BomberPat

The big question for me is whether Jon Moxley makes it out of this one with the title. It's a really hard time to be booking him to drop the belt, but I think the C2 has more significant stakes if it's not just the Jon Moxley Show again. I don't think you need to explicitly continue the story of him dealing with grief, but maybe losing in the C2 could give him the crisis of confidence to move on to new things. I'm not sure about blocks, but I would go with a field of Jon Moxley, Ilja Dragunov, Tomasso Ciampa, Kevin Knight, Mark Davis, Konosuke Takeshita, Speedball Mike Bailey and Ricochet, with the remaining numbers worked out based on who is involved in other stories and other title pictures - it would be fun to have Swerve and Hangman in there, though it would mean the Trios Titles being put on the backburner for the duration, which I wouldn't be happy about. While I think it would be a downgrade in the usual match quality, I wonder if we see Adam Copeland enter it, given it will probably be his last opportunity to do so, and they could have him do an "old gunslinger's last stand" run for him. Maybe get Samoa Joe in there. It would be nice to have some NJPW or CMLL representation to vary things up, though other than maybe Hechicero I don't see it happening. Claudio is probably in again, maybe Gabe Kidd and Jay White, so there can be some Death Riders/Dogs/Bang Bang Gang tension. I agree that Ilja winning feels like the right move now. When he signed, my first thought was to stick him the C2 and let him build up people's investment in him by just letting him have great matches, and figure out a long-term plan once the tournament's over. But striking while the iron's hot is definitely the move, and I think he's a guy they could have take the title from Moxley without it feeling like a downer, because they'd just beat the shit out of each other and shake hands afterwards.

That felt like a really eventful show, in a way Dynamite hasn't for a long time. I have some nitpicks, which will be liberally littered through this post, but mostly I thought it was brilliant, with only the Opps/Jack Perry and women's tag backstage brawl being particularly weak segments. The Davis & Doyle/Young Bucks tag was superb. I assumed we'd get a standard Bucks TV match, with Renee talking about them working hurt just being to add some colour, but instead that line sowed the seed for what the match would be, and it was perfectly delivered. Love Davis & Doyle as a team, and they're the perfect choice to run that angle with, as are the Bucks - their match formula is so established as them escalating offence and kicking out of bigger and bigger near falls, to just get absolutely demolished meant more happening to them and it would had it been anyone else in their spot. The next tag was fantastic too, but they shouldn't have been formatted next to each other. Two Don Callis Family heel tag team wins in a row could have been avoided, and putting more space between the Bucks getting battered and then one of them coming out to make the save would have done more to keep Davis & Doyle's win feeling legitimate. I thought it was odd when this match was announced, that the first in-ring meeting of Fletcher and Ospreay since the cage match would be a barely promoted TV tag, and the reaction to them squaring off cemented that for me - it should have felt monumental to get those two back in the ring, and could have done with more weight being put behind promoting that. I wasn't at all interested in the prospect of a Copeland/Okada match, but then it became clear that this was all building to Blood & Guts rather than a pair of singles matches. I'm willing to forgive Blood & Guts feeling cobbled together given PAC's death likely changed all of their plans for the match, and Christian's injury changed their plans for Cope. They have some ridiculous talent in there, it should be great fun, and they've done a good job of actually making it all make sense in short order. My criticism, though, is that we've had months of Ospreay recruiting members of the United Empire, only to get to the big faction warfare gimmick and not be teaming with any of them. I feel bad for Wardlow, too - I think the ship has sailed on him as a top act, but he's reduced to maybe the seventh most important guy in the Don Callis Family. I would have had Don bring him back with loads of hype, only for Wardlow to reject him and just run roughshod through the Don Callis Family B and C teams. Mercedes and Marina felt massive. Mercedes mouthing "...fuck" when Marina's music hit, but then trying to big herself up and act tough once she was in the ring was a great character note. I don't know what the match will look like - Marina somehow manages to be brilliant and compelling while I still can't actually tell if she's any good by any of the usual metrics of whether someone's good at wrestling or not. She's been incredibly well protected for her entire run, to the point that I can't picture her in a Mercedes Moné match. The Dogs turn was weird. Jay White had some great babyface promos behind him, but the Bang Bang Gang were treading water and maybe will be better off as heels. The Dogs kicking out Gabe Kidd is probably the worst solution to the Dogs/Death Riders problem - I prefer The Dogs as a tag team to a trio with Gabe, but any version of this story that stays with Gabe as a Death Rider feels like the wrong direction. Again, I assume the PAC situation plays into it. I also found it very odd how much they allowed Claudio to fight back and batter everyone in what should have been a new super-faction showing their dominance. The Jericho/Nick Wayne stuff highlights something about Jericho - as a veteran, he's at his best when working with someone who reminds him of himself. Assuming he has a ton of creative input into this, it feels like Nick Wayne is just playing a younger Chris Jericho - you could picture Jericho doing the "I just beat...!" celebrations after a screwy win over someone like Goldberg in WCW, and the veteran trying to talk sense to the younger wrestler routine feels like him calling back to his feud with Shawn Michaels. It's fantastic how important they have managed to make Ilja Dragunov look immediately. The presentation, the teasing of the match with the metronome, how much they talked him up - brilliant stuff. Have they ever trailed a debut match all the way through a show like this before? A tiny thing that made me laugh - Excalibur running down the card for Collision, said that the Rascalz have been winning some Trios matches and want to get back into Trios Title contention....and so Myron Reed is having a singles match. And I checked, and the Rascalz have had six trios matches in AEW, and they lost five of them.

which is frustrating, because being a tag team of identical twins should be enough to get around at least some of that - they're not as big as an Earthquake or a Yoko, but there's two of the fuckers. They should have been Three Minute Warning before Three Minute Warning, fat lads doing moonsaults and fucking people up. But for all that 1997 gave us a lot of good things from the WWF, it was hardly an embarrassment of riches for the tag team division - if there were some smaller teams for them to lob about, maybe they'd have fared better, but it's all Davey Boy and Owen and the DOA and Nation of Domination, all other massive lads. And when they did get a proper team in Furnas & LaFon they never knew what to do with them either. It's just weird that twice they did a one-off appearance, got fucked off by Davey Boy, and then vanished.

I'd be amazed if I ever saw that segment as a kid; I never watched RAW, and I can't imagine that segment made it on to any of the highlight shows. I also think I was probably done with wrestling at that point - I think I watched from '94 to '96 and maybe a bit of 1997; I have a vague memory of seeing the clip of Shawn Michaels superkicking Bret when he was in a wheelchair, which would be about a month earlier than this, so maybe, but I still think it's unlikely. I'm mostly replying just to say what an awfully booked bit of business that is. Just like the Rumble you were in, you introduce these two massive heavyweights, only to immediately have Davey Boy bodyslam one of them, and then have them go evens brawling with the fucking Headbangers, even getting cut off while going to the top rope. Mental.

In terms of wrongful convictions, in the US the vast majority of exonerated criminals are black, and we don't really need to hand more of the machinery of the state over to enforcing institutional racism. There is also a concerted right-wing effort to paint any acknowledgement of LGBTQIA+ identity or issues, any support given to queer kids, any education on queer topics, as tantamount to grooming. I don't think you can have a conversation about the death penalty for sex offenders without acknowledging that there are significant forces at play who are trying to paint being trans or queer in public as a sex crime in itself.

it doesn't look like there's any hope of someone else picking up the work, but the mention of getting the union involved seems to have ruffled the right amount of feathers. We have a weekly meeting with the member of SMT that in theory has oversight of our team - I don't trust him, and I've yet to see any tangible benefit from these meetings. Last week he didn't show up, and only apologised after the fact, this week he didn't show up and sent a replacement, which we only found out when said replacement joined the meeting. Whenever I next see him, I intend to tell him how disrespectful of our time I find this - it's fair enough that he can't always be available, but give us the courtesy of telling us ahead of time when that's the case! The person sent in his stead is one of the Deans of Faculty, who I have a lot more time for than the usual guy. He was a lot more receptive, admitted a lot of things that were at fault, and sounded a lot more committed to making sure our workload is better managed and other departments are expected to better pull their weight - whether anything comes of it remains to be seen, but it was reassuring to hear, at least. I didn't bring up my email, but a colleague did - not one I would have expected to have spoken up in my favour - and the Dean said that the email had been forwarded to him, and that he was planning to talk with management about making sure I was fairly compensated for the additional work I have been having to do. That addresses part of my email, it doesn't address the lack of management or respect of boundaries - there was one point in the meeting, before my email had been mentioned, when he said something about making sure that our team aren't asked to do anything that's outside of our remit, and I just involuntarily let out a short laugh, given that the person who has volunteered me for work outside of my job description is in my team and was in the meeting. The call is coming from inside the house! At least it's something, though, but it's something I am going to follow up on repeatedly until I get something in writing to say that I will be getting paid at a Grade 7 rate. What's frustrating is that I have had opportunities to apply for Grade 7 jobs in the past, and I have always been very clear that I wasn't interested - I don't want that level of responsibility, I find the work too stressful, and I'm happy with the work/life balance that my current grade affords me, and, thankfully, I'm in a position where I'm not desperate for the additional money. I'm confident that had I applied for those roles when they were available, I would have had a decent shot at getting them. Doing that work but not getting that money is, obviously, the absolute worst of both worlds. My preference would have been not doing this work at all, if I had to choose between that and doing it while also having to fight to be paid fairly for it.

aaaand on top of all of that, I got an email at 4.30 yesterday that absolutely ruined my day, made me so angry and so stressed about the response I was going to have to write to it today, and about every single conversation I would have to have today, that I barely slept last night. It was someone in a senior management position basically saying, "this huge piece of work urgently needs doing, and after a conversation with X and Y it's been decided that you are going to support this work". A conversation I wasn't in, where it was decided that I would be doing this work. This super-urgent, business critical work. Followed up with usual platitudes of "I know that everybody is at capacity right now, but please find the time for this" - if we're at capacity, where do you think I'm finding this time, exactly? If I'm leaving other work undone to get to this, are you going to reach out to all the people not having their requests answered and explain to them that you have told me that they're not as important? The email ended with the suggestion that I speak to X about how to manage this workload. X, who couldn't be bothered to so much as send me a message giving me the heads-up about this, didn't involve me in the conversation he was going to put me forward to do a massive piece of work above my pay grade in, and now I'm expected to even take the lead on a "conversation" with him about the work he's asking me to do? Fuck off. So I've responded to this morning. Firstly, I've pointed out that if this work was so business-critical, the person sending the email probably shouldn't have signed off on voluntary severance for the one person in the entire university with any knowledge or experience of how it worked. I've also pointed out that if it's so urgent and critical that we start this work immediately, it's probably a stupid allocation of time to, as they have, immediately arrange two separate meetings about it on a day that we already have multiple meetings in the calendar, so I'm effectively out of action from 12 until 5. Then I've added that I'm on annual leave from Friday, and that if anyone had actually bothered to ask I could have told them that. More significantly, I've laid out a timeline of events from April of this year, in which promises have been made to our team that the university has completely failed to meet, in which I arranged a meeting back in August to lay out all the ways I could already tell we were going to be let down this year, and how important it would be to actually set and maintain clear boundaries about what work we were prepared to pick up - within that meeting, it was agreed that a large part of the work I perform does not appropriately sit within our team, and it was also agreed that X, the same prick putting me forward for this work now, would draft an email to go out to all heads of departments clarifying our role, and create accompanying automatic responses for our team inbox detailing this, and for our personal inboxes redirecting people to email our team inbox rather than individuals. The report produced from that meeting has not been acted on, and none of the things X was supposed to have done got done. Also in that timeline is the fact that I have had no line management since August. So not only did I have to pick up a shit-ton of work above my pay grade, in the subject area that was already agreed to be outside of our remit, but I've had to figure out that entire process and get it all done off my own back with no support, no steer, no management oversight whatsoever. As a result of that, the head of that subject area started emailing me relentlessly because he figured I was now working exclusively for him and was the person who could fix every problem under the sun for him - something that he should already know isn't the case, but certainly would know if the guidance X had promised had ever actually been delivered. So, with no other option, I took it upon myself to explain the situation and lay out boundaries - I did this work once because it needed doing and there was no alternative, but this is Grade 7 work and I am Grade 5, it is not reasonable to expect me to pick it up in perpetuity, and I have no intention of doing so. I copied X in on this email for visibility, and on Monday explained exactly why I had copied in on that email. So in my email to everybody involved today, I have said how disappointed I am not only that my email wasn't supported by management - despite it being clearly within the structure they laid out for how our team would operate this year - but that the one person I should be able to trust to back me up on it has actively undermined me on it instead, by telling me that they expect me to pick up another massive piece of work in the same subject area, above my pay grade. I've ended by saying that this is, at minimum, a full month of doing Grade 7 work at a Grade 5 salary, and that this is neither appropriate, sustainable, or within the university's guidelines for appropriate cover for absent colleagues, and have said that in the absence of a satisfactory response I have no interest in continuing that conversation without a union representative present. As shit as this job has been at times, I've always been able to fall back on having a good team around me, but it turns out at least one of them is a careerist backstabbing cunt who would rather promise the bosses the world than look out for his colleagues, and I'm not going to stand for him thinking he can use me as a pawn in that game - I've copied every other member of our team in this email, so they can all see what's being asked of me, and who's doing the asking. Prick.

Street Fighter I don't think I have ever seen another film that was so enthusiastically four stars in the moment, but which I know will be lucky to get two stars on a repeat viewing - it will not hold up at all, the plot and tone are all over the place, they try and cram four hours worth of story into a two hour film, half the cast can't act, the soundtrack is wildly anachronistic, and you can practically see the seams where things have been saved in the edit, but I had an absurd amount of fun watching it.

I think Clockwork Carnage works a lot better as a match for a title shot than for a title - the TV in the run-up to Clockwork Carnage suffered for Ospreay as World Champion not being enough of a focal point, and not having a feud to get his teeth into to really sell the pay-per-view, and with qualifying matches running right up to the week of the pay-per-view meaning there wasn't enough time to properly build it as a main event World Title calibre match. Now, it may be that I've got cause and effect the wrong way around here - Ospreay spent at least part of the build off in Japan doing NJPW stuff, so it might be that they went with Clockwork Carnage precisely because Ospreay wasn't going to be around enough to build a big heated feud, in which case it's smarter booking than I was initially giving them credit for. There were story points in there that I enjoyed - I thought Excalibur did a great job of putting over the importance of both phases of the match, I really liked him making sure to get across that the eighth entrant has the advantage because they're the only one guaranteed to enter into the second phase, and saying early on that Takeshita could pin Will early and while it wouldn't make Takeshita champion, it would guarantee that Will wasn't leaving with the World Title. Nigel, meanwhile, was arguing that he wouldn't be trying to eliminate people early, he would be spending the first phase trying to defend himself and reserve his energy, effectively hoping that the other wrestlers would punch each other out. That kind of discussion of the strategy behind a match like this is one of the ways you really make it work, and ties into Statto's point about Nigel suggesting Will should give up a fall to save himself further damage - that's how Nigel McGuinness would approach that situation, but not how Will Ospreay would, and therein lies the story. I'd be interested to see if future Clockwork Carnage matches take that kind of thing into account and do things differently, because there's so much scope to play around with the format - if they all just end up much like this one, where the people lower down the pecking order are eliminated early, the "proper stars" go through to the second phase, and then the result runs right down to the wire, it will be disappointing when there's so much they could be going. It put me in mind of two of my favourite wrestling moments - first is the ECW World Title three way match between Taz, Mike Awesome, and Masato Tanaka. It was elimination rules, and Taz, the champion, was eliminated really early in the match - Joey Styles screaming about how now whatever happens, you're guaranteed a new World Champion. It's not what you're expecting, and it instantly gives you a hook - the champion going out in the first phase of a Clockwork Carnage would be really interesting in that way too. The other is the Kurt Angle/Brock Lesnar Iron Man match, where Brock hits Kurt with a chair, dropping a fall by DQ, but he knows he's done enough damage that he's going to pick that fall back up again moments later anyway - I don't think I'd ever seen that in an Iron Man match before, and that tactical mentality of "I can afford to take a fall here" should come into play a lot more in multi-fall matches, rather than each fall being treated as equivalent to how they'd be seen in a single fall match.

not a Mandela Effect as it's a single false memory of mine that nobody in the world would share, but I talked in the Debut to Departure thread about a false memory I had of the 1996 Royal Rumble. For years I had a memory of a Rumble match featuring two identical twin sumo wrestlers; I could picture one getting eliminated, waiting on the ramp as the second entered, them realising that the referee would be unable to tell them apart to know which had been eliminated, and both (re)entering the match together, going on to dominate. This didn't happen. The closest I can figure is that the Headhunters were the identical twins, but they were in and out in seconds, but that I had somehow conflated them with Yokozuna, who did have a longer and more dominant run in the match. It's a combination of watching wrestling with almost zero context - my parents and older brothers hated it, so I'd just catch what I could on TV when I could, weeks or months apart, usually just highlight shows with no real understanding of who any of the wrestlers were - and probably only half paying attention, on a grainy CRT TV, and then the memory just warping and shifting in my brain, because I rarely had cause to actually think about it. My brother and I used to play at wrestling on the top of our bunkbed, until one time he shoulder tackled me and I fell off the top bunk, landing on the Manta Force spaceship on the way down, and that put an abrupt stop to it. We'd play as characters we invented, drawing pictures of them and giving them names - they were all blatant rip-offs of WWF gimmicks, or characters from Mortal Kombat or Streets of Rage, and somewhere in there we made up this twin sumo wrestler tag team; so I thought I was ripping off something I had seen in the WWF, but it was inadvertently an original creation! In terms of actual Mandela Effect shared false memories, the ultimate one has to be people insisting that Kane wore green at least once when tagging with X-Pac, right?

For the most part, though, while it's interesting, it's usually completely explicable.... ...and things like this are often why. When something is referenced, especially comedically, that extends the shelf life of the quote or memory. People think the line in The Empire Strikes Back was "Luke, I am your father" because every time someone has referenced that moment, or done an impression of Darth Vader, they've started with "Luke...", because they've stripped the quote from context and because "Luke" is the quick tell as to what impression you're doing. So, yes, they're often a shared false memory, but I don't find the fact that it's shared to be particularly interesting because the root explanation remains the same - you're asked a leading question about something you have only the fuzziest of memories of, and your memory fills in the blanks, usually with the help of some extraneous context; other versions of a quote or image do exist, as reference or parody, and they cloud your recollection. I don't find the core Nelson Mandela example all that interesting, largely because I've never encountered anyone who believes it, and because it seems to be the most blatant example of the self-absorption I'm talking about - to learn that one of the most prominent international statesmen of the twentieth century died decades after you thought he did should be cause to consider your own ignorance about world affairs, and it is profoundly egotistical to instead insist that you must be correct and that it's the universe that's wrong. I've seen various "explanations" - misremembering the death of Steve Biko as the death of Nelson Mandela (which doesn't work for me, as the false timeline for Mandela's "death in prison" is usually given as the mid-80s", but the most likely to me is that someone saw tributes and concerts in Mandela's honour while he was imprisoned, and mistook them for a funeral, and then remained incredibly incurious for decades after the fact. I would be amazed if there is anyone in South Africa who shares that false memory, and almost as surprised if anyone in the UK does, it seems to exclusively exist among white Americans. The only one that I find even vaguely difficult to explain is the Sinbad genie movie thing - but even then, the simplest explanation is just "you're wrong, and you've let the internet convince you that there's something special in your wrongness". For a movie that people apparently vividly remember, I've never seen one person able to explain the plot, name a single other member of the supposed cast, the director, the details of a specific scene - nothing, quite frankly, that would convince you that there is a widespread memory of an actual film.

when did the Saudi shows stop being these mad bespoke affairs, with stuff like Shawn Michaels coming out of retirement, Tyson Fury wrestling, them making up new title belts for the occasion, or putting on matches like Goldberg vs. Undertaker? From what I've read more recently they just seem like fairly standard WWE PPVs - I can't imagine the Saudi royal family have become less demanding in their tastes!

my manager's sick leave was extended for another week. So that's coming up on three months that I've had functionally no management whatsoever. The worst chunk of work at the start of the month is out of the way, so it's not as overwhelming as it was. But we're coming up on round two of that for November's payment, and it's looking increasingly like she won't be around for that either. I have made it very clear that I'm not doing it again. At some point you would think that how obviously short-staffed and overwhelmed we are would break through and mean something to someone outside of our team, but we get more and more piled on me. In our last meeting with someone in senior management, I said that we as a team are receiving far too many emails from people who seemingly don't know what our role and remit is but should know better, and that I personally am getting far too many emails specifically to my personal account assuming that I'm either more senior than I am or in a position to fix all of their problems, when they should at the very least be contacting our team inbox. The main culprit has now taken to copying in two other members of my team, and everyone else he can think of, saying "I think X is responsible for this" when they're not even remotely associated with that piece of work and God only knows how they got that idea. We were told before the start of term that we would be given a standard automatic response redirecting people from our personal inboxes to the team one, and the team one would have an auto-response with links and replies to common enquiries - none of that has happened, and in fact things have only got worse. Meanwhile, on the academic side of things, the union have been taking industrial action since August. Good on them. The last offer from management was offering to open a voluntary redundancy scheme, with a commitment to no more compulsory redundancies this year - that has had the opposite effect to that which they presumably expected, as all it did was highlight that currently the plan is for compulsory redundancies this year, something they had been skirting around actually saying. And as for voluntary redundancy, it will be the third such scheme in eighteen months - at some point you have to assume that everyone who could be eligible for it already has been; if it comes up again and apply for it and it's granted, I would have to seriously ask what's changed so much to have made me disposable now when I was turned down for the same scheme four months ago.

This is what almost every single example of the Mandela Effect comes down to for me; how often do you actually think about this shit? Of course you don't have a very clear memory of a fairly inconsequential kids' book, or a line in a film, or what a corporate mascot looks like, so it's not very surprising that if someone asks you a leading question about it - "do you remember the Monopoly Man having a monocle?" - your brain fills in the blanks and figures, "I guess, probably, who gives a shit?". It's an act of monumental self-absorption to think that the explanation of alternate timelines or widespread conspiracy is somehow more believable than "you remembered something wrong".

I still haven't watched Clockwork Carnage, but I'm amused by the second point as that's basically how the EVE version of the match went, and given that was produced by Ospreay, I have been suspecting that the AEW one would be formatted almost exactly the same. On the first point, my kayfabe justification for this is always that a wrestler in a multi-fall match might take the gamble of conceding a fall if it means reserving the energy required to kick out and fight back, knowing that they are able to win it back later. It's a bit nonsensical, but you can justify it, unlike the old trope of Survivor Series matches where someone would get pinned by a move that's never beaten anyone and be eliminated.

I'm always fascinated by this stuff - Tough Enough winners were always set up to fail, because you always had the grumpy old-timers angry that they're getting paid big money and getting featured despite "not paying their dues", and the WWE's attitude was just to let those old-timers be horrendous violent bullies rather than protecting the wrestlers they put in that position. Compound that with someone like Daniel Puder or Bart Gunn who is put in an unscripted situation, then punish them for not following the script that only existed in the booker's head. Madness. In both cases, even if you're annoyed that things didn't go the way you wanted, would you not roll with the punches and at least try and get one decent story or match out of it? Rather than sending Daniel Puder out to be battered by the old guard in a Rumble, would you not book at least one match with him against Kurt Angle to capitalise on an unexpected moment? It doesn't have to be PPV, doesn't have to go long, doesn't even have to make Puder look good, but at least you get something you can sell for a night. Same with Bart Gunn - he wins the Brawl For All, sure, he's not who they wanted to win it, but he can't get a title shot against Austin on RAW, just so the top guy can show he's "tougher" than the guy who won the tough man contest? I think Aja Kong disappearing was a victim of the booking team changing; at the start, Kenny Omega had a lot of oversight over the women's division, and was leaning on Joshi promotions to bring in talent. Those connections fell through pretty quickly when it became the Tony Khan show. Awesome Kong just abruptly retired - she'd basically been done for a couple of years before AEW, and has only wrestled once since, I just don't think her heart was in it any more. It would have been nice to see her stick around a bit longer.

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.