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Month: May 2004

Except for heros

OK, but I will take a second to note that my respect for Pat Tillman grows more and more the more I learn about him. Sounds like he thought a lot. Sounds like he didn’t care much about convention. I already knew that he turned down big money to go fight for his country, and I already knew that he turned down a large contract earlier in his career so he could stay in Arizona with his team. I didn’t know he attended a christening in drag, or that he read as much as he seems to have.

Also, as noted progressive economist Max Sawicky notes, Ted Rall sucks.

That funny feeling

Feeling fitful. Posting to be light or non-existent until such time as feeling goes away.

Nocturnals M&M book v. good. Adventure! D20 as expected; not v. good but solid. Pavis/Big Rubble omnibus reprinting v. good. Believe I have finally cracked the Glorantha mindset. Much like perl mindset, but with less punctuation. (Previous sentence, while jocular, is not a joke.)

Still not king.

Frammistan housings

In April, people grabbed the index.xml file at the root of this site 499 times, presumably hoping for an RSS 2.0 feed. Mostly it was two aggregators politely retrieving the file once per hour. Sadly, that file hasn’t gotten any new content for three months, since I decided to only maintain an RSS 1.0 feed and an Atom feed. I was going to hand-craft a new item for that feed explaining that I had given up on it, but then I noticed that it was already in RSS 1.0 for some reason, so I just linked it to the RSS 1.0 feed and had done with it. This entry may or may not reach the eyes of the people behind those two aggregators, but if they’re paying attention they’ll see it. (Hi, guys! I’d switch to http://popone.innocence.com/index.rdf, but you don’t have to if you don’t wanna.)

Also: my RSS 1.0 feed, which is the easiest feed to find due to autodiscovery, got 5799 hits last month. The main page got 7315 hits. The Atom feed got 250 hits. I neglected to add autodiscovery for the Atom feed until this moment; we’ll see if it gets more hits this month.

Fight fight monster fight

I girded my teeth. I gritted my loins. I ventured out, bold and unafraid, into the strange world where art students meet wrestling and nothing is safe; where every entrance theme is J-Pop; where the heels are square and the faces are from Mars. I did it — for Johnny.

I dunno, man. It’s like wrestling, but they wear big Japanese monster suits made out of foam rubber. And it happens in my city. Like I wasn’t gonna get down to a show eventually.

Pablo Plantanos

Recap? Not so much. I mean, there were five matches, one unscheduled. There was a musical tribute. I am thinking that a detailed explanation of the latest developments in the Dr. Cube/Unibouzu feud might be a waste of time.

Kind of to my surprise, the wrestling was about as good as I’d expect from semi-amateur wrestlers inside very ungainly monster suits. Which is to say I wouldn’t expect to see any of these guys in the WWE any time soon, even without the suit, but I was not completely horrified either. Dr. Cube did make one leap from the top of the cage which made me want to scream “Down with backyard wrestling!” but otherwise it was all well within my tolerance for both safety and skill.

The key, and this is what really surprised me, is that the booking was out of sight. I am not kidding, here. The good guys won every match except the comedy match leading up to the main event, then the tweener beat the heel in the main event, then the evil heel conned the tweener into another title defense and won. It worked really well, and — more surprise coming up — whoever booked this stuff knew how to book both the storyline and the matches.

“Whoa,” saith I. “They’re building to a face comeback, and now they’re giving the fans hope, and now the heel is cutting out our hearts!”

Dr. Cube and Unibouzu

Plus all the good bits like the heels getting arrogant and refusing to take the easy pins, and run-ins that didn’t last forever, and so on.

Also the announcer put his heart and soul into it while maintaining the personality you’d expect out of a guy named Louden Noxious. There were faces and there were heels and this guy spent a lot of time driving home that point. He made the show comprehensible and totally avoided the usual indie problem where people cheer for the heels and kill the drama of the match.

(He did play by play during the match. This turns out to be a really good idea, if you can pull it off. You need a good announcer.)

So by the end I was all happy and I bought a T-shirt. Also on my way out I saw a couple of guys in RoH T-shirts, indicating that I was not the only indie wrestling snob there. I will probably go again. It worked both as humor and as a wrestling show, which is the kind of dualism you need for good comedy.

Burn it all down

I now believe that Hollywood is in imminent danger of being destroyed by an angry God. It’s an unavoidable side-effect of reading the fall 2004 TV pilot roundup.

It’s nice to know that Seth MacFarlane (“Family Guy”) is working on another animated show. I did not particularly want to know that Rob Lowe is in a pilot in which he plays the in-house doctor at a Vegas casino. Nor do I have much hope for the premise “Animated show about Siegfried & Roy’s Vegas act, told through the eyes of the animals.” Or “Suburban mom uses psychic powers to solve crime.”

Probably my fault somehow for watching every episode of Mr. Sterling.

Not quite Bobo

The Great Garamond

Any MMORPG in which I can create a big bruiser wearing a green suit and a sleek black shirt, with a wrestling mask to match? That’s an MMORPG which is perfectly OK by me. I had a refreshing evening of beating up thugs and muggers, during which I looked a lot like this (click the thumbnail for the big picture):

Now, that’s what I call entertainment.