BomberPat

18 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

Growing up bombarded with messages like this from a variety of sources across the cultural landscape, to view the erosion and outright violation of someone's sexual agency as nothing more than a bit of fun at worst and a comedic mishap at best, it's not surprising that insufficient comprehension of what consent entails, both by men who breach it or women who defend said behaviour, has been so endemic.

I think what's worse than it being played for laughs is the extent to which various romance films, TV shows and the like have depicted persistence and ignoring boundaries as somehow romantic, that the way to a woman's heart is just to keep pursuing her until she eventually says yes. That, as much as sexist jokes and objectification and titillation, has contributed to those aspects of the culture.

To bring it back to Vince, and to comments by people like Kevin Nash - I don't know who first said the line that everything is secretly about sex, except sex, which is secretly about power, but lately I tend to see a lot of cultural failings rooted in our inability to reckon with issues of power and systems. Especially in America, where a combination of the fact that talking about power dynamics that can sound a bit too much like scary Marxism, and their culture - especially on the right-wing - being profoundly individualistic, they don't like the idea that anyone but themselves can have bear any responsibility for their actions, or that any external factors can impact on someone's decision-making. When it comes to broader politics, it means pattern recognition that should be identifying systemic corruption and inequality instead misfires and creates conspiracy theories, and when it comes to consent, they can't frame it as anything but yes/no, so anyone who entered into a relationship of any kind with Vince McMahon was de facto consenting, because there's no appreciation of the enormous power imbalance that relationship entails, or the pressures that somebody like Vince McMahon can place on somebody.

It also raises the other two ugly aspects of Nash's response - one being that by consenting to a relationship, even if we overlook the duress she was placed under to do so, she consented to everything that Vince subsequently did to her, which is the logic of marital rape. The other is financial - the idea that Vince's victims are either only after his money, or that Vince's actions are excusable because they got or are going to get his money. It seems to start at the assumption that the victims are acting dishonestly, and work backwards from there.

if I'm writing massive walls of text on here, it's usually a good sign that I've got some tedious paperwork that I'm putting off.

In the last couple of weeks it's been Skyvegas. There's a couple of daily free games that can win you free spins on others, so I try and fit those in, and if I win any money on there, if it's less than a fiver I'll generally stick it on a scratch card or another game and try to up it, and withdraw if it's more than a tenner. No money in, so no loss, and I once won £60 doing it, so it beats Solitaire.

One time when working in a call centre, it was a really quiet weekend, getting towards the end of the day with no calls coming in, no mail orders to input, no emails to answer, so we were basically sat clock-watching, some of the temps had already been sent home early as there was nothing for them to do. It got to maybe half an hour, an hour at most before clocking off time, and I'd been (I thought) discreetly fucking about with some games online to pass the time. The supervisor calls out, so everyone can hear, "you fancy going home now Pat, or did you want to finish your game of Tetris?". 

Years later, I worked part-time in a branch of Moss Bros. There were only ever two of us at most on shift, and on Sundays I was the only one in, and because in Jersey shops opening on Sunday was still something of a recent novelty, and we were off the main drag, I hardly ever got any customers. The building had a glass ceiling and no air con, so it was sweltering heat in the summer, you have to be stood up, and you're in a full suit and tie all day. Miserable. Phones have to stay in your locker, so finding any way to pass the time was a killer once you'd got all the little jobs done - and it was a small shop, so with no customers, all of that was done by lunchtime. 
We had these fancy UNIX touch-screen tills built into the counters, though, and I realised on one particularly dull day that there was a decent workaround there - through the till system, you could access the Moss Bros website to check prices, product availability and whatnot. And on the Moss website, there was a link to their Facebook page - and from there, you're just on Facebook, so I could log in, use Messenger, and play some games. They were all practically unplayable with that set-up, but still, it was a good effort.

23 minutes ago, Supremo said:

Interesting that Danielson said they need to do the rubber match on, “neutral ground.” Butlins?!

Zack alluded to wanting to wrestle Danielson in Arena Mexico after the Hechicero match.

been playing Assassins Creed Unity; most of the AC games are free on PS Plus at the moment, and I like the setting of this one, and never really played it, just watched my ex play it. You know what you're getting with these games, so it was all decent enough, but a bit of a slog toward the end - I finished the main story, and started on the Dead Kings DLC and some of the few remaining side quests, but while the DLC has some nice new additions, the story is dogshit and lumbers you with an annoying child sidekick, and it has the problem of all open world games in that after however many hours I've put into it the novelty of jumping about finding treasure chests and collectibles has long since worn off, so I can't get remotely invested in doing any more of it. So I'm shelving that one for the time being.

Still pulling from PS Plus free games, I gave Stranger Of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origins a spin and barely made it out of the tutorial. My only prior knowledge was that it was a kind of remake/reimagining of the first Final Fantasy game, but I just didn't get it at all. The opening is just a series of barely connected scenes, unlikeable out of place characters, an inexplicable Frank Sinatra setpiece, dogshit voice acting, and tutorials teaching you how the combat works after it's already made you fight a boss monster. An incomprehensible mess that gave me no reason to want to keep playing.

So instead I went to an old faithful, and started Secret of Mana. It's the PS4 remake, so all cutesy 3D graphics rather than the SNES original, and at least this time the voice acting is, while still bad, kind of charming. It's one of the great JRPGs, and I have only the faintest of memories of anything that happens in it, so it's nice and easy one to play and I'm enjoying it.

Finally, I started playing Rollerdrome and I absolutely adore it. I was sold the moment I saw the trailer, but assumed I would be terrible at it. Luckily the controls are a lot more intuitive than I imagined, and it manages what to me is the real sweet spot of good game design - it's enjoyable and you want to keep playing even if you keep losing, and I never get annoyed at the game design when I lose, as it's always my own fault, not a bit of bad level layout, cheap CPU behaviour or bad camera. 
If you don't know it, the game is right up my street aesthetically - a retrofuturist blood-sport in the Speedball/Death Race 2000 style; it's rollerblading with guns, so gameplay is fast and frantic and bonkers, but the main selling point for me is that it's visually gorgeous, everything that as a kid I wanted video games of the future to look like. Beautiful cel-shading that makes it look like a European graphic novel.

Mega Drive games all fall into one of three categories for me - the ones we actually owned, the ones we rented a few times, and the ones I didn't play until years later on emulation, and Mega Games 1 falls into the first category, which means it was played to death and it's pretty much impossible for me to be objective about it.

I'm not a football guy, and while I've played a few later football games on PS1 and PS2, I probably put more time into World Cup Italia '90 than any of them. All of your criticisms are spot on, but they can't combat the wave of nostalgia that comes from those chunky top down sprites and that world map. I have joked a few times over the years that the last time I was any good at a football game I was playing as West Germany, because they were my go-to team (mostly because everyone else always went straight for Brazil).

I enjoyed Super Hang-On for a time but was never good at it, because as a more or less straight arcade port it was hard as balls. After I'd rented Road Rash 2 a couple of times, I almost resented having to play a bike game where I couldn't hit the other riders with a chain. As a kid, the challenge was always trying to run across the finish line after getting knocked from your bike.

Columns is the one, though. I have the Mega Drive Collection on PS2, and have sunk more hours into Columns than any other game on there, it's just beautifully meditative and the right side of challenging without getting frustrating, so I've racked up some mad high scores on there over the years. I played it before I ever played Tetris, so for a long time it kind of felt like the default of this sort of game, and the matching colours mechanic felt more intuitive to me than making lines in Tetris. It was also, until Beehive Bedlam came along on Sky Digital, the only game my Mum ever played.

7 hours ago, simonworden said:

I've got two questions for all the wrestling history buffs on here. What prominent 80s wrestlers started wrestling pre 1960? And we're there many/any wrestlers that were wrestling way back in the 20s to 40s still active in the 80s or even later. I o ow Lou Thez had a match in the 90s and Moolah is probably a good example but are there any others?

There's guys like Fritz Von Erich and Stu Hart who debuted in the 50s and 40s and still worked occasional tag matches up until the mid-80s.

Killer Kowalski debuted in the '40s and would still work the occasional tag match into the early '00s.

Jackie Fargo debuted in 1950 and worked his last match in 2006.

Adrian Street debuted in 1957, and had his last match in 2014.

Mr Wrestling II debuted in the 50s and had his last match in 2006.

Mae Young claimed to have debuted in 1939, though more likely it was 1941, and her last "match" was 2010.

Bruno Sammartino debuted in 1957, had his last match in 1987.

Gypsy Joe debuted in 1952 and wrestled until 2011.

Dominic DeNucci debuted in the 50s and had his last match in 2012.

I'm not aware of any from the '20s that would have still been working as late as the '80s - Angelo Savoldi and Michele Leone are as close as it gets, working from the mid-30s to mid-70s, or Octavio Gaona in Mexico in a similar timeframe. Aside from the amount of time passed, there's a real changing of the guard in wrestling after World War 2, and really another before that in the 30s.

12 hours ago, IANdrewDiceClay said:

Been a fan of Kevin Nash for years. Even in the years it was clear there was little value in him. But I saw someone I really dont like watching that clip the other day. Like a desperate man who knows so much, trying to cover it up just so he can still have his legends deal. So fuck him. 

That's the thing - Kevin Nash is likely a millionaire, could coast on royalties from video game appearances and nWo merch alone, and won't ever wrestle again. If he's too scared to criticise Vince, even after the stories are public knowledge, what hope do we have of anyone who actually works there, or is in his inner circle, doing anything?

Of course the alternative is that it's not about protecting his buddy Triple H or downplaying what Vince did, but that wrestling has been so deep in this shit for so long that Kevin genuinely doesn't see what the problem is.

Fuck, that one hurts.

His stuff with Can is as good as anything ever recorded, and his never-ending improv tour was fantastic. I met him at ATP in 2007, and he was a real class act - wheelchair-bound at the time, but just super enthused to be around music and watching as much as he could.

I agree, I just don't trust them not to change their mind at the eleventh hour

17 hours ago, JNLister said:

Biggest weakness is that they don't always nail the difference between "winning the world title in a wrestling match is a work" and "being made world champion in the business is a competitive activity".

I haven't seen the film yet, but was talking to friends who had seen it, and that was their main criticism, and I think it comes down to directors not really knowing how to tell stories within the framework of a wrestling match without treating it as real; Cassandro was similar in basically presenting wrestling as real, and trying to tell years' worth of story across one match. 

17 hours ago, wandshogun09 said:

He’s claimed to have witnessed, and tried to attach himself to a bunch of murders and high profile crimes over the years.

This is one of the reasons I think he might be schizophrenic rather than just a conspiracy theorist - I've known a few, and those who went down the conspiracy rabbit hole often did so with full conviction that they were personally being targeted or otherwise implicated in it all.

On top of that Arkansas is rife with Clinton conspiracies, that would definitely have indulged the worst of that, and then shoot interviewers played him for laughs and encouraged him and egged him on.

13 hours ago, Frankie Crisp said:

Imagine if Reigns goes over, though.

I think it's worth putting money on, tbh.

Sean Oliver tried to defend it by saying they did it to make fun of the Jericho situation, without addressing why it might have upset people, or how inappropriate their reaction was. 

He also believed that Chris Benoit was set up, because Daniel was actually Vince's son, and they had the family killed to cover all of that up, and that's barely scratching the surface. I honestly think he's a paranoid schizophrenic who was taken advantage of by the shoot interview mob.

yeah - some people here have suggested this is The Rock as heel authority figure, but I don't see it, and I don't see any scenario that doesn't end in Rock back being babyface by the RAW after 'Mania. Either he directly costs Reigns the belt, or does so accidentally, Reigns has Solo take Rock out on RAW the following night, writing him out long enough that he can return in time for whatever PPV they decide to do the match at. It may actually be more interesting to see Reigns turn face (which I think is in the works sometime after he loses the belt anyway) against heel Rock, but I don't see that being the direction they go in.

As for Rock as heel authority in general - the last thing WWE want is to be presenting the company itself as the heel again. It took them twenty years to get over that, and they're getting enough of it in real-life, it's in their best interests to babyface themselves as much as possible on TV. For people wanting to make this a Daniel Bryan vs. The Authority situation, none of that makes sense, and it's why this story doesn't make sense in the most fundamental way - Cody wasn't held back by the evil corporation, he wasn't robbed of his opportunity, he gave it up freely of his own volition, and then when he decided he wanted it back, the boss said, "yeah fair enough, you won the Royal Rumble after all". 

I once saw a Queen tribute band inexplicably play "Mr Blue Sky". Whenever you get stuff like that, a tribute act playing another band's song, or being a tribute to two different bands, it always feels like it was a compromise to convince one of the musicians to join.

16 hours ago, Loki said:

This is quite common - it’s the same thing as waking up just before your alarm goes off.

 It’s actually a trick your mind plays on you as it comes out of sleep where it reorders events.

 So what most likely happened is that your phone pinged which woke you up but in that state between sleeping and awake your mind reverses cause and effect.  It feels 100% real.

 

This is true and the most likely solution, but there's also the coincidence factor - the old, "oh, I was just thinking about this person and then seconds later they phoned me, how weird", when the reality is that you probably thought about them a hundred times and then they didn't phone you afterwards, but there's no reason at all that you would have noted or remembered that. How many times have you woken up and looked at your phone and not received a text immediately afterwards, or woken up and looked at your clock and realised that it's actually ages until your alarm? Bloody loads, but they're not worthy of note. It would be weirder if the entire time you had your alarm set for that time you never woke up right before it, given that's the time your body is accustomed to waking up. 

I always think similarly when I have to be up really early in the morning for any reason, I always feel like I wake up during the night more, but I think the most likely explanation is that I always wake up a few times during the night and get back to sleep, but because I know that this time I need to be up at a certain time, I'm more likely to check the time every time I wake up, so I'm just more aware of it.

I'm part of a group chat film-watching thing that started during lockdown, where everyone nominates a (usually bad) film on Prime or Netflix, and then one is picked at random to watch. Last night's was Double Team, the bonkers Tsui Hark directed Jean Claude Van Damme and Dennis Rodman vehicle. The movie is completely incomprehensible, weirdly tries to become The Prisoner about halfway through, Rodman vanishes for most of the film, and it culminates in a fight with a tiger and Mickey Rourke in a colisseum full of landmines. Five stars, no notes.

Anyway, there were no ads at all. 

1 hour ago, FLips said:

I think the whole thing is made worse by the reports that The Rock was only shoved into the main event because he bought his way in as part of his TKO deal. It's Hogan levels of bullshit politicking and it single-handedly nearly killed a two year Cody push that was almost killed last Wrestlemania.

I'm glad they've done a pivot but at what cost? Cody looks stupid, The Rock has been exposed as an arsehole, and Seth Rollins looks like a worthless secondary champ.

 

"At what cost" is entirely where I'm at with this. Is anybody in a better position now than they were when this mess all started? If the timeline going around is correct, and people knew that there was at least a plan in place for Rock/Roman as the main event yet they went with Cody winning the Rumble anyway, then did the pivot to Rock/Reigns, then seemingly back to Cody/Roman, who is benefiting from that? I like a bit of chaos and unpredictability in my wrestling as much as the next man, but you've got two clear potential stories here - Cody fulfilling his destiny, getting his revenge, and "finishing the story", or The Rock getting sick of Roman running roughshod over his own family and coming back to prove who the real "Head of the Table" is. If they fully committed to either one of those stories from the beginning, fantastic, they're both worthy Wrestlemania main events. But they didn't do that, they flip-flopped awkwardly between both of them. 

So now, assuming the match is Cody vs. Roman, then sure, maybe they've course-corrected to what a lot of people wanted, and it will keep the #WeWantCody crowd satisfied. Though if they're patting themselves on the back that they've done a "Yes Movement" there, it's a bit premature, given it was, what, a week of TV and the solution was, "oh yeah, he won the Royal Rumble, he can have the match if he wants it". Hardly Daniel Bryan fighting against all odds to earn his spot, is it? 

What's worse than that, though, is that they planted the very clear possibility of The Rock vs. Roman Reigns. If it was the plan all along to pivot back to Cody vs. Rock - which I don't believe for a second that it was - then you don't do it by teasing the prospect of another match that an awful lot of people are going to want to see. By making it a choice between both matches, all they've done is guarantee that they're going to be disappointing someone, when if they'd just committed to one match from the beginning, without floating the prospect of another, people would have got behind it. And the problem isn't just with this one match - it took them the better part of twenty years to get to a point where their fans are largely happy with what they are given, rather than questioning and rejecting everything, and they're risking throwing that all away, and for what? 

Admittedly, Wrestlemania builds are generally completely forgotten so long as the match and the highlight video end up looking good - "forget about Debra, she's a non-factor" - so maybe it's all nothing, but I doubt it. If we get a tag match, it smacks of The Rock coming back to fight Awesome Truth rather than holding off until the big Wrestlemania singles match.

Since going to two-night Wrestlesmania, WWE haven't yet really leaned into the possibility of telling coherent stories across both nights - Roman carrying two belts never translating into him defending one on each night - so I'm not convinced that they're going to do that here and have all the major players work a tag team match on night one. Partly because I don't see Roman Reigns or The Rock working two nights in a row, partly because they don't want to risk the prospect of any of those men getting injured on night one and costing them their main event, having to change direction again for night two, partly because you don't dilute the appeal of The Rock's return to wrestling by having him do it twice in one weekend even if he is physically capable of doing that. Now, it's a WWE under somewhat new creative direction, it's a theoretically McMahon-less Wrestlemania, and maybe they do think outside the box and do something like that, I just don't see it, nor do I think it's the right move.

The other thing with that tag team match is where does it leave Seth Rollins and his presumptive opponent? In the tag match, Rollins is the fourth most important man in the ring, and almost certainly there to take the fall, and that's not a position you want a "World Champion" to be in. It also means that he's a bit player in someone else's story, rather than doing anything to build to his own singles match on night two, unless they somehow find a way to crowbar Drew McIntyre or Gunther or whoever he's going to end up defending against into this presumptive tag match as well, just to make it even more of a mess, so that's someone else left looking like a spare prick. This, after a couple of weeks now of people on TV actively treating Rollins' title as a consolation prize, with no neutral or babyface voice of the promotion aside from Seth himself meaningfully arguing against that distinction. Now, I don't really give a fuck if Seth Rollins looks like an afterthought or not, but you'd think it's something that the promotion hoping to present him as a top star should care about.

tl;dr - nobody benefits from this build, everyone involved was in a better position at the Royal Rumble than they are in now 

She "retired" in the late '80s, but wrestles fairly regularly these days, especially for a woman in her 60s. I might be misremembering, but I think she had a serious health issue a few years back and basically said she wouldn't let it stop her doing what she wants, and that she wanted to keep wrestling until she physically couldn't. 

I expect they'll do a double whammy on that show - drop all the hints for Mercedes coming in, but then have Okada make his debut on the same show as more of a surprise

I think there was enough balance across the card at XIX; they weren't to know that Lesnar was on the way out within a year, they had Goldberg coming in, guys like Batista, Orton, Edge and Cena on the way up, as well as Guerrero and Benoit still being around, and Shawn Michaels might not have been quite full-time, but he wasn't as part-time as guys like Lesnar, 'Taker and Triple H became. So they could afford to do the big showcase matches like Rock/Austin and Vince/Hogan, while still at least believing that they were building up the next generation beneath them.

I'd say it was around 25/26 that it really started to change - that's when you're starting to get The Undertaker being a once-a-year attraction or not far from it, then 27, 28 and 29 are all built around The Rock vs. Cena, and after that you've got Lesnar back, Triple H going part-time, Batista at 30, Sting vs. Triple H at 31, Goldberg coming back in, and so on.

The most egregious for me was Wrestlemania 32. Shane McMahon booked to go toe-to-toe with The Undertaker in Hell In A Cell, The Rock fucking about, Triple H going thirty minutes in a main event that should have just been Reigns steamrolling him, Jericho going over AJ Styles, and bringing out Austin, Michaels and Foley to beat up The League Of Nations for no good reason - I remember that one particularly annoying me at the time, because they had a goofy heel jobber stable in The Social Outcasts who could have been fed to those guys for a cheap pop, rather than needlessly squashing established heels after a win. 

Lee Lard used to be a regular fixture at the hotel where I worked 90% of the wrestling shows I worked in Jersey, never went to see him though.

I saw a Rage Against The Machine tribute act a couple of weeks ago. I was thinking there were few bands less suited to the tribute act set-up than RATM, until they mentioned a gig with a Cypress Hill tribute band. They played all of Battle Of Los Angeles, and at one point did a "who remembers?" about buying it on CD, and asking people in the crowd where they bought it from, leading to him going, "oh yeah, HMV, who remembers HMV, yeah?". I don't know what it is, but I can't really picture Zack de la Rocha leading a crowd in fond reminisces of commerce.

My older brother was in a few bands when I was a kid, usually just different combinations of the same three or four blokes. Their drummer went on to be part of a reasonably successful death metal band, and guest with plenty more, while the bassist went on to play for ZU2, a U2 tribute act that used to play all over the world, he was getting gigs in Russia, South America, all over the place last time I spoke to him. No idea if they're still together, but they were one of my first gigs.

I mostly know Mojo from his collaborations with Jello Biafra - they did a fun cover of "Love Me I'm A Liberal" by Phil Ochs, which I actually knew before I ever heard the original. He was also inexplicably in the Mario Bros movie. 

Tove

The biopic of Tove Jansson, creator of The Moomins. All about her love life, her relationship to her art in terms of navigating being a serious painter but finding more commercial success from cartoons and illustrations that started out as idle doodles, and how her life and work intersect. She's someone I've read a lot about, so there wasn't really anything that could surprise me here, but also it means I could have very easily found fault in it and I really didn't, just a lovely little film.