sevendaughters

3 hours ago, Merzbow said:

It'll deserve it's own thread when it's closer to the time but Big Brother is coming back next year, although it's an ITV thing this time around and not even on the main channel it seems.

Continiuity Love Island

Disgrace, come on, let's not overstate ourselves after we get a good lick in, Vince McMahon's conduct is a disgrace, Ric Flair's last match is the kind of weirdo shit that wrestling is founded upon and it happens three-six times a year in Mexico.

never a red

I can't bring myself to hate it. Wrestling has rarely been about dignity and refinement, which is a bourgeois concept utilised to promote the idea that high culture is of greater value. The old geezer got some temporary relief from his bills and everyone had a good old laugh.

3 minutes ago, jazzygeofferz said:

I saw Cowdenbeath play in the Lowland league now? 

they got canned by Gala Fairydean too. From the Blue Brazil to the Blue Belize.

I notice Banks o Dee have moved from junior fitba to the HFL too.

2 minutes ago, DCW said:

Flair's promo at the end where he said he's looking forward to hanging out with Kid Rock as some sort of affirmation of his life was sad. The whole thing was sad really. 

Found it strange that Taker took his wife and young daughter out to watch a 73 year old man bleed too. 

If you follow @madandpissedoff on Twitter (which is the real Undertaker, don't let the global elites tell you otherwise) you'll understand why

8 minutes ago, Merzbow said:

It seemed like all the dirt sheets were paid shills for the event, no chance we're getting a genuine review.

Dave and Bryan on WOR did not like it but are trying to show some respect for the old geezer. They point out that he basically never got up from the suplex onward, that you could hear him mouth 'I passed out', that his hand was shaking so violently that he couldn't get the knucks on, etc.

I actually wrote an academic paper on longform documentaries on Netflix and came up with a fancy bit of jargon (that no one has adopted yet) for it - narrative prorogation. In theory they're trying to build the world around the story as much as tell you the story (ie. Making a Murderer spending time with the family, trying to understand their place in the world, unpack their various traumas) in order to create that deep engagement that drives major longform narratives like Game of Thrones etc., problem is when they don't 'pay off' ie Lost then they create a wave of negative energy toward associated productions.

Flair's Last Match was wrestling at its most noble and interesting. A fitting parade of pure carnival, the line of reality and falsity tightroped with free abandon. It should be buried in a time capsule and shown to future generations to educate them how kings lived. That it was funded by Conrad Subprime and probably nine commission doctors were paid to look the other way only adds to it for me. Point off for Fatu flipping around like a nerd. ****1/2

2 hours ago, Accident Prone said:

The big break in the FBI finally sending Al Capone down wasn't all the bootlegging, racketeering and murder. It was tax evasion.

Unfair comparison of evils. Capone would never have booked Mason Ryan.

55 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

I would say it's depressing that that is the case, but really what's depressing is that it is of no surprise whatsoever. It's probably failed to be surprising since before most of us on here were born.

True enough.

Anyway, he's in the bloodstream now.

HHH definitely ported some of the Dunn-isms to NXT. I remember when Balor debuted down in Florida and they had to shoot something like 4 minutes of him posing on the turnbuckle (in the script as "physicality") facing the hard cam to get it right, only at that time there was no crowd behind the hard cam and the whole thing came off as ridiculously false. Nothing in NXT felt particularly natural or organic, but at least you would get some matches that felt a bit gritty.

In the great helix chart of my wrestling fandom we are at a dip (or a continual downward movement) and I haven't been able to watch a WWE show from beginning to end in one go since 2013 when I was forced to (was at the B+ Player Raw after Summerslam). That's probably on me as much as anything, but I will genuinely stand up and applaud HHH if I can one day watch an entire episode of WWE main roster original television and not think I've wasted part of my life and devoted 34 years to the sheerest idiocy, let alone think it was fine or good.

extremely milquetoast modern liberal thing to say but it is quite the thing that what sinks him is the legality of using money from his own company in the eyes of the corrupt stock market rather than the morals of being a sexmon beyond redemption.

I hate yer Shapiros and yer Petersons (and especially people like Mike Cernovich) more than all of the above because of their potent mix of awful politics and pure grifting, but I think they synthesise some of the above aspects (particularly a kind of sick debate club mentality to life) rather than doing pioneering work in the field.

There's a really good book by a playwright called Simon Gray called Fat Chance. It's a recollection of the West End play Cell Mates that Stephen Fry was cast in the lead in and subsequently walked out on mid-run, leaving Rik Mayall and a few others holding their dicks in quite a spectacular way.

Gray goes in quite hard on Fry - caveat obviously being how spectacularly pissed off he is with him. I'll try and find a couple of choice extracts and post them here.

1 minute ago, SuperBacon said:

I mean it was clear from the start he was more than just "spiritual" but when he asked Nathan 

  Hide contents

If he knew how to hit a bong and Nathan's awkward "uuuuh" reply, I was howling. 

 

his

is a particular form of American passive-aggressiveness I've seen quite a lot of too, if it's fake then a very good bit of observation!

7 hours ago, SuperBacon said:

The first two episodes of The Rehearsal have been excellent. If you like Nathan For You, you will love this.

In the first episode, when he walks round the corner as the owner of the blog The Thrifty Boy I absolutely lost it and had to pause it for a long while. Nathan Fielder is a genius.

the numbers guy in episode 2 cracked me up too. the show is shaping up so well.

41 minutes ago, Mr_Danger said:

I like the look of Disco Elysium at the £16 it’s on sale for but not sure it’ll play great on console. 

I have it on PS4 and it works great. You lose some of the ease of PC nav - TAB to highlight all objects in the room you're in, for example. It crashed once on me and I did stop for a while.

It was recently about the same price on Steam so whatever works best.

For me I just like lying back on the couch and taking it all in, pad in hand. I said pad.

WWE is beyond the 'change your approach to in-line editing and colourscheme' approach to redemption. They are fully in league with Satan.

probably technically not the right thread for this but I just saw the Titus promo from Raw and it is more successful as a cult leader promo than anything Bray ever did.

genuinely a bit taken aback by all this. knew it was coming and hated Vince for a long time, but still. end of an era. for me and for wrestling being on telly.

I just tried explaining this thread concept to the Mrs and she didn't get it for ages and then nominated Stephen Hawking.

I think I've changed my mind on nearly everything in wrestling (from wrong to right, obv) on nearly everything from John Cena to the entire nation of Japan.

The biggest swing is probably the Undertaker. From 'the reason I watch wrestling' to 'glad you're gone old dickhead'.

Richard Dawkins has to be there. He is the ultimate example of no such thing as universal intelligence. He is the font that all the other atheist/'logic' bullies draw from, y'know, this guy:

He's also a bigger draw than Neil DeGrasse Tyson, hence his elevation to Rushmore status.

I think stone two would have to be Stephen Fry. I like some of his work (mainly as an actor) but he's also - kind of like other incredibly well-spoken polymath Will Self - not really someone who has thrown down brilliant work befitting of their status as cultural giant and, in fact, are more famous for their lighter work playing an intelligent person on telly. He (Fry, but also Self) is also capable of saying some of the most deranged and demented things from time to time, like the whole thing about women not liking sex.

You could argue that no real moron likes Fry, that he's mostly loved by harmless people whose TV turns on at Dave automatically, but I think it's the lack of depth Fry seems to encourage - fun facts as conversational lifehacks over emotional depth or analysis - that gets him carved into a mountain.

Stone three might be controversial but I think it would be Karl Marx.

I'm leftist and have genuinely read Das Kapital and Der Grundrisse and even the whole bolts of cotton bits and use/exchange value sections, not just the greatest hits of Marx, and I've even read books by other eggheads explaining Marx and I think I get it and agree with his descriptions of capital and even can get on board with some (not all) of his prescriptions. His work, taken with a degree of cynicism and no little worldliness about individuals and psychology, can be really enlightening. A truly great thinker; I think it is hard to think about the modern economy and its relationship to other spheres and not be invoking Marx on some level.

So why do so many people who follow him, particularly in the vocally online way, become such steaming "angry" performative tossers? If you've ever spent a nanosecond in young leftist circles, these are some of the biggest freaks on the planet. Marx is Jesus, Lenin is John the Baptist. The 'Rik from the Young Ones' image is out of date and also several shades too redeemable. If none of this is known to you, thank your lucky stars that you have never had your every public comment and utterance scrutinised by the spectre of ideological purity.

Lastly, there has to be a major shithead capitalist to balance it out. Musk fits the bill perfectly - beneficiary of apartheid stomping around pretending like he's a mate of the free world with his memes and calling a guy physically trying to help some drowning kids a paedo. He's developed a full on cult of weirdos who really believe he is a force of good and will change the planet into a technocratic utopia when in fact he can barely stop a firmware update crashing an entire car.

Disco Elysium: The FinaL Cut is on sale on PS4 and recently was on sale on Steam.

I think it might be the best game I've ever played. I'm not a big gamer, so take anything I say with a pinch of salt. I mostly play sports sims (racing games, Virtual Pool 4, and baseball) and then dip into the nostalgia basket of old favourites like Resident Evil (when it was third person) and Monkey Island.

In fact that last comparison is fairly apt: though more serious and literate in tone, it shares some DNA with Monkey Island's irreverent point-and-click conversational style. Here it's isometric rather than 2D.

Instead of a hubristic pirate you play a detective who spent the night before the game started so paralytic and aggressive that you made the barmaid quit. Now you've got full-blown (though temporary) amnesia. Around the back of the inn you're staying at is a dead body and your partner is tut-tutting at you downstairs. Your belongings - badge, gun, case notes - are all gone.

There are lots of games that incorporate moral decision trees that lead to an outcome, I'm led to believe, and I can't talk about how this one is specifically different. What elevates this game is not just the superior art style, but the writing of the dialogue and the excellent handle on politics - both monetarist and cultural. It's a world where racism is real in the sense of believing in eugenics and the superiority of one race over another, and it's a world where communism, fascism, free market capitalism, and some old fashioned 'moral values' are trying to assert over one another.

There's no combat - just conversations and snooping around. I've died several times - of heartbreak, strangled by my own tie, gassing myself while trying to chin a lippy kid - and for a game that is very much invested in the idea of exploration and not trying to strongarm the game with favourable stats, I have ballsed up quite a bit.

Even for people like me who are suspicious of cop portrayals in this year of our lord should find something in this - there's no thin blue line shite here.

It's like playing an Alasdair Grey novel. No less a compliment.

re: Backlund, do you think there's a chance they saw his 2 match run in UWF Newborn? He was a bit goofy in that but also could go in a serious style.

I met Charlie Lawson once in 2020, just before COVID hit, as he was having a birthday party in the hotel I was staying at in Belfast, where he lives, and it rarely tops out past 25.

Just about seeing this patch out but the neighbourhood reggae and barbeque smoke blowing in through the opened windows and doors has been a pain I could live without. I get it lads, you're chilled out entertainers.