#Egyptian MMA fighters

[conandaily2022]

'UAE Warriors 40' results: Ali AlQaisi vs Ahmed Faress in Abu Dhabi

promotion: UAE Warriors title: “UAE Warriors 40″ venue: Etihad Arena, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates date: March 19, 2023 FIGHTERS Bahrain: Abdulla Al Bousheiri Egypt: Mahmoud Atef, Mena Mohamed Abdalah, Omar El Dafrawy, Ahmed Faress England: Ibrahim Al-Faqih Hassan France: Badreddine Diani Iraq: Hassan Talal Jordan: Fouad Al Shami, Mohammad Qwai Abzakh, Hassan Talal, Jalal Al Daaja,…

[maxkels]

* ◟ : 〔 TESSA THOMPSON, CIS WOMAN + SHE / HER 〕 MAXINE KELLY , some say you’re a FORTY YEAR OLD lost soul among the neon lights. known for being both HARD-WORKING and JUDGEMENTAL, one can’t help but think of I LIKE THAT by JANELLE MONAE when you walk by. are you still an ASSOCIATE, TATTOO ARTIST AND PIERCER for THE DEAD HAND, YAMI INK, even with your reputation as THE SONGBIRD? i think we’ll be seeing more of you and LETTTERMAN JACKETS THAT SMELL OF TOBACCO , NEEDLES PIERCING VIRGIN SKIN, EYES THAT HOLD A BOTTOMLESS GUILT, although we can’t help but think of KARLACH (BG3) + BRIENNE OF TARTH (GAME OF THRONES) + SEKHMET (EGYPTIAN MYTHOLOGY) whenever we see you down these rainy streets.

FULL NAME: Maxine Bernice Kelly NICKNAME(S): Max AGE: Forty GENDER: Cis-Female PRONOUNS: She/Her BIRTHPLACE: Harlem, Manhattan OCCUPATION: Tattoo Artist & Body Piercer, Underground fighter GANG AFFILIATION: Associate of The Dead Hand FC: Tessa Thompson

APPEARANCE

HAIR COLOUR: Black EYE COLOUR: Brown HEIGHT: 5”5 PIERCINGS?:Both ears & nipples, tongue. TATTOOS: Full sleeve on left arm that spans her shoulder blade also. Behind her left ear, on her right hip and underbust.

TRAITS

POSITIVE: Focused, Loyal, Grounded NEGATIVE: Critical, Pessimistic, Indelicate

BACKGROUND

death tw

Maxine was destined to get involved with the seedy underbelly of NYC. While her mom worked nights, her dad took her to his job ; from a baby she’d been in a car seat while he beat people up for money, sold drugs, engaged in routine intimidation of local businessmen and politicians. It was a job the man was good at, so why stop doing it now? Why not let Maxine know that this was really how the world really worked. There were only two types of people; the strong and the weak. He asked Maxine, one day while doing her maths homework, what type do you want to grow into?

She chose to be strong.

It was the answer her father wanted, if he couldn’t have a son then Maxine would become one. She signed up for boxing, track, MMA, started to routinely bully kids for their money or lunches - when she got a little older, it transitioned into selling cigarettes and providing some of the meaner kids with needed backup when other schools came for events, or just turned up at lunch for a brawl. Thanks to her dads name, Maxine also got into underground fighting rings, lying about her age so she could take down women twice her age. The money got split, and she’d go get her hair done with it or buy some new sneakers. Questions were asked about her bruises of course but, the girl did so much sport there had to be accidents. Sometimes on the quad she got into fights but not so much anymore. There was an opportunity talked about; the Olympics. Maxine could get onto their training programme, maybe even the squad with a few years under their wing, groomed into a professional athlete. The teenager couldn’t wait to get out from Harlem, move onto better things. What made it better was that her father seemed to approve of this to - they’d have to work on Maxine’s discipline.

But, there was a secret the young girl couldn’t tell him. That was, that Maxine had discovered a secret talent, a hobby she enjoyed more than beating others up, than revealing in violence. Art. In secret, she worked on a portfolio. It was a backup, she told herself, just in case everything fell through, an apprenticeship in Portland. Except, when two opportunities came knocking at the same time, Maxine knew which one she’d prefer. Her father of course intercepted both, confronting Maxine about which opportunity would really get her out of their shitty neighborhood, and allow her to make a life for herself. All her life, she’d done what he wanted and in a fit of rage, she smacked her dad.

He went down, smacking his head open on the fireplace as he did so.

The decision was made for her then. The young woman covered it up, said she came home and found him like that. His line of work meant that he had plenty of enemies, nobody suspected Maxine. She moved out to Portland, taking up an apprenticeship for a tattoo studio and attending a local arts programme. America held too much pain, though, and after befriending a Japanese student, she would go to Kyoto to train under masters of the tattoo craft. Getting involved with low-level Yakuza only seemed to be a natural progression, especially after she stopped a local underboss from getting murdered at night on the streets. The fighting she’d left behind only followed her.

Years later, Maxine followed some members back to America, taking up shop at Yami Ink and still serving the Dead Hand even in another country.

[mask131]

Deadly fall: The other “curse of the pharaohs”

THE OTHER CURSE OF THE PHARAOHS

Category: American urban legends / USA hauntings

I talked about the “curse of the mummy”, also known as the “curse of the pharaohs”. But you might be surprised to learn that there is “another” curse coming from old Egypt – a curse said to strike only a specific place in one of the most iconic American towns: Las Vegas.

Las Vegas is filled with the most extravagant and unique hotels and casinos you will ever see. And one of them is rumored to be cursed. Given we are speaking of Egypt, you won’t be surprised to learn that it is the Luxor hotel and casino: a towering pyramid structure standing over the Las Vegas landscape. The very outward shape of the casino has been known to make people feel unease: the enormous pyramid is entirely black, with no ornaments of any kind, just the opaque and dark imposing structure – and at night one beam of white light gets out from the top of the pyramid, like some occult scene from horror movies.

But even eerier is the dark history of the Luxor – which seems to be filled with a lot of nasty incidents.

The Luxor opened up on October 1993. 30 stories high, it is one of the biggest hotel-casinos of Las Vegas, and its beam was designed to be one of the strongest beams of light of the world, visible by pilots flying even hours away from California. As you can guess, the Luxor was entirely based around Ancient Egypt: the casino is pyramid-shaped, there is a sphinx statue near the entrance, the name of the casino can be found on an obelisk, and the inside is filled with Egyptian-looking statues and murals. The Luxor was created by the Circus Circus Enterprises (a big hotel-and-casino corporation from Nevada) during the brief “family-friendly” era that Las Vegas knew at the end of the 20th century: the Luxor, as a top-class hotel and casino, was designed to attract a wealthy clientele, but its unique theme and decorum was also prepared to appeal families seeking “theme park”-like fun, basically making the Luxor both a five-star hotel AND a true tourist attraction.

To list the incidents attributed to the “curse”, I will invite you to go backwards with me through time…

# 2012: Three guests of the hotel fell ill. They had contracted the Legionnaire’s disease, and it was found that the Legionella bacteria had somehow infected the water system of the Luxor. Bizarrely, after two guests fell ill, the water was tested but the Legionella was nowhere to be found: it was only after a third guest was infected (and in fact later died, the other two healed), that the Legionella was discovered.

# Also 2012: the elevators of the Luxor are not called elevators but “inclinators” because, due to the pyramid-shape of the building, they actually go in a diagonal way, following the slopes of the pyramid. In 2012, two airmen from the Nellis Air Force Base had a fight in the first-floor lobby of the western part of the Luxor. One of the two pushed the other against the inclinator door – which mysteriously opened, despite there being no cabin at the level of this floor: just the empty shaft. The victim fell 25 feet down, all the way to the basement of the Luxor. He was sent to hospital in critical condition.

# In June 2010, Las Vegas football player DeMario Reynolds and his friend, Jason Sindelar, a MMA fighter (Mixed Martial Art), got into a fight in a suite of the hotel. The fight started when Sindelar, drunk and angry, verbally fought with his girlfriend during a party organized in Reynolds’ suite. Reynolds asked Sindelar to leave the party, but it only made him angrier: he tried to hit his girlfriend, and grab her by the neck. Reynolds tried to restrain the fighter by pushing him down the bathroom floor. Then the fight was taken to the main bedroom, where the two men had a short fistfight. Sindelar finally left the suite, but not before returning shortly after, hitting Reynolds in the head and in the chest – after bringing Reynolds to the ground, Sindelar went all out on him, and other guests of the party called the hotel’s security. The injured Reynolds was taken to the Desert Springs Hospital, but he had died of his wounds before arriving there.

# May 2007: in the parking garage of the Luxor, a young food court employee left a coffee cup on top of his car. When he later returned to remove the cup, it exploded in his hand and killed him: a homemade bomb had been placed inside. Investigations led to the arrest of two men, who had indeed created the bomb and placed it in the cup – but they actually didn’t know the victim, and there was no evident motive for why they would do such a thing. Visibly, they just wanted to make a bomb and kill someone – anyone.

# September 1996: A woman jumped from the 26th story of the hotel and died. Her heavy injuries coupled with her lack of identification made it hard to identify her – she fell near the entrance of what was then the buffet, but by today has been completely reshaped into the new food court of the casino. We never knew who she was or why she jumped – all we know is that she clearly killed herself. The women of the 26th floor soon became a “ghost story” in Las Vegas, as everybody invented their own “legends” about the reason for her fall: the most famous of which claims that the woman was a prostitute who killed herself after discovering she had HIV. Still today people claim her ghost can be seen on the 26th floor.

# Beyond this woman, three more deadly falls were reported at the Luxor, two of which were suicides but one – a man jumping from the 10th floor – still of unknown nature (suicide? Accident? Murder?).

# But the oldest “ghosts” of the Luxor are said to be here since the building of the hotel. You see, William Bennett, the CEO of Circus Circus Enterprises in the 90s, built the Luxor in eighteen months at a very low cost. When you see how big and grand the construction is, you realize what it means: corners were cut. We know that when the Luxor actually opened, in October 1993, the construction wasn’t actually complete – some parts of the structure were still built, and some guests had to stay in unfinished rooms. We also know that during the first years of the hotel, the “inclinators” didn’t work properly – and soon people realized that the Luxor had been built in an unusual soft spot of the desert, meaning the pyramid was literally sinking in the ground. This led to the rumors that workers had died during the constructions – while there is no official death record of any worker during the building of the Luxor, the rumor claims that at least two men died during the building, but that their death was covered by Circus Circus Enterprises – some local media even went as far as claim it was seven men, and not two, that died. The rumor notably fed of the real fact that the construction of the pyramid had been a very difficult and dangerous process due to its unusual shape (coupled with the all the cut corners). Rumors claim that in the quiet part of the hotel the ghosts of the workers can still be spotted – and back when the hotel had a unique boat-riding attraction called the Luxor’s Nile Riverboat, some visitors claimed to have seen the dead workers inside the tunnels.

- - - - - - -

All those incidents and ghost-sighting coupled together led people to believe that a “curse” had been placed on the Luxor. Why? Because of the very Egyptian model of the Luxor.

The outside pyramid is a reproduction of the Great Pyramid of Giza (well, it is only three-quarters its size, so a smaller replica), and the hotel contains the biggest and most accurate replica of the Tomb of King Tutankhamun known on American ground – carefully recreated down to every detail with the same materials originally used for the tomb. No need to tell you that Tutankhamun was THE big curse of Egypt, but strangely it is not this replica that is thought to have brought the curse, but rather the rest of the hotel: because the other “Egyptian decorum” are all noted to be basically cheap and inaccurate replicas. As such, it is thought that the curse was brought onto the casino due to being a mockery of a pyramid, and due to the creators of the site not understanding the meaning of the occult and mystic symbols they used.

For example superstitious people refuse to go play in the Luxor due to a pyramid being a tomb – and it is always bad luck to go gambling in tombs or near graves. Other point out that there is only one sphinx in front of the pyramid’s entrance, when Egypt belief claimed that before a palace or a pyramid you needed to build two sphinxes to ward off evil spirits and wicked influences. The constructors did so to replicate the “lonely sphinx” sitting in front of the Great Pyramid – but archeologists will tell you that if there is one sphinx today, it is because the other one was destroyed. The urban legend notably claims that the dark pyramid attracts malevolent energies, and that the only way to purify it would be to place an eye sculpture at its top.

Now beyond the Egyptian-cultural-appropriation theory, another story for the “origins” of the curse is much more local and rooted in the history of Las Vegas: it is said that the Luxor is cursed because it was built on the site of a former secret mobster burial ground: a mass grave for the victims of the mafias.

[totallyhussein-blog]

“The same hand that can write a beautiful poem, can knock you out with one punch”

The origin of boxing as a sport, may be its acceptance by the ancient Greeks as an Olympic game. But earlier boxing records are depicted in Sumerian carvings in Iraq, while an ancient Egyptian relief depicts two fist-fighters and spectators. 

Other examples can also be found in Assyrian and Babylonian art but back in 2017, Iraq Solidarity News (Al-Thawra) reported how Iraqi athletes have been competing in Mixed Martial Arts events in the country's capital, Baghdad.

“As the audience cheers, judges look on using a points system to evaluate the fighters in a number of categories including striking and defence. Tournaments see professional fighters fighting it out in the ring with players taking part in each competition.”

Events are held at the Yarmouk Leisure Club in western Baghdad. The full contact sport includes elements of wrestling, boxing as well as other martial art disciplines. This sport came to Iraq in 2011 and such sporting events are held by organizations like the Iraqi Combat Fighting Championship.

Amir Albazi’s journey to become the first Iraqi man fighting for the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) may have been tougher than any of his bouts to date.

The rising talent in professional mixed martial arts (MMA) was born in Baghdad but grew up in Sweden, after his family fled Iraq to escape Saddam Hussein’s authoritarian regime.

As the BBC reported back in December, Albazi arrived in the Nordic country as a boy who could not speak a word of Swedish - and he experienced severe culture shock in his new surroundings.

“In school, I couldn’t understand what people were saying, but I could tell they were making fun of me,” he told the BBC. “The only way I could express myself was with my fists.”

The 29-year-old said his world was transformed when, by chance, he found MMA on TV. It was love at first sight. As a professional, Albazi is known by his ring name, “The Prince” - a translation of his Arabic first name.

He now has almost 15 years of experience in the sport and wants to become the first Iraqi and Arab champion in the UFC’s history. “I feel a great responsibility on my shoulders being the only Iraqi in the UFC. I feel as if I am representing my country and the whole Arab world,” he said.

Following years of hard work, It was a historic day for the Iraqi Mixed Martial Arts Federation (IRAQMMAF) as it received official recognition from the Iraqi National Olympic Committee.

An election also took place to determine the federation’s board, where Raad Jameel was elected as president and Haydar Mahdi as vice president. Ahmed Jameel will serve as the Secretary, with Salwan Raheem, Mohamad Dawod, Hammen Tahsyn, and Basma Jabar all confirmed to be members of the board.

Since receiving recognition, IRAQMMAF has been actively planning for the future, hosting the first meeting of the executive board to discuss the development of coaches and athletes by making courses readily available.

As IMMAF reported on April 10th, the first training session of the national team also took place, led by the coaching staff and the national wrestling team captain, Samir Mahdi.

The IRAQMMAF has already been active on the IMMAF circuit, debuting at the 2021 World Championships before going on to feature at the 2022 Asian Championships and World Championships. The federation has big plans for the future of the sport in Iraq, and the recent achievement of recognition will be a major factor in those plans.

[topsportsasia]

BRAVE CF champ Amin Ayoub names Rolando Dy, Ahmed Amir, Sam Patterson as his potential challengers

BRAVE CF champ Amin Ayoub names Rolando Dy, Ahmed Amir, Sam Patterson as his potential challengers

Amin Ayoub

Amin “Fierceness” Ayoub, 24, of Nantes, France has named his potential challengers just days after becoming the new lightweight champion of Bahrain-based mixed martial arts promotion BRAVE Combat Federation. Among them are Rolando “The Incredible” Dy, 29, of the Philippines, Ahmed “The Butcher” Amir, 29, of Egypt and Sam Patterson, 23, of England.

On November 5, 2020, Ayoub challenged…

[do-gooders-and-mad-science]

Muse Profiles | Chouseishin Dai Risers

Something I’ve been working on here’s some profiles in the cut below.

Name: Shuji

Nicknames: Dumb, (Takeo is Dumber) Kiddo, Orange-head. 

Age: 19 Sexuality: ??? 

Preferred pronouns: He/Him 

Character Concept Inheritor of the blood of Horus The Egyptian God of the Sky and Kingship, He takes up the mantle of Talon Riser and calls on the great Chouseishin Ra. 

Personality: Shuji, when left to his own devices, can be lazy and unsure of what he wants, when in the right headspace he can be charismatic and cunning. 

History: Once he completed high school Shuji wanted to pursue his dream the only problem is he had no clue what that was he knew he liked history but lacked the patience to study, he liked sports, mainly basketball but wasn’t good enough to play professionally, so now he languishes trying to figure out what he wants as he works at a history museum after his dad got him a job there as a janitor.

Name: Mako

 Nicknames: Big Brain, Neko, Keeper of the Brain cells 

Age: 23 

Sexuality: Bisexual 

Preferred pronouns: She/Her 

Character Concept: Inheritor of the blood of Spenta Armaiti Persian Goddess of Earth, She takes up the mantle of Gao Riser and calls on the great Chouseishin Manticore. 

Personality Mako is an egg head of the highest order and she knows it, along with many other things but her overconfidence hides an in-security that she’ll take it to her grave, or so she thinks. 

History: As soon as she left high school Mako applied for university and aced her entrance exams now she studies History, Archaeology, Palaeontology, and Psychics she wants to study the ancient human civilization that existed 400,000,000 years ago and study under Professor Horiguchi, the foremost expert on the subject but is having trouble getting to him so, for now, she works at the same museum as Shuji. 

Name: Takeo Matsuzaka

Nicknames: Baka, Wolf-boy, That dude that kicked the shit out of me for calling him Baka and Wolf-boy. 

Age: 26 

Sexuality: Heterosexual 

Preferred pronouns: He/Him 

Character Concept: Inheritor of the blood of Tyr Norse God of War, He takes up the mantle of Howl Riser and calls on the great Chouseishin Fenris Personality: Takeo is a hot-blooded and a little dim-witted but loyal once you earn his trust otherwise he can be standoffish and rude. 

History: When Takeo was a boy in 2003 his town was attacked by Bossquito the most dangerous being in the known universe, a being that feasted on life itself Takeo saw his family drained of life all that was left of them was their clothes. This event haunted Takeo for years after even after being adopted by famous MMA fighter Naoto Matsuzaka but Naoto’s guidance helped Takeo to make peace with what happened and even followed in his adopted father’s footsteps and became a fighter, it just felt right to him, the art of combat is something Takeo respects immensely.

The Dairiser Suits, Howl Riser, Talon Riser, Gao Riser.

[themarshalalii]

I'm pro MMA fighter 💪💪 Egyptian Top Team 🤩

Marshal of Egypt

#followforfollow #followme #follow4follow #follow #follower

#egyptiantopteam #evoultion #efc #mma #mmafighter #mmatraining #one #onefc #ufcfightnight #ufc #bellator #cage #cagewarriors #efcafrica #brave #bravemma #boxing #boxingtraining #kickboxing #work #mmagirls #fit

#Ali_The_Marshal_Moftah

#The_Marshal

#مارشال_مصر

[jamsque]

Bitterness in the Age of Fighting

I was excited when the first episode of Fighting in the Age of Loneliness appeared in my youtube feed last Monday, I’m willing to watch anything Jon Bois puts his name on right now. Most of his content is centered around American football and basketball and baseball, which is great, those are all sports I have watched at least semi-regularly at some point in my life, but for the past few years I’ve followed Mixed Martial Arts more closely than any of them. Felix Biederman, the writer and narrator of the show, was a new name to me: I know Chapo Trap House by reputation but the most I have ever heard of it is a few clips out of context.

That first episode did some strong establishing work to set the tone and context for the series, and then got to work telling the fascinating story of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and the Gracie family. It’s a story I know decently well, I think Felix did a good job of picking out the interesting characters and especially the moments of class struggle, and of course his words are backed up by the datawave audiovisual stylings of Jon Bois that we have come to know and love. The political ideas were more familiar and less interesting to me than the bits about fighting but I was curious to see how the show was going to try to draw connections and parallels between the rise of MMA as a spectator sport and the socio-political environment in which that rise took place.

I was engaged and I watched each episode as it came out through the week and by the end of episode four on Thursday I was starting to turn a little on the series. In this era of Youtubers with healthy Patreon support and good microphones I’ve gotten used to clear, smoothly edited, well recorded voice work and for me Felix’s narration falls short there, especially for a project with a major media company behind it. More than that, though, I was no longer on board with where the show seemed to be going, and I was worried that it would end on a sour note. I found myself agreeing with Felix’s political commentary but disagreeing more and more with his thoughts on MMA and the way he was choosing to frame the history of the sport.

The final installment disappointed me more than I had feared it might, enough to motivate me to make some kind of response to or critical reading of the whole series. Re-watching it with that in mind I (unsurprisingly) found more things I disliked. Fighting in the Age of Loneliness does an excellent job of telling the story of the ancestry, birth, rise, fall, second rise and anticipated second fall of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, but along the way it makes some pretty big missteps and takes some positions that I strongly disagree with. I’m not going to break down each episode individually but I do want to lay out the issues I have with the series and in particular dig in to the problems with the last episode. Towards the end I think I might even call Felix Biederman a fascist.

First, I want to provide some context for my own thoughts about MMA, and make some inferences and assumptions about Felix’s history with the sport that I think go some way to explaining why we see it quite so differently.

*

I am absolutely not a long-time hardcore Mixed Martial Arts fan, until relatively recently I didn’t have any interest in combat sports at all. Growing up in the UK around the turn of the millenium I was aware of boxing but only from a distance, it was already well on its way to fading from the forefront of the popular sporting consciousness, and my pacifist socialist middle-class parents certainly weren’t watching Mike Tyson fights. The first contact I had with what I would later know as MMA was a grainy video I remember watching on some pre-YouTube video sharing site as a teenager: a highlight montage of a man wearing black, red and white shorts kicking various different people in the head in various different boxing rings, with the same concussive effect each time.

I became more aware of the modern sport of MMA when I started noticing the UFC in mainstream sports media headlines around 2014. Three names kept appearing in those headlines: Jon Jones, for running into things with cars, Conor McGregor, for running his mouth, but most of all Ronda Rousey, for running through every challenger the UFC put in front of her. I suspect that there are a lot of newer MMA fans who, like me, were swept up in the hype surrounding Rousey and McGregor during that time, and stuck with the sport after they finally broke their respective winning streaks and came back down to earth.

Three years later even though I watch MMA most weekends and even though I have become almost as fascinated as Felix Biederman seems to be with the history of the UFC, the people who have fought in it, and the things that they have done to each other, I still consider myself a ‘casual’ fan. This is at least partly because when I think of ‘real’ or ‘hardcore�� MMA fans, I think of people like Felix, who have been around the sport for a lot longer and are, at best, skeptical about the results of its most recent jump in popularity.

Felix doesn’t explicitly talk about the genesis of his interest in the sport but there are hints in the text. The general tone of the piece goes from being detached and historical in the first episode to personal and emotional in the last, which I think is both a deliberate choice on Felix’s part and a reflection of his own experience. The third episode, when his narrative reaches the mid-2000s, is when I think it transitions from learned history to memory, and it’s around here that Felix starts making frequent references to goings on in MMA fan culture. If I’m correct then Felix Biederman has been following MMA for at least a decade longer than I have really known what it was. He has had the time to become emotionally invested in fighters and even the UFC as an organisation in ways that I am not, and of course his initial views on the sport were formed a relatively long time ago. MMA fights in 2018 don’t look all that different than they did in 2005 but the UFC has certainly changed a lot in that time, as have public awareness of and attitudes towards a new generation of combat sports stars.

*

That decade and a half of change in the UFC is the real focus of Fighting in the Age of Loneliness, but it presents itself as something much broader. The first episode is titled ‘The Invention of Fighting for Money’ and in it Felix makes a lot of sweeping statements about the past that don’t hold water. He very much tells the winner’s version of history, the narrative favoured by the UFC and the Gracie family, who would have you believe that they invented not only the modern sport of MMA but somehow the very idea of fighting itself. Felix remarks on the marketing and promotional skills of Rorion Gracie in the second episode without seeming to realise quite the degree to which he has himself fallen prey to them, and he also comes across as having the slightly fetishistic attitude towards East Asian martial arts that has become common in the USA over the past half century or so.

As he transitions out of the prologue, Felix says “the true catalyst for MMA as a sport, business and spectacle go back to Japan”, and when he goes on to describe the spread of Jujutsu from Japan to Brazil he says “after hundreds of years, Martial Arts had finally broken containment.” At the end of the series he proclaims that the “fourth era of fighting itself” is currently beginning and that the previous two ‘eras’ only lasted a handful of years each.

These generalisations don’t stand up to even the lightest scrutiny. The history of Martial Arts or combat sports or fighting or whatever term you care to use goes back much farther than feudal Japan, and some of the other things Felix says imply that he is at least partially aware of this. As he is giving his starry-eyed take on the life of Judo’s inventor he says “As long as there are people, they will at some point want the ability to keep someone from kicking their ass, no matter how unlikely it is that they will ever get into a fight.” It strikes me as particularly American that his argument in favor of combat sports being inherent to human society is based on the concept of self-defence. I prefer a line of reasoning that is similar but based on competition: As long as there are people, they will at some point want to test their wits and skill and strength against each other.

Indeed, the story as we know it of unarmed combat sports is as old as recorded history: there are images of wrestling in four thousand year old Egyptian tombs, and the classical Greek Olympics included an event called Pankration, which could be roughly translated as ‘fighting with all of your power’, that had an almost identical ruleset to early Ultimate Fighting Championship events.

Felix oversimplifies the history of fighting as a whole, but even if we just look at what he says about Mixed Martial Arts he gets it wrong. In episode one he says “The entire sport of Mixed Martial Arts owes its existence to Mitsuyo Maeda” and then in episode two he alleges that “A world where proto-MMA existed outside of gymnasiums in Brazil seemed pretty unlikely in 1976.” A corollary of my earlier statement might be that as long as there are people testing their wits and skill and strength against each other, there will be other people who think they can do it better. People have been pitting different schools of fighting against each other and amalgamating them long before the Gracie clan existed.

A decade before the date when Felix claims that mixed martial arts were confined to Brazil, Bruce Lee was blending Wing Chun with other styles to formulate Jeet Kune Do. A decade before that a Japanese Karateka was devising a ruleset which would eventually become Kickboxing to facilitate competitions between karate and Muay Thai. In the 40s the Kajukenbo school was founded in Hawaii with the goal of rigorously testing multiple fighting styles against each other to determine which elements of each were the most effective. In the 30s a Czechoslovakian Jew was refining the boxing and wrestling he had been taught in gyms into Krav Maga in brawls against anti-semitic thugs.

In Victorian London the Bartitsu school taught gentlemen a blend of five different fighting styles from around the world, while in the music halls exhibition matches pitted boxing against Savate. Savate was itself developed over the preceding century by efforts to find a middle ground between the heavy-booted street fighting style spreading from French ports and the Queensbury rules boxing that was popular in England.

Even the legend of the birth of Muay Thai, a fighting style which has had arguably as much influence on the modern sport of MMA as Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, is a story about mixed martial arts: when the Konbaung Dynasty of Burma captured a famous fighter during their battles with Siam in 1767, they offered him the chance to win his freedom if he could demonstrate the superiority of his Siamese boxing style against the Burmese school, which he promptly did by knocking out ten Burmese opponents.

Felix contradicts himself on this topic in the first episode when he describes Jigoro Kano studying western wrestling and sumo to augment his Jujutsu training and develop Judo. In the second episode when he says “In 1993 no one knew anything, and most people still thought that if you did karate the right way you could blow up somebody’s heart” he is obviously being facetious but he is also projecting his own ignorance outwards. There has always been fighting, all over the world, and there have always been evolving schools of thought about the best ways to fight and the best rules for fighting as a sport. The story of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and the Ultimate Fighting Championship is captivating but it is not, as Felix presents it, the only story about fighting. In this regard, as with others, he seems to have internalized the some of mystique that the UFC has cultivated around itself and its history.

*

Once the history lesson is over I think Fighting in the Age of Loneliness hits its stride and Felix’s passion for the Pride FC and UFC fights and fighters that drew him into the sport shines through in the writing and the narration. His criticisms of the ways that the UFC continues to underpay and otherwise mistreat its fighters are spot on and if anything he could have gone into its anti-union policies in more depth. Before I get to the final episode, there are a few smaller criticisms I want to get out of the way.

Firstly, I would like to have seen more about modern women’s Mixed Martial Arts in the show. I largely chalk this up to the difference in perspective on the sport between Felix and myself: a female fighter was what drew me to watch the UFC in the first place so my image of the sport is one that has always included women, whereas Felix got his start watching Pride, which had no female fighters, and an all-male era of the UFC. There were women competing in MMA at that time and a few exclusively female promotions but if Felix ever watched any of them he doesn’t mention it. In the end, Ronda Rousey gets a minute and a half, Joanna Jędrzejczyk gets about 30 seconds and Cristiane Justino gets a name check.

Rousey is the only female fighter to be mentioned outside of the quarantined WMMA portion of the show, and she comes up during a rather odd accusation of nepotism that Felix levels at Dana White, one which I have heard from other longer-standing UFC fans. I am no supporter of Dana’s and I’m not seeking to defend his character, but it seems far more likely to me that the reason the UFC put so many promotional resources behind Ronda Rousey and Conor McGregor is not, as Felix supposes, simply because Dana White personally liked those two fighters, but rather because he saw the opportunity to make a lot of money off of them, which he did. Dana is a fight promoter, he is notoriously fickle in his affections and the warmness he displays towards any given fighter is directly correlated to their ability to drive pay-per-view buys for his promotion.

I also think that there are some more straightforward explanations for the UFC’s success than the poetic ones that Felix understandably focuses on. The ideas of the UFC as a refuge for outcasts and the alienated, both as fighters and as fans, and the honesty of single combat in an age of uncertainty are clearly very thematically important to Fighting in the Age of Loneliness as a project. For me the series places too much importance on the role those things played in the current popularity of the sport and doesn’t put enough emphasis on, or even mention at all, some more mundane but more significant contributing factors.

The vacuum at the top of combat sports that was created when boxing all but collapsed under the accumulated weight of decades of corruption and promotional malpractice, and the brief but significant success that the WWE had with a grittier presentation of professional wrestling in the late 90s both set the stage for the rise of modern MMA in the USA. That rise was helped along by things like the value of the walk-off head kick knockout and the fourteen second armbar victory in the age of the highlight clip and the animated GIF, and the mix of astuteness and good fortune that led the UFC to put out a reality TV show featuring actual physical conflict at a time when programming was being dominated by reality shows based on exaggerating and continually re-hashing interpersonal squabbles.

*

At the end of episode four, titled “As the world fell apart, the only magic was in the cage”, Felix’s rhetoric about the things that happen during UFC fights reaches its most florid, mythological heights. Against a montage of post-fight embrace photographs he says “The magic that we wish we saw everywhere else was in the cage [...] At least there was one place where unthinkable things actually happened, at least if you put two weird people with incredible abilities in front of each other their combined experiences and opposing martial abilities would create a beautiful, maddening story.” I am not criticising Felix for being more captivated by the emotion and passion of fighting than I am but the praise and reverence which he lavishes upon his favourite period of the sport’s recent history at the end of the fourth episode clashes brutally with the way he starts the fifth.

“No-one is ever content to just like something, especially not nowadays”, he says. “We’re not just fans of things any more. We declare our media consumption habits to determine the types of people we are [...] now if someone doesn’t like something we like they hate us” These lines and the visuals that accompany them are presented as a barb aimed at the legions of TV personality and pop star fans bitterly defending their territory on social media. Although there is a hint of self-deprecation about this segment I don’t read much self-awareness here, mostly just old fashioned middle-class punching down at the popular culture of the working class.

In the way he frames what he views as the best period of the UFC’s history, Felix is himself engaging in, as he puts it, “battles that our millionaire entertainers will probably never give a shit about or even find out about”. He has taken to the field of the culture war to defend his memory of a past version of a massive, sinister entertainment company against the changes that he perceives to be ruining it.

Here is where the bitterness begins to creep in, and build. Felix starts talking about the insecurity of modern MMA fans and the sport’s image problem, but then he abruptly dispenses with those concerns and starts arguing that MMA should remain insular and niche. A this point he also waves a huge screaming red flag by describing Jon Jones as a “weird person” who is “actually pretty fascinating once you get to know him” and who has “more depth than most would know”, but we’ll get to that later.

“Who gives a shit if we don’t have hundreds of millions of people watching with us every time, and why do we care if people think we’re fucked up or weird for watching it. We know what our sport is, and we know who we are [...] It’s our stupid violent insane spectacle sport for freaks and assholes that’s as legitimate or illegitimate as any other sport in the world. Well, at least it was ours at some point.”

I recognised this argument the moment I heard it. It sounds almost word for word like an insecure gamer defending video games as an art form and as a hobby that is just for real nerds and not the masses. I know that argument very well because I have been that insecure gamer in the past. In complaining that MMA is not “ours” anymore he has jumped from “if someone doesn’t likes something we like they hate us” to “if someone likes something we like for the wrong reasons they hate us”.

This is the tone that Felix adopts for the entire final episode, and he proceeds to decry three recent changes he thinks the UFC has made in an effort to bring the sport into the mainstream, changes that he declares as already being “to the detriment of the viewers, the fighters, and ultimately, [the UFC] themselves”.

The first is the Fox TV deal, of which his criticism is that it has led to too many fights and therefore too many fighters, but he doesn’t present any reasons why more fights has been a bad thing. He talks about how poorly the UFC compensates its rank-and-file fighters, which is a great argument for better fighter pay, but is not an argument for fewer paid fighters or fewer fight cards.

The second is the UFC’s apparel deal with Reebok, which he accurately assesses as a disaster for their fighters.

The third is drug testing, and for me this is where Fighting in the Age of Loneliness goes completely off the rails. The first thing he says in this segment is probably the only part of it I agree with: “the vast majority of your favourite athletes use steroids.”

*

Felix is right that the UFC asked the US Anti-Doping Agency to start testing its fighters more to provide an image of legitimacy than because they actually care about fair competition, but his main problem with the policy is that performance enhancing drugs are in fact cool and good. Earlier in the series he celebrates the way that Pride FC’s “loose medical oversight” and “pro-steroid policy” allowed its fighters to “consistently break laws of god and man,” now he gleefully exclaims that “Steroids are actually kind of amazing.”

“The human body is absolutely not designed to fight for 15 to 25 minutes, but steroids help make it work”. Felix provides no justification whatsoever for this claim, and it’s a ridiculous one that springs from the same myopic view of the history of combat sports that he expresses in the early episodes. To present just one counterexample, fighters in classical Greece did not have the benefit of modern nutritional science and training methods, let alone anabolic steroids, but the only time limit on Pankration bouts was sunset. Fights that last more than 25 minutes might not be the most fun to watch but they’ve certainly been happening since long before the steroid era.

Felix doubles down on this position. While he acknowledges that steroids “have their side effects” he asserts that “it is impossible to compete at the highest levels of fighting without some chemical help.” This is another absurd claim, he does try to back this one up but in doing so he immediately undermines it: “Talk to any retired fighter, and they’ll give a number anywhere from 75 to 90 percent of their former training partners juicing.” Rather than proving his point, this statement suggests that it is not at all impossible to compete at the highest levels of fighting without chemical help because at the very least ten percent of fighters are doing it. This scaled-back version of his original pronouncement does make the prospects of success seem pretty bleak for clean fighters, but Felix doesn’t care. He is happy to accept that if most fighters are doping then fighters need to dope to compete and therefore it is OK for fighters to dope.

USADA testing in the UFC has, in Felix’s opinion, fucked things up. There are a lot of very valid criticisms that he could make about the inconsistent way that the policy has been applied to different fighters or the odd ways it has conflicted and overlapped with state athletic commission testing policies or the lack of fighter engagement in the process of rolling out the program leading to confusion and uncertainty about the rules, but he doesn’t. Instead of talking about the massive unregulated supplement industry in the USA and the habit that some supplement brands have of ‘accidentally’ slipping a bit of the good stuff in their products to make sure that their customers get the gains they crave, he complains that fighters are being punished for “by-products of over the counter substances”. By-products and contaminants are not the same thing, I’m not sure if Felix just misspoke here or if he genuinely doesn’t understand the problem he is talking about.

He goes on to moan that the punishments for breaking the rules of the sport are longer under this new program. He doesn’t say why the longer bans are bad, just that the UFC has been ‘capricious’, and it seems obvious to me that the reason he disagrees with the longer bans is that he thinks PED usage is a good thing. Let’s address that idea.

There are two main reasons why I think performance enhancing drugs should be banned in almost all sports. The first is that PED use is bad for the long term health of athletes. We know that there are permanent negative effects associated with the use of anabolic steroids, and there are scores of other widely used PEDs that simply haven’t been around for long enough for the consequences of their use to be properly understood. It is possible to argue from this position for the regulation and standardisation of PED use in sports, and although I disagree with that line of reasoning I do think it has some merit, but there is no hint of this argument in Fighting in the Age of Loneliness.

I think the most practical way to prevent athletes from being incentivised to gamble with their future health for short-term gain, especially in a sport like MMA which already carries so much physical risk, is to ban the use of PEDs and enforce that ban with testing. Felix talks about steroids helping fighters to recover quickly from serious injuries, but I don’t think that is a worthwhile tradeoff to ask them to make, and I don’t think it would be a bad thing for the health of fighters if less prevalent PED usage meant that fewer of them had to endure the accumulated physical toll of fighting four or five times a year.

The second reason is a purely sporting one. The rules of all sports are arbitrary, but they usually constitute an attempt to delineate a competition that tests one particular set of skills and abilities in its competitors and excludes others. Chess is not designed to be a test of split-second reflexive reactions, 100 meter sprinting is not supposed to challenge your ability to predict the strategy your opponent is going to employ and prepare a counter-strategy, and as far as I am aware there is no sport that seeks to test its competitors ability to improve their bodies through medical intervention. I want the sports I watch to be fair competitions that are about what they are about, and Felix does too: he repeatedly praises the “truth” and “honesty” and “earnestness” of “what goes on in the cage,” but he fails to see how this contradicts with the idea of allowing the outcomes of fights to be heavily influenced months ahead of time by means of one fighter having access to less scrupulous, less restrained doctors than the other.

There is some nuance here around where you draw the lines between sports nutrition, necessary medical assistance and doping, but again Felix does not adopt a position so sophisticated. It’s been demonstrated in almost every popular sport that athletes with the help of an organised and scientific doping program have a significant advantage over clean rivals with similar levels of experience and training, and that’s not a contest I was ever interested in watching. Fighters shouldn’t use steroids any more than match sailors should use outboard motors, it is contrary to the very concept of the sport.

*

Felix isn’t just mad about USADA testing because he thinks steroids are nifty, though. He’s also mad that they took away one of his favourites. “At the absolute highest level of the sport, no-one was derailed by this as much as Jon Jones” This is another part of Fighting in the Age of Loneliness that emphasises the gulf between Felix Biederman’s perspective on the UFC and my own. He watched Jon Jones’ rise through the ranks and his multi-year reign as the consensus best fighter in the world, and was apparently completely captivated by it. In describing him Felix returns to the hagiographic tone of the third and fourth episodes, describing him as “a giant, freak athlete who did moves that he learned off of youtube to humiliate fighters we grew up with”, comparing him to Napoleon, calling him “a genius who can destroy world champions with stuff he saw in a movie, the equivalent to those savant kids who can hear a song once and instantly play it on a piano perfectly”

By the time I was starting to watch the UFC, Jon Jones had already sabotaged his career fairly comprehensively. I don’t know Jon Jones as a legend or a genius or the greatest fighter in the world because I’ve never seen the fights that earned him that reputation. Here are the things that I do know about Jon Jones, things that have happened or that I have learned about since I started following the sport:

Jon Jones is a homophobe. In 2012 Jon Jones crashed his car, plead guilty to driving under the influence, and received a slap on the wrist. In January 2015 Jon Jones tested positive for cocaine in an out-of-competition test and was issued a token fine. In April 2015 Jon Jones ran a red light and caused an accident involving two other cars that left a pregnant woman with a fractured arm, then ran away only to turn himself in after an arrest warrant was issued and eventually plead guilty to fleeing the scene of an accident, receiving 18 months of probation. In 2017 Jon Jones was given a one year suspension after testing positive for banned hormone and metabolic modulators, which turned out to be contaminants in an erectile dysfunction pill he had been given by a training partner. In 2018 Jon Jones tested positive for an anabolic steroid and was suspended again for 15 months.

On the front steps of courthouses Jon Jones is humble and apologetic, and in the immediate aftermath of being caught doing something he shouldn’t have he often talks about how hard the experience has been for him and how much he has learned from it and grown as a person. At all other times he acts as though the bad things that happen to him or around him are never his fault, that he has no responsibility to ever change or even reflect upon his own behaviour, as though in all these struggles he has been the victim of cruel circumstance and conspiracy.

The Jon Jones that Felix describes is not someone I recognise, and the way he describes him is concerning. “As we got to know Jon more, we saw his personal foibles, like his DUI arrest and rivalry with Rashad Evans” I don’t think that having a heated rivalry with a competitor is comparable with drunk driving at all, and in framing the incident this way Felix trivializes it. He does this again with Jones’ hit-and-run conviction, mentioning it in passing but quickly moving on to quip about how awesome Jones got at powerlifting in his year off. He calls Jones “a person with failings who sometimes acted like an asshole, got pissed off and said incredibly cutting things to his opponents”, reinforcing the impression that Jones’ main character flaw is simply being too fierce a competitor, instead of calling him, say, a person with failings who sometimes acted like an asshole, took drugs he shouldn’t and crashed cars.

Felix is constantly making excuses for Jon Jones in this part of the episode. When he gets to the second failed drug test, he says Jones “got popped by USADA”, a turn of phrase that subtly reinforces Jones’ own narrative of victimhood, especially since Felix has already established USADA as the bad guys who are fucking up the UFC. He wraps up the Jones segment with a ‘boys will be boys’ defence couched in another appeal to the glory of days gone by: “It used to matter less if you acted like an idiot. Everyone was a bit of an idiot in one manner or the other in life, but god forbid you now embarrass the sport”.

*

From here, Fighting in the Age of Loneliness whines to a messy conclusion. The segments get more disjointed, it’s at this stage that modern women’s Mixed Martial Arts gets all of two minutes of consideration, and then there is a rather reluctant summary of the UFC career of Conor McGregor, who Felix seems not to like. He certainly doesn’t describe him with close to the same kind of exaltation that he deploys earlier for fighters who had similar trajectories like Mauricio Rua, Anderson Silva and Jon Jones.

After that, Felix goes back to behaving like a fan of an indie band that has started making top 40 hits. He doesn’t like that the one of the UFC’s new part-owners is an asset stripping firm, even though in his golden age one of the UFC’s part-owners was an Emirati war criminal. Back in the first segment of the first episode he references “this modern era of fighting, where all of the things that used to make the sport unusual are mostly gone,” and now he returns to that idea and calls the supposed new “fourth era” of fighting “sanitized and oversaturated,” contrasting it with the “honesty of a fist-fight” and the “cultural haven for strange people” that the UFC offered ten years ago. He complains that there aren’t enough knockouts any more. When he brings up the recent long-anticipated fight between Conor McGregor and Khabib Nurmagomedov he says “sometimes the dam of normalcy breaks and we get momentary bursts of how things once were,” which strikes me as a rather ‘what have you done for me lately’ attitude to take about something that happened the month before this video series came out.

Things drag closer to an end and Felix keeps returning to his golden age. “What was once a weird refuge for those who needed it is now eroding into just another thing that’s as formless and indistinct as everything else. Fighting has rid itself of so much of its magic. It does not transcend the world any more.” The way that he constantly makes references to a bygone era when everything was simple and pure and good and as it ought to be, and wishes dearly that we could return to that era instead of continuing to face the injustices of this current moment in time, reminds me a lot of an ideology that has has a big resurgence in the USA recently.

The episode wraps up with one final spasm of bitterness. “This will happen to everything that you love. Nothing you like will remain untouched, and it will get further and further monetized into meaninglessness. This isn’t just our problem in our idiotic bloodsport. You’re fucked too.” He’s not wrong about the commoditization of entertainment and sports-as-entertainment but he sounds once again like a whiny gamer stereotype or a disillusioned popstar fanboy of the kind he mocks at the start of the episode.

And then the episode doesn’t actually end. The sort-of epilogue about Donald Cerrone fighting Nate Diaz seven years ago is a good little segment, but it doesn’t do anything here. It doesn’t serve to illustrate or emphasise any of the things Felix has been talking about in the minutes leading up to it, it doesn’t follow from them in any kind of narrative. It feels like a piece that some combination of Felix Biederman and Jon Bois just liked too much to cut, even though they couldn’t find a place to put it, so they stuck it here at the end. Maybe it is intended to provide some sense of denouement after Felix’s angry ranting. Regardless, it comes at the end of such an unpleasant half hour that its attempt at poignance failed utterly on me.

*

Felix Biederman likes different fighters than I do, he has a perspective on the sport of Mixed Martial Arts that often seems parochial and outdated to me, and I am puzzled by his obsession with the idea that combat sports athletes are all strange, broken people, but none of these things would bother me if Fighting in the Age of Loneliness did not present itself as an authoritative, comprehensive history of fighting, instead of what it is, which is the story of Felix Biederman falling into and out of love with the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Together with Jon Bois he certainly tells that story well, their collage of tales of societal fracture and political indifference with images of single combat is a powerful one, but in pursuing its thematic goals the series fails over and over to justify or interrogate the positions it puts forward.

If the UFC disappeared tomorrow, or if it had never been created in the first place, fighting would still exist, Mixed Martial Arts would still exist, the “one two path of a punch to a guy snoring on the ground” that Felix claims to adore will still exist. Fighting is exactly as magical and exactly as mundane today as it it always has been and always will be, even if Felix Biederman doesn’t enjoy watching it as much as he used to.

[thefightfanatic]

It's all eyes on Hamdy Abdelwahab @hamdy.abdelwahab1 this weekend 👀 The Egyptian heavyweight is a late notice replacement, facing Don'Tale Mayes on the undercard of UFC 277 this weekend. Abdelhawab marks the first Egyptian born fighter in the UFC, and has aspirations of being the first Egyptian champion too 🔥🔥 Record: 3-0 MMA 100% finishes 2-0 Bareknuckle MMA 100% finishes See you this weekend Hamdy Abdelwahab! #mixedmartialart #mixedmartialartist #mixedmartialartsfighter #mixedmartialartsfighters #mixedmartialartstraining #mma👊 #mmafitness #wmma #mmaconditioning #fightpicks #fightbetting #fightweek #bloodsports #bloodsport #bloodsporttraining #mmastriking #mmahighlights #mmamotivation #mmaboxing #mmafighting #ufc #mma #kick #punch #wrestling #bjj #grappling #kickboxing #boxing #muaythai https://www.instagram.com/p/CgjqJGPjn0x/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[thornstocutyouwith]

AHS AU

Tate Langdon

> Ghost, Lives at the Murder House

>  Born in 1977 Tate is one of perhaps four children of Constance and Hugo Langdon. Unlike his other siblings, he seems normal enough. Except for that he's mentally ill/disturbed. Tate grew up to become hateful of the world around him, mostly do to the lies his mother fed him from a young age. This hatred eventually manifested itself into the form of him committing a mass shooting that ultimately killed 15 of his fellow students, in 1994.  After that he quickly made his way home, to the Murder House at the time, where he was eventually gunned down by a S.W.A.T. Team, for not surrendering when ordered to. After these events Tate became a ghost, along with the others, inside of the murder house. Where he stayed until the Harmon's came along. During that time he bonded with the Harmon’s teenage daughter, Violet. Until she killed herself, along with the other events that soon followed after. Tate had even impregnated Vivian, Violets mother, with what could be considered the antichrist. After the events at the Murder House with the Harmon family ends on a sour note, with the entire Harmon family being dead and trapped in the house along with the other ghost, Tate tries to get with Violet,still. Violet however no longer cares about him, unable to forgive him for what he did and Tate is told to move on. Originally Tate ignores this advice because he still hopes that Violet will come around and forgive him. But as the years went on he eventually decided to find others to entertain him while he waits for Violet. Maybe he really doesn't need her in the end anyway.

> Grungy, Charismatic, Attractive, Manipulative, Likeable, Dark, Abused, Temperamental, Hateful, Liar,

Setirasuri Pharos

> Patient, Medium

>  Seti was born to Egyptian born Weaponry family. His father had been the sole heir to the company and his mother was a house maker and an architect. Seti was born the fourth child and youngest of his family. Though in total he is the ninth out of twelve children, the others being miscarriages, of course. Seti grew up a relatively normal life. So when he was about four years old and began to wake up many nights in a row complaining of someone being in his room at night, or of hearing voices of people who weren’t there. His parents had begun to worry. Someone suggested he go to see a therapist, perhaps there had been something that had been stressing him out, they suggested. So Seti’s parents did that. But nothing came of it in the end, the therapist had only suggested that he was perhaps hyper sensitive and that they were going to prescribe him something to help with the anxiety. And so Seti had grown up still hearing voices, still thinking there were people in rooms that weren’t actually there. And at times, seeing people who would disappear, or things that weren’t even people at all. This all continued on, slowly depriving Seti of sleep and sanity the older he got. Until one day, he had cracked under the pressure. It had been at school. He was in eleventh grade, the voices of the ghosts at the school had become too loud, and too hard for him to ignore any longer.  After his meltdown in class he was ordered to go to therapy. And for the next years of his life that was all Seti had ever done.

> Anxious, Sensitive, is often very down to earth and easy to get along with when he’s not having panic attacks.

Asher Delkari

> Patient, MMA Fighter

>  Asher was born into an abusive family where, after his mother abandoned the family his siblings would often beat up on the infant/toddler along with his father. During those days Asher was often seen to be malnourished and sickly, almost dying on several occasion and covered in marks and bruises from being hit and such. After some time a neighbor had caught the beaten and neglected Asher playing near a storm drain when his father came out and began to drag him back into the home. It was after that that the neighbor finally decided to break their silence and have someone sent to the house to check on the children. All seven of the kids living at the home were eventually removed from his fathers care and separated. Asher, being young and quite adorable was quickly adopted by a family. With this family the toddler grew up to become a happy  child over all. But during his teenage years mental illnesses began to disrupt these happier days. Thought with therapy Asher was able to keep himself stable and sane enough to continue functioning as normal. Asher still attends therapy even if these days he doesn’t need any, so much.

>Quick Tempered, Childish, Ambitious

Abunai Galilei

>  Shay’s new best friend, Detective

> Abunai was born to an Japanese father who taught martial arts and a German mother who grew up to become a crime scene investigator at the local police department. It was from them that she learned how to be a total and complete badass. When people ask if her father is her real father, it often bothers her, because obviously she doesn’t look that much like him at all. But he most certainly is. From him Abunai learned many effective moves that she applies in her practice of being a detective. After some strange cases of disappearances and murders happening at the local ‘murder house’ Abunai heard a family had recently moved in. Being the snoop that she is she has decided that now would be a good time to make a friend, and find out what’s going on in that house.

> Stern, Quick-thinking, Curious

Flavius Delacroix

> Musician

>  Born in an extremely wealthy family Flavius didn’t have to want for anything in life and grew up to be able to do whatever he had wanted. So when he told his parents that he wanted to sing for a band and play guitar, he wasn’t exactly taken seriously. A lot because, at the time, he had only been five years old. But as he grew older and this didn’t seem to change, his parents grew concerned. However they had grown to know Flavius as someone that you could not tell what to do. When he was thirteen Flavius ran away from home and joined a local band that used his natural born talents to their advantage before eventually abandoning him for someone they thought had been better. Ever since Flavius had spent the next few years of his life moping around playing for a new band, hoping to eventually land a job that would make him famous. Until then he stuck in some place where one of the most famous things around is a place called a Murder House. Which he had seen get some attention later after a family recently moved into it.

>  Stubborn, Moody, Oddball

Malakai La De Vander Louch Vegamere Pierce

> College Student, Ghost

> Malakai was born during an unknown date, to unknown parents in an unknown part of the world. It’s far to say that other than his name, no one ever knew much about him anyway. He just came, he saw, he died. Mostly because he became too curious with the ghost filled house that some of the people in town spoke of, while he was staying to finish up his remaining years in college. So with some friends he decided that, some years before the current family came along to live in it, and after the Harmon’s, that he would stay the night. It was more of a test of bravery, his college friends would say as they all broke into the creepy Murder House. Whoever could last the entire night would get some sort of respect. Not that Malakai cared about that, but he did want to see what all the hype was about. And too bad for him and several of his friends, they would all die that night, of their own stupidity.

> Trickster, Easily annoyed, Charismatic

[jmgamesyear2fmp]

Boxing two people, usually wearing protective gloves and other protective equipment such as hand wraps and mouthguards, throw punches at each other for an amount of time in a boxing ring. Boxing has been around for a large number of years dating back to ancient civilizations such as ancient Greeks and ancient Egyptians. In ancient Greece boxing was well developed but didn't have exactly the same rules as there is in today's boxing, as there were no weight classes which lead to heavier weights dominating people that were not matched or near their weight and also that there were no rounds and they would go on until a fighter admitted to defeat or that they could no longer continue to fight. In modern boxing, there are rules set in place to protect the health and wellbeing of the fighters as boxing is a dangerous sport. Even though it is dangerous there are safer regulations today as in ancient times there were not really any regulations in place to protect the fighters. I believe that some arena fighting video games were inspired by combat sports like boxing, MMA, and ancient gladiatorial battles.

[darth-flex-performance]

#Introduction

#  My name is JJ Rojas, some may know me as Darth Flex from the popular web series and podcast Geek Bros or even less from Darth Flex Performance. Who am I? There are many faces to this allegedly handsome Egyptian cinnamon colored geek. I am a United States Marine Corps veteran who has held an interest in health, fitness, nutrition, and combat sports since I got my first pube. Shortly after I was honorably discharged from the corps I pursued my education in exercise and sports science and a minor in Folklore and Mythology at Nova Southeastern University. I was lucky enough to be in a program at NSU that had association with pro MMA fighters, ultimately igniting the kindling I had for fitness. Once I graduated with my B.S. (not bullshit) in Exercise and Sports Science I was ready for the master program to roll on in.  My stint at NSU afforded me the opportunity to not only be involved in research for athletic performance, but also become a sports nutritionist through the International Society of Sports Nutrition. So why did i decide to pursue a book of this sort? There are two things that I love to brag about in this world, geek culture and science. God, do I love correcting people, which I guess makes me an asshole, this is of course reinforced by my girlfriend.  Through out my life I have noticed a disconnect between the geek culture and fitness, which is not 100 percent the case, but is damn well all too common in my eyes. While exercise science is a science it isn’t rocket heart surgery, it is easy to apply when the right guidelines or motivation is found. I doubt many of my geek brothers and sisters are going to sit through a whole four year program, specially if the courses don’t interest them. My goal is to get straight to it with out all the bullshit in between as well as put an entertaining twist to the information relative to geek culture. I have selflessly gone through the burden of being the oldest guy in all my classes, selfies, social media stories, tide pod challenges, dabbing, fins up, safe spaces, 72 genders, and countless nights of drinking the pain away to bring you this awesome science wrapped in fun geekiness. Full disclosure, I hope no one is easily offended. While I am a geek I am also an salty jar head, so I may, at times, express myself as so. While it is not my intension to offend any one, I do not know if you will #Triggered by something not meant to be insulting. Also I apologize in advance for the profanity and my dark humor. I am actually a very nice guy if you know me, If you ever get a chance, ask my fellow Geek Bro Juancho. This book can be read how ever you would like. Feel free to skip to what ever chapter you feel peaks your interest as the chapters are not dependent of each other. So sit, enjoy, and may the force be with you.

[topsportsasia]

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China and the Philippines were among the 15 countries represented at “ONE: Legendary Quest.” On the card were both mixed martial arts matches and ONE Super Series contests, featuring both kickboxing and Muay Thai.

ONE Championship held “ONE: Legendary Quest” at the Baoshan Arena in Shanghai, China on June 15, 2019. The fifth bout of the evening was between “King Kong Warrior” Fan Rong, 25, of Harbin, China and Sherif “The Shark” Mohammed, 36, of Cairo, Egypt.

Fan was one of the five hometown heroes who competed at “ONE: Legendary Quest” while Sherif solely represented Egypt. Australia, Brazil, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Morocco, Myanmar, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Scotland, South Korea, Thailand and the United Kingdom were also represented.

On June 12, 2019, Fan and Sherif had their official face-off during the press conference at Yunspace in Shanghai. The event was graced by ONE Championship Greater China chairman Hua Fung Teh and reigning ONE Women’s Strawweight World Champion “The Panda” Xiong Jing Nan, 31, of China.

Blue Corner

Born on September 6, 1982 in Cairo, Sherif has been competing professionally since 2012. He is a former Egyptian Fighting Championship Light Heavyweight Champion.

Representing Egyptian Top Team, Sherif joined ONE Championship in 2017. “ONE: Legendary Quest” marked his third bout in the promotion.

Red Corner

As an amateur fighter, Fan was a World Mixed Martial Arts Association Champion and as a professional athlete, he has been competing since 2016. He is training out of Longyun MMA Gym in Harbin under the tutelage of Jiang Long Yun.

“ONE: Legendary Quest” marked Fan’s second ONE Championship bout. Before joining the promotion, he competed in Wu Lin Feng, Dacheng Wuyi, Legend King Championship and Glory of Heroes.

Red Corner

Fan and Sherif competed in an MMA match in the middleweight division.

[RESULTS TO BE ADDED HERE]

Sherif: 9 wins, 4 losses

Fan: 12 wins, 2 losses

“ONE: Legendary Quest” Main Events

ONE Super Series debutante Alma Juniku, 18, of Australia challenged reigning ONE Atomweight Muay Thai World Champion Stamp Fairtex, 27, of Thailand in the main event.

[RESULTS TO BE ADDED HERE]

Agilan “Alligator” Thani, 23, of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia faced ONE Championship debutante Yoshihiro “Sexyama” Akiyama, 43, of Osaka, Japan in an MMA match in the welterweight division.

[RESULTS TO BE ADDED HERE]

Check all “ONE: Legendary Quest” results on Conan Daily.

[PHOTOS] China vs Egypt: Fan Rong, Sherif Mohamed fight at ‘ONE: Legendary Quest’ in Shanghai China and the Philippines were among the 15 countries represented at “ONE: Legendary Quest.” On the card were both mixed martial arts matches and ONE Super Series contests, featuring both kickboxing and Muay Thai.

[joseaesquea]

Reposted from @sultan__samir I WILL GO ANYWHERE AS LONG AS IT IS MOVING FORWARD. #fights #boxingtraining #boxersofinstagram #fighters #cardioworkout #fitnessjourney #fittness #boxerlove #newyorkcity #mma #mmatraining #ufc #bellator #fights #fittnessmodel #sports #sportsapparel #sportswear #nike #adidasoriginals #adidasoriginals #motivational #kickboxing #muythai #mmafighter #egyptian photo by the talented photographer @lacreativiteausein @technique2training - #regrann https://www.instagram.com/p/CBYzUW0JsyC/?igshid=ldhlj6u2yci7

[theramirezboysfighthouse-blog]

Yes. Wolfden BJJ & MMA San German, Puerto Rico New Egypt, NJ, that there is your Fight House team of Jenny "Scout" Hlubik (bottom left), Andrew "BearWolf" Hlubik (bottom right), and Rogers "Daddy Ninja" Ramirez (2nd from top left). We trained at the WolfDen BJJ with some amazing BJJ players and MMA fighters. LOVE HOW THIS SCHOOL DOESNT GIVE OUT BELTS EASILY. THE WHITE BELTS THERE WERE SO SOLID. INCREDIBLE. Had an amazing time with amazing people. OSS to all of you!!! We will be back soon but this time we will bring more New Egyptians! Now we got work to do. Gotta get this place up and ready for you guys! * It looks like Daddy Ninja is hiding his belt. I'm pretty sure hes a BJJ White Belt one stripe from Clay MMA in Browns Mills, NJ, but the way he is standing it kinda looks like a black belt since it blends into his Gi. Quick, everyone jump on him and beat him down! Join us. #theramirezboysfighthouse (at Wolfden MMA & BJJ) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bsq5kHyh7z4/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1n2htq9kvpmul

[big83boy]

@wawanprotein ・・・ The biggest match between Kuwaiti player eqab alenazi martial arts coach and self defense with Egyptian player Mohammed mansor the match will be 3/3/2017 in Kuwait crown plaza hotel albaraka hall are u ready المباره المنتظره بين رجل الصاعقة مدرب الفنون القتاليه والدفاع عن النفس في الحرس الوطني الكويتي 🇰🇼 عقاب العنزي والبطل المصري 🇪🇬 محمد منصور راح يكون تحدي ناري 3/3/2017 ليلية الأبطال #واوان_مارشيل_ارت_اكسبو @wawanmma @wawanmma @wawanmma #wawanmma #wawanprotein #ufc #wawanfederation #ufc206 #gfcmma #mma #ufcfightnight #kuwaitcity #fight #fighter #workout #mmafighter #boxing #selfdefense #Egypt #kuwait #kickboxing #manager #new #instagram #2017