I hope that Randy Orton teaming up with Sting ends with Orton turning on Sting and revealing that he's been with the Authority all along. Every storyline should end with someone betraying Sting.

How's Bo Dallas these days? There's been a giant Bo-sized hole in my heart this past year while he's been absent.

Yeah, I've beaten the Mask with normal tears and no bombs before, but holy fuck was it ever tedious. Just lots of dodging and shooting at its back in the split-second before it turns around, and still I'd barely ever get a hit in.

Definitely the Mask of Infamy for me. The addition of the health bar makes him way more tolerable in Rebirth, but fights with him are still incredibly tedious if you don't have some sort of absurd offensive power. The Bloat fight is hard, but it's also fun and engaging, so I don't have a problem with him.

Plus with the high chance of dropping the Virus, Lust is the enemy that most literally turns you into what you fight.

The announcers pondered that question pretty often, but I assume that he needed the controller to be able to wrestle. Can't play a game without your controller attached.

Yeah, that's a good point. Here I was mostly just thinking of there being different regionally specific sets of plants on every different street corner. They could probably make that happen on a tv budget.

Might be harder to capture the idea of a perfectly ambiguous American city when the outdoor scenes all have to be filmed somewhere. It would be kind of funny if they'd thrown in a bunch of contradictory indicators of location to confuse the matter as much as possible though.

Create-A-Wrestler and Player Uno are both actual gimmicks that have been used at Chikara. It worked mostly because Chikara is great.

He was probably referencing the fact that members of the Anoaʻi family tended to get "Wild Samoan" gimmicks until just recently. Seems like they'd want to avoid talking about WWF racism instead of solidifying it as canon though.

It may have been terrible, but this cover is pretty delightful in its peak-Liefeldness. DEATHBLOOD! SHOTDEATH! BLOODBLOOD!

These people want you to quit, just like CM Punk did.

Dang, a podcast episode that analyzes similar themes present in the Montreal Screwjob and Don Quixote sounds tailor-made to my interests to an absurd degree.

The main appeal to me is the character relationships. I really like the way Empowered, Thugboy, and Ninjette all support and rely on each other in different ways, and there's a lot of other nice character work.

I read and reread a bunch of Empowered. I've now read up to volume 4, since I like to be perpetually behind on everything. It's pretty great stuff. Fun writing, great facial expressions, and the porny elements aren't too offputting. I'm fairly sure it's on the verge of getting way darker, and I don't know how I'll…

Are you planning to continue with X-Men volume 1? It's fairly interesting seeing things for the first time in the first dozen issues or so, but I found it to get really inessential really fast.

They're very different from the Black Mirror, and a lot of people seem to strongly dislike them. His Batman run has been a lot more superhero-y, and with a large variety of tones. I personally love Zero Year but am not as big a fan of his other arcs.

As long as people are recommending BrubakerCap, I think I should point out that they made a magazine-like release of the first seven issues of the run for $5, which is a pretty cheap way to try it out. You might be able to find it among the magazines at your friendly local Wal-Mart or whatever.

I always name my first save file Bagna, and then attach numbers to the end for subsequent saves. If I feel the need to restart the game at a lower difficulty, then I'll name my new save file Wuss, and then start numbering that one.

The world is clamoring for a Contract J.A.C.K. 2.