GLOW Official Trailer

If you had told me last year that in June 2017 I would be hotly anticipating a new GLOW TV show AND a Baywatch Movie I'd have been very incredulous for about 5 seconds, thought about it, and then said "you know, that sounds about right".

The only big problem with this is that it's on Netflix and right now Netflix is on super-ultra low priority at casa de Newburn. I'm about 5 episodes behind on Bob's Burgers, The Goldbergs, Fresh of the Boat, etc. Not to mention I haven't even started Luke Cage or Iron Fist. There's a VERY VERY slim chance I get to GLOW before Fall when the new season of everything starts. My only chance is if all the WWE stars start tweeting or Instagraming about it and my wife really wants to check it out. So, hopefully that happens.

That's not The Miz, That's Mike Mizanin

I'm a bit late in posting this but... oh well? Last Tuesday on the WWE network show Talking Smack former WWE champion Daniel Bryan called the Miz a coward, to his face, and we got to see what happens when the Miz decides to stop being polite and start being real. Seriously I haven't see The Miz this worked up since Real World vs Road Rules when someone did something to someone, probably while drunk, it was probably Coral.

The internet pretty much lost it's shit over this promo, saying it was a complete shoot (inside term for when wrestlers go off script and say what they really mean). I'm sure it wasn't a shoot, The Miz would probably get fired if it was, but at the same time I'm pretty sure the Miz is venting some very real frustration. Hopefully he get more opportunities like this, he could and should be one of the biggest heels on Smackdown. Also he was pretty great in Santa's Little Helper. Hopefully that movie gets a sequel.

Ruin The Links

Did Millennials Ruin the Olympics? I know it's hard for older people (like the kind of people that run TV networks) to wrap their mind grapes around this but younger people just don't sit down in front of the TV as much as previous generations did. It's not a matter of getting them to tune in, it's a matter of taking the content to where they are. I mean, I'm too old to know where they are but I know they're out there. Snapchat maybe?

Former NBC Analyst Dwight Stone Calls It's Track & Field Coverage a Disgrace. Former employee calls out old boss is hardly a surprise, but I love that Pole Vault seems to be right at the forefront of the track and field discussion. Pole Vault hasn't been this relevant since Sergei Bubka was breaking the world record every 2 weeks.

The Four Women Saving Wrestling. First off, that's a fantastic illustration, top notch work by GQ. Secondly, this is a great article about the current state of women's wrestling in WWE. It sucks that it's taken so long but we're finally at the fireworks factory. Bayley's debut to the main roster on RAW last night was probably the highlight of the show and definitely got the biggest reaction from the crowd. I know this might sound crazy but when you give the audience a reason to care about something, as opposed to relegating it to pee breaks between the "important matches" people will actually care about it. Crazy huh?

13 New Marvel Cosplay Variants. In theory I really like these Variant covers, but in execution many of them don't have very interesting backgrounds or dynamic poses. The photos and costumes look a little amateurish. Maybe it's the trade dress? I don't know what it is exactly, I just know that as much as I like cosplay I'm not shelling out 9.99 for any of these.

WWE 2K17??????????????

First off, as much as I would like to buy the NXT special edition of WWE 2K17, I'm prety sure it's going to cost like $400 and you'll need a wheelbarrow to carry everything it comes with, so that's off the table completely. The question is whether or not I'm interested in picking up the game at all. I mean of course I'm interested, but am I interested enough...

My wife bought me WWE 2K15 a couple Christmases ago and it's a nice little game. Nothing really special to write home about, like any wrestling game that isn't on the N64 the controls are a bit clunky and the "story" mode isn't very good. Still, its fun to pop it in every now and then, beat up my son for a couple minutes (his favorite is Kane).

From most of the accounts I've read on twitter 2K16 wasn't very good, especially not on PC. Maybe this year it will be better, long time WWE video game publisher THQ went bankrupt last year and 2K Games took the titel over. I don't know if that means anything, maybe some fresh eyes will make for a better game? I don't know, it's Friday and I don't have much anything else to post.

Ricochet Vs. Will Ospreay, Best of the Super Juniors

New Japan Pro Wrestling is in the middle of something they call the Best of The Super Juniors Tournament. It's basically just a tournament for the lighter-high flyers of NJPW. This match between Ricochet (ie Lucha Underground's Prince Puma) and Will Ospreay set the internet ablaze. A few fans and pro-wrestlers were critical of the style, saying it undermines the believability of the sport but most praised it for the amazing display of athleticism. If you have a few minutes to spare check it out. They're definitely pulling off some video game level ish.

Daniel Bryan Says Goodbye

Here's Daniel Bryan's retirement speech from RAW last night, kind of. His speech was something like 20 minutes long and the WWE in their infinite wisdom has edited it down to 6 minutes. I'm sure some dutiful wrestling fan will upload the whole thing somewhere but I don't really feel like searching for it.

I'll freely admit I cried. I know it's a silly thing to cry about, a man who pretends to fight in his underwear for a living retiring. Daniel Bryan isn't dead or anything. He's living the dream, retiring early to raise a family with his hot wife, piles of cash and composting toilet. We should all be so lucky.

It's blog posts like this where I wish I was better with words.

Daniel Bryan wasn't anyone I knew personally but it felt like I did. I guess that's the beauty of entertainment, on occasion you're presented with something unreal that you connect to in a very real manner. There's a cognitive dissonance at work. It's the crux behind the meme "It's still real to me dammit". Ok, I think I'm starting to lose my point. I guess the point is that I don't think we should be ashamed to admit we've been emotionally touched by art and entertainment. I mean, that's sort of the point of it all, isn't it?

Daniel Bryan was a fantastic wrestler, he was one of the best in the world and by all accounts was a pretty good dude. Every time he wrestled it brought a smile to my face. Everyone in the DevilDinosaur household wishes him the best in his future endeavors.

The Greatest Professional Video Gamer Entrance?

Professional video game player Kenneth Bradley really upped the ante on Marvel vs Capcom tournament entrances. I guess. I mean I have no idea what the other entrances are like but I think it's safe to assume they don't include chugging steve-wisers and stone cold stunnering randos from the crowd.

Practice? Links

Allen Iverson Has Destroyed The Legacy Of Allen Iverson. Sooooo Allen Iverson is kind of a loser. That's sad I guess. I mean I never met him or anything so it's not like I really care if he was a good guy or not. I will say he's one of the most freakish athletes I've ever seen in person. He must have weighed 100 pounds and there he was driving the lane, scoring and rebounding over huge guys. He was a lot of fun to watch.

Copy of original Star Wars script discovered in UNB library. Guess what? Han Shot first. That is all.

The 10 Most Unwatchable Films Featured on MST3K. This list is a good reminder that I haven't watched enough MST3K. When it was at it's most popular I didn't have cable and by the time I finally did it was already winding down on comedy central. Are these on Netflix yet? I feel like they should be on Netflix.

WWE Money in the Bank: A Step-ladder? We delve in to find the truth about the real ladder. In honor of the Money in the Bank PPV this weekend (only $9.99 on the WWE Network) one blogger has finally answered the question all pro wrestling fans have had at one time or another. Where do they get those ladders?

Austin 3:16 says you don't graduate

You've probably seen that viral video of the two High Schoolers that decided a fun way to celebrate graduating would be for one of them to give the other a stone cold stunner... during the graduation ceremony. Well, and this will really shock you, as it turns out the school didn't think it was very funny. They're threatening to take the kids diplomas away. I assume if they do one of them is going to drive a milk truck right up to the principals office and hose him down with 1,000 gallons of 2%.

Wrestling Isn't Wrestling

This fan film by Max Landis (yes the son of John Landis and the screenwriter of Chronicle) on Professional Wrestling and Triple H is amazing. I know, I know it's 20 minutes long but I enjoyed the hell out of everyone of those 20 minutes. Professional wrestling is equal parts ridiculous and awesome and he really captures both. It's a must watch.

How to La Parka

Found out today that one of my credit cards got HACKED. Luckily they didn't run up to many charges but my card did get declined at my son's preschool. That's not embarrassing at all.

As such I needed something to cheer myself up and who better to do that than the original chairman La Parka? Step one, Dance!

Refined Links

WWE Diva AJ Lee Publicly Calls Out Stephanie McMahon Over Women's Wages and Air Time. This is kind of hilarious. Basically Stephanie McMahon (daughter of Vince, on the board of Directors for the WWE and underrated in ring performer) tweeted some bland congratulations on Patricia Arquette's Oscar acceptance speak using the hashtags #womensrights and #useyourvoice. She of course tweeted that on the same evening the only WWE Divas match on Raw as an embarrassingly short 30 seconds. AJ Lee (WWE Diva, wife of CM Punk disgruntled ex-WWE employee) responded by blasting the WWE on twitter over how they treat their female talent.

Whoops.

Homeworld Remastered impressions: A refined masterpiece. Homeworld! You remember homeworld, right? Right? Ok, so Homeworld wasn't a huge hit but it is remembered fondly, fond enough that it's getting an HD remake. I'm pretty excited for this one.

Surprise: Almost Everything About Pimp My Ride Was Hilarious Bullshit. This is pretty fantastic. It's hardly surprising but it's still pretty fantastic. I like the part about how MTV put it into the contract that you couldn't list your car on Ebay right away.

Comic Book Writers Matt Fraction & Kelly Sue DeConnick Sign Deal With Universal TV. Woot Woot! These are two of my favorite comics book writers right now, I'm excited to see what they'll bring to TV.

Retro Light Guns Throughout History. Cool little stroll down memory lane. I'm surprised light guns aren't a thing anymore. Shooting games are some of the more popular games at the 7 arcades that still exist in the country. Why hasn't anyone tried to bring that experience home lately?

A Trios of Reviews

WWE Network
For my birthday my wife got me a six month subscription to the WWE network. Now when the WWE network first launched a lot of people lauded it as the future of "television". I use quotes there because the WWE Network like any modern app works on Kindles, iPads, computers, etc. I still don't think that's the case. The WWE is unique in that it completely owns all of its content and is in a situation where it's old product is still highly desirable. Wrestling fans will gladly pay 9.99 a month to watch Bret Hart vs Stone Cold Steve Austin from 1997 but how many NFL fans are willing to pay a monthly subscription to watch the Bills choke away a Superbowl to (insert team name here). Anyway not the point.

The WWE Network is a lot of fun, for a long time wrestling fan like myself it's easy to just spend hours watching it. You get current Pay Per View events live as the happen, every old WWE, ECW and WCW PPV on demand, some original shows that vary wildly in quality and some random WCCW and Clash of Champions shows from the 70s, 80s and 90s.

It's not a flawless app. It froze on me a couple times during last weekend's big Money in the Bank PPV and the search feature is TERRRRIBLE. For example, I searched for Raven (one of my favorite wrestlers from the 90s) and it returned about 5 results, about 100 too few.

TL/DR, for a wrestling fan the WWE Network is well worth $9.99. There are bugs they need to iron out but as a whole the network delivers on it's promises. Solid B+

My wife is awesome, she gets an A.

Heroes of Cosplay: Season 2
Last year I reviewed Heroes of Cosplay, looking back on the review I was probably a bit too kind. I felt like the shows repetitive format mixed with some really fake drama took away from what the show was supposed to be about. Fast Forward to Season 2, which had its season finale last night, and a few of my complaints with the show have been addressed, while others have been exacerbated.

Most of the stupid fake interpersonal drama has been ditched, which is great. The problem is without the drama every episode follows the exact same format. What to wear? I'm running out of time! Oh man I didn't win the contest.. or WOOHOO I won the contest!

That's literally every episode. I mean I still watched and for the most part I enjoyed the costumes but it would be nice if the producers could figure out a way to avoid every episode ending with a contest. From what I've learned of the Cosplay community having a picture go viral or hit the front page of reddit is every bit as important as winning a costume contest. Heroes of Cosplay gets a metacritic score of 72/100

The 2014 USMNT World Cup Performance
So the World Cup is over now right?

The US Men's National Soccer team showed once again that they can compete on the highest level but they also showed just how far they have left to go before we can even dream of actually winning the cup. All we need to improve is our defense our midfield and our forwards. We're pretty set at goalie.

It's hard to complain about the results, getting out of the group of death was really amazing but if you look at the Nat's record over the last two World Cups we've only won 2 out of 8 games. That's not very good. The inability to posses the ball with purpose really kills the team at this level. Turns out Michael Bradley isn't the world class midfielder a lot of us thought he was. The striker pool is as thin as we were afraid it was. It's telling that when Jozy went down with injury we started Dempsey out of position for the next 3 games as opposed to replacing him with one of the other 3 forwards on the squad. The defense is still full of potential but young guys like Besler, Cameron and Gonzalez are still trying to find out a way to actually play together and form anything that resembles a competent back line.

But hey, the games were entertaining and a lot of people watched. That's the most important thing for US Soccer going forward. More people interested in the sport equals more money which will in time provide us better players (knock on wood). I rate the USMNT 2014 World Cup Performance as plucky.

Flip the Script

Well we're about 2 hours from the US/Belgium kick off, are you pumped yet? If not here's a video that might do the trick. Still not pumped? Try this:

Nothing? Way to let the terrorist win.

Links, for Science!

All of Art & Science Has Culminated in Kate Upton's Zero-G Bikini Shoot. This is not click bait at all, this is your yearly reminder that magazines (specifically sports illustrated) still exist. I don't know about you but can you imagine waiting a week to receive all your sports news? A WEEK! In 2014 terms a week is forever. Ever issue might as well read as a best of the previous year. Even the swimsuit issue makes zero sense to me. Almost every picture has already popped up on imgur (more on that later this week), why would anyone actually pay to look at what's so free on the internet? Are these marketed exclusively to children that can't figure out a way to get around their parents porn blockers? That can't be that big of a market. 10-15 kids tops?

We’ve Witnessed The Greatest Pro Wrestling Entrance Ever. It Involves Giant Swords And A Velociraptor. Kazuchika Okada of New Japan Pro wrestling destroys the best Pro Wrestling entrance with the inclusion of an animatronic dinosaur. At least I assume it was an animatronic dinosaur. I guess it could have been a real one. Japan has those crazy square watermelons. As far as I can tell breeding Dinosaurs is pretty much the next step after square watermelons.

BTW, the picture above isn't from said entrance. It's just from some press conference. So animatronic velociraptor press conference is also a thing in Japan.

Horse: The Jalopnik Review. You know what's sort of ironic about horses? Most have more than one horsepower. Sure by definition a single horse should have a single horsepower but since horsepower has become a scientific measurement of power most horses have more than one. And that folks is why I'm awesome at trivial pursuit.

Nerf Zombie Strike Toy Weapons Are the Best Defense Against the Imaginary Undead Uprising. I'm a bit torn on Nerf guns. On one hand I feel like I don't really want my son playing with guns. It kind of sends the wrong message about gun safety. On the other hand kids pick up a stick and they turn it into a gun so why try and stop the tide? Maybe when he's 11 or 12 we'll take a couple gun safety courses together so that we can go hog wild on nerf guns.

Lets talk about the WWE Network

Last week at CES the WWE announced a new streaming service that many have heralded as the future of television. Go ahead and click the link if you want all the details, if not allow me to summarize. For $9.99 a month you'll have access to a large portion of the WWE's catalog; Pay Per Views, DVD compilations old episodes of RAW and Nitro. All available on your tablet, PC, Roku, Xbox Live, etc. Essentially it's the Netflix of wrestling. Here's the kicker though, you also get live Pay Per Views such as Wrestlemania, the Royal Rumble and Summerslam.

Now I don't know when the last time you ordered a wrestling or even a UFC pay per view but they start at $50 and can run $70 easy. If you're a wrestling fan who orders just one PPV a year, you're a sucker not to sign up for the WWE Network. For the price of Wrestlemania alone you get 6 months of programming along with 5 other PPV events.

Ok, enough of the wrestling geekery. Here's what has net-nerds excited. The thought that other networks will follow suit. The holy grail of a la carte networks of course being HBO.. or ESPN I guess, if you're into Sportsball. Kids these days don't want to sit down in front of their TV and watch what's on. They're greedy little snots that want to watch what they want when they want and they only want to pay for what they watch. Which I guess is reasonable. The problem is that most channels (like ESPN) aren't built like the WWE.

The WWE owns everything it produces. Sure USA and SyFy and ION put their programing on the air but they don't actually own the shows. In contrast save for old episodes of PTI, ESPN owns nothing. In fact a lot of networks are in the same boat. There are a handful of shows they actually own and then everything else is owned by the production companies that produce the shows. For example If NBC tried the same thing using content they owned 100% they would have rerun after rerun of The Single Guy and ZERO episodes of Seinfeld.

Long story short, I'm not sure how much the WWE network really heralds a new era of a la carte programing as much as it heralds in a new era for the WWE. Quite honestly I'm not looking forward to a future where I have to pay a dozen different subscriptions for the same content you can get with cable for one price but I guess that makes me an old fuddy duddy.

Professional Wrestling Promo of the Week: CM Punk Pipebomb

I've decided that every Friday I'm going to post a little thing I like to call the Professional Wrestling Promo of the Week.

I just watched the CM Punk best in the world DVD so this CM Punk pipebomb (ie worked shoot) from 2011 is fresh in my mind. Man what a promo this was. You know something in wrestling worked when all the mainstream media pick up on it the next day. It's laughable to think that Punk didn't have the ok from the WWE to vent his frustrations like this but it's fun when wrestling storylines and reality sort of blur together.

The Triumph of Links

Half an operating system: The triumph and tragedy of OS/2. Good gravy, find yourself a few minutes and go read ArsTechnica's epic tale of IBM, Microsfot and the OS/2 operating system. It really is amazing how Bill Gates and Big Redmond made all the right moves back in the 80s and early 90s. Think about it this way, Microsoft pants IBM so hard they gave up on the personal computer market in 2004. Gave up... the guys that practically invented it. That would be like Apple deciding that smart phones weren't really their bag anymore.

Great read, can't recommend it enough.

Background Actors Who Have No Idea What They Are Doing. I've been watching this gif all morning like it was the Zapruder film. Why is that guy throwing his dog? WHY!!!????

The Greatest Doink the Clown Story Ever Told. I want this to be true so bad. It probably isn't but can't we just pretend? What harm would there be?

Cops Called Over Cosplayer’s Underboob. I'd like to think that when the cops took this call it played out very much like the episode of Seinfeld where Elaine complained that Monk's was only hiring women with big breasts. Like every cop in the city showed up to help file the report. The entire CSI unit showed to take measurements and pictures.. the whole 9 yards.

Professional Wrestling Promo of the Week: Scott Steiner and Size Matters

I've decided that every Friday I'm going to post a little thing I like to call the Professional Wrestling Promo of the Week.

Scott Steiner is probably insane. He's the best worst promo guy ever. By that I mean his promos are always so bad they become awesome. This one from the dying days of TNA where goes on and on about how "big" he is, is an instant classic.

Professional Wrestling Promo Of the Week: Macho Man Randy Savage and the Cream of the Crop

I've decided that every Friday I'm going to post a little thing I like to call the Professional Wrestling Promo of the Week.

It's almost unfair to all the other professional wrestlers both past and present to start with Randy Savage but who cares? They're not Randy Savage, so screw those guys. "Cream of the crop" is the quintessential Macho Man promo and one of my favorite ever. It's completely insane. He's like a loaded high tension spring just waiting to explode. Near the end just when you think he's about to really go off he just ends it and walks away. It's so perfect.

Where does he keep getting those cream packets?