BomberPat

with this week's show being a tribute to Memphis legends, apparently DAVE BROWN will be doing commentary on AEW Dark!

5 minutes ago, Onyx2 said:

https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/uk-news/kfc-vegan-burger-chicken-vegetarian-17512099

"KFC admits selling chicken instead of vegan burger to vegetarians" 

tbf, that's a really blown out of proportion story of someone being misheard and served the wrong item. The story is basically "woman orders and is given chicken fillet burger". 

I'm more thinking that if you're vegan on ethical grounds, how much do those ethics really count for if you're still giving your money to a takeaway whose business model is built on wholesale slaughter? 

A league table/rankings makes a little more sense than overall win/loss records, because wrestling is more about short-term than long-term success. If a wrestler is on a ten match winning streak after a rough year, that's impressive, but not so much when a graphic pops up saying "10 wins, 52 losses".

23 hours ago, mim731 said:

Anyone got a good scrambled tofu recipe? Assuming it's pretty straight forward but not something I've tried before. 

Honestly, you can't really go wrong. I tend to use Tofoo brand stuff, as it's a decent consistency, and you can get pre-flavoured variants so even people as hopeless at cooking as me can manage it.

Then really all you have to do is crumble it up, mix it with whatever you want to add - salt, pepper and turmeric will normally do the job - and fry it in oil for 5-10 minutes or so. Experiment with adding other bits and pieces to it until you find what works - I tend to lob it in a bit of vegan butter, maybe add salsa or mustard to give it a bit of a kick. If you've got a bit of black salt, that tends to make it taste more like egg, if it's what you're going for. 

Just as plausibly, they either haven't considered that sharing the same grill would put it off-limits to most vegans, or else don't care because an awful lot of people won't know or care either way - they'll see "vegan burger" on the menu and order it, if they haven't read the headlines. I imagine most people doing "Veganuary" likely won't give a toss. Any time you're ordering food out it's a calculated risk, in that you put your trust in the establishment to deliver on what's promised.

I'd say if you're dedicated to a vegan diet then it's a bit odd to be buying food in Burger King or KFC in the first place, but then I concede that you might be there with mates.

CHIKARA attempted a mad league team system a few years back, where the roster was divided into teams, and each team had to face every other team in various combinations of singles, tag and trios matches. It was incomprehensible.

I just don't think that level of stats-heavy analysis gels well with a story-driven form like wrestling. It's something that requires punditry and poring over league tables, which just isn't how wrestling is structured as a TV format. 

Yeah, that's vaguely what I think happened - in the series, I think he had different forms; Thunder Liger, Fire Liger, and so on. Thunder Liger is the closest to the wrestler's most famous look, and was seen as an "upgrade" for the wrestler as it was in the anime - but as he became more famous than the source material, the distinction between "Jushin Liger" and "Jushin Thunder Liger" became less relevant, and have since been used more or less interchangeably. 

On 1/2/2020 at 6:39 PM, RedRooster said:

Roberts’ podcast is perfectly fine, but I’ve never quite understood why WWE like him so much.

He pays them to be on their shows. Or at least used to.

16 hours ago, BigJag said:

Why does Lyger not have his horns here?

As @wandshogun09 said, the Liger gimmick went through a few iterations - he was initially Jushin Liger, and didn't "upgrade" to the horns and more familiar look until becoming Jushin Thunder Liger, which is a distinction no one really makes any more, but was more significant back when the gimmick was more closely based on the anime that inspired it.

9 hours ago, Cannibal Man said:

Loved his willingness to act like a soft arse all the time despite being idolized. Guy could have acted like Mil Mascaras but with reason to act like Mil Mascaras, but there he is in a legion hall going IN MYYYY AAAAAARSE with a train full of lads with thumbs up each others council gritters

 

 

Something that perhaps gets overlooked about Liger in general is that he's just a weird mischievous goblin. I've seen him try and untie Tiger Mask's mask when he wasn't looking, draw moustaches on other people's 8x10s, and get involved with just about every comedy wrestling trope imaginable. He has a really goofy sense of humour, and doesn't take himself seriously at all.

Severn talks about that in his book, saying he had other professional commitments that would be at risk if he did that gimmick. Not the only reason he left, though.

AEW promised a "sports-like" presentation. As in, the framing of the TV show, the use of rankings, win/loss records and so on. They never said that the wrestling matches themselves would be "sports-like". So can we at least nip that particular inane criticism in the bud?

But in that example Owens established himself by beating someone who had *already* been established for 10 years or more. No one in AEW, bar Jericho and maybe Cody, is established enough to elevate that person.

Beating the Young Bucks doesn't mean anything when they haven't had time to become the John Cena of this analogy.

I think the lack of storytelling is absolutely turning people away, and it's mad to suggest otherwise. Wrestling is about stories. If they're not giving us stories, why keep coming back?

To take the Emi Sakura/Riho example - I'm invested in that because I know Emi, am a big fan of her work, and know the backstory. Most people watching AEW don't know who either of those women are - they didn't have any substantial prior experience in English language promotions. AEW did little, if anything, to tell us who they were, let alone what their history was. How many people might have got invested in that story and wanted to keep watching to see the outcome, if they'd bothered mentioning it on TV? Extrapolate that to every other "well, you could just read about it online" justification for matches that haven't been given a story on TV, and it adds up to not engaging a potentially huge number of people.

She first did it with the full cosplay on AEW, but had been incorporating bits of it elsewhere before then. 

Gladiators ran 'til 2000, and Baywatch 'til 2001. Blind Date 'til 2003.

Not a computer in sight!

Also, the use of "and you turned out ok", because that's the only way anyone ever finishes these bloody things. Was watching Gladiators and singing in school recently found to be hazardous to your health?

45 minutes ago, Supremo said:

Funny that the first time Triple H was willing to play straight heel and show enough arse to make someone a proper star was for Ronda Rousey, who fucked off after a year anyway.

I'd slightly disagree with that - he bumped his arse off for Daniel Bryan, sold for a baseball slide from Brie Bella, and basically channelled his inner Ric Flair for that match (and parts of that feud) by recognising that his role was to bump for the hero, not to be the cool bad-ass legend. It's frustrating because he's really fucking good at it, too. That's what Reigns needed.

I did a gig with Howard Marks, and he asked the audience if they wanted to hear him play a punk set or a dubstep set. Turned out he just had two CDs, one with his punk "set" on it, the other with the dubstep, and just hit play.

10 hours ago, Chunk said:

Think you could extend it to all of the characters in Friends, personally. Over time they all become more and more one-dimensional and caricatures of themselves.

They also become bizarrely self-referential. By the end, Monica isn't really a neat freak, so much as a vehicle for jokes about her being a neat freak. Chandler doesn't make jokes any more, everyone else makes jokes about how Chandler's always making jokes.

Few sitcoms have aged as badly, I find it barely watchable if it comes on telly now. The only upside is watching the entire thing as the story of the slow mental breakdown of Ross Geller.

6 hours ago, PowerButchi said:

If Labour went all in with Brexit under a left narrative it would have been a hung parliament. My constituency was part of the red wall which went blue, but talking to people in the pub they didn't like Corbyn but would have voted Labour if Brexit Meant Brexit and they'd Get Brexit Done. Men in their 60s saying their dads are spinning in their grave as they've voted Tory. They should have taken a Lexit position. It wasn't as if Corbyn was a fan of the EU anyway. 

You're probably right. People are constantly trying to map Remain & Leave to conventional Right & Left positions, and they're just not like-for-like. For all the talk of "SEND THEM BACK" knuckledragging racists, there are plenty of solid left-wing arguments for leaving the EU. There is no left-wing argument for leaving the EU under a Tory majority government. While my preference would have been for a second vote/referendum, a Labour-managed Brexit deal that prioritised workers' rights and EU citizens' rights in the UK would have likely been a strong, clear electoral policy.

It's probably the area where the gulf between the middle-class membership and working class voters is most glaringly apparent, and if I were to find any specific truth in criticisms of the party becoming too London-centric, it would be on thinking the Remain option was a stronger possibility than it was.

21 minutes ago, LaGoosh said:

And people just don't talk enough about him as a wrestler. Outside of maybe Daniel Bryan he's been the best in ring performer they've got by some margin for ages. Far surpassed Rollins for sure. He's had countless excellent world class matches but we forget most of them because the booking has been so dire.

There was a match with AJ Styles early in AJ's run that was absolutely incredible. The crowd were chanting "you can't wrestle" at Reigns, he hits a gorgeous sit-out Razor's Edge, and they start chanting "we still don't like you".

That felt like a pretty significant moment for me, that even when their criticisms are being disproved right in front of their eyes, a significant portion of the fanbase were still going to say "Nope, not him".

They should have capitalised on the heat from beating Undertaker to turn him heel, but it's not like WWE's track record for booking heels is any better than for booking babyfaces. He'd be doing comedy skits and hiding behind Triple H within a month.

They really fucked up when trying to capitulate to both sides. For a top guy, Roman Reigns was losing all the time. It seemed like they wanted to silence the fans saying that he won too much by having him lose more often - in 2017 he lost to Kevin Owens at Royal Rumble, and followed up beating the Undertaker at Wrestlemania by losing his next three PPV matches, and not winning on PPV again until his match with John Cena, following a programme where Cena routinely belittled him. The biggest win of his career, and it may as well have never happened. So he never felt as special as he should, and it never did enough to shut up the fans who felt he was over-pushed.

Aside from making him the world's biggest babyface when coming back from cancer, which is still mad that they've not managed to do, the opportunity to make him the star they wanted should have been the Triple H match at Wrestlemania. The build should have focused on making people hate Triple H more than on trying to convince people to like Roman, and the match should have been Roman destroying him in short order. But instead it was another interminably long Triple H Wrestlemania match that helped no one.

14 minutes ago, Loki said:

Fuck yes, Hogan passing out in Lesnar's bear hug, and Lesnar wiping his blood across his chest, is one of the standout images from that period for me.  Hogan put him over... big time.

Hugely.

Was there any reason Hogan was written off TV at that time? For Brock it was the build to his match with The Rock, but it seems nuts to have had Hogan available in August, yet write him off before Summerslam. Unless he was injured or something, imagine ending the following PPV on that image of Lesnar just murdering Hulk in his first title defence, having already run The Rock out of town. He'd look even more of an absolute killer, cementing his place at the top. 

I don't know about complacency - more often than not he's gone hell for leather and worked ridiculously hard for matches that he could have afforded to sleepwalk through, and the series with Daniel Bryan wasn't just one guy busting his arse off for a spot, it was two. 

He just falls into that 2000s milieu of being a guy who's been a world champion, only for it to have no discernible impact on their career whatsoever.

I think with Chavo it's more that he grew into the role than him being an elite level worker. I'd struggle to point you to a great Chavo Guerrero match, but could definitely do that for Waltman.

If nothing else, in Chavo's case, he started relatively young, got signed to a major company young, so by the time he became the veteran you could trust to work with anyone, he was still young enough to be working to a decent standard. Whereas Waltman was a diverse, reliable performer in his youth, and personal issues probably fucked off the years of his career where he'd have otherwise slotted into the "reliable veteran" role.

I finished the main story of Ni No Kuni 2 last night, after sinking 60+ hours into it, and there's still post-game quests and optional dungeons and bosses to come, plus DLC if I opt for it. It's been a fun, brilliant, varied game, with my only real criticism being that too many of the sub-quests come down to repetitive back-tracking and fetch quests. I'd sunk so much time into it that I was massively overpowered for the closing stretch.

I started Wattam last night too - the new game from the guy behind Katamari Damacy. And Katamari is probably the only thing I can compare it to, in terms of the mixture of confusion and joy that it's given me. The controls are clunky, the gameplay not even remotely challenging, and the story utterly incomprehensible, but it's great. It's so utterly bizarre and charming that I couldn't stop smiling. You play, initially, as a cube-shaped "Mayor" who explodes every time he takes off his hat. Every single object in the game is a playable character. At no point do you ever have the slightest idea what's going to happen next.

16 minutes ago, WyattSheepMask said:

They tried to do that after a while by feuding him with Chavo, but even he couldn’t get a decent Lucha match out of the guy and he’s a fucking Guerrero.

Wasnt part of his deal, and I’ve always taken this with a pinch of salt, that he go straight to the main roster and forego developmental? 

Being a Guerrero aside - and I loved Chavo on commentary during Sin Cara matches insisting he invented everything that Sin Cara was doing - I'd never actually consider him a Lucha guy. Apparently he was working Mexico at the start of his career, but he was in WCW within two years of debuting, and then didn't work Mexico again until his WWE run ended some 15 years later, and never as more than a one-off special attraction.

I don't know if it was contractual that he would forego development, or if it was just that he was such a big name that they wanted to capitalise as quickly as possible, not realising how vastly different working as a top level luchadore is to working WWE TV. I remember an interview with Vampiro where he talked about how Rey Mysterio and Alberto Del Rio were able to adapt quickly because they were effectively American, in terms of culture and language, while Mistico was coming in with an entirely different background, very little English, and used to a completely different way of working. 

They seemed to think that they could make him a star in the WWE mold by having him win easy squash matches and rub shoulders with John Cena. But Rey Mysterio didn't get over winning squashes, he got over by working competitive matches with similarly talented luchadores, and then by being a master of sympathetic selling - that we hardly ever saw Sin Cara on the receiving end of a beating meant he never connected on that level.