JNLister

CUUUUUUUUUNNNNNNTTTTT

Rees-Mogg formally selected as the candidate in what will be our new constituency at the next election.

Only consolation is that his niece (who was the failed Tory candidate in the May-booing article I posted), who found a safe seat and got in in 2019, has effectively been deselected because she "betrayed Boris" by resigning last summer.

Played Cascadia, a 2021 release that's in the top 50 at BoardGameGeek. It's a tile/token laying game where each tile has a habitat background (water, prairie etc) and a space for a specific animal token. The catch is that you can earn points by having continuous areas of the same habitat, but also by having animals arranged together in different ways (salmon want a line, bears like to be huddled together, hawks need to be separated but have straight lines of sight).

It plays very smoothly and is very much in the "easy to learn, difficult to master" category. The only problem is that each of the animals can score in one of four slightly different ways, randomly selected at the start to add variety. That means you need to be very hot on explaining exactly how that works, otherwise anyone who's misunderstood will find they've wasted a lot of the game doing something that won't pay off.

Later that day...

4 hours ago, Gay as FOOK said:

I get complete fatigue from MJF promos now, too. He's almost like the heel AEW version of that thing people pick up on with Cody's new stuff too where the act's almost too polished, too bullet point for bullet point,

The moment you realise you are indeed going to be on the hook for child support:

Going forward, all New Japan's events in the US will be live PPVs. The matches will then be shown over the next few weeks as episodes of the weekly NJPW Strong show, which is on NJPW World. (NJPW Strong isn't getting dedicated tapings any more.)

21 hours ago, scouseman said:

@ JNLister is your writing based on wrestling also? Any recommendations of your work?

Details at https://prowrestlingbooks.com/books-by-john-lister/

1 hour ago, scouseman said:

Guys I have been on a wresting book kick lately. Did the complete list of Jericho get a UK release or know where I may get a new copy from. Also struggling to find Booker T's second Book My Rise to Wrestling Royalty without having to pay US postage charges. Any ideas. Also JNLister do you do signed copies of your book on Brian Pillman?

Jericho book was only available direct through the publisher: https://thescribestore.com/products/the-complete-list-of-jericho-by-chris-jericho

Pillman book was by @Liam O'Rourke

Domestic but low-level, a lovely counterpart to the "Japan left the dressing room immaculate with origami gifts" posts:

1 hour ago, Daaaaaad! said:

From what I've gleaned by interacting with a few clickbait-y sites, that asking price is around $2-3bn more than their current share value. Could this confirm a theory that Vince actually isn't after selling at all and has simply sought to return himself to the show?

You normally have to pay a bit above the stock market value to buy a whole company. If you're buying, say, 10% of shares it doesn't matter who you buy them from so nobody can charge you above the market rate. If you're trying to buy the whole company people can charge you extra because people know it's much better for you to get all 100% of the shares rather than just have a majority but still have to deal with other stockholders.

Fan-made hype video.

4 hours ago, Hannibal Scorch said:

I don't think I could avoided calling him a cunt to his face if i'm honest

There's a show on Sky where Nish Kumar and Josh Widdecombe go to different local papers and try to find and report stories. One one of them they get sent to cover a Boris Johnson visit (as PM) to a local college and Kumar is tasked with shouting a question when Johnson goes past.

Instead he just shouts "Fuck you, you fucking cunt!"

The whole show is something of a worked shoot, but the way he reacts afterwards, it does very much come across that it was just a gut instinct.

Just come across a bookmark of that time Teresa May came to town and I went to say hello. Can't believe this is three fucking Tory PMs ago.

Found it -- it's on the 13 December 1994 TV episode: https://watch.wwe.com/episode/ECW-Hardcore-TV-9695?startPoint=1331.267

It's Styles rather than Heyman using the "magic marker" (which they call the pain scan.)

@cheapshot

Just noticed that while WWE's YouTube puts up a three-minute clip of each match/segment from its TV shows, BT Sport's YouTube usually has the main talking segment/angle in full.

So, you know how there were a few WCW songs that sounded a lot like "real" songs by actual bands?

It wasn't a few.

It was nearly a hundred.

Couple of new (or rather first-time playing) ones this week:

Darkrock Ventures is what a mechanics nerd would call a lightweight dice-driven worker placement and everyone else would call "Castles of Burgandy but simpler... and in space." Pretty universal reaction on the table was that it's a nice idea to try do a short-play Euro game, but it's neither one thing not the other, so it feels like you need to build up a strategy but then it ends before you can get anything going. There are quite a few official rule modifications/variants/extra components that might improve it but I wouldn't rush to replay.

Parade is one of those very simple card games that has just enough depth and a twist it make it interesting. The actual rules would probably take longer to read than they do to teach. There's a fair bit of luck but it's short enough that you don't really mind if you have a bad game (he says, having won through pure skill and judgment of course.)

Has BBC Three dropped the Bellator deal?

7 minutes ago, Supremo said:

What’s deal with Peacock in the states? Are they showing adverts between every match? Is there a tier that has adverts and another that doesn’t? If so, what’s the difference?! The endless, pointless vignettes that I assume are used to fill the ad time are exhausting to get through.

Yes, it's exactly that. It's $4.99 for the standard tier with ads (or free if you are on certain cable companies) and $9.99 for the ad-free version. Which is all great until you come a to a live broadcast and you either see "proper ads" or WWE filling time with those videos.

Assuming they aren't doing Zayn-Reigns at WrestleMania, I reckon they go:

* Zayn-Reigns at Elimination Chamber in Montreal, winds up with Zayn looking like he can win but Temporarily Good Uso turns against him.

* Night One of Mania ends with Zayn/Owen beating the Usos for the tag belts.

* Night Two of Mania is Rhodes-Reigns with a mid-match section where the Bloodline are doing loads of interference but Zayn and Uso run them off, leaving Rhodes to finish a fair one-on-one match.

Not saying it's a booking crutch, but the word "return" now appears 75 times in Lesnar's Wikipedia bio.

I'm going to attempt to mention all the games I play for the first time at my weekly group from the start of this year in this thread.

Kicking off with Obsession, which is a Downton Abbey/Jane Austen type theme where your family is trying to raise money by holding events, using the money to expand your facilities, and attracting more of the gentry into your social circle. The big challenge is balancing money and reputation (because rich Americans are so vulgar). It's a lot to get your head around at the start, but it scales up very smoothly as the game progresses and you start planning several turns ahead. Once you get the flow, you realise it's actually pretty tight because you only do the main turn sequence (pick an activity, pick the guests, assign servants, buy a facility) about 14 times. Not really got the hang of how to win yet as it's got a lot of different ways of scoring.

Shear Panic is a surprisingly tactical light game from several years ago. It's all about manipulating a bunch of sheep (two per player plus a black sheep) using a fixed set of actions (eg push your sheep's row, jump over other sheep, turn everything 90 degrees), with a simple rule about the flock having to come back together after every move. You can only use each action a certain number of times and that's it for the game, so you have to pick your spots (and see what moves other people have left to use). It's kept interesting by the fact that how you score changes across four sections of the game (keep your sheep together/be closest to the front/get your sheep by the black sheep/be furthest from the front.) I don't think anyone would play it enough to develop a winning strategy but it's a good longish-filler.

Roll Through The Ages is a roll-and-write version of the much longer board game. As you'd expect, it's a good mix of strategy and tactics and a case of making the most of the randomness.

We had our first monthly all-day session specifically for long games and I got a chance to play the hot-game-of-right now, Ark Nova. In a sentence, it's a game so good that it taking five hours to play was not a chore at all, though the length does severely restrict its potential for repeat plays. The look and feel is pretty much a cross between Terraforming Mars and Wingspan. It's based on your building a zoo and trying to build up appeal (ie how cool the animals you have are), conservation points and reputation (which gets you access to better things.) One unusual point is that the appeal and conservation point trackers run in opposite directions and you play until somebody's scores "cross over", play one more turn and add bonus points, then the winner is based on the gap between the two. In other words, you can't just go for one type of point.

The gameplay is very smooth and turns are quick (which makes the long play time bearable) with a lovely mechanism where you choose between five actions. Each are in a slot (1-5) and the power of the action depends on the slot. After you've played an action, it goes to slot 1 and everything else moves up. So you are trying to find the right mix of using a particular action right now or waiting until it's built up to something more powerful. It all winds up in this lovely flow where you are thinking about making the msot of the current move, planning the sequence of the next few moves, and thinking about the long-term strategy as well. It's also pitched just right to where you have to think carefully about your options, but there's never so much choice that you wind up overwhelmed and either taking too long or feeling rushed into picking a sub-optimal play. 

Regarding the numbers, the current "worth" of WWE is its market capitalisation, meaning the number of shares x the current share price. At this precise moment that's $6.65 billion.

One way to estimate a likely share price is "a bit over the market capitalisation", with the extra being a "takeover premium". That reflects the fact that you have to pay above market price when people know you want to own the whole thing. So something in the $7-8 billion region wouldn't be insane.

Whether it's a worthwhile investment is another calculation. If you paid the $6.65 billion, at current profit levels it would take about 20 years to make your money back, which isn't outrageous for a public company. That would change if the TV rights go up as expected.

However, it's a very different proposition if you're a TV company. WWE's total US rights fees (Raw/NXT/Smackdown/The Former Network) are currently the best part of a billion per year, so if that goes up significantly, it could almost be cheaper to buy the company than to sign a long-term TV deal.