BomberPat

I loved the Network angle when I saw it, but that's because it was a heel stable with Rhino, Corino and Tajiri, and Don Callis as a mouthpiece, and that's hard to fuck up.

Using an on-screen heel to explain unpopular changes to the product - similar to what the WWF did with Right To Censor - is something I'm generally a fan of, and knowing that there was always a chance that Cyrus would get his comeuppance at a PPV is a great touch. I wasn't aware of any of the politics or behind-the-scenes drama feeding into it at the time, so it just felt like another iteration of the "heel authority" act that was everywhere in 99/2000 anyway. In retrospect, ECW on TNN was the height of wrestling pettiness.

Maybe a better example for this kind of thing would be Bill Alfonso's gimmick as a representative of the Pennsylvania State Athletic Commission, banning moves and being anti-hardcore on top of being a heel ref. 

I'm in a weekly "bad movie" watchalong thing that started during Covid, where everyone nominates a film each week, and then what we watch is decided on the roll of a dice.

Last night's was Starslammer a.k.a. Prison Ship a.k.a. The Adventures Of Taura: Prison Ship Star Slammer. 

It's a strong contender for not necessarily being the worst film I've ever seen, but certainly one of the most unpleasant. It jumps between sci-fi parody and borderline softcore porn women's prison stuff, and every bit of dialogue is either misogynistic as hell or a punchline with no joke - at one point the warden of the prison does an "oxygen masks will fall from above you" joke, but they're not on a plane, and she's not an air steward, so why? Similarly, there's an ill-defined space emperor type bloke who was clearly never on set at the same time as any of the main cast as he never interacts with any of them, and he ends one of his video broadcasts by saying "that oughta hold the little bastards" - the same urban legend referenced by Gabbo in The Simpsons - but it's just meaningless in this context, just a reference for it's own sake. Speaking of not being on set at the same time as anyone else, John Carradine shows up on a green screen for one scene, because I think he just naturally occurs once a film is bad enough, you don't have to even film him, just when you start editing he'll be there. Imagine the scripts he turned down.

I couldn't even tell you what the plot was. 

It had Johnny Legend - wrestler, founder of Incredibly Strange Wrestling, rockabilly musician, brother of Andy Kaufman's girlfriend - as a kind of space wizard, and it's some of the worst acting I've ever seen. I found out this morning that the director, Fred Olen Ray, was also a wrestler, under the name Fabulous Freddie Valentine.

they've been a couple since late 2022, and got engaged in October.

Just now, The King of Old School said:

Why?! Or is it folk taking themselves too seriously again?

I think Scotty's issue was that he entered before Joe, so just had to stand in the ring and take the insult, when if he'd known the song ahead of time he would have insisted on coming out second so he could act fired up and annoyed by it. 

19 hours ago, Merzbow said:

Why is Yarnham behind them? Is someone coming in with a Bloodborne gimmick?

I was wondering why they were fighting in front of the whalebone arch in Whitby.

I think the NWA's issue with keeping the belt on Kerry wasn't whether or not he could draw, but whether he would be reliable, and, I suspect, them not wanting to give Fritz the kind of power and leverage he would have in the NWA if his boy was a long-term World Champion.

he got some genuine heat with Scotty Too Hotty over this one.

I always thought that it had been released in English and then removed from print, but bizarrely, looking at the publication history, it was first published here in 1991, and reprinted in 2005, despite having been deemed too racist decades before that.

It's the only book in the series I've not read, but I've seen excerpts from it - across multiple editions Hergé did tone down stuff like exploding a rhino with dynamite, and a lot of the more colonialist and racist content; most infamously, a scene in which he's teaching African kids a Maths lesson originally had him saying, "I'm here to teach you about your mother country, Belgium". I think in the final edition, one of the villains is changed from an African caricature to a white big game hunter.

I think Hergé was, as a young artist, incredibly naive and never sought to question the logic around him - that led to him depicting Africans as childish savages during a time that Belgium was committing horrific acts in Congo, and to draw comic strips for Nazi-owned publications during the occupation, and it's hard to justify those things. But by the last book, Tintin has a CND sticker on his bike helmet and is pastiching revolutionary movements in South America, and Hergé's politics are clearly no longer anywhere near what they once were.

my favourite thing about Asterix is that all the punning names had to be translated into every language the books have ever been published in, in a way that means they both function as puns and fit the naming conventions of all the Roman names ending the same way and all the Gaul's names ending the same way. Wonderful stuff.

Though both Asterix and Tintin have their fair share of decidedly unwoke moments, between Hergé's writing for fascist newspapers and Tintin In The Congo, and that pirate in Asterix.

It's hard to say without being a snob, but I can never understand when I meet people older than me who are really into Harry Potter, because when the first book came out I was towards the end of primary school but already thought it all seemed a bit childish and beneath me - probably as much a kneejerk reaction to thinking that any books with child protagonists were for little kids, but mostly, I'd already read The Hobbit, most of Narnia, and was mad for Discworld, so it just didn't appeal, even if at the time the only reason I could have articulated about why Discworld was more mature was because sometimes people say "bugger" in it.

I didn't read the books beyond one attempt to read the first one, but did end up seeing all of the films over the years. The films are decent enough, because they're very well made and exceptionally well cast, but it's still not enough to paper over the cracks of a very poor story.

I think it's probably a bit simplistic to say it's just a rip-off of Earthsea, though Le Guin had the best criticism of the Harry Potter books when she described them as, "stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited". I'd say she was pretty on the money about that, long before others cottoned on to the "ethically mean-spirited" aspect.

She also highlighted something I think is key to their success, which is that Rowling married all the borrowed fantasy tropes to the format of an English public school novel - when you see foreign tourists lining up for Harry Potter tours, or at the made-up platform at Kings Cross, or the merch shops that have blighted the Shambles in York and half of central London, and Harry Potter stuff in British tourist tat shops, you realise that a lot of what made the books attractive internationally was that the weirdness of an English boarding school setting was just as alien to other people as all the magic.

3 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

 I also remember someone some years ago calling her out about her claims that Dumbledore was gay, effectively saying that if it's never represented in the story, it's not representation.

The root of her deciding to claim "Dumbledore is gay, it just never comes up in the books" tends to be forgotten these days too - it was her reaction to a reader who was claiming Harry Potter as an analogy for coming to terms with one's sexuality; a young boy with a family who don't understand him is literally forced to live in a closet, until his true identity and purpose are revealed. Rowling rejected the idea that there could possibly be queer subtext or a queer reading of the book, and threw down the breadcrumbs of "Dumbledore is gay, though" as a kind of literary "some of my best friends are..". 

Thank you!

I've done a lot of research into revisionism over the years - a friend of mine used to delight in introducing me to people by saying, "this is Pat, he's been getting really into Holocaust denial lately" - so I try to add anything that can add a bit of nuance to an argument that risks just taking a very serious allegation and using it as an insult rather than understanding what it means. 

On trans identities, I owe a lot of the direction of my argument here to the Bad Gays podcast, which often reiterates that point about recognising that when we talk about gender and sex identities we are talking about them in a narrow historical and cultural context, and that it's not necessarily useful to project that on to others; the flipside is that it would be equally foolish to think that we've got it all exactly right here and now! 

I finished the Secret of Mana remaster last night. It's a great game, but the remaster doesn't do a lot to paper over how much it's showing its age. It's a good thing it has a Game Guide to effectively tell you where you need to go next, because it has that very 16-Bit RPG thing of sometimes giving you no indication at all what you're meant to be doing.

I enjoyed it, but how much of that was nostalgia carrying me along, I don't know, as it was getting a bit tedious and repetitive towards the end - the halfway house of Final Fantasy and Zelda style adventuring basically means it turns into "complete themed dungeon, go to next town" over and over again. Luckily the art style and characters are charming enough to make up for it, and while the story is as generic as JRPGs go, it at least has a few twists and turns to it.

11 hours ago, Loki said:

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).

This is something I've had to kind of teach myself to consider in other areas too - I used to be really critical of Chyna being used as an example of female empowerment in wrestling, because I don't think that was ever the intent; Chyna being strong and fighting men was never meant to say "women can be as good as men", it was a freak-show act to say "this woman can wrestle women", because she was the exception to the rule. But then I speak to lots of women in wrestling who were inspired by Chyna, and whatever my thoughts on her and how she was booked, it's only right that I take a step back and let the women who did see her as empowering and inspirational step up.

10 hours ago, Chest Rockwell said:

I think I might be getting confused because you were talking about anti-Semitism, and it seems the two are in this case completely unrelated?

My understanding of 'Holocaust' and 'Holocaust denial' has always been that those terms refer specifically to the systematic genocide of Jews in Nazi Germany, and not any other social groups targeted by the third reich. That doesn't seem to be how those terms are being used here.

I don't think it's helpful to use ambiguous language to imply she has been expressing anti-Semitic views.

There is legal precedence in German courts that the law covers denying any aspect of the Holocaust, not only the genocide of Jews - the specific letter of the law refers to the denying of Nazi crimes, rather than the Holocaust, which has the effect if not the intent of skirting around the linguistic debate over whether the "Holocaust" should refer solely to the genocide of Jews or to all victims. As an aside, a lot of people who write about this stuff prefer "Holocaust revisionism" as a term to "Holocaust denial", to better illustrate that it's a broader category of hate speech and extremism than just those who outright pretend the Holocaust never occurred at all.

In that light, I don't think the intention of accusing Rowling of Holocaust denial is to imply antisemitism, but to show the circles that she now runs in and the fellow travelers who share her views. In denying that the Nazis targeted trans people, there is recent legal precedence for that to be considered an act of denial - the case Houchen mentioned is, I believe, currently awaiting appeal, so it's not a done deal, and there's a lot of scholarly writing about the targeting of trans people by the Nazis, and will be lots more in years to come.

On Houchen's point about the Nazis not targeting people because they were trans, I think that's largely an issue with projecting our current understanding of sex/gender roles and identity on to the past - I think I have said on here before that I think there are LGBTQ+ activists who can overstate the significance of the Hirschfield Institute by effectively treating it as a queer Library of Alexandria, this repository of lost knowledge destroyed by history's greatest monsters, and that without that destruction and the loss of their research we'd be living in far more enlightened times, and I understand why it can be helpful to believe that as a call to arms, but of course it's all more complicated than that. 

The issue with saying that trans people killed by the Nazis were actually killed for other reasons neglects that, until relatively very recently, there really wasn't much distinction between categories like "gay" and "transgender" or "gender-fluid"; the idea of a defined identity of a "gay man" is really a late 20th century invention. For a long time, to be gay as we would now understand it was argued as a "third sex", and a person assigned male at birth who identified as female would, in many cases, have been treated as falling under that broad umbrella. For the Nazis, the labels of trans woman, gay man, and pederast may as well have been interchangeable, but that was largely true in this country for decades as well.

It's a mistake to look back at even the recent past and ascribe identities to people who never chose them personally - one of my favourite artists is Claude Cahun, and there's been debate over whether she should be referred to by male pronouns given that she went by a male name for most of her life, and much of her art and photography played in a space that prefigures a lot of more recent art exploring questions of gender; I fall down on the side of the argument that says she never, as far as we can tell, referred to herself as anything other than she/her even while using the name/identity of "Claude", so it would be unjust to project our current ideas of what her gender role might be on to her as anything more than speculation.

So determining to what extent trans people were targeted for their trans-ness rather than being seen as a subset of gay people is a messy and often speculative process. But we know that Weimar Germany had laws against public crossdressing, for which it was possible to obtain exemption permits if it could be proved that the holder of said permit was living their life as the gender they presented as. These permits were revoked by the Nazis. There was a limited and rudimentary understanding of trans identity, work by Hirschfield and others to establish an idea of trans rights, and there were trans magazines, societies, and clubs, all of which were targeted by the Nazis.

A trans woman who has sex with men, sent to an extermination camp because the Nazis saw her only as a cross-dressing homosexual man, should not be seen distinctly as either solely a gay victim of the Holocaust or solely a trans victim of the Holocaust. To do the former is to shy away from the motivations of the Nazis and the understanding of sex/gender roles that was most prominent at the time, but to do the latter is to see her only in the same terms that the Nazi regime saw her in, which is an injustice in itself.

I don't think Vince starts a wrestling promotion because I assume that he won't let go of the idea that he will be exonerated and waltz victoriously back into WWE - a new promotion feels like a very un-Vince admission of defeat.

5 minutes ago, Chili said:

Or he'll just try a new catchphrase that'll bomb.

I think that's more likely; how much of his trademarked AEW material has actually got over? Does anyone care about "the Demo-God" or "The Ocho", or is just rattling off every idea in his head hoping that one will catch on?

I saw someone suggest that he's only trademarking "The Vortex of Jericho" so that nobody else merchandises it to make fun of him. But even knowing it's a thing means he's aware of his current reputation, and there's no good being self-aware enough to know that you're an old bloke clinging to younger stars for clout if you're just going to keep on doing it anyway; I'm sure that the story with Hook is going to be built around that reputation, but how do you work with that in a way that's not just doing the exact same thing again?

the Bray Wyatt character was already a confused and muddled mess of references by the end, what did QR codes and glitches have to do with the character he was playing in the first place, aside from knowing that the people who obsessed over the minutiae of his gimmick would eat it up?

And as someone pointed out on Twitter earlier, the people who think that AEW having a wrestler from another country wrestle on television is impossibly complicated and alienating, and couldn't possibly stop and listen to the commentators explain who they are, or hop on Google and find out for themselves, are content to freeze-frame an episode of RAW to decode messages and follow QR codes to get one line of meaningless text.

what's worse is that they were still announcing Roman Reigns as the "undisputed" Universal Champion. I think when you have to introduce another World Title to make up for the existing one being subsumed into a title that never gets defended, you lose the right to call either of them "undisputed". 

9 minutes ago, air_raid said:

Still think "World" next to the title names is rubbish and there is nothing wrong with "Raw" and "SmackDown" as prefixes for midcard titles - especially with the Womens. "Raw Womens Champion" and "SmackDown Womens Champion" are far more logical than what they have now - they were the champions of their respective shows. Today, there's a Womens Champion of WWE, and a Womens Champion of "the World." Huh?

I hate both, to be honest. I never liked "RAW Champion" and "Smackdown Champion"; so what, you're only the champion of two hours on Friday night, while someone else gets to be the champion of the World? It's branding over prestige, and has always sounded naff to me.

The other problem is with having a "WWE Champion" (or Universal Champion) and a "World Champion". The Must See Matches podcast recently highlighted the commentary on Cena vs. Punk at Money In The Bank 2011 saying, "CM Punk is an X time World Champion, but has never held the WWE Title", and surely when you start saying stuff like that you realise that your championship situation is daft. 

1 minute ago, westlondonmist said:

I've never read or seen a film based on any of her books, any elaboration on this? Does she have tight fisted characters with big noses and stuff?

from what I can gather, the depiction is worse in the films than in her books, but her world's banking system is run exclusively by hook-nosed money-grubbing goblins. 

As with a lot of Rowling's work, I think it's laziness above all else. The Harry Potter books are a hodgepodge of ideas pilfered from other fantasy stories and folklore, and she's simply not a good enough or introspective enough writer to look at the tropes she's playing with and consider where they might have come from or what they might mean, or what she as a writer could do to subvert them. So because there's a long history of goblins and fantasy creatures modelled on antisemitic stereotypes, she just continues to play around with the same imagery and concepts, probably without ever once thinking about them as antisemitic - contrast that to a writer like Terry Pratchett, who specifically used the supposed limitations of fantasy tropes, creatures and races (e.g. with Dwarves and gender, Golems and self-identity and free will). And then by the time there were people publicly calling her out on this shit, she was in too deep in her TERF rabbit hole to ever admit fault, and has likely been surrounded by yes men and sycophants for so long that she hasn't had to accept criticism in twenty years.

REITA of Japanese band The GazettE. They were a huge Visual Kei act, which is - to over-simplify it - a kind of Japanese equivalent to glam rock and hair metal, taken to ridiculous extremes. He was 42.

My ex was a huge fan of theirs. Not long after we broke up she went to Japan on her own to go to one of their shows, and owned a shitload of expensive fancy limited and deluxe edition import vinyl and whatnot, so I've been around their music a lot, and this came out of nowhere, as far as I can tell.

kids in public places is one of the most insane arguments you can ever find yourself in on social media, it feels like the most innocuous thing, but soon goes mental. On one hand you have people objecting to a sign like that, when actually there's plenty of reasons to not want kids in a pub (and seeing it as an extension of not wanting women in pubs is shockingly gender-normative - it was always my Dad who'd drag me round pubs while he got pissed and gambled, after all!), and on the other hand you have people who seem to not see children as people at all, and think they should be locked inside and kept quiet until they're 18, and complain about them going to the cinema to see movies made for children, or being at Disneyland. 

The only thing worse is discourse about outdoor cats.

1 hour ago, Tamura said:

Was Tomb Raider "woke" in 1996 for having Lara Croft as the protagonist rather than some Indiana Jones-ish male character? 

This is an interesting one, because I've seen a few things pop up recently about Tomb Raider, with the developers giving really reasoned explanations about why they made the main character a woman, and how important that was to them. Back in the '90s, I distinctly remember one of them saying to Official Playstation Magazine that they did it because they "didn't fancy looking at a bloke's arse for the whole game".

It reminds of a time during the Gamergate shitstorm, when someone on the shit side of things tried to argue that actually there's loads of feminist games, but their definition of "feminist" boiled down to "has a woman in it", so half of their list was stuff like Dead or Alive that's entirely built on over-sexualising every single female character for the male gaze. As much as a lot of this stuff is built on simple old-fashioned misogyny, the complete lack of media literacy among a sizable percentage of the population has to shoulder some of the blame too.

You're absolutely right that it's about capitalism. Corporations don't give a toss about inclusivity and equality, they want to capture the widest possible market - they're not tailoring products to women because they're "woke", they're doing it because they want more people to buy what they have to sell. They're not putting mixed race couples and queer representation in adverts out of some grand conspiracy to minimise white men in media, they're doing it because it increases the chances of a wider audience finding it relatable, and then buying whatever they have to sell. And at the end of it all, they've realised that there's more money to be made in catering to surface-level messages of inclusion and equality than to the opposite - and while it's important to recognise that they're doing so for shallow capitalist reasons, it's equally important to recognise that it's a good thing because they recognise that the majority of people fall on that side of the line, not on the angry bigot side.

I saw a Facebook post yesterday making fun of the "go woke, go broke" meme, and asking for one example. The comments were flooded with people saying some variation on "Disney, Bud-Lite and the NFL". Aside from the America-centrism of it, it's just bollocks, isn't it? Disney, Budweiser and the NFL went broke, did they? 

I think AEW would suffer hugely from losing Moxley. While I think that the Blackpool Combat Club has potentially diminished what Claudio, Moxley and to a lesser extent Danielson, bring to the table as top tier talent, Moxley is such a statement wrestler for the company - he's not a WWE cast-off or also-ran, he's someone who chose not to re-sign with WWE, and who got on board with what AEW were offering when they were still unproven. That's the kind of wrestler that lends a promotion credibility, and reinforces them as an alternative to WWE rather than a second-choice. 

I have an Acclaimed foam finger from All In in my living room but, based on recent appearances, I'd struggle to justify them still being around - the Trios division has ground to a halt, and they seem as cold as a featured act can get, so right now I can say I wouldn't miss them, and that they might benefit from a WWE run. Ricky Starks kind of fits the same description, everything has been too stop-start with him.

Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning is fantastic, I really enjoyed that one, so much better than a straight-to-DVD B-movie sequel deserves to be.

If you're going to do sequels, it does what a sequel should do - it takes the basic premise of the franchise, and then looks at it from a completely different angle, so the mid-film twist comes as a genuine and brilliant surprise, and prompts a lot of questions about the concept and the series as a whole. I'll take that over the slew of modern sequels that are just swelling music while the camera lingers on a mundane object that means nothing to characters within the film but is treated with reverence because making the audience remember things from their childhood is easier than telling a good story.