I am like a billy goat
Whose horns are old
In a moldy coat
I will not shear a single hair
For I am not of Theseus or Jason
With rheumy eyes I watch the woman on the screen
And tremble
I’m not gonna bother finding an image or anything for this one, but I’d still encourage you to read it. I both review Dynamite and give a commentary on the Thursday Dynamite Review from the VoW Flagship Patreon. I’m also going to start giving “enjoyment grades” to segments, using the common American grading scale (A, B, C, D, F), with C being average or moderate enjoyment. Like with the stars, I’m going to avoid “adjustments”, so there’ll be few C+s or A-s. Also in this one, I really went for a blow-by-blow type of recording, as best I can. I lost steam near the end. It wasn’t a great show.
And here’s my commentary for the last AEW PPV of 2024, AEW World’s End! Happy New Year everybody, as I’ve said I’ve fallen behind a bit on my AEW watching but I’m catching up here. Here’s my reactions to the Voices of Wrestling Flagship podcast’s Instant Reaction Live to the show. This has a lot of talk about stakes, which is one of the Big Ideas that I’ve been working with when writing about wrestling.
Categories
Philosophy: What Is Attention?
Attention has always interested me as a subject of thinking, but as a non-psychologist, it’s been difficult for me to get stuck into the study of it. I can search, of course, but it’s not a huge topic when I do so. Instead, what I’m going to do here is a bias, which is a form I use to put forward my personal theory about an idea. From there, when I decide to pick up this line of thought again, I’ll have specific avenues existing already that I want to move forward with. I expect that a lot of my presumptions will be ripped apart when I look into them further; that’s the nature of honest research. I’ve had my own thoughts and done some preliminary reading on the subject. That said, I will be leaving this largely unsourced so that I don’t give off the idea that these are final conclusions.
It’s AEW’s final pay-per-view of the year and I’ve final-ly gotten to it. I took it in three chunks which probably colors my opinion. This review is just my notes as I watched through the show, including some digressions which I think are interesting. You’ll see some more move-calling in this review than in previous; this isn’t really to help people figure out what’s going on, it’s really about filling space (figuratively) if I don’t have anything else to say.
Categories
Friendship and Fandom
I’ve been thinking about submitting pitches and such again to publications, and that naturally led me to thinking about my hangups with submissions, promoting, and being in public in general. I feel as though I come off as unconfident but I’ve never felt like an unconfident person, and I’d say this comes out of a general not-fitting-in. A big part of this is that I am not a fan of things and I don’t make friends easily. It leads me to thinking that I should be seeking out somewhere else to lay my head, a place that I never seem to find.
Not much to sink my teeth into on this review, which isn’t to say it was a bad review, just that nothing came up in particular. Lanza told people not to argue with him about “funny doesn’t equal money” though so obviously I’m going to do that, but we’ll get there.
A sad post and now another review of a self-help book? Is Obi going through it? Uh well yes and no, but to be blunt, I was gonna do a New Thought podcast so I bought a bunch of books but then I lost interest in the project. I still have the books, though, and I want to get rid of them but I don’t want to waste them, so here we are. This time the book was a short one, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra.
One of the main things I wanted to do with the New Thought podcast was to explore the magical claims made by guys like this. They are definitely there, but it’s less of a focus than I thought it’d be from the outside. Most of what you’ll find in this book is vaguely Buddhistic advice about life and success; if I’m not mistaken, Chopra is actually more connected with Hinduism, but I use “Buddhistic” here as a genre descriptor more than anything.
I do think that I’ll discuss the more magical aspects of these works at some point, but it’s probably better done as a round-up after I’ve cleared my shelf. For now, I’m going to focus my discussion on the main messages I’m seeing in the work.
Categories
Unpleasantness
I know that this blog has had a kind of whiplash between wrestling posts and sad posts lately. I feel like I should apologize although I don’t want to. I like joy but I’m not a happy person. Rather than feeling as though I’m inflicting this on you, though, I hope you’ll see yourselves as taking part in an exorcism. I’ve got to get things out and for whatever reason it doesn’t work for me to put them in a diary for no one to read.
Part of it is that I’ve always looked to see myself in advice and posting online and I never did. I didn’t want to hold everything in and then be like why are people in my situation never represented well. I don’t think I have any answers for people like me, but I didn’t want this kind of perspective to be lost forever. If it’s just me, it’s an exhibit. If it’s more than just me, maybe it’ll help you to understand this type of person.
I caught the latest AEW Dynamite and I have to say… it was okay. I don’t really have any particular overall thoughts, though the reprise does have a discussion on what “a champion” is via talking about Darby Allin’s seemingly inevitable title win. Everything was built solidly but unspectacularly. No bad matches here, though I could have honestly done with a couple of squashes to cleanse the palate, and some of the promos were a bit of wasted space.