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.
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.
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.
Lanza uploaded his review late so I uploaded my commentary late. Don’t come at me with “his was done three days ago” either. I’m taking off my shoe and I will throw it. Do you want the commentary or not?
This will be a bit more thorough than the review I did for this episode. I did watch the show, even though that review doesn’t really show it. There is also a fairly in-depth reprise focusing on the idea of “hate and heat”.
The word I would use to describe Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now is “mirage”. I’m not going to lie: I wanted to hate this book. I did not like the book, I wouldn’t go that far, but my thoughts on it are more complicated than I originally thought they’d be. One of the issues with New Thought work is that it’s not always easy to say it’s capital-W Wrong. There are things wrong about what Tolle says, absolutely, but it’s not wrong in a way that responds well to a clear takedown. Tolle references people who call what he’s written gobbledygook. In my opinion, it’s not so much that it’s uninteligible as that it prescribes a philosophy of ignorance.
Getting this isn’t straightforward, and I am not going to do an exhaustive breakdown with citations here, so if you haven’t read the book you will have to trust me. Overall, the problem is that though Tolle’s descriptions of why things go wrong can be compelling, there is no insight offered into these events. The response is always to simply be unaffected by it, something that is completely impossible in a lot of situations.
There’s also something to be said for Tolle’s style, which is structured to lull you into certain patterns of thought. But we’ll get to that.
I recently saw a series of posts by Daniel Kibblesmith on bluesky about a kind of Luddite-ism where Napster has caused a bad shift in consumption habits that have made it harder for artists to make a living: the expectation of free, etc. I also recently ran into an article I wanted to read which was successfully paywalled (i.e. sites are getting wiser to archives). These two things made me want to work out my thoughts on free culture and artists making money.
I am a writer with zero success. I have published things but nowhere near enough, or high profile enough, to ever rest laurels on. I say that to make the point that my perspective on this is going to be different than someone who is paying their bills with art, and I get that. I also want to be in a position where I’m doing that, though, so it’s not as though I’m insensitive to the idea that free work can be bad.
Another so-so episode of Dynamite last night. Nothing really grabbed me on it. Next week I’ll try to lock in a little bit more, but I still haven’t really even found an act to latch onto. Even guys I like are involved in a lot of nonsense. And yeah, I know I’m being a downer right now. I’ll talk about it after the review.