BomberPat

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He is a hacker and has the system connected to your Facebook account.

 

This is a tremendously rubbish sentence.

Watched Okja last night. I enjoyed it, though felt it was tonally a bit all over the place, and far too heavy-handed - though it was offbeat and odd enough that it never felt like it was just moralising, which it could easily have done.

4 minutes ago, Wrasslin said:

Side note: Was Taz the one who introduced it to wrestling as a whole in ECW? I seem to remember hearing that at some point. The point being people couldn't speak in the Tazmission.

I believe so, yeah. I'm not aware of it having existed anywhere in wrestling before that - it's not outside the realms of possibility, but I've never seen it any earlier.

I don't know if it was so much being unable to speak in the Tazmission - though it may have been put over like that at some point, I'm sure I can recall the odd verbal submission to it in ECW - but Taz was presented as a legit MMA guy, to capitalise on the success of UFC, and the KATA-HA-JIME (thanks, Joey Styles) as an MMA submission, so anything that added to that image was a plus.

Shamrock was every lad at school's favourite. The kid who insisted he had insider knowledge of the WWF promised Ken Shamrock coming back on pretty much every RAW of 2000.

He had real intensity, seemed legit, and was seriously over. As for why he wasn't a bigger deal, I'd imagine it's a mix of nagging injuries, and the same things that hindered so many in the Attitude era - so many turns, and swerves, and short-term booking problems that it was often impossible for anyone to gain momentum, and simply not being The Rock or Steve Austin. With those two floating around the top of the card, it was always going to be difficult for anybody else to be much more than The Guy Who Works With The Top Guy. There was potentially always the question mark over how long he was going to stick with the WWF rather than going back to MMA, too.

Did Shamrock actually work with Austin much at all? All I've been able to find with a cursory Google search is an angle-heavy TV match in '98. It might be that, at that point in his career, Austin wasn't in the best of shape, and wasn't going to work a programme with a suplex-heavy, hard-hitting opponent. And in 1998, if you're not wrestling Steve Austin, you're not in the main event.

The significance of him introducing tapping out to the WWF can't be overstated, though - as @L_E_T_H_A_L said, it adds a whole new visual element, where a submission that can be teased, and that the audience can see, rather than the inevitable couple of seconds of "did he/didn't he" waiting for the referee to call a verbal submission which, as the audience aren't immediately engaged, is always going to be an anti-climax.

I find it interesting that the next attempt to emulate MMA in submissions by WWE achieved almost the opposite, though, as they've taken away the visual element of the "drop the arm three times" routine and instead just go straight to the referee calling for the bell. More realistic, but taking away that visual element.

Fun fact - the promotion I work for has a ring with a yellow canvas and red ringposts specifically to mimic that first Hasbro ring.

Not so much a cool find as a (daft) cheap plug. Apologies if there are rules about the sharing of videos etc. by our good selves, but this is a video put together by the promotion I work for, CIWW. One of the bosses has requested that I share it online a bit more than we have been doing.

It's stupid. Very stupid. And bloody long. But a good laugh.

I bought Kick Off Revival because I thought it was hilarious that game got a physical release on PS4, with pretty much no attempt to modernise it whatsoever. Only tried single player mode once, and couldn't figure out what the hell I was doing. Was fun, though. Imagine it would be a great laugh multiplayer with someone equally clueless.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/05/author-of-mysterious-voynich-manuscript-was-italian-jew-says-scholar

A scholar reckons he's roughly identified the source of the Voynich Manuscript.

For the Nexus angle, I would say their debut is essential viewing, the big Summerslam tag match with Daniel Bryan's return is well worth it too. The other bit that I loved was this Piper's Pit;

In which Roddy Piper does a better job of putting over the story in one promo than Cena, Barrett, or the entire writing team managed in a month.

Cryptozoology is probably the area of "Forteana" that interests me the most. Even the examples I don't believe in fascinate me.

I'd struggle to pin down one example that I definitely believe, though there's plenty I'd like to believe. I used to work in conservation, and while I was never lucky enough to do field work, I spoke to many who did, and they have coloured my thoughts on cryptozoology ever since, and not necessarily in a positive way.

I found myself getting annoyed recently with people convinced that Tasmanian Tigers still survive in mainland Australia, despite having died out there hundreds of years ago. While, in general, I find it more likely that there are "revenant species" or undiscovered surviving examples of species once thought extinct out there than genuine cryptids, the Tasmanian Tiger is extinct. I would put considerable sums of money on no one being able to prove otherwise. What frustrates me about it is that I've seen, and been part of, the work that goes into genuine conservation efforts, and how difficult it can be to secure funding, permissions etc., let alone public interest, and there are people out there putting themselves through hell to make these projects work, to try and protect, or even just monitor and study, animals we know are out there, but on the other hand we have people more invested in chasing ghosts and rumours.

That said, I've never met a conservationist, biologist or archaeologist who doesn't harbour at least some hope, and some interest, if not belief, in the idea of major undiscovered species.

I don't believe in Bigfoot. There are no great apes in North America, or anywhere like it, nor - as far as we can tell - have there ever been. Not only have we never found a Sasquatch body, we've never found any evidence of ape species in America in the fossil record. Apes exist in the tropics, not temperate regions of the northern hemisphere - for a breeding population to exist, in climate not suited to the genus, in an area where they would be competing with bears etc. for food and territory, yet in the decades that people have been actively searching for them, leave no bodies, no hair samples, no scat, and so on, I just think is entirely implausible. Similarly, I don't believe it could be an extant Neanderthal species - I just can't see any way that's possible - for a large mammal to go undiscovered for that long would be one thing, for a hominid to, some 30-40,000 years after disappearing from the fossil record, I think is totally impossible. I also don't think descriptions of Bigfoot match what we believe Neanderthals to have looked like - Neanderthals were far closer to modern humans, so much so that there's a school of thought that they should be reclassified as a sub-species of Homo Sapiens.

That said, I don't believe that the countless sightings and prints and so on can all be written off as hoaxes, and I absolutely believe that many people who have reported sightings honestly believe that they saw something. So while I'm not going to do the "so, there must be something in it" thing, I would be prepared to eat my words if I could be proved wrong. I would love to be proved wrong, on any of these. Me being wrong would make the world a far more exciting place!

Orang Pendek is one I find far more likely, and it's one of the cryptids I do believe in, though with sceptical caveats. The descriptions of sightings are largely consistent, it has a reported diet and behaviour that's similar to folk stories about other ape species, and would be consistent with the diet of something like an Orangutan or a gibbon; the size estimated by many who witness it would make a gibbon unlikely, but with darker haired animals, especially when only seen from a distance or fleetingly, it's notoriously difficult to gauge size (see Big Cat sightings in the UK that turn out to be domestic cats; sightings are almost invariably of a large black cat, despite that being a decidedly uncommon colouration in big cats), so they may be a larger gibbon. Personal theory is that they're an isolated group of Sumatran Orangutans, possibly a separate subspecies.

Outside of deep sea creatures, I would say Amazonian or Asian cryptids are far more likely to exist than those reported in more populous or well studied areas. There's enough wild or relatively unpopulated land for it to be plausible, and through good old-fashioned prejudice amongst researchers and anthropologists, always the possibility that local reports were ignored, or written off as either folklore or fanciful descriptions of known species.

The problem with a lot of cryptozoology is that it focuses on "sexy" animals; there are new species discovered every day, and cryptozoologists would always point to stuff like the Coelacanth or any recently discovered species as evidence that we don't know what's out there, but the majority of cryptids are large, charismatic megafauna. It's far less plausible that something like that exists out there, but it's a far more exciting prospect than discovering a new type of fish or beetle.

Brilliant post.

When it comes purely to the Forteana side of things, it's worth bearing in mind that Charles Fort never presented this stuff as fact - he just wanted to collate notes and news stories on the unexplained, on weird phenomena. His work was more analogous to something like Ripley's Believe It Or Not than to modern conspiracy theorists. And maybe that's the problem - that it all became conspiracy, rather than mystery.

There was always an element of it - UFO stories invariably bleed into government cover-ups and Men In Black, and Area 51 stories seemed to be everywhere when I was first getting into this as a kid, but the mystery was always first and foremost, the conspiracy was an afterthought, a convenient way to explain why we don't know the truth. Now, it's less about the mystery, and more about the mechanisms by which the conspiracy is executed - rather than marvelling at the prospect of, say, a crashed UFO in the Arizona desert, people are getting outraged at the government for the imagined conspiracy. The focus has shifted. It stopped being about questions and started being about answers, and where's the fun in that?

You're absolutely right about the ideological armour that religion or belief in conspiracies grants you - the idea that the lack of proof Bigfoot exists is somehow equal to the lack of proof that Bigfoot doesn't exist, rather than recognising that the burden of proof falls pretty heavily on one side of that equation. But with the conspiracy theorist, the logic is often even worse than "well, you can't prove it's not" - because there's a get-out for every counter-argument. All official records, and people in the know, contradict your version of events? Well of course, they would say that. Once utterly convinced their stance is right, evidence to the contrary only serves to reinforce their notion of a conspiracy. It's an utterly self-centred world-view, and while it's always been around, I do agree that the internet has a lot to blame for how much more widespread it seems to be now. The worst example is the concept of the Mandela Effect, which I hate - that people can be so self-centred that they would sooner believe that they've travelled into an alternate dimension than admit that they got something wrong, or didn't remember something properly, is staggering, and those who buy into it will never recognise it as such.

14 minutes ago, Arn Anderson's Darb said:

And you point to a show having to cancel after losing six wrestlers - how do you come back from that as a promoter? Horrible position to be in and a tarnished reputation through no fault of your own. Imagine the shit a promoter would get for pulling someone off a show because a bigger star came along, and rightly so, but it should work the same both ways.

This is the biggest point for me - it's not the bigger promotion that gets the knock on their reputation, despite them arguably being in the wrong. It's the smaller promotion that will be seen as having let down their fans, and will be left scrabbling for a replacement, sometimes at extremely short notice.

I don't know what the solution is. Ideally, I'd say that a promotion knowingly booking talent that have taken a booking elsewhere on the same date, or wrestlers pulling out of a show to take another booking, should have some moral imperative to help the smaller show find a suitable replacement. But that's a level of cooperation that doesn't come easily to wrestling.

I'm in a similar boat - though I grew up with Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World, the X-Files starting up, magazines like "X" and, of course, Fortean Times, where this stuff seemed to be presented everywhere as a "isn't this mysterious?!" or "what if?" scenario, whereas now you seem to get far more people presenting it as fact. It's far more interesting to me as a curio or a thought experiment than someone presenting it as a fully-formed world view, which is normally just irritating.

It doesn't help that, as we get older, it's easier to see the obvious flaws in this stuff and to get exasperated with it far quicker.

My understanding of the Flat Earth thing is that some people started it for a laugh; it was basically an experiment to prove that, with enough pseudo-science and convincing sounding buzzwords, you could make anything sound plausible, and the point was to make people think about what they're taking at face value, by presenting such an absurd stance in a way that made it sound almost legitimate. The problem is that you can never underestimate human stupidity or gullibility, nor plan for the fact that - especially online - ideas and content have a life of their own once you release them into the wild. I get the impression that a lot of people who claim to believe it are trolling or just having a laugh, but out of context they become indistinguishable from those who believe it for real, which gives the impression of it being a more widely believed theory than it actually is, which in turn causes it to spread more, which causes more people to believe it, and so on. It's all a bit Foucault's Pendulum - inventing the conspiracy brings the conspiracy to life.

You're right, but I think with WWE it is a case of goodwill. They've been around long enough, and people have invested enough in it, that they'll mostly - rightly or wrongly - forgive them at the worst, in the knowledge (or hope) that something better is coming along. I don't think TNA has consistently built up that goodwill, does that make sense?

13 hours ago, garynysmon said:

Yeah, strange they left in the pre-show but cut those out. Must admit, I never fully appreciated how much Don West represented the voice of TNA until now. What were they thinking replacing him with Taz?

As with all things TNA, it was a case of sacrificing long-term planning for short-term success. Especially around that time, having been in the company a long time and built up a role as a recognisable part of the brand meant fuck all the moment you could be replaced by someone from WWE came along. I can't think of another promotion that spent so long consistently making their own guys look bush league the way TNA did for years.

I'm going to check out this PPV, which will be the first TNA show I've watched in years outside of the Broken Universe stuff. It's been getting great reviews everywhere, and sounds like a company getting back on track, even if a large part of that is Jeff Jarrett hitting the reset button wherever possible.

The problem, for me, and I'm going to assume a lot of other people, is that even if this is the best show they've ever produced, it's unlikely to get me on board the Impact hype train. Because how many second chances has this company had by now? I want there to be a viable "second" promotion to WWE, but TNA/Impact/GFW need to stack up more goodwill from their fanbase than probably exists in the world to make the majority prepared to give them a chance without thinking that at some point, inevitably, they'll let us down again.

Depends on your tolerance for bullshit. It's not good, by any measure, but can be a laugh.

Format is pretty much invariably;

"Here's an impressive ancient monument. The people who supposedly built it lived here in olden times, so it must have been nearly impossible, and besides, they were brown. Let's lie about the weight/size/shape/positioning/functionality of part of this monument to make it sound like it would have been literally impossible to build, while again reiterating that these people were brown and a long time ago, so weren't smart enough to build things on their own. Here's a carving of a bloke with a long head, or like he might be wearing a space helmet, therefore he must be an alien".

Throw in interviews with "experts" like Sitchin and Von Daniken, and you're away.

1 minute ago, Carbomb said:

I reckon I'd read a novel based on a universe where every single conspiracy theory ever is true. The Illuminatus! trilogy was awesome, but is quite old now. Would be good to have one for the modern era.

It's something I've kind of always wanted to write - I remember thinking reading David Icke when I was younger that, with how adept he is at tying up disparate ideas and drawing connections between entirely unrelated events, he could have made one hell of a novelist.

Aside from the obvious contradictions you'd run into - is the world Flat or is it Hollow, did we land on the Moon and find evidence of alien life, or did we never go there at all, or whatever - I think you'd drive yourself mad trying to write it. I doubt I'd have the commitment, let alone the skill.

Pretty much everything I try and write usually ends up tying into at least one conspiracy theory or other, though - they just provide so many great concepts for a good story. I'm trying to write a fantasy story at the moment, and it's taking a lot of effort not to just turn it into a Hollow Earth thing for no real reason.

4 minutes ago, JNLister said:

I do have to say that I wish the Doctor would actually learn that when a new assistant comes and they have the "it's bigger on the inside!" moment, he should take the opportunity to go "yep, get used to things being different to how you expect. BTW, if I ever die, don't cry too much, there's this whole regeneration deal."

I'd explain that away as the Doctor not wanting to broach the subject of possible death, as one of his conceits to his companions is that he will always be there to protect them, and suggesting that someone might die - even if it's not exactly permanent - is at odds with that.

28 minutes ago, Egg Shen said:

if you still have Now TV, they have an app available in the store which is basically a collection of alien & ufo documentaries, it's free you just need to download it...why's its there buried in between pretty normal apps im not quite sure but that might be a worth a look for you pat.

Might check it out, though - despite the impression I may have given in this thread - UFOs are pretty low down my list of Fortean interests; give me some good cryptozoology stories or a rain of frogs any day. That said, if it's a free app, it's got to be worth a punt.

25 minutes ago, King Coconut said:

Hollow earth!? What the fuck is wrong with humanity?

Bonkers stuff, isn't it? This is the sort of Fortean/conspiracy-minded thing I find fascinating; the sheer extent of the weirdness people are prepared to believe, and the logical hoops they'll jump through to try and make it sound plausible.

It's why I love watching a lot of the Ancient Aliens stuff, even if it invariably ends up with me shouting at the screen about how wrong they are. There's a documentary on Youtube that's just two blokes picking apart every single false claim made on History Channel's Ancient Aliens series, and it's about three hours long, and really lacking in the kind of wit and charm that should make that kind of thing entertaining, but it becomes fun just through sheer absurdity. You find yourself laughing at how preposterous it is that people are making these claims, and at how exasperated these two fellas must have been to sit down and a record a feature-length video just to say, "no, actually".

The Hollow Earth thing is great - far more interesting than Flat Earth types! - because it's a conspiracy really in the David Icke mold, where it's really a case of why have one or two conspiracies when you can have seven? They just have to tie every other conspiracy together, so even if they ever did have a point, it's lost in amongst all that fluff. Cryptids? They live inside the Earth. UFOs? They come from inside the Earth. Disappeared aircraft? Inside the Earth, mate. Secret Nazi bases? Hollow Earth, that.

The other thing they have in common with Icke, and the Ancient Aliens lot, is this bizarre assumption that all ancient myth is supposed to be a factual account. So any mention of somewhere inside the Earth must be true, but also any other mythical land ever mentioned - Shangri-La, Garden of Eden, Atlantis - all obviously inside the Earth, aren't they?

There's a lot in there about the secret diary of Richard Byrd, which is interesting, but a very obvious hoax.

2 minutes ago, JNLister said:

(With apologies to everyone who either knew/noticed or read about this already.)

The last scene being in the snow is almost certainly because William Hartnell's final episode in 1966 is set in 1986 in the South Pole. During that episode the dying Doctor goes off screen making his own way back to the Tardis ahead of his companions, who later join him there where he regenerates.

That means this year's Christmas special almost certainly takes place *during* that 1966 episode and will involve both the first and twelfth doctors in their final moments before regenerating.

To make it even better, that 1966 episode was the first ever appearance of the Cybermen, in their Mondas (no armour) format. And Peter Capaldi has previously chosen it as one of his favourite episodes.

I don't think I can cope if the Christmas special has this jawdropping awesomeness of a premise and the payoff is Kris Marshall.

It ties in brilliantly with Hartnell's farewell speech, too; it kind of casts it in a new light, as if he was talking to himself as much as to Susan;

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 "One day, I shall come back. Yes, I shall come back. Until then, there must be no regrets, no tears, no anxieties. Just go forward in all your beliefs and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine"

That came to mind as I was watching it; the Doctor, as well as refusing to regenerate, was giving up on being the Doctor. He said that, wherever he was, he was going to stay. Coming off the back of his, "I do what I do because it's right" speech to the Master, that to me is the Doctor turning his back on his beliefs - and who better to remind him that he must go forward in all his beliefs than himself, one day coming back?

Something this two parter isn't being given enough credit for, in amongst all the praise its rightly getting, is that it made the Cybermen scary. Most of the classic Who villains are useless mooks these days, and even when the Cybermen do show up as a big threat, you know it doesn't really count for much. But they managed to make the original Cybermen, the ones that were obviously just blokes in rubbish suits, actually scary. Not only that, but when the "new" armoured Cybermen showed up, they were actually made scarier by association, despite us having seen them countless times over the last few years.

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I don't think I can cope if the Christmas special has this jawdropping awesomeness of a premise and the payoff is Kris Marshall.

Likewise. I'm a huge fan of Capaldi as an actor, and felt constantly frustrated by how poor some of the material he was given to work with has been, so I've loved this series. Prior to this series, I was close to giving up on Doctor Who altogether, but stuck with it because, even in a poor episode, you know you're going to get some good business out of Capaldi. But, with him going out, even with the goodwill this series has earned, a crap new Doctor could easily kill my enthusiasm, and it can't come much crapper than Kris Marshall.

I'm worried that they will have, before the rave reviews this series has got, looked at Capaldi as a bit of a failure and gone to cast a quirky young bloke again, and I don't want that! I want crotchety old man Doctor.

Retro Gamer magazine tend to keep a pretty decent list of what you can be expected to pay for rarer games; they used to produce an annual catalogue, not sure if they still do, but tend to have listings in the mag, and adverts for websites prepared to pay big money for rarer cartridges. It's worth swotting up on something like that so you know you're not getting ripped off - and so you don't miss out on a bargain too; I passed up the chance to buy an old Mega Drive Smurfs game in a second-hand shop because they were asking a tenner for it a few years back, turns out it's worth considerably more than that

I've been trying to justify the amount of money I'm spending on streaming services by watching any available guff on there - I signed up to Amazon Prime for American Gods, and it's likely to be the first service I drop, followed by Now TV after Twin Peaks is finished.

Now, while making the best use of Now TV has seen me watching a bunch of old Smell of Reeves and Mortimer episodes, making the best use of Amazon Prime is late night binge watching of its fine assortment of super low budget utterly dreadful conspiracy "documentaries". I'm talking YouTube basement dweller production levels passed off as the real deal.

It's almost all alien stuff, which isn't really my favourite area of conspiracy nonsense, but plenty ties into Ancient Aliens bollocks, and I find that thoroughly entertaining. It's staggering how committed these people are able to sound when making points that fall apart with the tiniest bit of scrutiny. Great fun, if you can stomach hearing the word "Annunaki" a hundred times a night.

There's a documentary about Hollow Earth theories on there, too, which starts off sounding a little smug but at least somewhat open-minded, and then ten minutes in you realise it's made by the Hollow Earth Society, who might have a vested interest in this thing.

On ‎02‎/‎07‎/‎2017 at 7:57 AM, d-d-d-dAz said:

My only complaint, which is a boring common one, is that I'd have rathered Bill had a noble death than a hazy happy ending.

Yeah, it would be nice to see Doctor Who fully commit to a death with some emotional weight to it, though obviously I understand the various reasons they can't. Is it 100% confirmed that Bill isn't coming back for the next series? I assume so, but I suppose it always helps to keep a companion alive in case they fancy bringing them back later down the line.

I loved that episode - aside from right at the beginning, it lacked the continuity-hopping that Moffat seems to have crowbarred into practically every episode and that really wore thin on me this series, as it was the one thing hurting an otherwise perfect storm of a series, and easily my favourite series of "New Who" yet.

A damn shame that Capaldi's on his way out when it seems they only just figured out how to write to his strengths. I was desperately hoping right up until the end that, somehow, they'd swerved us and he wasn't actually leaving! I was just clinging on to hope off the back of the new Doctor not having been announced yet. I hope they don't announce anyone - a regeneration where we genuinely have no idea what to expect could be superb.

And, well, that ending. Bloody brilliant stuff.

Nobody comes out looking good in the Hogan/Gawker trial. Sometimes there just aren't any good guys.

That said, I agree that the documentary was tosh. Too committed to proving a point to really acknowledge enough that in targeting Thiel they're defending some real nasty shits in the process; if the underlying point had been that freedom of speech means having to stand up for some right pricks, it might have been a more interesting story.

For me the most interesting part of the Hogan trial was that it almost like putting the Hulk Hogan gimmick on trial. Mad shit like him being allowed to wear a "formal bandana". So much of it was built on interrogating Terry Bollea about who Hulk Hogan was - at what point does Terry stop and Hulk begin, how much bullshit is he allowed to spout in the name of "staying in character", what can or can't be considered part of the Hulk Hogan Brand rather than just the words and actions of Terry Bollea. That's a far more interesting starting point to a documentary, for me.

As far as I know, I've only been blocked by Vince Russo. God knows why.