a Best of 5 series with FTR could be fun, but immediately talking about RESPECT and LEGACY is just the dullest way to build a wrestling match. And then the weirdness of them challenging for a match on the show, Stokely saying no, and then FTR just leaving and the MCMGs having to lamely play to the crowd and get no comeback for not getting what they offered the crowd was weird. The build to Clockwork Carnage means Ospreay is suffering from a similar problem to Hangman as babyface champion, where the World Champion isn't the focal point of the show, just a guy who shows up for a couple of segments. He's not feuding with anyone in particular, and has no lasting beef with the people in the title match, so he just sort of pops up now and then but isn't carrying the storyline. The show ended with a big schmozz of the entrants in Clockwork Carnage fighting each other, but Will didn't stand out any more than anyone else in that mix, he was just another guy there to take a move while everyone took it in turns getting their shit in.

very surreal hearing John Cena react to being told about a comedy match two of my mates were in.

Absolutely - make things equitable and accessible for everyone, so nobody is disadvantaged by just not knowing all the unwritten rules of what a CV "should" look like, or not having access to the means to write a good one. I'd add to this in terms of making job hunting fairer and easier, that employers should not be allowed to advertise a job without a clear and accurate salary expectation, without stating whether they are prioritising internal candidates, and if they're advertising it as "hybrid" they need to quantify exactly what they mean by that (I've applied for too many jobs advertised as "hybrid" only to get to interview and be told that actually they'd expect you in the office all the time).

I won a decent amount of money betting on them to win the Tag Titles, so no complaints from me.

I was talking to my partner about the Juniors division last night, because a clip of Super Porky wrestling Eddy Guerrero as part of a trios match came up on Instagram, and I was just generally talking about how great Super Porky was. I mentioned that WWE did a weird Minis division, and she couldn't understand why Porky would be part of it as he wasn't a Mini, and I genuinely just never thought about it. And then looked it up to realise that Porky never even had a match in WWE. For a few weeks it felt like they were really taken by him - fat guy popping up in backstage comedy skits is a pretty easy win for WWE - but I'm amazed it never translated into him actually wrestling, and that they just got rid of him with the rest of the division. He was there at the same time as Simon Dean, even if it's just one match that angle writes itself!