BomberPat

They just did a PPV where every single title was defended, and I would still struggle to remember who holds most of them. So they're not doing a very good job of making them important.

Off the top of my head, I couldn't tell you who the Intercontinental or US champs were, and had to really work to remember the Women's and Tag champs, and still aren't sure I'm right. There's two World titles and it took me a few minutes to remember who has the RAW one. 

More titles won't help. They matter more than a lot of other things happening on the TV shows, but that's not much of a stretch. To continue the Thor's hammer analogy, lifting Thor's hammer wouldn't have meant as much if there were eight smaller magic hammers being lifted by less important characters.

1 minute ago, David said:

In 2019 you'd hope so, surely.

I'm not so sure.

I don't live in the UK, admittedly, but I don't think the government here have my personal email address. The only reason they have my work email is because I work for them. 

If I decide on a new email address tomorrow, would I think to inform the government? If I move to a new constituency, would I think to email my local MP's office and say, "by the way, it's x_joker666_x@vampirefreaks.com?". To say nothing of disadvantaging constituents without access to email.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I think it's a gross simplification to say, "they should be using email" when it comes to governmental communication. 

2 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

One of the odder things about this is that Quildan is or used to be a ref himself (I haven't watched much BritWres recently, so don't know if he's still doing it), and I'm fairly sure he'd have objected to being treated in a similar manner, both in terms of the incident, and the professional and public reactions afterwards.

That was one of the things that disappointed me most about the whole thing - someone did ask him on Twitter how he'd have felt if someone had done something similar to him when he was refereeing but, obviously, he didn't reply. 

A lot of decisions you make as a ref are "in the moment" choices, and when it comes to "call a three when it's not the finish", you're usually weighing up pissing off the wrestlers vs. pissing off the boss, but you make that choice on the understanding that the boss has your back. I lost what little respect I had for Quildan when he tried to bury this, and when he immediately took the side of "the boys" over the referee. Because then it's not just Aaren, it's clearly sending a message to anyone else who might ever work for them that he doesn't support you.

I know other promoters who made a point of messaging their referees reassuring them that he would have their back, what to do in this sort of situation, that he would respect their call, and so on. But it's sad that we should all even be in a position where it needs to be said.

I don't think you can really fairly say, "well, some people are doing this work in their community for free..." - they're not. They're doing some of the work of an MP, but not all of it. 

If you drastically reduce an MP's salary, it doesn't stop attracting the posh boys, it starts attracting the richer posh boys - those who already have the money, either through inheritance or a former career. Because reducing the salary doesn't alter the mechanisms by which these people are channeled into positions of power, it doesn't alter the relationships between politics, big business, private schools, and the media.

You see a similar debate in the charity sector constantly. Every time it's revealed that the CEO of a charity is earning a lot of money, it's presented as a scandal. But what's the frame of reference? How do you determine how much of that money was translated into a net benefit? And if the charity weren't offering that kind of salary, would they be attracting someone with the relevant experience and skills? Probably not, because they wouldn't be competitive against equivalent roles in the private sector.

I'm not saying that MPs are living on a pittance - far from it, and there does need to modernise MPs' expenses, and bring salaries more in line with the rest of the country - but what are they earning in comparison to equivalent roles, if there are any, in the private sector? If MPs are making £80,000 a year, well, a lawyer with 15 years' experience in London can be earning more than twice that. It's all abstract because it's all more money than I'll ever see in my lifetime, but there still needs to be an effort made to offer a competitive enough salary to make it worth the while of, you'd hope, the top legal and political minds in the country.

6 minutes ago, David said:

They should be using email. 

Is there a centralised database of the email addresses of their constituents?

There really doesn't seem to be any communication between Sha and Aaren.

And while people have pointed out that Sha has protected Aaren's neck, everything else about the execution of that slam would be torn to shreds if he did it in a training school, let alone on the biggest show of the year. From what I can tell (like I said, it's "blink and you'll miss it") he doesn't allow Aaren the opportunity to post off him, so he's pretty much all deadweight no matter what, and seems to be more focused on just throwing him to the mat than anything else. 

Again, if it was about "calling an audible", it's a terrible job of it. If it was about Sha trying to get some heat back, why do it all in the blink of an eye? There's no argument with the ref, no point where Sha sells the frustration or makes a show of picking Aaren up for the audience to see before slamming him. It's a slam done with the intent to "teach him a lesson", and has fuck all to do with the match, the audience, or anything else.

I was at the point last week where I thought that Sha could be forgiven, and that it was a momentary lapse of judgement from him, but Bodom and Quildan were the real shits. But, while I still wouldn't put Sha on Bodom's level, seeing the footage in full makes me question his version of events all over again. 

Even so, it feels very odd to cut a match under almost any circumstances - particularly on a big show, that (largely due to all that controversy) will have a lot of eyes on it. I wonder if it's a timing issue - the show over-ran by something like 45 minutes, and maybe there's some reason they want to keep the overall show down to within a time constraint. 

I think it might be because the Aussie Open match had implications for Royal Quest the next day (no idea if the CCK match did or not, though), though mostly because they're at least smart enough to recognise that if they cut it out entirely they'd get no end of shit from people. I thought they would have edited it more than they have to try and cover their arses, there's definitely some dubious choices of camera angle in there - though, as you say, that may just be standard practice.

I'm not particularly confident in this point, and it's more than a little "back, and to the left" but I do find it interesting that they cut very abruptly on the cover, to a point where you can just see Aaren's hand in shot, then immediately cut back after the "kick-out". That's not a framing that makes a lot of sense - though I'm not overly familiar with RevPro's VOD content, so maybe it's par for the course - but it feels like they cut very abruptly to a tighter zoom (maybe even cropped in post?) in order to better protect Josh than Aaren.

The camerawork in general is fucking dreadful, but maybe that's normal - particularly as they've left in footage of Bodom attacking Aaren at ringside. You know, that footage Quildan mysteriously didn't see.

In terms of timing, Sha is barely in the ring before he starts with the bodyslam. If he were improvising a spot to get his heat back, you'd think he would milk it, give the crowd time to recognise what's happening. It's blink and you'll miss it stuff.

Pretty sure the Spiders' playlist hasn't measurably changed since 2003, tbf.

3 minutes ago, cobra_gordo said:

Oh god, a million times this. I don't think I've been at a metal night where the DJ has thought "We're on a winner here, lets drop something unusual in" and the place hasn't cleared.

It's the most annoying thing as a DJ, particularly when I was used to playing elsewhere before metal nights became my regular gig. Generally the rule of thumb is that once you've got them on the dancefloor, you can keep them there - so you might have to start out with playing stuff everyone knows, but once they're up, they're up, and so long as you don't massively fuck up, you've got them for the rest of the night. The best feedback I've ever had was after a set, dancefloor full all night, someone coming over to me and saying, "I loved your set, and didn't recognise a single song".

Metal's the only genre I've found yet where you can mix perfectly from one song into another, it can be perfectly in keeping with everything else you've played, but people will fuck off because they don't know it. It's really disheartening, because I would be spending a lot of money on new music every week, and a lot of time listening to stuff, and putting together playlists of tracks I think would work together. I'd hear an amazing new song, know exactly when best to play it, and think, "yeah, people deserve to hear this", or even just that I'd want to get a little self-indulgent and play a personal favourite, but the floor would empty, and someone would come up and request Chop Suey instead.

£13.49 on Switch

I'm still dubious when the context is a video headed "BROUGHT TO YOU BY TO THE STARS". There's still a very obvious profit motive above and beyond any sense of informing the public, which means it's almost guaranteed that their being selective about what information they're giving us. 

Ultimately, not one of us is familiar with the tech we're looking at to know what's "normal", and are just taking their word for it. The history of UFO sightings is littered with Navy pilots and so on, with the implied credibility that "they would know what they're looking at", rather than the Occam's Razor explanation of, "even these guys can not understand what they're seeing".

I don't know what it is, but it's not aliens. There's posts going around Reddit debunking the three videos, variously, as jets, birds, weather balloons, compounded by incorrect calculations of speed/distance. Again, I can't verify any of those, because I know nothing of the tech or science behind any of this. But I'm not jumping toward "definitely aliens" when there are more rational explanations out there.

Never mind lists, Untitled Goose Game is out today!

Bodom kicks out pretty much on the three, but after Aaren's hand hits the mat. You could go either way with that, but as a referee it's constantly drilled into you that you call the match as a shoot. If I were in that position, I'd have likely called that as the finish - if it had been Bodom on top, knowing his team weren't booked to win, I'd maybe use a judgement call and say that it was an exceptionally close two.

As for people talking about how Aaren should have been prepared or whatever - Aaren's trained, he knows how to bump, and has taken ref bumps on other shows. There's a big difference between taking an agreed ref bump in cooperation with the wrestler, and getting hoisted up and slammed by a bloke twice your size when you're not expecting it and not prepared. In very simple terms - I took a ref bump on Friday from an errant clothesline, in the show's main event, that the guys only decided they were doing moments before the match. During the second wrestler's entrance in the main event, the first wrestler ran it by me, and I agreed to it. It was two guys I know and trust, and the spot made sense, and wasn't endangering me. It would have been a very different situation if a wrestler I don't know just clobbered me out of the blue because he felt the match called for it.

In terms of improv, if I was the promoter, I'd have been pissed off at Sha "improvising" a bodyslam on the referee anyway. It's not his call to make. The main event of that show featured, if I remember correctly, three separate ref bumps, playing into a long-running angle. It shits on the credibility of the referees, and on the drama of the main event, if you're also doing zero (kayfabe) consequence ref bumps in a midcard match before that. Just like you wouldn't do a main event wrestler's finish in the opener, you shouldn't repeat key main event spots in the midcard. That's far from good improv skills.

Last metal night I was at, there was one of the crowd who had been there when I was DJing, a few years older than me. 

Friend of mine was DJing - one of the most knowledgeable people about metal I've met, and not a snob with it. Has DJ'd and written about the genre for over ten years, toured supporting Cathedral, did US and European tours with his old band, session musician for a few others, was involved with a small label for a while. Knows his shit. 

He's the bar manager of the venue, and it's their first time trying a metal night, so he's agreed to play the whole night to keep costs down while they gauge the interest level. So he's playing a nearly 6 hour set. 

Guy in the crowd starts (loudly) complaining to his mates about how, "this is shit, it's not a real rock night, he hasn't even played any Slipknot". Sounds like I'm inventing a strawman, but that's word for word what he said. He went on to say, "we can hear this shit anywhere else in town". Reader, we could not. It was a mixture of just completely failing to appreciate that the rock/metal music being played was valid as rock/metal in spite of not being one of the four bands that made up his frame of reference, the assumption that because it wasn't part of his frame of reference, that he must therefore know better than the DJ, the kind of petulant entitlement that all of his forms part of, and that all of this was coming from someone who would, 100%, self-identify as a "metalhead" above all else. And I'm wary of anyone making the media they consume a central part of their identity anyway.

It was during the same night that we watched a complete lack of reaction to a Soundgarden song being played, from several people who we had both maybe a week earlier seen posting statuses about how super sad they were that Chris Cornell had died, and the same night that another rock night regular walked straight through the door, and immediately up to the DJ booth with a list of requests. Didn't go to the bar to get a drink first, didn't go and speak to her friends, didn't stop and get a feel for what was being played, just immediately walked in and demanded that a list of songs be played, that the whole thing be catered to her. I told the DJ that he should have just said, "sorry, I've already played all of them". All kind of reminded me why I sacked it all off in the first place.

It's hard to complain about this without sounding gatekeep-y, or like a snob, but again, it wouldn't bother me so much if they weren't the same people wearing metal t-shirts 24/7, throwing "devil horns" gestures in every photo, and self-describing as metalheads. It feels like you're opening yourself up for criticism when you wear "I Am A Heavy Metal Fan" as a badge of honour and then have barely a surface level knowledge of the genre. I have far more time and patience for people who like one or two songs but don't make a fuss about it.

And it is fairly unique to metal, in my experience. It's only in metal where people have (by their own admission) requested obscure songs/artists when I started DJing in order to "test" me. It's only in metal where I've had self-avowed fans of the genre complain about what I'm playing in holier-than-thou tones, then request something like "'Halo' by Disturbed" (an actual request I got once, in a snotty voice from someone annoyed that was I was playing wasn't "proper metal"), only in metal where I've had people come to me with an actual written list of requests, and only in metal where people will get on the dancefloor for the song they know, then immediately turn and walk away when I put on a song they don't know.

18 minutes ago, Sheffbag said:

i was going to say it was missing a spelling mistake but then i found one. Great flyer

There's plenty. I'm a big fan of "avaiable", but Schadenfreude, Chris Brookes, Aussie Open, Dani Luna and Chris Ridgeway are also wrong.

I'm not completely ragging on nostalgia - it's perfectly valid, and the music you get into as teenager tends to be the stuff you respond to most emotionally. I just don't understand people who seem to have heard four bands when they were fifteen and then decided, "that's it. That's all the music I will ever need".

I think what bothers me most about is that they also tend to be the same people who make being a "metalhead" a significant part of their identity.

"The one thing that we never ever had on our table...", aside from the exhaustive list of things not on the table preceding it.

Got to love those Christmas bananas, though.

The love for that period has always surprised me. I started DJing around 2005, and it already felt like an utterly dead scene around that time, yet people my age and slightly younger would still constantly request songs from that '99-'02 period all the time. It used to annoy me, because it was never something I was really into, and most everyone I knew had moved on by then.

What baffles me now, though, is that I go and watch my friends DJ now, and not only are the same people still requesting the same songs, nearly 15 fucking years later, but there are 18/19 year olds requesting it all as well. Mate, you weren't even out of nappies when Soil released "Halo", how do you even know what it is?! 

Not really sure where else to put this, but a Twitter account shared some Mervyn Peake artwork earlier, and I was surprised to see a depiction of UKFF legend Bumgull;

Someone in their sixties posted on a local news group here after a stabbing a couple of years ago saying, "Jersey's become unsafe, you never used to get anything like this back in our day".

So I replied saying something to the effect of, "no, in your day all you had to worry about was a decade long campaign of horrific sexual assault, decades of institutional child abuse, widespread corruption, prolonged hate campaigns, arson and mob justice...." and so on.

Quite often, when people say "unsafe", they're only a breath away from saying "too many foreigners".

5 minutes ago, HarmonicGenerator said:

For a guy who so many have railed against for being the 'chosen one', Roman hasn't even had a memorable run as the Champion. First reign was barely any time at all, second one lasted slightly longer until he lost it to Triple H in 2016, third one was a couple of uninteresting months til you got that 'all the Shield win the belt in one night' bit, and fourth one he had to vacate. I couldn't name what Cena did in all 16 of his reigns but his first, at least, lasted the better part of the year.

They've really consistently shot themselves in the foot on this - they seem to try and book Roman in such a way that they can say, "look, he's losing matches, he's not overpushed at all!" to sate the fans who think he's forced down their throat, but then they still need him to be a focal part of TV, so still gets the big stories in spite of losing as often as he wins, and he ends up looking weak on either side of the argument. 

At least, I've always put it down to them struggling to find that balance, but then they've booked Seth so badly that at one point I thought they were genuinely striving to emasculate him, so maybe they just can't book main event babyfaces?

12 minutes ago, Dead Mike said:

Same tbh but I was also aware that a lot of other kids we knew were getting up to far worse than my mates & I.

I think the biggest difference is social media & the instant availability of information. Not just for children's mischief but everything. A mate's uncle used to work the doors in Blackpool in the late 80's/early 90's & he maintains it's 100x nicer & safer round there now. He reckons it used to be an absolute war zone but the perception is that it's never been worse. The difference being that if someone got a kicking  or there was a mass fight back then unless you were there then you were pretty much oblivious. Now with 'local 'news' pages' on FB the like you've got what's essentially curtain twitching on an industrial scale.

Yeah, there's a lot of this.

When I could be dragged away from computer games and comic books, I was a consistent minor nuisance as a kid, and I was by far the meekest of the lot of us. Most kids around me grew up pelting cars with rocks, playing with fireworks, stealing from building sites, and throwing stuff on the bonfire. Kids in primary school were expelled for attacking teachers. And there were far rougher schools, and rougher kids, around than mine.

By 2000, kids in Hull were getting mugged at knife point for Pokemon cards. My dad's first teaching post after finishing his teaching training, in the late '90s, was Amy Johnson School, which was in the bottom 50, and at one point the bottom 10, schools in the country. I don't think he would agree that kids today are any worse behaved or less respectful than what he had to put up with there!

I'm not saying that there aren't some entitled parents out there, but I see that as a changing dynamic around education, rather than a lack of parental responsibility - education is framed as a service industry, now, so they think they as the customer should get to dictate terms.

Just now, Dead Mike said:

It's always been like this, you're just getting older & are now the 'back in my day' bloke you likely promised you'd never turn in to.

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”
― Socrates

 

Yeah, pretty much this. But doubled by the fact that the person posting it has no children, has no connection to education, and was born in the early '80s. So making an argument that an education system he wasn't part of in the 1960s is superior to an education system he has no connection to in the 2010s is a daft take.

If there's something I'd agree with there, it would be the shift in how education works, to see the student as a "customer", with the associated "the customer is always right" mentality. But that's absolutely not the context he's sharing that in, nor is it the context it was likely created in.

2 minutes ago, Snitsky's back acne said:

If people want to continue to believe a false narrative about who the real abuser is in that situation and ignore facts [as it seems lots are prone to do] then I won't burst anyone's bubble.

They're both abusers. Her being an abuser doesn't mean that Michael Elgin, who is on record bragging about pissing on women without their consent, isn't also an abuser. Two people are allowed to be shitheads at the same time.