Skummy

I bought the game on Steam a couple of days ago, and from what I can tell, if you go into the individual page for the wrestler you want to subscribe to (rather than just clicking the "subscribe" button when they appear as a list), and subscribe from there, it will prompt you to subscribe to all the extra bits you need. Much easier done accessing the Workshop through a browser than through the Steam app itself. I cannot figure out how to make mods work, or if they even do work on the latest version, at all.

The focus on legacy is, I think, twofold; firstly is the gatekeeping side of it, but it ties to how most of us experience music through our lifetime - nothing we hear now is likely to excite us the way a new band could when we were 15, and we're likely to hold on to that feeling and, if we don't acknowledge that we can easily fall into the trap of assuming that the music of that era was inherently better. Seeing that on a generational scale, gives you a pretty static view of musical history and "legacy". More than that I would say is the emergence of "serious" music journalism in the '70s; that really lead to a codifying of music history as one band influencing another, and specific scenes and movements, in a much more structured way than ever really happened. It's especially true for what lead to punk, which has become a set in stone story of X leading to Y, and held up as a more important and influential scene that it perhaps was (and to a lot of the anti-disco sentiment). The writers of the 70s often became the editors and publishers of the 80s and 90s, and so on, so their tastes continued to colour the discourse for decades.

The sonic/production side of the Beatles is something I'm really glad you picked up on; McCartney is underappreciated as someone who was really excited by the work of Stockhausen, and by the possibilities offered by tape loops, smart editing, and the growing sense of the studio as an "instrument". They're a band who started out and reached success at a time when no one knew how to mic up a live concert on anything like the scale that the Beatles were playing, and really had to write the rulebook as they went along.

Bill, Kevin and Mary Jo all popped up in the Netflix series, so if they're available I think that's pretty fair game. I hope we get TV's Frank and Dr Forester, as they felt quite conspicuously absent in the revival. Mike is the only one who I think we can totally write out as not appearing. I get the insult/snub thing to a point - I think when Joel first announced the relaunch, he hadn't spoken to a lot of the old crew about it and they felt understandably a bit put out by that. But Mike made it pretty clear afterwards that he just sees MST3K as a job he did years ago, and that he's spent more time with Rifftrax than he did there. And with Rifftrax being very much his project, I wonder if there's an element of not wanting to risk some of the growth of that brand by going back to being "the other guy from MST3K". It's reading a lot into a stage performance, but when Rifftrax did their live MST3K Reunion show, Mike seemed like the only one there who wasn't really enamoured by the idea. Kevin Murphy was fanboy-ing over having Bill and Trace on-stage together, everyone was joking around together, but Mike just seemed completely off on his own not really reacting to any of the guests apart from Frank. It really felt like something he did to get it out of the way, rather than because he's part of that group. Still, a lot's changed since the first Netflix series, and it would be nice if he could come in for even just a small cameo - I'm thinking something like Joel's appearance in Soultaker.

Joel also said that there's basically an open invitation to any MST3K alumni to appear in this series, but made it very clear that "some of them have their own movie riffing projects and might not be interested or available". My first instinct from that is that they've already directly spoken to people - they played clips of the charity shorts Joel did with J. Elvis and Bill - and that one or more of them have said no, and they just want to get ahead of that. I don't think it would be particularly wild speculation to guess that Mike Nelson won't be showing up.

Genuinely uncomfortable about them putting Lee Mack in a situation where he had to bite into an egg, though. That's not cool.

It's actually the other way around - he wrote "Hulk Hogan's Theme" for The Wrestling Album, which was then used as the intro theme to the cartoon, and then later repurposed it for the Bonnie Tyler track "Ravishing". Never ashamed to recycle old ideas, was Jim. He's someone I used to think of as a bit of a joke - there's an old joke about how one sentence never heard in musical history was "I think the melody's a bit too subtle, Mr. Steinman" - and in my more elitist hipster days, when I was really into punk and DIY stuff, I saw any sign of excess and bombast in music as all a bit wank. But as I've got older I've developed so much respect for people who are capable of going entirely over-the-top, but managing to stop at the brink of self-parody, and I love anyone who is just undeniably the best at whatever it is they do. Any artist where you can listen to them and instantly recognise it as them, and I think Steinman is one of very few producers you can say that about. In the last few weeks before I left Jersey, I would meet a couple of friends for drinks, and start out the night listening to country music and gradually the playlist would get sillier and cheesier as we got more drunk. It was pretty much guaranteed we'd end up with Steinman-era Meatloaf at least once a night, and I'll always associate him with those daft singsongs.

Same, and I think maybe Starcraft back in the day. I was okay at them. I recently tried to play Age of Empires 2 online and got slaughtered. Especially when it comes to RTS games, the way I play against AI just doesn't work against human players, and I'm not good enough to adapt accordingly. I want to get into some online gaming to keep up with old friends now that I've moved to London, but mostly I just can't get into it.

Genuine question - do you think we would be that far removed from an NFL-like situation where the owners would be prepared to effectively sell up and move to another city in this respect? If it becomes about super-teams and brands, does the geographical location of the grounds cease to matter? Or are there rules preventing that?

You have to have really fucked up for FIFA to be the voice of reason, for fuck's sake. I'm not really a football fan. A large part of that is because of what we're seeing here. I like the grassroots game - I've really enjoyed seeing Jersey get their act together and put together a really great team, even if they're nowhere near most people's radar. My dad used to play for a team that 99% of fans will never have heard of. One of my brother's mates started his own team back in 2008, and I love that. When I speak to my friends who support tiny Scottish teams, I almost feel jealous of how much of a connection to the club, to other supporters, and to their community that gave them. I grew up supporting Hull City, and ostensibly still do. For my entire childhood they were a joke, an answer to a pub quiz question - the largest city in Europe whose team had never made it to the top division. But that was part of the charm. I remember the tour of the old grounds at being full of jokes about the empty trophy cabinet. Because of all that, it really meant something when we finally made the premiership. That was a huge celebration. The idea of there being a top flight/"elite" level that the people who play for Bishop Burton FC, or Jersey Bulls, or Hull City for that matter, can never even hope in their wildest dreams to get to is ridiculous. It destroys so much of the drive behind the grassroots game if you don't have that dream to play for, no matter how preposterous that dream might appear. And, yeah, it's this sort of thing that meant I was never really won over by football in the first place. I struggle to have any emotional connection to teams who no longer have anything but the most tangential connection to the communities they're supposed to represent. The further divorced the top flight is from the grassroots, the worse off the game is as a whole. And I know I'm not a fan of any of these teams, and my opinion doesn't count for much, but this feels like the inevitable result of the way football has been going for at least 20 years, and probably longer. An awful lot of people need to accept that this hasn't just started overnight, and consider the roles that they and their clubs have had in football going in this direction, sadly.

Who's everyone got? I've never watched before this season of both US and UK, but my other half watches it with a group chat every week so I've been following it a bit. I genuinely can't see how Kandy made the final - it just seems to be that the judges enjoy her personality, but there's no way she's one of the best queens of the series. Rosé is fantastic, and I would be happy with a win there, but I'm Team Gottmik all the way. Just absolutely nailing every challenge, with some fantastic looks, and a great presence and energy to everything she does.

It was so good. The combination of Lee Mack becoming increasingly competitive as the series goes on, and Mike Wozniak's mad crab movements was superb. The "organise objects with your face" task was almost too much for me, I found it genuinely hard to watch. Thankfully Mike made up for it by smelling some brie and saying, "if it's wedge time, that's three sides". His repeated use of "it's X time" is wonderful, as is Greg finding him obviously delightful all the time. I had said early on that Mike was going to win, but I'll settle for him losing spectacularly. My girlfriend straight away asked why the others weren't wrapping up each leg individually. It never would have occurred to me to do that.

Horizon Zero Dawn is one of my favourite games of its generation, I absolutely adore it. It was the first game I played on the PS4 that felt like something I was really getting my teeth into and justified the purchase, and made me feel like exploring a really interesting and dynamic world. I wouldn't say I got open world burn-out, but it did have the problem of the open world aspects sometimes meaning that I was losing track of the story, and that it didn't seem to progress as naturally as it might have done had I just focused on the main game. That said, it probably managed that divide better than most, if not all, open world games I've played. Because so much of it was based around a bit of a personal discovery quest, it never had the Red Dead Redemption 2 thing of "we need to go and rescue a kidnapped child, but first let's take in a vaudeville show and go fishing".

It sounds to me like the new episodes will basically be "as live", similar to Rifftrax Live or the old Cinematic Titanic stuff. It's not necessarily what I want from my MST3k, but could be a nice middle ground between the touring show (which is likely where the real money is) and a full-blown new series, and obviously allows them a far greater degree of creative control than Netflix or another platform would allow them. I like Jonah, and think the Netflix series was by and large pretty great, so would gladly take as much as I can get - I like Rifftrax, but their writing and running jokes can be really overdone compared to Joel-helmed MST3K, which feels a lot more free and spontaneous, so Rifftrax doesn't always scratch the right itches. If they're going to be effectively self-reliant, and not getting the advertising or curiosity seekers that come from being on Netflix, I imagine they will lean a little heavier on the nostalgia angle even though Joel was really against that being the main selling point of the Netflix series. I know Mike wanted nothing to do with the Netflix series, but obviously J. Elvis, Kevin, Bill, and Mary Jo all popped up in the Netflix series, and it definitely seemed like they were open for The Mads appearing; I don't know about Trace, but I follow Frank on a lot of social media and he seems like he'd more than open to it. I think it's more likely we get a return of The Mads than of Patton Oswalt, really. Around the time of the Netflix relaunch, Rifftrax did an MST3K reunion, which showed that at least the various cast members are on good enough terms to share a stage together, so I wouldn't rule anything out, necessarily. It looks nailed on that they will meet their goal, and it will just come down to what stretch goals they meet, and if they will be producing enough (and good enough) content to remain sustainable beyond that.

I never watched Friday Night Dinner, but he was absolutely incredible in Chernobyl. 54 is no age.

I sunk well over a hundred hours into Xenoblade Chronicles on the Wii. It had the problem a lot of open world games did where it feels like it just throws a hundred plot twists at you all at once out of nowhere, and it's really hard to keep up, but actually it's your own fault because you spent the last thirty hours doing fetch quests and seeking out obscure collectables and forgot what the finer points of the story were. I'm sure it would all flow really well if you just followed the narrative instead!

I have a Puerto Rican friend, through wrestling, who grew up in a family that pretty much only knew Puerto Rican music and hip-hop, and it wasn't until he was a teenager that he started discovering other music, and getting into punk and hard rock. His partner told me a story about he had been really blown away that he had been in a car journey somewhere in Europe, and the other wrestlers there played "Turn The Page" by Bob Seger, and he was amazed that they knew it because he thought it was just some obscure track that another friend had always played when they were driving. His partner just told him, "honey, that's just white people music". I definitely think about this a lot, though - we're seeing it in WWE now, with so much of their fanbase complaining about Bad Bunny being there because they've never heard of them, and if they've never heard of them then he must be a nobody, even though he's a huge star by absolutely any metric, he just doesn't cross their radar. Similarly, if you find yourself deeply involved in one scene and then move outside of it to another, it's easy to find yourself thrown off by how many things you thought were common knowledge, or easy cultural touchstones, don't translate.

Apparently I hit 59 books last year - that sort of thing is always skewed, as it includes graphic novels that I probably went through in one sitting, and my shortest book was Orwell's "Fascism And Democracy", which is a 36 page pamphlet. Looking over the list, it was a good selection, though a bit heavily weighted toward wrestling books as I did a lot of research for my own writing toward the end of the year. I'm not sure how much effect lockdown had on my reading - on one hand, I had a lot more dead time, but on the other, I used to read on my lunch break, or I'd sit in a coffee shop over the weekend and catch up on reading, which didn't happen at all for large chunks of last year. This year, I haven't set a target, but I am reading a lot more than in my downtime than I thought I would be. I've somehow ended up with a lot of books to read this year that are all ridiculously long - I recently finished Volume One of Simon Callow's Orson Welles biography, which was more than 600 pages and only got as far as Citizen Kane, and I have the next two volumes of similar length still to read. I have a history of American theatre that's 700+ pages, and just started on The Terror by Dan Simmons after watching the TV series, and that's 900+.

two episodes in and I think Mike Wozniak might already be my all-time favourite contestant.

Mike Wozniak is going to be an absolute stand-out this series.

I think Galaxy 2 is probably the greatest 3D platformer ever made, just an absolute masterpiece of level design married perfectly with controls and gameplay mechanics. Everything that Mario titles are great for, but just done to perfection. My simple test of if a game is well made or not is if, when you're doing badly, you blame yourself or the game. If you're blaming the game - the camera's in the wrong place, the controls are too clunky or unresponsive, the level design is unclear, or there's something just cheap like an enemy you don't see until the last second - it's poorly made, but if every time you fuck up you know that it's on you, you know what you should be doing to achieve, and you're happy to keep going until you manage it rather than getting frustrated, then it's well made. Galaxy and Galaxy 2 nail that probably better than anything I've ever played.