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.
Tag: review
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.
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 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.
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Review: The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
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.
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Review: AEW Dynamite 12/11/24
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.
Here is my commentary on the Voices of Wrestling Thursday Dynamite Review posted today, December 5, 2024. If you’re not aware, you can listen to this by checking out the VoW Patreon, which I’m going to trust you to be able to find. I’m not gonna shill every week but I figured I should at least point out exactly what I’m reacting to once. The host is the inimitable Joe Lanza; I’d have a specific nickname for him but they stopped doing that bit like a year ago.
Anyway, I have done a review of this event on my own where I give thoughts on suspension of belief, and I refer to some of these thoughts in the commentary so it’s worth checking out first.
Spoiler ahead for something that happened after the broadcast ended.
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Review: AEW Dynamite 12/4/24 – Disbelief
This episode of Dynamite is a great example of why I don’t like AEW. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the show and I still thought it was godawful. Now look, I admit that I’m in a bad mood for other reasons today, but usually, good wrestling can brighten my mood. I didn’t feel like we got a lot of it here, and it’s for one main reason: suspension of disbelief.
To be specific, I was not suspending my disbelief for any of this shit.
Why not? Well, let’s go through the show and I’ll point it out to you.
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Review: AEW Dynamite 11/27/2024
This was a pretty good episode of the old coyote stick, largely helped (I think) by the Continental Classic.
Also, since I’m here, I suppose I’ll explain how I’m currently viewing the star ratings. This might change as I keep going, especially as I understand more about how other people are making their decisions; these types of things always have an influence. I’ll also give them a score range out of 100 as that might help clarify more; this isn’t a real point scale, it’s just to help visualize what I think of as the quality ranges.
I’m gonna start covering AEW shows when I can, I’ll be attempting to keep up with Dynamite and the PPVs at the least. Why? Well, I don’t like AEW, so it’s not out of enjoyment. I just need to get back into watching wrestling regularly and, more importantly, talking about wrestling. While I don’t like AEW, I like WWE less, and WWE is barely pro wrestling so there’s less for me to talk about.
I love pro wrestling. I do not love watching pro wrestling, I love the idea of pro wrestling. This is said badly: I do love watching pro wrestling. When I say that I don’t love it, what I mean is that I don’t love all wrestling and I don’t just watch wrestling that doesn’t connect with me. I haven’t been watching regularly for years because most wrestling does not appeal to me. The last promotion that really grabbed me was New Japan Pro Wrestling in its golden period under Okada, but that’s over now and New Japan stinks.
So why am I covering AEW? My ambition is to run wrestling. I don’t know how that’ll happen or if it’ll happen. It probably won’t. But I’m covering AEW so that I can think more about my ideas of what I want to see in wrestling. This is also why I’m going to be doing commentaries on audio from the Voices of Wrestling Flagship podcast fairly frequently as well. More than anyone else, I feel that Lanza and Kraetsch think deeply about wrestling. I don’t always agree with them but they are usually good at explaining trends and they at least prefer to think in a more sophisticated way than who is a fan of who and isn’t it cool that this happened (though they do that too, that’s what being a fan is).