Category: Opinion

Categories
Opinion

Pro-Wres Lab: Damage and Vulnerability

Bryan Danielson wearing kinesio tape
Bryan Danielson wearing kinesio tape

Let’s talk for a little bit about how pro wrestling matches themselves can be different. I’m talking about more than just skin-deep; I want to talk about the bones. If you watch WWE, AEW, NJPW, and UWFi (from back in the day) one after another, you’ll see that they’re all presented with significant differences, but they all move in a way that has basic similarities. There’s an underlying assumption that everyone shares about wrestling. This is what I call the “match theory”. This article is going to explain what I think the common match theory is, then I’m going to introduce my own match theory: vulnerability theory.

Continue reading “Pro-Wres Lab: Damage and Vulnerability”
Categories
Opinion

Pro-Wres Lab: The Agency System, Part 1 (feat. AEW)

Cody Rhodes after winning the NWA World's Heavyweight Championship at the original All In
Cody Rhodes as NWA World Heavyweight Champion

Let’s try and rethink wrestling. It’s an ambitious proposition, I get it, but I’ll have fun with it and maybe you will, too. What I’m going to do is propose a new style of wrestling booking: the Agency System. If I had to boil down the goal of the Agency System to one word, it would be realism. If I had a few more, I’d say this: we’re going to rely on naturalistic stories for wrestling rather than on artificial stories.

American pro wrestling is for children. When I say this, I don’t say it disparagingly as-such. That is, I’m not saying “American pro wrestling is for children and therefore bad, because children only like bad things”. What I’m saying is compare the beats of The Sopranos to the beats of Power Rangers (look, I’m not watching TV these days, work with me) and see what pro wrestling hews closer to1. Not just WWE. All of American TV pro wrestling is like this. It is loud, it is in your face, it is frantic. It’s almost desperate not to lose your attention.

Continue reading “Pro-Wres Lab: The Agency System, Part 1 (feat. AEW)”
Categories
Opinion

Stancil and Theory

I gotta get back to blogging instead of doing long tweet threads (@nearzone.bsky.social). I also gotta get better at transferring threads to the blog so they’re not quite so obtrusive. Maybe I’ll set myself reminders.

Anyway, here are tweets about Will Stancil and my theory (which you can check out on Journal of Cogency). I do want to try to keep politics off of this blog for the most part (and I swear I’ll try to do a light thing soon, been working) but it’s a series of tweets so it’s better for the silly blog.

Continue reading “Stancil and Theory”
Categories
Opinion

Review: AEW Dynamite 1/1/25 – Look I Know It’s Late

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.

Continue reading “Review: AEW Dynamite 1/1/25 – Look I Know It’s Late”
Categories
Opinion

Commentary: Instant Reaction Live – AEW World’s End 2024

AEW Men's World Championship Match Graphic from AEW World's End 2024: Moxley vs. Page vs. Cassidy vs. White
Title Match Graphic from AEW World's End 2024: Moxley vs. Page vs. Cassidy vs. White

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.

Continue reading “Commentary: Instant Reaction Live – AEW World’s End 2024”
Categories
Opinion

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.

Continue reading “Philosophy: What Is Attention?”
Categories
Opinion

Review: AEW World’s End 12/28/2024 – Last Shot

AEW Continental Classic Final Graphic from World's End
AEW Continental Classic Final Graphic from World's End

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.

Continue reading “Review: AEW World’s End 12/28/2024 – Last Shot”
Categories
Opinion

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.

Continue reading “Friendship and Fandom”
Categories
Opinion

Commentary: Thursday Dynamite Review 12/19/24

Mercedes Moné from the 12/18 AEW Dynamite
Mercedes Moné from the 12/18 AEW Dynamite

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.

Continue reading “Commentary: Thursday Dynamite Review 12/19/24”
Categories
Opinion

Review: The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra

Cover of The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra, with Picture of the Author
Cover of the book with an image of Chopra looking like an Ascended Master

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.

Continue reading “Review: The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra”