Just a quick note saying Happy Easter to all you who celebrate the holiday! Happy Holiday that Corresponds with Your Religion if you’re not Christian. And Happy Candy Day if, like me, you’re not particularly religious at all.
In the early-to-mid 90s, I was a big professional wrestling fan, specifically of WWE, then known as the WWF (And before we go any further, yes, I know professional wrestling is “fake” in the sense that everything is predetermined. Do I come up to you and go “DUR HURR YOU KNOW IT’S ALL FAKE, RIGHT??” when you and your family/co-workers/whatever are discussing Lost, or Kyle XY, or your favorite scripted show? No, I do not. Then please don’t do the same to me and my pro wrestling fan brethren. Thanks.). I’ve gone in and out of wrestling fandom since then, mostly due to college friends that were huge fans, but regardless, I tend to lurk and occasionally post on the WrestleCrap forums.
My inspiration for this particular blog post actually comes from two sources. The first was a topic on the Wrestlecrap forums titled “Accidental Pushes” (In wrestling parlance, to “push” someone is to throw your resources behind them, give them lots of screen time, the quality spots at shows like the closing match, make them your champion, etc. etc. etc.), and the link goes directly to my post in said topic. If what I’m saying there looks like it may as well be in Russian to you, I’ll translate: “This could be more accurately phrased as ‘Steve Austin gets really lucky that Jake Roberts happens to be playing the character of a Born-Again Christian at King of the Ring ‘96′…” and the rest is pretty much the same.
The second inspiration was the AIM away message of a friend from college, basically lamenting the predictability of wrestling nowadays, and missing the Monday Night Wars (Wikipedia was the only thing I could find that accurately summarized it. *Muttermuttermutter*) where WWE (I’ll be calling the company “WWE” from here on out, even though they were actually “WWF” during the timeframe in question) was forced to be on top of their game due to the competition.
Here’s the thing, though. The Monday Night Wars really weren’t as epic as people remember. Indeed, outside of the brief shining moment for a year or two when WCW was top on the world, that company’s entire existence was plagued by incompetence. The Monday Night Wars officially ended in 2001 when WWE bought WCW, but I would argue that I knew WCW was finished as early as 1999, watching the Hulk Hogan/Ric Flair First Blood match where, as multiple people have said before me, “They started bleeding and it didn’t count.” Even then, I got the impression that WCW was a complete mess and was barely trying at that point.
Let’s go back to 1996 and to the title of this post. At the WWE’s King of the Ring 1996, Jake Roberts, playing the character of a Born-Again Christian (Which may or may not have intersected with Roberts’s real life at that point), makes a run to the finals of the KotR tournament, where he is unfortunately vanquished by Steve Austin. During his coronation ceremony, Austin breaks from whatever script he may have had (Most promos or whatnot don’t have exact scripts so much as a list of points the participants have to hit. How they hit those points is up to them. This is an excellent example of what happens when that exercise goes badly; it’s also where my current name on the Wrestlecrap forums is derived from) and ad-libs a line that goes approximately “You can sit here and you can talk about your John 3:16…Austin 3:16 says ‘I Just whipped your ass!’”
From there, the rest is history. Austin goes on to become WWE’s biggest star for a time, they sell millions of dollars worth of merchandise with “Austin 3:16″ on it, and one could argue that the Monday Night Wars are over before they ever really began. And it was all because Austin was lucky enough to have Jake Roberts for an opponent. Without Roberts, Austin never ad-libs “Austin 3:16″, and wrestling history may well play out completely differently.
Waiting in line at the grocery store yesterday, I heard a song on the store radio. The drumbeat sounded familiar, but I thought it was a little quick to be what I thought it was. It wasn’t until I heard the line “A full commitment’s what I’m thinking of” that my initial suspicion was confirmed.
Yep. I had been Rickroll’d. Offline.
Incidentally, my dad called while the song was playing. It’s a good thing he did, because I would’ve had a fun time trying to explain the huge grin on my face to the clerk had he not called (I was off the phone by the time my turn at the counter came).
Also, the Rickroll may be my favorite Internet prank of all time. Being a victim isn’t likely to get you fired as being redirected to some shock site at work would be, and it isn’t going to suddenly scream at you and potentially give you a heart attack like some other sites. All the Rickroll does is put a catchy song from the late 80s in your head, and we could all use more of those, right?
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to try and replicate Rick Astley’s sweet dance moves.
-EE
Way to choke on your own overconfidence, and way to forget the history that put you where you are in the first place(1). Enjoy your offseason, knowing that your 18 victories were for absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things.
Much Love,
-Emptyeye
(1)- Pretty much no one (Outside of the Patriots) expected the Pats to win their first Super Bowl victory in Super Bowl 36 against the Rams. Likewise, just about everyone, forgetting this fact, all but crowned them Undefeated Super Bowl Champions before Super Bowl 42 was ever played. Dennis Green would’ve been proud.
You’ll all be delighted to know that “incompetency” is a word. Yes, this is important, for reasons that will become apparent as I start uploading my Ys I & II Let’s Play.
Speaking of Let’s Plays, watching Cornshaq’s playthrough of the NES game Rambo convinced me that this game may be the worst application of a license in video game history. I mean, you’ve got the Rambo license. You know, Sly Stallone, hugely musclebound Vietnam Vet, bow and exploding arrows? Apparently someone decided that a game playing much like Zelda II’s overhead sections, and set in Vietnam, would be the perfect use of the license.
Full disclosure: When I was little, I liked this game a lot. The music especially stood out to me; there aren’t a whole lot of tracks, but what’s there is great, and would suit itself pretty well to a rockout-fest Minibosses style. Re-watching the game as an adult, I still think the game would hold up pretty well as one of the better licensed games of its era (Admittedly not a difficult feat), and removing the Rambo license altogether would leave you with a solid adventure/exploration game that could hold up on its own merits.
But c’mon. Someone decided RAMBO would make a good Zelda II clone? All right…
This is why I’m not a game company executive, I guess.
Just an observation I made awhile back. You probably know “O Fortuna”, you just don’t know it by that title. It’s this piece of music, which is currently being used in several commercials. But seriously, anything set to “O Fortuna” just automatically becomes awesome. Gotta make a copy of something at work? Set it to “O Fortuna” and you’ve just turned an everyday workplace occurence into the most mind-bendingly epic event of the year!
It also occurred to me that, if not for the beginning, “O Fortuna” could serve as the pre-Internet (By about 100 years) prototype for those “Screamer” sites that were big a few years back (You know, “Look at this picture and find what’s wrong with it with your volume all the way up…AAAAAAAAAH!! [With a scary picture flashing for good measure]“). You get the big “O fortuna” beginning, then the whole thing gets really quiet for about a minute and fifteen seconds before….*WHAM!!* everyone jumps up the octave and it gets super loud and epic (It’s generally only this last part that’s used in pop culture, by the way).
-EE
“Democracy was such a bad idea.”
Context behind the cut.
(Continue reading…)
Less than two days until I’ll be at M6. Hooray!
Merry Christmas! Or a belated Happy Hanukkah. Or Happy Kwanzaa. Or Happy Solstice. Did I miss any holidays in December?
Anyway, whatever holiday you celebrate, hopefully it goes well for you.
This was something that I got to wondering about going over my MySpace page and looking over my friends list. I’ve talked elsewhere about the fact that it seems like everyone I knew in high school in college is moving out/getting married/etc. and I’m…well, not, at the moment. That’s fine, as I honestly think the path I picked for myself, while making me a “loser” in American society in the short term, will work out far better for me in the long term, and those close to me seem to agree. That’s not really my point. My point is that, as mentioned, a lot of my friends are getting married. And as a result of this, a lot of my female friends have changed their last name to that of their husband’s. Okay. But from looking at their display names, it seems many of them are downright enthusiastic about this specific aspect of marriage.
Huh?
Now, maybe it’s because I was born with, and last I knew, still had *Checks…yep, still do*, the male genitalia and the balance of hormones that come with it, and so I can never know why this is. I do understand that there is this pressure on females in general to run off as it were and get married–my girlfriend once told me that this desire was drilled into her from the age of approximately 4–perhaps deriving from a history where traditionally, the only way for a female to be able to survive once she became an adult was essentially to get married and have her husband care for her, so to speak. And indeed, from a functional perspective I understand to a degree why someone’s last name has to go upon marriage–otherwise, your child’s full name will be something like “Firstname DadLastName-MomLastName”, their child’s name would be “FirstName LastNameOne-LastNameTwo-LastNameThree-LastNameFour”, and after that…well, it’s a huge mess.
But to me–and again, my views on this may be influenced by the fact that I’m male and so don’t really have to deal with losing my last name upon marriage–your name is really a part of your identity. Is part of the legacy of the pressure to marry a pressure to give up part of your identity…and worse, to present this as though it’s a good thing?
Any female readers (Or male, for that matter) out there, please comment on this, as I’m clearly missing something.
-EE