From my cold basement, I type at thee…

Greetings from my hovel on the shores of the Bow.

I’m watching some wrestling in preparation for a new project. There is a real shortage of people talking about wrestling on podcasts so I am taking matters into my own hands. More details to come probably next week.

Speaking of pummeling people, there’ a new Streets of Rage game out tomorrow. I am not really sure what, if anything, I want or expect out of a new Streets of Rage game, but the bits and pieces I’ve seen in some streams today make me at least curious to check it out. The “beat-em-up” is really a genre that has fallen by the wayside in the last… well 25 years. There have been cool things here and there, but they mostly feel like they trade mainly on nostalgia? and I’m not sure that’s enough. The beat-em-up bundle that Capcom put out a while back was pretty rad, playing Metal Warriors for the first time was a real joy and made me want a new Mech beat-em-up… I guess that’s what I want in a new beat-em-up: Giant Robots.

Currently Playing: Yuzo Kushiro – “Streets of Rage 2 Soundtrack”
Currently Reading: THE HOUSE OF MANY WAYS, Diana Wynne Jones

I’m gonna get killed in an avalanche of books/comics/manga as I keep piling them higher on this desk down here, and that’s how I’ve ALWAYS wanted to go out.

Greetings from my hovel on the shores of the Bow.

Someone talk me out of buying a Gigantor Tetsujin 28 Vinyl figure! HURRY. I like his little pointy nose and those wrist band thingies. There is also a funko pop figure, at the best of times Funko pops don’t really look great? but this one in particular is annoying me.

Like… Gigantor’s huge body and tiny head are like… that’s the whole iconic THING about Gigantor… Look at this stupid thing!

Now I want a whole shelf of cool robots from movies and animation… The guardian robots from Castle in the Sky, the NES R.O.B., Johnny 5, Gigantor, Astro Boy, Android 13…. Yeah… Robots are rad.

Currently Playing: Aesop Rock – “Music From Freedom Finger”

Currently Reading: HOUSE OF MANY WAYS, Diana Wynne Jones

Yeah, I’ve been thinkin’ about gettin’ an ottoman.

Greetings from my hovel on the shores of the Bow.

I spent some time trying to find a youtube video of a kid eating a radish because they thought it was an apple. I didn’t find it yet, but I did see a bunch of kids eating onions like apples. These kids are just going to town on these onions no matter how much it hurts their eyes or makes them cough… they are going to do okay in life. They’re gonna be ready. Good for you, kids.

For some reason searching for baby eats radish also yielded a Dragon Ball Z clip of Bulma trying to punch Goku? I like to think YouTube is just worried I might get bored after 2 or 3 baby videos and is trying to look out for me. Thanks, YouTube. Now stop giving white supremacists a platform!

Currently Playing: Phish – “Sigma Oasis”
Currently Reading: CASTLE IN THE AIR, Diana Wynne Jones

Is it considered bad parenting to lock a couple tiny anarchists who live in your house in a garden shed for a day or two? Asking for… myself an the bride.

Greetings from my hovel on the shores of the Bow.

Up to about 30 different April 2020 Manga Haul youtube videos now… this is what I’ve become. I have thousands of comics in this house I could read and I’m just watching videos of strangers opening boxes containing the same books over and over again for hours.

To be fair (tobefaaaaaaaiirrrrrrr) I have actually read some comics this week, but I’ll save that for a Read Icculus on friday.

aaaaaaaaaaand I got nothing. See you tomorrow.

Currently Playing: bvdub – “The Times the World Lied”

Currently Reading: HAYAO MIYAZAKI: MASTER OF JAPANESE ANIMATION, Helen McCarthy

Happy 420. SMOKEWEEDEVERYDEED

Greetings from my hovel on the shores of the Bow

Dana White has apparently secured a private island to host UFC fights.

It’s not that I didn’t always suspect our society would get to “Enter The Dragon/Mortal Kombat Island” or even that I thought it would take longer. I just always imagined a better class of super-villain to be behind it. We as a crumbling civilization deserve a better deranged criminal to organize fight island than Dana White.

Call me crazy, but this seems like an irresponsible thing to do. How are you supposed to maintain social distance while in a cage-fight?

I also worry we’re maybe 2 months away from some kind of Battle Royale or Running Man situation.

What we really need is BATTLE BOTS. We need that movie REAL STEEL starring noted song & dance-man Hugh Jackman. (Which I think is based on a Richard Matheson story? Did I make that up?) I want Big Robots and I want them to fight each other.

In case it wasn’t clear it’s monday morning and my brain is short-circuiting. Buckle up, it’s gonna be a week.

Currently Playing: //delay(5000); – “Dispatch from COVID-19 Occupied Tokyo, pt 3”

Currently Reading: CRYING FREEMAN: VOL. 2, Kazuo Koike & Ryoichi Ikegami

Tiny anarchists ate in my bed again. Popcorn this time.

Greetings from my hovel on the shores of the Bow

I have a lot of comics and every time I walk past the shelves I think “I really need to reorganize these shelves”. To do this I need way more shelves and to take a bunch of stuff to the dump and I should really create some kind of database to track all my stuff and, and, and…

I usually get sweaty and anxious and just go stress-eat some pizza or something at this point.

I love collecting stuff, much to the chagrin of the bride, I have multiple stupid collections. I collect old video games, books, comics, blu-rays and probably other stuff I’m forgetting. I’ve stopped collecting physical music and toys (meaning I’m not actively acquiring new items, doesn’t mean I still don’t have a metric ton of those things taking up space in my basement).

At some point I started to realize I was running out of space (and the bride was running out of patience) and I decided to try to focus a bit. I rarely buy single issue comics anymore (those physical collections are currently split between my mother and mother-in-law’s homes, it’s aroudn 20,000 comics I think) and I mostly only buy physical manga collections these days. Books I’ve all but switched to reading digitally and only buy physical books of specific authors or of big art/coffee-table type things that just don’t make sense to read digitally. Blu-Rays I’ve tried to slow down… I mostly stick to one or two boutique labels and resist the urge to be a completionist for anything.

I don’t know why I’m like this. I mean, I have SOME idea -I don’t take those prescription meds every morning for hay fever- but I’m really pretty fortunate to be married to such a patient, understanding woman… Anyway, I am gonna go count my collection of used bandages.

Currently Playing: Tuluum Shimmering – “Bird Song”

Currently Reading: THE DOGS OF RIGA, Henning Mankell

This basement was not designed with my hermit command center in mind, and so I have too many things to plug in and not enough outlets. There’s never been a better time to learn how to wire up more outlets I suppose…

Greetings from my hovel on the banks of the Bow.

I think I’m finally getting cured of whatever strange mental deficiency caused me to never bail on an anime series no matter how bored I was. I dropped 3 shows this week that I only had 3-4 episodes left in and it felt good… but also terrible and there’s a non-zero chance I’ll end up finishing them just because my brain is broken.

Granted, my standard for anime is MUCH lower than the standard I hold other forms of entertainment up to for some reason. I think it’s because I watch anime the way some people watch reality TV. I’ll watch whole multi season series of anime I barely have any interest in whereas I STILL have not finished The Wire, a show I KNOW to be brilliant. I like to have bad anime series on as a sort of background hum while I’m doing other things. At some point I realized I watch more YouTube and bad anime than I do anything else? It should maybe bother me, but I also know that I get more pleasure out of bad anime than most prestige tv. When I want entertainment to engage and challenge me I will watch a film or read a book, watching tv for me is way more passive.

I promise to finish The Wire someday though.

Currently Playing: Phish – “Sigma Oasis” (it’s gonna be this for a while)
Currently Reading: WHAT I TALK ABOUT WHEN I TALK ABOUT RUNNING, Haruki Murakami

Finished the last energy drink I had in the fridge. Gonna be a rough go for a while.

Greetings from my hovel on the shores of the Bow.

Watched night 2 of Wrestlemania 36. What a weird show.

It’s a real feast or famine situation this year at Wrestlemania. 16 total matches (18, but I didn’t watch the preshows). I gave ratings to 14 of them (2 are not really wrestling matches, they are performance art pieces so they can’t *really* be rated as wrestling matches). Of those 14 only 3 matches met or surpassed the 3 star mark for me. Of those 3 only 1 match surpassed the 4 star mark. That’s not a great ratio for Wrestlemania, especially one with this much talent. I’m going to give my star ratings for each of the matches here, so if you don’t care about pro-wrestling I would advise you to stop reading and come back tomorrow where I’ll probably talk about something else. I will think no less of you.

NIGHT 1
Women’s Tag-Team Championship
Kabuki Warriors (Kairi Sane & Asuka) (c) VS Alexa Bliss & Nikki Cross
**1/2

King Corbin VS Elias
*

RAW Women’s Championship
Becky Lynch (c) VS Shayna Baszler
**1/2

WWE Intercontinental Championship
Sami Zayn (w/ Shinsuke Nakamura & Cesaro) (c) VS Daniel Bryan (w/ Drew Gulak)
**

Triangle Ladder Match for SmackDown Tag-Team Championship
John Morrison (c) VS Jimmy Use VS Kofi Kingston
***

Kevin Owens VS Seth Rollins
***3/4

WWE Universal Championship
Goldberg (c) VS Braun Strowman
*3/4

The Boneyard
The Undertaker VS AJ Styles
(no rating, but if it had one it’d be ***** because it was the best thing WWE has done in years)

NIGHT2
NXT Women’s Championship
Rhea Ripley (c) VS Charlotte Flair
****1/2

Aleister Black VS Bobby Lashley (w/ Lana)
**

Otis Dozovic VS Dolph Ziggler (w/ Sonya Deville)
**1/4

Last Man Standing Match
Edge VS Randy Orton
ZERO stars (this was one of the worst matches I’ve ever seen)

RAW Tag-Team Championship
The Street Profits (Montez Ford & Angelo Dawkins) (c) VS Austin Theory & Angel Garza (w/ Zelina Vega)
**1/2

Fatal 5 Way Elimination Match for SmackDown Women’s Championship
Bayley (c) VS Sasha Banks VS Lacey Evans VS Tamina VS Naomi
***1/4

Firefly Fun House
Bray Wyatt VS John Cena
(again, not a match, but if you ever wanted to see John Cena in the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks? This was for you. I LOVED this.)

WWE Championship
Brock Lesnar (c) VS Drew McIntyre
*1/2

Ok. That’s it. I promise. No more wrestling talk… until I next want to talk about wrestling. See you tomorrow.

Currently Playing: Just a podcast. About wrestling. Don’t worry about it.
Currently Reading: WHAT I TALK ABOUT WHEN I TALK ABOUT RUNNING, Haruki Murakami

I don’t want to be typing this. I just want to go play Animal Crossing. It’s that kind of a day.

Greetings from my hovel on the shores of the Bow.

I watched Night 1 of Wrestlemania (not live, but they didn’t perform it live either). I’ve been a huge wrestling fan my whole life but in the past few years I’ve watched precious little WWE programming. I started watching less of it when New Japan Pro Wrestling stuff became easier to get ahold of and now that AEW is a going concern I am completely checked out of the current WWE product. I still know who everyone is and keep up with big news and whatnot, but I’m mostly ignorant of the product these days.

I’ve watched 35 Wrestlemanias and this one sounded like it was going to be WEIRD, so I had to watch.

For the most part? It’s just like I remember. Mostly really talented roster with just wretched booking and match layouts. Not having a crowd is weird, but I got used to it, sadly it REALLY impacted some of the matches (the ladder match in particular was hurt BAD by having noone to react. Ladder match selling and dramatic tension spots just looks stupid in silence). Of the “matches” on the show the only one actually worth seeing was Kevin Owens VS Seth Rollins, but even that one suffered from stupid booking and layout.

Then came the “Boneyard Match”. The Undertaker VS AJ Styles.

It’s been many years since the Undertaker had anything resembling a good match, and they knew that this year would be no exception so they did something different… and it ruled. Regardless of your interest in wrestling, I’d recommend checking out this match. It’s the natural next evolution in the “cinematic wrestling storytelling” of things like Matt & Jeff Hardy’s “Final Deletion” or the crazy shit DDT has been doing in Japan for years. Pretty Special.

Currently Playing: Nothing. Watching Wrestlemania 36 Night 2 to talk about tomorrow.
Currently Reading: NORWEIGAN WOOD, Haruki Murakami