#i have no idea what the Trademark Gimmick for that game would be

[radioactivepeasant]

Fic Prompts: Zelda Tuesday

At the very edge of the Gerudo desert, right at the foot of the mountains, a watchtower balanced between two climates. Sometimes blisteringly hot, other times bitingly cold; it was a post no Hylian in their right mind would volunteer for. Of course, soldiers had whispered that retired marshal Bram was a little bit mad as it was, which was why no one was particularly surprised when he chose the watchtower for his home.

Bram didn't take his duties all that seriously-

At least, not the duties expected of him by the crown.

He didn't spy on roving Gerudo bands from his tower, or collect tolls from the Rito to remind them that they were subject to the King of Hyrule. Instead, he spent hot days napping in the sun, and cool nights attending the only duty he found worth pursuing: teaching his daughter to protect herself.

Linkel was a stout-hearted lass, full of courage and mischief alike. But courage without strength and wisdom could only get a child so far before they ran into trouble of one kind or another. Bram didn't insist that Linkel practice swordsmanship, as the knights of Hyrule had nagged him to do when the mark of the Triforce appeared on her left hand. There were plenty of things a body could use to defend themselves in a pinch: hammers, axes, crossbows, even cutlery! He saw no reason to enforce old traditions under the guise of "destiny" A blinky triangle on a ten year old's hand was no reason for everyone to lose their heads!

Linkel delighted in trailing along behind her father at night, terrorizing the local chu's and driving moldorms away from the slopes where a travelers' stable sat. Frightened horses caused Situations, and Situations were -- as her father often complained -- a Hassle. During the day, she attended lessons at the stable with several Gerudo and merchants' children around her age, or scampered up and down the foothills like a rabbit with little oversight.

Or at least, she did, until a Sheikah mistakenly accused her father of spying for the kingdom of Holodrum, and everything just got needlessly complicated.

[floralseokjin]

The Zoom Halloween Party

⇢ and beyond timeline (after crystallised)

[saga index] [drabble index]

 kim seokjin x reader // slice of life, humour // 2,556 words  

a/n; thank you to all the anons who gave me ideas for this halloween drabble, it wouldn’t exist without you! 

“I have to say your costumes are pretty lame this year, you guys.”

“We’re having a Halloween party over fucking zoom, forgive us for not going all out.” 

Seokjin bit straight away, unable to help it. He and Namjoon were like cat and mouse at all times, but even you had to admit to being offended by your friend’s dismissal. 

Halloween was finally here, and while you couldn’t celebrate in person together, the marvels of technology were letting you celebrate virtually – although this was more like a Halloween hang out than a Halloween party. 

“I’m just saying,” Namjoon shrugged. “Hoseok went all out for his.” 

You looked over at Hoseok’s screen, watching him smile smugly. You had to admit he made a great Joker, but it was also the year 2020... He and his girlfriend, Nora were like two years behind with the whole Joker and Harley Quinn gimmick, it was old now. 

Seokjin rolled his eyes, willing to argue black and blue. “It’s only good because his mom helped him with the makeup.” 

“Oh shut up, you’re just jealous because me and Hoseok will win best dressed tonight!” Nora scoffed under Hoseok in her own little screen. 

Pouting like a baby, your boyfriend crossed his arms. “I’m not voting for you.” 

“If anything, I should win. I make a mighty fine Batman.” 

Attention back on Namjoon now, you all had to agree. But maybe that was because everyone was feeling sorry for him tonight. He was after all, the only single one amongst you. There was Jin and you, Lina and Jimin, Hoseok and Nora, and even though Sandeul was on his own tonight, he had Jess, who was working the night shift tonight. Two months ago there had also been Namjoon and Hana, but not anymore... Let’s just say Namjoon wasn’t having the best of time lately... Getting dumped during a pandemic wasn’t ideal. So he’d paired with Hobi and Nora tonight in some sort of DC-esque collab. He was definitely winning best dressed tonight, but maybe he’d see it as a pity vote… 

“You’re body looks amazing in that suit, Joon,” you complimented, hearing Lina hum in supportive agreement. 

“Hey!” Seokjin exclaimed, sounding mighty offended as he looked your way. You were smushed together on the couch, the takeout you’d ordered on your laps, but you were pretty full now, a belly full of wine already. 

“The devil and an angel though.” Jimin’s voice sounded awfully judgemental. “Come on guys, so basic.” 

“Well, who the hell did you to come as?” Seokjin was loud. 

“Zombie Jim Halpert and Pam Beesly,” Lina replied as if your boyfriend was dumb. 

“Lame,” Seokjin scoffed. “Half of these guys haven’t even watched The Office.” 

“It’s a way more original idea than yours.”

You scoffed. “Um, this is the epitome of everyone’s sexual fantasy, I’ll have you know.” 

“Whose?!” Lina roared, wrinkling her nose. She and Jimin were also squished together, but on his bed, the camera angle giving you an amazing shot of their chins... Not that you would tell your best friend that, of course. 

“We all know what they’re doing after this then,” Sanduel stated. He was dressed as some character from a game he and Seokjin played (a lot.) Nerds.  

“Stop,” Hoseok whined. “Does that mean you guys fucked as The Addams family couple last year?”

“Of course it does,” Namjoon replied matter-of-factly. 

“Jesus.” 

Ah yes, you two really had out done yourselves last year for Namjoon and Hoseok’s joint Halloween party. Thinking about it maybe your devil and angel costumes were quite lame this year…

“As if you didn’t guess,” Lina laughed. “They were reciting all those weird lines practically dry humping in the kitchen at one point.” 

That was your cue, slamming into action, although as luck would have it you had re-watched The Addams Family two nights ago. You gripped Seokjin’s face, yanking him to look at you. “Seokjin, last night you were unhinged.” You began dramatically. “You were like some desperate, howling demon. You frightened me.” A pause for effect. “Do it again!” 

Seokjin took your hand, in character immediately. He leaned down to kiss your knuckles. “Cara mia.” 

You opened your mouth, ready to purr out mon cher in your best French accent but you were interrupted by Namjoon’s gagging noises. “That’s it, I’m leaving.” 

Seokjin snapped his head around, unamused. “Bye.” 

Everyone laughed… just before Hoseok sighed. “Aw, this makes me so depressed. I miss last year, when things were simpler.” 

“This was the worst year to officially become an adult.” Nora joined in with a whine. 

They were 100% correct. There couldn’t have been a worse year to graduate… The past few months had been so stressful but thankfully you were now in a much more stable place. Granted, you hadn’t been able to start the post-graduate internship you’d bagged right before the pandemic hit yet but eventually it would happen, and in the meantime you still had your retail job – and your savings. 

Seokjin had truly lucked out, although his job at his father’s company had been set in stone since high school. He was working remotely until the end of the year (hopefully), rocking that business on top, casual down bottom fashion that he was so gleefully fond of – think a dress shirt and sweatpants ensemble – but you were so incredibly proud of him for adjusting so well after this shitfest of a year. He was your sexy, serious businessman. 

Your friends hadn’t been as lucky though – well, mainly Hoseok and Namjoon who had recently moved back home with their parents while they job hunted. (That’s why the former and Nora were on separate screens – she still lived close by for work.) Lina hated her new job and Jimin still had a year left at college, so maybe he was better off at the moment... Sanduel and Jess were okay too, and had recently moved in with one another, leaving you and Seokjin to… follow suit… 

It came as a surprise to you both, but it made more sense than the two of you living alone. You’d already grown used to it during those couple of months of lockdown at the start of the year and it felt weird after he’d left... It was a big step, but an easy one once you’d found the most perfect apartment to rent together. (You couldn’t officially live with one another in that shoebox of an old apartment, but it had been sad to leave it – you’d shared so many good times there.) It had only been about six weeks since you’d become official roomies, but you were loving every second of domestic bliss. Despite this crazy year, things were on the up, and you were very happy. 

“Now we’re freshly graduated bums.” Namjoon moaned, knocking back the last of his beer.

Seokjin laughed. “Speak for yourself.” 

“We can’t all have a CEO for a dad,” Namjoon shot. 

“That sounds like a you problem.” 

You pushed at your boyfriend’s shoulder, silently telling him to behave. Where was the sympathy for his heartbroken friend?

“At least you’re not stuck doing online classes.” Jimin piped up. 

“I’d actually kill to be back there,” Namjoon chuckled. “I’m sick of receiving rejection emails.” 

“Don’t give up hope, bro.” Hoseok told him. “I have an interview next week so fingers crossed.” 

Nora squealed. “I hope you get it, babe. You need to get your ass back here. I miss you.” 

You all missed him. And Namjoon. Even if you couldn’t all hang out like you were once able to, it was strange to think they were both living in different cities now. Last year seemed like an eternity ago, all you had were memories and even then they were murky. 

“Guys, please,” Namjoon wailed, forehead hitting the screen as he threw forward dramatically. “One of us is single here.” 

“Sorry.” 

In fact, you all felt the need to apologise, a string of them following for no real reason other than you felt really bad for the guy. You knew he’d find a job soon, that wasn’t the problem really – whatever the company they’d be a fool to turn him down – you were just concerned about his mood. Getting dumped had come out of the blue so he was still adjusting, all while his life turned upside down in other ways too. 

He hadn’t lost all sense of humour though, his trademark smirk growing across his face a few moments later. “So who will end up fucking on camera first?” 

Amongst the groans, Sanduel scoffed. “Probably Mr and Mrs. Devil.” 

“I’m an angel,” you corrected, a glass of wine back in your hand now. “Also, why would we fuck on camera? You guys don’t deserve the show.” 

“God, you’re so drunk,” Lina screeched. She wasn’t exactly sober herself. Beside her Jimin winced at the volume. 

“Of course I’m drunk, Lina, this is the first proper chance I’ve had in months.” Getting drunk alone was pretty miserable, now you had an excuse. 

“So it’s definitely them who’ll start fucking first…” Hoseok muttered. 

Seokjin heard him loud and clear though. He hooked his arm around your shoulders, pulling you against him. “Yeah if we leave randomly you know this angel got horny for some devil dick.” 

“Seokjin!” You exclaimed, pushing at his chest. He just laughed, reaching down to kiss you. 

He did look mighty fine dressed as a devil though. Yeah, the red cape was basic but so were your angel wings and halo, but with his dark hair pushed back above his forehead, two red devil horns visible and his eyeshadow off the scale (your doing), he made a very, very sexy Satan! 

Jimin pulled a face. “You’re actually going to fuck in those costumes, aren’t you?” 

“Of course we are.” Seokjin rolled his eyes. “That’s what Halloween’s all about.” 

“No, it’s not,” Nora laughed. 

“I don’t know why you’re all so surprised,” Sandeul sighed before shovelling down some candy corn. 

“You know them better than anyone,” Namjoon chuckled. 

“I was the first to know! Sworn to secrecy for weeks!”

“Yeah, and she didn’t tell me for so long,” Lina whined. Even though it was ages ago now you were still pretty sure she was salty about it. 

Hoseok snickered. “It was because she was embarrassed to be fucking him.” 

You scoffed, about to refute his claims but Sanduel had more to say apparently. “And then I had to deal with Jin moping around when she dumped him for that basketball player.” 

“She didn’t dump me,” Seokjin protested. “We won’t together then.” 

“Bro, you were still moping though.” 

“Awh, you guys,” you whined, running your fingers through the hair on the back of Seokjin’s head. “Stop teasing him.” You leaned in to kiss his cheek but he moved, stealing one from your lips instead. 

“Great Deul, you’ve started them off again.” Hoseok moaned. 

“I don’t care anyway. The amount of times I’ve heard them going at it has made me immune.” 

“Sanduel, we’re not that bad!” You complained, leaning forward to place your glass down on the coffee table. 

Seokjin had your back. “As if we haven’t heard you and Jess fuck before.” 

That however was not at all interesting to your friends though. They blatantly ignored it for a more interesting direction of topic.  

“Did you ever catch them?” Jimin asked, sounding weirdly excited. 

“No actually, which is baffling.” 

“You nearly did – multiple times,” Seokjin informed him, which instantly turned Sanduel grey. Not bothered, my ass. 

“Why are you guys so obsessed with our sex life?” You whined loudly. Was theirs that boring? 

“Ooo, let’s play a game!!” Lina exploded suddenly, sitting up, her head now cut off from the screen. “Who’s the freakiest!!!” 

Seokjin turned to you gleefully. “We got this in the bag, babe.” 

In your eyes, the questions were quite tame, so yes, you and Seokjin really were scoring first place left and right. Although you had a hunch Lina was holding back information. As her best friend you knew what she was like and she was being awfully quiet for someone who’d suggested the game… 

“Where’s the weirdest place you’ve ever boned?” Nora asked, six questions in. 

Seokjin didn’t even need a second. “Namjoon’s bedroom.” Your eyes bulged immediately, surprised he’d gone there. 

“What?” Namjoon choked. 

“Sorry, man. It just kinda happened.” Seokjin glanced at you, deeply amused. Poor Namjoon didn’t need more bad news. 

“You guys have fucked in my bedroom?” 

“Well, technically it’s not your bedroom anymore, but yeah,” you shrugged.  

“When?” 

The third degree was real. “A while back.”  

“What the fuck you guys,” he groaned, his face a picture. “And you didn’t think to tell me?” 

“You don’t even know the half of it.” Lina couldn’t help but add. 

“You, be quiet!” You warned, although you knew she wouldn’t spill. Your secret was safe with her. 

Namjoon was looking more and more scared by the second. “What the fuck did you guys do in there?” Seokjin just laughed loudly. “Did you at least clean up?” He got no reply. He was deadly serious with his next question. “Did you make Ryan watch?” 

“Namjoon!” Seokjin cried, practically wiping tears from your eyes. Maybe he was more drunk than you… You hadn’t realised. “He’s a stuffed animal.” 

“That plush is all I have now.” 

“Pity, the guy’s recently been dumped. This is bullying,” Hoseok interrupted, sticking up for his friend. 

“It’s not,” your boyfriend insisted. 

“Aw, Namjoon, I’m sorry,” you apologised, feeling guilty now. How could you make it up to him? “When all this is over you can come over and fuck someone in our bedroom.” 

“What,” Seokjin protested. You ignored him. 

“Who though?” Namjoon asked, sounding sad. 

“You’ll meet someone new soon enough.” Lina reassured him. “You’re any girls dream guy.”  

He perked up at that. “You think so?”

“Legit, man,” Jimin joined in. 

“Wait,” Sandeul interrupted, seemingly realising something. “Is the costume roleplay exclusive to Halloween?” 

… Of course the conversation was back on you and Jin…

“Why?” You asked. 

“Because Namjoon had a fancy dress party for his birthday last year…” 

Seokjin shrugged. “Any celebration.” 

Sanduel instantly looked disgusted. “So you guys fucked as The Incredibles couple?” 

You and Seokjin didn’t reply, but your faces said it all. 

Namjoon groaned loudly. “I want to scoop my brain out.” Then he thought of something. “Was it in my bedroom?” 

“Noooo!” 

“Yes.” 

You both replied at the same time and you pushed Seokjin. Now he was just purposely teasing his friend. 

“Who’s lying?” Namjoon demanded, but Sanduel was too busy going through it, distracting you all. 

“The Incredibles is my favourite childhood movie, man, now I feel gross. I can’t watch it ever again because I’ll imagine you two trying to superhero fuck.” 

Your friends were way too dramatic. It wasn’t even a big deal, they were making it out to be way kinkier than it was, and Seokjin wasn’t helping matters. You were literally just having normal sex dressed up. That’s all. 

“This game has taught me I’m best friends with a bunch of vanilla ice creams,” Seokjin tutted. “It’s called having fun. Something you guys can’t seem to do.” 

“You all suck!” You agreed. 

Hm, maybe you were just as guilty as your boyfriend… It was just too damn amusing goading your friends… 

[stachehand]

Sonic the Hedgehog game stage ideas

When I think of stages for future Sonic the Hedgehog games, all I really ask for are the kind that are fantastical and colourful in aesthetic, put alien-looking spins on what look like familiar locales, tell stories of the worlds that Sonic and friends explore through sub-text, and, for the final zones, evoke dread through the crazy designs put together by Robotnik, or some other villain’s desecration of sacred land with their trademark.

Like, can’t we have a 3D Sonic games that has lively worlds like what we see in the Sonic Advance trilogy or the Sonic Rush duology?

I thought of my own zone ideas for my imaginary Sonic game, Sonic Nomads. They’re rough, and take inspiration from various places, but they are what they are.

- A mountainous region following an airborne railway and a fleet of ships, like Rail Canyon, but with added interaction with clouds and some boats on a lake below.

- A Green Hill-type place inspired by Niagara Falls, because I would really like a stage like that, with enormous bodies of water to explore, caves behind waterfalls, platform near waterfalls, boats traveling around them, steep slopes and woods on top of the hills.

- An extreme sports city with rows of advertisement posters, rails that sharply turn along stairways, quarter-pipes down the sides of buildings, parkour billboards, parachute gliding sections and giant bicycle wheel platforms.

- A golden countryside forest where twilight is perpetual, the trees are massive enough to act as quarter pipes and hold treehouses and decks as platforms, leaves can be ridden along the air and flowerbeds are enchanted walkways.

- A video game and game of skill-based carnival with gimmicks centered around pushing buttons to activate rides, scoring points to determine what pathways you’ll access, platforming across tickets and entering zones where the graphics turn 16-bit.

- A haunted palace filled with ghosts, invisible walls and platforms, gravity-defying hallways and balconies and plenty of mirror portals shifting between light and dark.

- A desert where deadly sandstorms threaten to tear you apart, underground caves are constantly trying to swallow you, cacti hide among dunes that shrink and grow and spiky armoured vehicles rule.

- A snowy mountain with a Japanese flair, filled with mirages, blizzards that push you on a set path through the air, dragon statues to grind or parkour on and a fireworks display to climb up.

- A mine where rock slides occur to provide platforms, crystals that influence the shape of the area are spread about, oil spouts provide a means to grind and shifting metal platforms are abundant.

- A coast where typhoons move you and other stuff through the air, tsunamis occur regularly, palm trees are springy and gigantic sea creatures act as platforms to help with crossing the sea.

- A water park labyrinth where bubbles take you for a ride up, inside or on top of them, water slide half-pipes can either be your friend or your enemy, tube mazes attempt to disorient you and giant buckets can open other pathways.

- An underground jungle that calls back to an ancient civilization with old booby traps, crazy bridges across enormous gaps, big mounds that take the form of creatures at the top and pits inhabited by kaiju-like abominations.

- A musical instrument-themed factory where piano key roads, saxophone launchers, electric guitar rails to grind on and beatbox launching musical notes to jump across dominate every corner.

- A volcanic cyberspace area where fiery traps materialize here and there, it rains pixels that corrupt the landscape, ramps are formed from digital constructs and Internet propaganda fills the infernal sky.

- A flying fortress built by Robotnik with clock parts all over the place, minute and hour hands to grind on, flipping hourglass platforms, floor and wall-electrifying alarms and pocket watches that create time-slowing fields.

- A casino in outer space with coin mounds to parkour on and gain momentum from, giant slot reel conveyor belts, pinball tables with a wide variety of pathways to lead you to and low-gravity craps tables with dice that can launch you over to other tables.

- A Chinese demon temple Death Egg-type base built by Robotnik on a nearby moon, with weaponized walls, moats of purple lava, Badnik manufacturing plants where the doctor has set up some really deadly security measures, blade-covered towers, demonic speed traps and self-indulgent fun zones.

- A celestial void where the final boss battle against Robotnik and a godly entity takes place, capping off the adventure of Sonic, his friends and their newest ally.

That’s a grand total of 18 zone ideas. 14 of these would have 2 acts each, the 1st and 17th would have 3 acts, the 1st having an opening tutorial act, and the 17th being a grand finale for the regular platforming acts, while the 12th and 18th/final stages would both be 1 act, as the former is where a critical development in Sonic Nomads’ story would play out, and the latter exists only for the game’s last fight.

[unpopularly-opinionated]

Nintendo is like 85% of the reasons why I hate things like patents, trademarks, and copyright law in general.

It strangely feels very anti-free market because the whole point to being a free market is that you’re able to hold your product out to the public and say “here mine is better than theirs” and have people decide to agree with you and buy your product over someone else’s.

Copyright laws stand in the way of innovation and development because it gives people legal ownership over an idea, something which should be free for anyone to have and improve upon. If someone takes your idea and makes it better and it sells better than yours, then make yours better. Plain and simple.

It’s always hyped and wow’d when Nintendo finally decides to grace us with some ‘innovation’ in Pokemon, but it’s always a matter of too little too late. Not to mention, they always seem to go one step forward and one step back, too afraid to change the magic formula which ultimately leaves the product feeling stagnate.

Like oh this is cool, some Pokemon have an extra evolution? I can’t wait to see what other Pokemon get one of these in the next ga--and they’re gone. Well okay, but Z-moves are pretty cool, right? Can’t wait to see what new Z-moves they come up wi--and those are gone too. Wait really, the gimmick now is that they set the scale to 200%? But then they have the audacity to shutdown fan-made Pokemon games that dare to break the formula.

Like, the only moderately valid argument for copyright laws that I’ve seen is that it would over-saturate the market with cheap knockoffs of every product out there, but again there will always be a better product. It doesn’t matter if there are 300 different kinds of rubik’s cubes in the world, one will always turn more easily, or be marketed better, or be made by a more-liked company, etc.

In short, copyright laws should be abolished to promote innovation and de-incentivize product stagnation.

[beardycarrot]

I’m the world’s worst as predicting things or having my hopes come true, but that’s not gonna stop me from weighing in on tomorrow’s Pokemon Direct!

We are, obviously, going to see some new Gen 8 Pokemon. That’s a given. I personally hope we don’t see the evolved forms of the starters, as I like evolutions to be a surprise when I play the games... buuuut, I’m pretty sure it will be impossible for me to use the internet for the next five months without it being spoiled for me, so whatever.

As always, I want... no, I NEED more butterfly and moth Pokemon, and some cute Grass-types. Where my hummingbirds, dolphins, and capybaras at? Evolutions of existing Pokemon please? I’m actually legitimately expecting not one, but TWO new Eeveelutions tomorrow. Ground and Ghost baby, c’mon let’s see ‘em! I also expect there to be some new fairly humanoid Fairy-types, since it’s based on the UK... and by that same token, some kind of big green wyvern. Make it happen, Game Freak!

I legitimately don’t know whether Galar forms will be a thing. I think Alolan forms were an elegant solution to shining a spotlight on older Pokemon, and have with every new game been mad that we’re not getting new Shellos and Gastrodon forms... so yeah, I’m all for it. Gimme a Galarian Zangoose that looks like a badger, a highland Miltank, a Stantler with a face that’s anything but Stantler’s current face. I feel like, if they did a version of variant forms, it wouldn’t be quite how Alolan forms worked... but I would be completely happy if it was.

I’m most curious about this game’s evil team. Aside from Team Magma’s cute costumes, I haven’t really cared for any of the non-Team Rocket bad guys... right up until Team Skull, who were by far my favorite thing about Sun/Moon. The new team could be pretty much anything... if you want to go by British stereotypes, maybe football hooligans or Oliver Twist-style street urchins. Maybe an aristocratic secret society that hunts Pokemon for sport, complete with Slowpoke heads mounted as trophies all over their hideout. An ancient order of knights? The logos for the game also makes it feel like there could be two teams again.

I’m pretty sure we’ll be given a more in-depth look at the stadiums that seem to be replacing the gyms. I expect it to culminate in a Pokemon battle with some kind of leader... but what will lead up to that? Probably not sports-based minigames, probably not just plain battles against other trainers... so what else fits? The soccer uniform your character wears in the stadiums, the stadiums themselves, and the Japanese logos for the games all bear this swirly, spiky red and blue pokeball symbol:

What does it mean? Well... the same spot in the logos for the last two generations bore the symbols for mega evolution and Z crystals, so it’s probably a pretty big deal. As I said back before the Gen 8 reveal in February, the term Alter Genesis had been trademarked in Japan, which I predicted would be either the name of a TCG set or some new gameplay mechanic. As it turns out... yeah, it’s a TCG set. If that symbol is related to the stadium gameplay, then we might not be getting a new let’s put something on kids’ wrists that isn’t a Yokai Watch gameplay gimmick... which is perfectly fine by me.

It kinda reminds me of rotation battles, with the three things swirling inside of it. Maybe the stadiums will feature battles using entire teams of Pokemon? What’s interesting is that they’re swirling freely between the red and blue portions... which in my mind, symbolizes two different teams. Maybe the mechanic will involve the Pokemon you send out switching sides throughout the battle? That would actually be pretty cool... It would prevent either side from being overpowered, since sometimes you would have to use your opponent’s Pokemon while they use yours. The battle would have to be based on points rather than knocking out the other team though, and that’s dangerously close to contest territory for my taste.

It’s also possible that it’s a traditional battle with all the Pokemon involved shuffled between the participants... but that feels like it would really undermine the premise of the series, and isn’t a very interesting gimmick. What could it be, then? For all I know it’s a big game of battle chess and the meaning behind the symbol only makes sense once you’ve seen it in action. Maybe it’s like a canine agility course and the symbol depicts the trainers calling out to their Pokemon with instructions?? Yeah I have no idea what it could be.

They also recently filed a trademark for the term Pokegenic... it’s entirely possible that it related to the new Pokemon apps and games introduced at that event last week and unrelated to the main series. I’m only mentioning it because Pokegenic sounds like photogenic, and could be a photography-centric replacement for the “bonding with your Pokemon” modes that have been in the last two games... though whatever it is, that’s an absolutely terrible name for it. Right up there with Gen 4′s Poketch. People got all excited when Armored Mewtwo was trademarked, since the games are called Sword and Shield, before realizing that it was in relation to the upcoming CG Pokemon movie.

Which brings me to my final point: why Sword and Shield? Ever since Gen 2 the game names have referred to what people call the “box legendaries”, which we’ll probably be seeing tomorrow... but lately, they’ve also tied into the games a bit. Black/White’s plot is squarely focused on morality and extremism, X/Y’s big focus is mega evolution, which is implied to be genetic in nature... I probably don’t have to explain Sun/Moon. So, what about Sword/Shield? Will there be equippable weapons and armor, distinct from held items? Will there be a Fire Emblem-style weapon triangle to deal with in addition to existing type matchups?

Now that I’ve gone on the record with all of that, it’s guaranteed that none of it will be even close to what we’ll see tomorrow, so you can look at all the things I didn’t say for clues as to what the direct will focus on.

[closetofanxiety]

NXT to the Main Roster: A Haphazard Examination, Part 2 (2016)

More wrestlers went from NXT to the main roster(s) in 2016 than in any other year, so I want to examine it separately in my ongoing question to determine whether getting a coveted spot on Raw or Smackdown (or a less coveted spot on 205 Live) likely means stagnation and disappointment. Again, the grades here are for the way these wrestlers have been presented to the WWE audience, not for the wrestlers themselves. Except, I guess, for the F handed out to Big Cass.

Sami Zayn

Call-up date: January 24. The perfect underdog babyface at the top of the card in NXT (a role they’re currently trying to give Johnny Gargano), Zayn has had a respectable but mostly unspectacular run on the big shows. While they were never going to build main event storylines around him the way NXT did, after his initial feud with eternal lifemate Kevin Owens, he kind of drifted around the middle of the pack without a clear character or motivation. Hampered by injuries, his heel turn was initially masterfully handled: by saving Kevin Owens from Shane McMahon, Zayn was, in the immediate aftermath, allowed to seem conflicted, uncertain, and anxious about what he’d done. It looked like there was going to be real character development, and then, in a few months, he was challenging Bobby Lashley to obstacle course races. 

Grade: C

Eva Marie

Call-up date: March 28. WE DIDN’T DESERVE HER. She could have been a sensational, crowd-baiting heel, as she was LOATHED by the super nerds in the WWE audience, who hated that she couldn’t wrestle and was only getting pushed for her looks. I mean, the same was true of Lex Luger ZING. Anyway, it wasn’t too be, and we’re left to wonder what could have been.

Grade: F/Incomplete

Baron Corbin

Call-up date: April 3. Big Banter has grown into the role that is probably the top-dollar best he can hope for in the WWE: a sneering heel near the top of the midcard who can talk well and wrestle well. He’s a plug-and-play guy for babyfaces who are being kept on the stove while the main event picture sorts itself out, and he does great at it. I saw Baron Corbin wrestle Tommy Dreamer at an NXT show in Albany once and thought, “This guy suxxxx.” But he has proved me wrong! Good for Big Breakfast Constable Corbin.

Grade: B+

Enzo Amore

Call-up date: April 4. I’ll go on record as saying he was used well as the shitty heel champion in 205 Live. Everyone hated him, and that was his role. That was probably his ceiling: top hate figure on the ‘C’ show, but we’ll never know.

Grade: F/Incomplete

Big Cass

Call-up date: April 4. His attitude and behavior must have really been something for Vince McMahon, The Big Man Liker, to so quickly part with a big man who could talk and was at least more adept in the ring than, say, the Great Khali. After the split with Enzo, they didn’t really seem to know what they were doing with him, so I’m not entirely sure we missed out on a legendary career or anything.

Grade: F/Incomplete

Apollo Crews

Call-up date: April 4. This decision remains a head scratcher. Crews made his NXT TV debut on August 22, 2015, and in less than eight months, was debuting on Raw. Although he’s an incredibly talented wrestler, I don’t know that his NXT stint was quite the rocket to the top that would justify this. Since his debut, he’s been totally lost in the shuffle and without a discernible character. His most significant match to date was a losing bid for the Intercontinental championship against The Miz on an episode of Smackdown. The Titus Worldwide stuff has helped, but not much.

Grade: C-/D+

Aiden English

Call-up date: April 7. Rusev DAAAAYYYEH. If it weren’t for his alliance with Big Matchka, English would be staring down the barrel of a D+. Initially arrived on the main roster as a tag team with Simon Gotch, the two had an undistinguished run that included Smackdown tag title tournament losses to the Hype Bros and Breezango. Now that he’s the guy who stiffly raps before Rusev comes out, English is basking in his Mizdow Moment. When it ends, though, what will become of the Operatic Superstar?

Grade: C-

Simon Gotch

Call-up date: April 7. His gimmick had a lot of potential: the super old-timey wrestler in a postmodern, post-kayfabe world. It never really got off the ground, though, and while his team with Aiden English worked at Full Sail, Vince’s dim view of tag teams generally, plus the material they were given, meant it didn’t have much of a shot on the big stage. WWE let the trademark on his name expire, which tells you a lot.

Grade: F

Dana Brooke

Call-up date: May 9. After kind of a hot start that I’ve largely forgotten - she was heel Charlotte’s protege, remember? - she quickly settled into the rut of main roster women’s booking, which tends to consist of two women fighting over the title and then everyone else forming an amorphous backdrop, occasionally emerging for random six-person tags involving the main eventers. Dana did eliminate Kairi Sane at the first-ever Women’s Royal Rumble, so that’s something, I guess. Since November, she’s been one of the few people in the company with a manager role, as an Alexandra York figure in Titus Worldwide. 

Grade: C-

Mojo Rawley

Call-up date: July 24. Did you know Zack Ryder’s been in the WWE system since 2006? He’s incredible. He’s like one of those NBA guys who you see playing five minutes in a playoff game, years after you assumed they had retired. Anyway, Mojo Rawley. He’s done as well as he’s ever likely to do, destroying Ryder after a heel turn, feuding with No Way Jose, and no longer being hyped. His main roster run hasn’t been disappointing, largely because his NXT run was about the same thing, minus the heel turn.

Grade: C

Nia Jax

Call-up date: July 25. Rock’s cousin or no, she’s managed to remain above the midcard scrum in the women’s division by having a unique look, as the only credible monster in the locker room. She has the problem that all monsters have sooner or later, which is: what do they do after getting beaten? In her case, it was a clumsy face turn in a bullying-themed angle with Alexa Bliss that didn’t do much for either woman. Still, because of her size and ability, she’s always somewhere near the top of the card, something that’s unlikely to change.

Grade: B

Finn Bálor

Call-up date: July 25. To my mind, he’s one of the few wrestlers who’s been better served on the main roster than he was in NXT. He’s the longest-reigning NXT champion so far, but his tenure there seems largely forgettable apart from his Beast in the East match against Kevin Owens and the bloodbath against Samoa Joe at Takeover: Dallas. On the main roster, he’s regularly near the top of the card, with his painted demon character receiving the holy-shit treatment, as we saw at SummerSlam. He’s become one of their most recognizable stars and the company clearly loves him.

Grade: A

Alexa Bliss

Call-up date: July 26. One of the best examples I can think of that demonstrates how a turn can elevate a wrestler, she went from boring, sparkly cheerleader to the top woman in NXT by becoming a heel. Initially the manager of the lookalike midcard tag team of Make and Blurphy, it was clear from the start she was bound for greater things. She’s been the signal success story of the WWE System in developing stars, as opposed to repackaging stars from the indies, Japan, and Mexico: Bliss is, if not quite a mainstream star, one of the most recognizable women in the company, constantly on top of the women’s roster, and winning raves for her incredible microphone work. Nerds who complain she isn’t good at wrestling probably wouldn’t have understood Abdullah the Butcher either.

Grade: A+

Carmella

Call-up date: July 26. OH THE IRONY! When she managed Enzo and Big Cass in NXT, she was despised by the Full Sail nerds, who would chant “you can’t wrestle” at her. Two years later, and here we are: Real1 is making unlistenable hip hop tracks for his Instagram stories, Big Cazz is set to make his indie debut for Big Time Wrestling in Spartanburg, S.C., and Carmella is coming off a 131-day run as Smackdown Women’s Champion, having beaten Asuka in matches on pay-per-view and free TV. She’s not at Alexa’s level as a heel - not many people are - but she’s done a great job of establishing herself in a women’s roster that suffers from way too many bland characters and storylines.

Grade: B+/A-

Jason Jordan

Call-up date: August 2. Listen, Vince hates tag teams. American Alpha was a red-hot team in NXT, where they got over thanks to their phenomenal work inside the ring. But even there, they were kind of bland as individuals. On the main roster, where tag teams rarely last, this spelled trouble. Jordan has been hampered by injuries, but even without that he’s a man adrift, the highlight of his tenure so far being the kayfabe revelation that he’s Kurt Angle’s son, which has mostly been treated as an afterthought. 

Grade: D

Chad Gable

Call-up date: August 2. Second verse, same as the first. They tried to spark some of that American Alpha magic after disbanding American Alpha by pairing Gable with Shelton Benjamin, with predictable results. I don’t think Gable’s been on television since May, and he’s not injured. He apparently feuded with Mike Kanellis on Main Event back in June, to give you some idea. He taped a thing for WWE’s social media channels with amateur wrestling god Dan Gable, which I liked, so there’s that.

Grade: D

Bayley

Call-up date: August 22. I will admit here that I did not “get” her gimmick in NXT. It just always seemed vaguely unsettling, and now we know that it led to the Cult of Izzy. That aside, she had an undeniable connection with the audience, largely thanks to her palpable enthusiasm and tremendous in-ring skill. I never really bought the commonplace line that she could become the female John Cena, mostly because I think that underestimates how much of Cena’s appeal comes from the fact that half the audience hates him. But she’s a true-blue babyface in a company that doesn’t really know what to do with true-blue babyfaces, and so her main roster stint has been something of a disappointment. It’s weirdly fitting that she’s locked into this seemingly endless frenemies storyline with Sasha Banks, another woman who was adored in NXT and who hasn’t really found her footing on the main roster.

Grade: C

Rich Swann

Call-up date: September 19. He had his moments in 205 Live, but it was clear his off-kilter personality and presentation were not what they had in mind as the Face of the Division. They were trying to mold him into what they have with Mustafa Ali or Cedric Alexander, when they would have been better off trying to make Swann the Dean Ambrose of the cruiserweights. Instead, well, we know what happened instead.

Grade: F/Incomplete

Austin Aries

Call-up date: December 18. I have a theory that Vince McMahon thought Austin Aries was Bobby Roode, and that when they hired the real Bobby Roode, Vince immediately said, “Well, then who the fuck is this guy?” 

Grade: F

[kaibutsushidousha]

Artbook Data - Tsumugi Shirogane

Best girl doesn’t disappoint.

Seiyuu’s comment: Mikako Komatsu

She looks very much like a class representative, so I first expected her to be like a cool big sis, but when I got to play her it turned out she was much instable character, always getting overexcited about the things she like. I didn’t have much experience with this type of character, so I had a lot of fun with her. I’m really looking forward to play this game for myself.

Kodaka’s comment: The fanatic mind hidden in “plain” sight

She’s named “Shirogane” because it’s a name gives sort of a “honours student” vibe and “Tsumugi” because she is the one who weaves the story. This is a verbal representation of her mentality that allowed the killing games to continue. The keyword for her design was “honours student-like” and for her personality was “cringey otaku”. I personally wanted her to have vaguely likeable features without looking any special, but if I made her too lacking in personality it would get suspicious, so I tried to make her stand out from time to time while still keeping her plainness as her central gimmick and find this balance was extremely difficult.

The “Super High School Level Cosplayer” characterization was established starting from its final punchline: the alternating transformations. Reverse-engeneering from this established conclusion, we defined her as a cosplayer. And then we made her mixing this with the vaguely-defined “honours student” keyword we set from before. I had quite a tough time trying to decide how her “true personality” sprite, how it should be different from her regular sprites, what indications should I give to the seiyuu and stuff. I wanted her to be something more than just threatening... So we made her in a way she feels like an escalation of the outside world’s worldbuilding, a world hopelessly obsessed with DanganRonpa.

She has some “fun cosplay stories” in the first half of the story and her free time events. These were all stories I got by interviewing real cosplayers. I think that’s  the first time I actually interviewed someone to make a character. But it was very worth it, seeing how well-liked she is among the cosplayers.

By the way, about her cosplays of past characters, I really wanted to include the the characters from the DanganRonpa 3 anime. However, we didn’t have enough budget nor ready sprites, so my idea was almost immediately rejected. We’re limited to videogames, 1 and 2. Ultra Despair Girls was removed for being as spin-off and I cry every time I remember this fact. But even without them, the voice acting cost for the final parts already killed me... I’m sorry I had this idea.

Design Notes:

Plain Glasses: A must-have item for the plain folk. We’ll never figure out whether wearing glasses make you plain or if being plain attracts glasses but we still not for sure this is the plain character’s trademark.

Plain Face Out of Costume: Normally, she gets called a plain face a lot. But if Shirogane words “When I take my glasses off, I transform” are real, she could probably look like a different person with the power of her make-up.

Company Badge: 

A misterious company’s badge. She keeps it hidden in her person instead of wearing it so it won’t disturb her plain visual. Is it a cosplay office or is it perhaps something else...?

Plain Conversations: Shirogane’s speech pattern has the distinticve otaku quality: she’s only talkative about her hobbies and normally just reacts to what other people are saying and nothing else. She shows up for breakfast every morning, so the reason why people forget she exists so much is indeed because she is plain!?

Plain Body: When it comes to cosplaying a wide range of characters, having curves too wide can sometimes be counterproductive and you can hear many ingenious tricks to purposely make your chest look smaller, bigger, etc. Good thing she’s was born with a plain, moderate body, perfect for cosplaying.

Plain Uniform: A high-waist skirt with a form-fitting jacket. But even an uniform so cleverly design to emphasize her femininity so strongly becomes plain when Shirogane wears it.

Underwear: A pair made for the ultimate final battle. But they are not for show, so she firmly refuse to take low angle photos.

Favorite presents:

Cosplay Carrying Bag: A carrying case highly demanded by cosplayer for being easy to carry. Very useful for things like travels and of course, conventions. Something Shirogane would probably consider a trusted partner.

Photostore: An image editing software used mainly to retouch photographs. Perfect to erase flaws in your make-up or visible freckles. Indispensable for any cosplayer nowadays.

Sewing Set: A portal kit all the basic tools necessary for sewing. In the context of cosplay, she can use it to immediately fix a damaged piece. Indispensable for Shirogane’s daily life.

Steels Glasses Case: It’s sturdy enough to protect your glasses from any kind of shock, even being stepped on by an Exisal. After all, glasses are as super important as underwear! 

Hated present:

Death Flag: An item with an unexplainable effect of increasing it’s owner chances of dying. A rare case of an item hated by Shirogane, who is otherwise very proud of her open-mindedness.

Key phrases:

Cosplay is an Equivalent Exchange: The cosplays that defined Shirogane as the Super High School Level Cosplayer are famous and popular enough to earn her sponsors and their selling point is faithfulness to the original’s character design. That said, she prefers devoting herself to making the costumes rather than wearing them and acting the character. For that reason, she has a lot of complaints about the current community of idol-like cosplayers and vocally expresses them in order protect the quality and the soul of cosplaying. By the way, the condition for her cosplay is an “Equivalent Exchange”. She claims that if she imitates real people, she breaks out in a horrible allergic reaction and is limited to only playing fictional characters... Leaving aside the question that this can’t be described as Equivalent Exchange at all, this is a terrifying allergy that colors her whole body pink. You can tells it’s harsh just by looking at it.

Glasses are underwear!?: For Shirogane, a fervent defender of plainness, glasses are an indispensable prop, an item to be always worn, no different from underwear. The glasses are the trademark of the plain. By just wearing a pair, you are turned into a plain person and disappears from the plains of existence... That quicly leads to you having innumerable plain anecdotes, like passing unnoticed by the cashier, being left behind by your friends, entering the movie theater with a ticket, becoming an expert in covert investigations, etc. Leaving aside the question of how many of those are true, the point here is that appearence is important.

God has Black Hair and Red Eyes: Angie’s God prioritizes convenience above all else, changing it’s appearence according to the believer. So, if you’re wondering what would he be like for the fiction-loving Shirogane, the answer is the expected one: she sees a God loaded with fantasy tropes like “black hair and red eyes”. She, who values those characteristic hard to find in real life and makes fervorous speeches about “Red-eyed black-haired characters are all perfect”, has already completely turned to an Angie devout. I... just hope  someone who would wholeheartedly listen to all her hyperfixations descends from heaven to her soon!?

Main Quotes:

“Huhuhu... Don’t you know? Those who see my true form pay a terrible price, you see?“: The foul-mouthed Iruma told Shirogane “If you take off your glasses, you’ll fade away“. In other words, if she loses the glasses that mark her as a plain character, her character would lose it’s meaning of existance and disappear. However, Shirogane said she’s off, if she takes her glasses off, she will transform. “She was actually hot all along without her glasses!” is a plot we see a lot in shoujo manga, but in Shirogane’s case we’re very curious to see what her real face will look like!? 

“Sorry... I’m in a bit of a financial trouble. Oh, if only someone could support me, that would be so great“: Now, Shirogane ascended to the top of the cosplayer world with overwhelming fame and reach. But before, she was a measly cosplayer that lived barely scraping by and had to earn her money through part-time jobs. A simple and easy option if you wanted to earn money fast, is to work in a place that sells alcohol to rich men, smile sweetly and conquer sponsorers. It’s admirable how far her passion towards her hobbies go!

“But, as I thought... maybe you should be The White Kanata“: After teaching the Cosplaying 101, Shirogane finally starts luring Saihara into the unescapable path of cosplay (popularly known as “cosplay hell“) and starts endlessly brainstorming garments that would suit him! After considering fantasy knights, failproof school uniforms and even crossdressing, the answer she arrived at was the protagonist of an old superhero anime Saihara also knows, “The White Kanata“. It was the first character Shirogane ever cosplayed and visibly a character she has strong feelings about. Knowing about their unexpected common point, Shirogane became unstoppable, filled with the will to put her soul into Saihara’s outfit.

Final comment: She clinging on to her otaku hyperfixations, fully trusting the belief they do no harm nor good. Shirogane’s presence runs full speed on the path to plainness, but it turns out she wants to make it shine on the cosplay stage!?

[clickbliss]

Pig Eat Ball is a bewildering and frankly disgusting game of sportsball

by Amr (@siegarettes)

Pig Eat Ball

Developer: Mommy’s Best Games

Publisher:  Mommy’s Best Games 

PC

Bizarre, bewildering and frankly disgusting. That’s how I’d describe pretty much any other game from Mommy’s Best Games. Thankfully, they’re also a lot of fun, Pig Eat Ball included. 

The trademark Mommy’s Best Games originality is here, with out there mechanics and art. Previously, their games all shared a similar rough, overgrown art style. There were grimy textures that felt as if they’d been melted and reconstituted into ridiculously detailed tableaus. 

Pig Eat Ball goes for a more animated vibe, with a lighter hand on textures, more broad strokes of colors and expressive characters. It’s still made up of an absolutely bewildering combination of imagery, but there’s a more confident, less chaotic approach this time. 

Not that the chaos is gone, no, no. 

While the art goes with a clear, readable style, the mechanics branch into several bizarre takes on the maze running genre. There’s a few basic moves, but how they interact with each level’s layouts and gimmicks gets a lot of mileage out of them. 

The princess, a pig in disguise at a tournament held to decide who wins her hand, constantly inhales objects in front of her, which can be spit out in a barf covered state. Holding her breath makes her move slower, and a dash lets her crash through objects and build speed by timing the next two dashes. Inhaling tennis balls increases her size, which prevents her from getting through narrow passages, but might be useful to take down certain obstacles. Oh, and if you inhale a barfed up ball too soon, or get hit, you’ll spew the contents of your stomach. 

Things get really chaotic when these basic mechanics play off the environment. At the start I was simply gathering up tennis balls, spitting them into new rooms, and avoiding them as I waited for the gross stuff to roll off the spit up balls. But soon I was puking on bugs to make them puke, losing ghosts in Pac-man mazes, eating their brains, and using my suction to drag balls through mazes to get them to areas where I could gobble em up. 

There’s a real madcap, experimental quality to a lot of the stage designs. It’s the kind of game where you look at the stage title to get an idea of what the heck the designer was thinking, then parse the gimmick while trying to avoid the tricks they’ve laid out for you. Then you do it again to get the gold medal. 

It’s a familiar loop, and it would be easy to get comfortable with if it wasn’t for how outlandish it gets. It seriously, seriously gets weird. Like, I’ve played a lot of games and seen a lot of weird games, but most of them use familiar, predictable mechanics to direct you. In Pig Eat Ball I’m never quite sure what I’m gonna see next, or what the next stage is gonna have me do. It’s not so scattershot that I find myself lost, but there’s an astounding set of ideas on display. 

Within the first stage I was doing careful sneaking missions, fast paced races against the clock, convoluted mazes, and even engaging in battles with bugs where I had to gobble up more balls, catch stars and uh, build a sandwich. Then I topped it off by fighting a giant dragon who was also an accordion. 

Describing what you do in Pig Eat Ball really doesn’t do it justice. This is the kind of game that’s bursting with a creative energy that you just sort of have to witness yourself. It’s got the level design sensibility of an arcade game, but with a willingness to recontextualize itself at every turn. I could write another five paragraphs just listing notable stage gimmicks, but you wouldn’t get the same rapid fire nonsense that comes along with each of them. 

There really is something wonderful and bizarre about Pig Eat Ball. It’s a refreshing game to take in bite sized stages, often leaving me with a a bemused, and somewhat disgusted, smile. 

[officialotakudome]

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AEW Double or Nothing 2021 Review

Double or Nothing has come and gone and AEW put on a a spectacle of an event for a good four hours or so of pro wrestling action. In what definitely felt like a star making show Double or Nothing featured five title matches, and tons of great wrestling. Though it did suffer from some small duds the show overall was an incredible presentation. 

AEW Double or Nothing is a 2021 pro wrestling event, it is produced by All Elite Wrestling and aired on May 30, 2021. It is available on demand as a replay on Fite.TV and other services.

Editor’s Note: Medium to complete spoilers for AEW Double or Nothing 2021 may be present within this review.

Double or Nothing was probably AEW’s strongest PPV to date.

Following it’s debut on Friday nights AEW once again returned with a packed house. This time for it’s annual Double or Nothing event. The show was nearly a complete sell out with The Wrestling Observer’s Dave Meltzer reporting that only 352 tickets were left available for purchase just hours before the show began. The show opened with AEW’s free portion known as the buy-in which featured NWA Women’s Champion Serena Deeb defending against former AEW Women’s World Champion Riho. While I’m in agreement with those that this should have been on the main card, I think this was the perfect way to wake up the live crowd and get the energy flowing from the jump. Deeb has been killing it with strong performances since debuting in NWA & AEW and this one was no different. Riho is another well-received worker so this match was expected to deliver and it did. The finish saw Deeb who was working Riho’s leg all match slam her knee down on the mat several times following with a Serenity Lock for the win.

Winner: Serena Deeb retains **** stars

Double or Nothing opens with a very fun title match.

Next it’s the main show and Taz is out on commentary to rep his (soon to be former?) man Brian Cage as he takes on former Number 1 Contender Adam Page in a rematch from Dynamite a few weeks back. Cage promised Page a man to man contest after screwing him out of title contention much to Taz’s chagrin. The match was very good but Cage was doing a lot of really odd moves for the sake of it and it looked hilarious in motion. The finish saw Ricky Starks coming in with the FTW Championship calling for Cage to use it. Cage refuses keeping his word to Page only for Page to turn the tables with the distraction and hitting the Buckshot Lariat for the win. This would be lame otherwise, but the storyline made up for it. Cage is also clearly turning babyface very soon.

Winner: Adam Page **** stars

Adam Page makes another comeback while Brian Cage prepares for a different direction.

The second title match of the night is up as those dastardly heels The Young Bucks take on Jon Moxley and long-time companion Eddie Kingston for the AEW World Tag Team Championship. The feud all began because Kingston got involved with Kenny Omega and Moxley’s beef during the finish of Revolution leading to the Bucks joining Omega & The Good Bros. and reforming The Elite as a heel group. Since then, Moxley and Kingston have reformed their friendship entering the tag division. I really like Kingston & Moxley together, but as a wrestling duo they don’t always click for me. Their match with the Bucks however, is probably the best match we’ll see the two together in during their tag team run (prove me wrong AEW). The match opened with a trademark AEW brawl before the match began. There was a hilarious bit where Moxley shoved the streamers from the Buck’s entrance into Matt’s (God I hope I got the right Buck) mouth. There were tons of Superkicks and even an even an Indie Taker on the ramp. At one point Moxley got color on his face and looked like a badass throughout the rest of the match. After a couple of Paradigm Shifts and some very realistic near falls the finish saw the Bucks hitting the BTE Trigger for the win.

Winner: The Young Bucks retain ***** stars

AEW continues to show that the tag division is probably the strongest quality wise.

The next bout is the annual Casino Battle Royal featuring 21 men vying for a future AEW World Championship title match. This match also featured two of my favorite moments of the show which I’ll get to in a bit. So for a battle royal there isn’t much to go about talking on the wrestling of the match. However, I will say that when Max Caster made his entrance he continued with his no fucks given epic rap entrances. He even had no issue giving Christian an Edge dig. The Acclaimed was one of my favorite teams on Dark just based on their ring work alone, but since being featured on TV more that fandom has only grew. Speaking of Caster, there was a nasty spot during his elimination where it looked like he injured his leg hopefully he’s ok. This was an extremely fast paced match and the eliminations came quick. Following Double or Nothing doesn’t look like the Rhodes Family is done with The Factory just yet as they teased Dustin feuding with Nick Comoroto moving forward. Now on to favorite moment number one, Lio Rush made his debut. Yes that Lio Rush and I have no idea what it means for AEW as a business moving forward. And what I mean by that is, is this the beginning of a talent program with Major League Wrestling? If so awesome, last I checked Rush was still signed to MLW and he’s been working NJPW’s US-based show Strong. So is Rush gone from MLW or is this the start of a partnership? So many question unanswered with this one. The second favorite moment was of course the winner of the match. Everyone and their ancient ancestor expected Christian Cage to win. However, AEW went for the swerve and gave the win to a fresh face in Jungle Boy. And yes I’m aware he’s been on AEW TV for well over two years now but he’s really come into his own as someone they see a future in the last year. There was a moment post-match where it looked like Christian was dangerously close to turning heel with the story being he’s pissed he lost. However, Christian continued the moment by pumping up Jungle Boy and telling him to win the gold which was a neat moment.

Winner: Jungle Boy ** 2/4 stars

Quick Update: Turns out Lio Rush is signed to NJPW who allows him to freelance elsewhere and they have a deal with AEW so this all lines up.

AEW provided us with a star making move by giving Jungle Boy the feel good win.

Reaching the middle point of the show it’s time for The “American Dream” (yes that’s the name he used for this match) Cody Rhodes to face off against The Guv’nor Anthony Ogogo. So this match should have been way better than it was given the hype. However the point was to show off Anthony Ogogo’s wrestling training from the last two years. Which I think they ultimately succeeded in doing. After a gut punch Ogogo opened the match with an Olympic Slam and showed off some really strong wrestling talent. I’m glad they didn’t go too far with Ogogo’s “former boxer” gimmick (yes I know Ogogo is a shoot boxer). They definitely teased it in the beginning of Ogogo’s run, which I was always worried about, but I’m glad I was wrong and the wrestling came above all else. Cody picked up the win with the Cross Rhodes.

Winner: Cody Rhodes ** 2/4 stars

While the match itself could have been much better Ogogo showed off his two years of training impressively well.

It was time for the big HOSS fight in TNT Champion Miro defending against “The Murderhawk Monster” Lance Archer. This was a really short but sweet match between two very solid big man workers. Strong showcase of power style wrestling from both men. At one point Archer slammed Miro through a table. Jake “the Snake” Roberts brought out the snake (in bag), but Miro attacked him and tossed the snake for huge heat. Finish saw Miro taking advantage of Archer being distracted from another Roberts attack with Archer being choked out with the guillotine hold.

Winner: Miro retains *** stars

A good big man wrestling match which featured two monster workers.

Our next match was the second Women’s Championship with Britt Baker facing off against AEW Women’s Champion Hikaru Shida whose held the belt for over a year. So this one kind of hurts as I’m a bit of a Britt fan and I was looking forward to seeing her win the belt with a great match. Unfortunately this match seemed to suffer from going on a tad too long. And it especially sucks because it was just last year that Shida and Britt had a fantastic match in which Britt had to deal with a broken, bloody nose afterwards. Here the chemistry just felt off again I don’t know if there was too much time given or what. But something just wasn’t clicking here. There was a ton of near falls, Rebel (Reba?) interferred but was caught. Shida hit the Tamashii, but Britt kicked out and caught her in the Lockjaw for the win. I really wanted Britt and Shida to have another great match to start Britt’s run and cap off her & Shida’s feud. Hopefully things only improve from this point.

Winner and NEW AEW Women’s World Champion DMD Britt Baker ** 3/4 stars

The doctor is in as Britt Baker’s moment continues as she ends Shida’s run as Champion.

Sting’s first in-ring match since 2015 is here as he teams with young Darby Allin against the newly formed team of Scorpio Sky and Allin’s old rival Ethan Page. This match likely surprised many who watched as Sting, especially for his age of 62 went above and beyond in his performance. It starts with Sting & Darby attacking Page & Sky and he does a crossbody dive off the ramp. We even get to see Sting wrestle without a shirt on for God knows how long. Commentary even made what looked like a jab at the shirt wearing Sting joke by immediately pointing out that the “old Sting is back” after he ripped it off. Sky hit Sting with a suplex on the ramp, which I’m sure made people watching shit bricks with worry. However, Sting almost instantly got back up and no sold it which was cool. There was also a fun spot where had Page in the Scorpion Deathlock and Sky had Allin in a hold of his own. The two were face to face and began beating the hell out of each other while in their respective holds. Finish saw Sky going for what looked like a cutter only for Sting to reverse it into the Scorpion Death Drop for the win. Really fun match that saw Sting being in much better shape than initially thought.

Winners: Sting & Darby Allin *** 1/2 stars

Sting made his return to the ring in a very solid tag match.

The penultimate match arrives as the AEW World Heavyweight Champion Kenny Omega defends against “Freshly Squeezed” Orange Cassidy & “The Bastard” Pac. Don Callis is out on commentary and I love his character. He has the obnoxious, talentless heel using the talent of others to boost himself gimmick down to a T. Wrestling wise this was probably the strongest match on the card, but the tag title match had a lot going on that give it a bit of an edge in overall quality. A lot of focus on Pac and Kenny going at it basically ignoring Orange in the process. When Orange got some work in it was great. Some fun near falls. There was a spot where Kenny & Orange were trading pins and Pac broke it up with the Black Arrow onto both men. Don got involved with a very convincing Orange fall. The finish had Orange giving Omega an Orange Punch with an extremely close fall only for Omega to reverse the pin into a crucifix pin for the victory. Really supreme back and forth wrestling from all three workers in this match. They had a perfect opportunity to have Cassidy regain the moment he lost with the pandemic effecting attendance and took full advantage of it establishing him as an upper midcarder & potential main eventer.

Winner: Kenny Omega retains ****

Kenny Omega successfully retains in a very fun world title match.

The main event arrives as The Inner Circle take on the Pinnacle in a Stadium Stampede match where if the Inner Circle loses then they must disband. The Inner Circle made a neat entrance by coming in on hanging wire from the big tron. Fun fact the John Wick stunt coordinator apparently helped AEW pull this off among a number of other sequences in this match. It starts off on the football field with most of Inner Circle & Pinnacle battling it out. MJF who had began taunting them earlier alone hid jn a limo thinking he one upped the group only to be outsmarted by Chris Jericho who was waiting for him. The two battle across the arena and there’s a bit with a staple which MJF was a champ for being on the receiving end of. There was also a funny moment with a cardboard cutout of Tony Khan’s dad Shahid being used as a weapon and Jericho “protecting” it afterward. We got a couple of NFL cameos one of which being Urban Meyer who responded to Jericho & MJF busting into his room with a “holy shit”. We see Wardlow and Jake Hager beating the hell out of each other before it becomes completely one sided on Wardlow’s end. Wardlow beats Hager with water jugs and eventually spears him through a wall. A very surprising lack of Santana and Ortiz in this we get a couple of moments of them facing FTR but nothing too special. However, there was a scene in a bar with a Konnan appearance that was awesome. Jericho & MJF eventually spill into the live arena and beat each other between the crowd. Sammy & Spears appear next in what I can only describe as a “chair war” they toss and beat the hell out of each other with chairs before heading to the ring. The crowd was in absolute love with Sammy. The finish saw a call back to the Pinnacle’s debut where Sammy got his face mashed in by a chair in the corner. He did the same spot to Spears before ending it with a 450 Splash for the win. There was so much going on in this match. Sammy winning was the right move he’s gonna be a huge star for AEW when he has his solo babyface run. I thought this match was a bit weaker compared to the first that had stronger wrestling, but this year the match was way more about the story and it told an excellent one.

  Winner: The Inner Circle *** 1/2 stars

While not as good as the first, the second Stadium Stampede provided some cool moments to send fans home happy.

 OVERALL THOUGHTS: AEW’s second PPV for 2021 was one of it’s strongest shows in quite sometime. Most of the matches were good, but there were some duds of which were disappointing to be unimpressive matches. This was a show meant to invest in the promotion’s future and I think they succeeded for the most part. Otaku Dome gives Double or Nothing 2021 an 88 out of 100.

[wineanddinosaur]

The Twisting, Turning, Slightly Dirty History of the Foam Party — and Its Enduring Global Appeal

Around 2 a.m. on June 3, 2012, guests started spilling into the parking lot of Loft 59 Nightclub in Naples, Fla. Many were vomiting, some had chemical burns to their skin and scratched corneas, others had head injuries and broken bones that would eventually render a few wheelchair-bound. Soon epidemiological officials from the Collier County Health Department would descend on the gruesome scene.

The culprit? Foam.

“It smelled like soap and it was mostly dripping from the ceilings,” one victim told Naples News. “I put my trust in the club owners. I thought they knew what they were doing.”

The nightclub industry, in fact, seems built on club owners not really knowing what they are doing — beds in bars, for example —but surely hoping they accidentally stumble upon the next gimmick that will get partiers into their bars. Now, the idea of injecting foam into a club may seem pretty strange, as it did when it was introduced in the early 1980s, but it would create an immediate local sensation, then form a cottage industry of nightlife that, remarkably, still prevails across the globe today.

It started with much more humble origins.

Espuma, literally meaning “foam” in Spanish, started in Ibiza at a club called Amnesia, the birthplace of acid house music and the oldest nightclub on the island (having opened in 1976). The then-open-air terrace club started foam parties with basic fire hoses.

“The fire department would literally go into the street, put a hose into the hydrant, and run it through the club and upstairs until you filled the whole dance floor below,” recalls Robin Whincup, who first encountered a foam party while on vacation in Ibiza in the mid-1980s.

Jane Bussman, the author of “Once in a Lifetime: The Crazy Days of Acid House,” and a visitor to Amnesia in its early espuma days, claims the mostly British tourists back then would “flail around [in the foam] like very drunk puppies in their first snowfall.”

It was a far less cute sight by morning. “The problem was it left a lot of water residue on the floor afterward,” explains Whincup. “I had to come up with a better idea.”

Whincup was a bounce house operator and new father at the time. He took what was essentially a vacuum cleaner motor, screwed on a mesh sock, then connected a half-inch-diameter plastic hose. Reversing the vacuum’s suck function to blow, the fluid would squirt into the sock right in front of the air stream, then shoot out, leaving a mere 1 percent of the water buildup on the floor.

He called it the Foam Cannon.

“Before me, no one had ever had a foam party in the U.K., and it caught on very quickly,” he claims. He started a new company called Big Fun, this time for an adult audience.

Whincup used his background in bounce houses to add inflatable perimeters to dance floors, assuring no foam would escape to the main areas of the club. He created an oil-drum-sized device that could “pre-foam” an entire dance floor in the 30 minutes before partiers arrived. A typical party would have four Foam Cannons shooting at once, soapy streamers arching 20 feet along the nightclub ceiling.

“It was such a blizzard of foam with all the lights shining through it,” he explains. “It looked really cool.”

Whincup would tackle the north of England, renting and selling his equipment to some of the era’s biggest nightclubs like Mayfair Ballroom in Newcastle, which hosted a weekly Roman toga night in concert with the foam. He partnered with a buddy, Roy Barlow, who would handle the top spots in southern England like The London Hippodrome. For a good chunk of the 1990s, the U.K. became the epicenter of foam parties.

Whincup reckons he must have sold over 500 $3,500 Foam Cannons and made well over $1 million during those seven or eight years. Unfortunately, he never got any sort of patent or trademark on the Foam Cannons — he claims people simply didn’t protect their IP as much back then like he would have today. He is proud of how much cleaner and safer his foam parties were than the ones that soon followed.

“We went through a lot of effort to get a detergent that wasn’t going to hurt people’s eyes,” he explains. “But it was just never 100 percent safe, and it still isn’t today. You’re crawling home at stupid o’clock, you’re not going to shower before hopping into bed, and if you have sensitive skin, you’re almost certainly going to get a rash.”

A rash would be the least of the worries of foam-party patrons as foam parties became more prevalent across the pond.

Whincup started selling Foam Cannons to America in 1993, partnering with another bounce house purveyor based in Orlando. By then, however, he was ready to get out of the foam party game, as he was starting to become concerned about liability issues. Someone else would have to take on the challenge in the States.

“‘Oh no no, this was done in Ibiza years ago, it won’t work!’” Yves Di Lena recalls being told when he tried to bring the foam party concept to Miami. The then-40-something Frenchman had also partaken in Ibiza’s foam scene in the mid-80s and then introduced them at a Paris restaurant he owned. He immediately realized they could be a sensation in America as well, but he, too, feared our sue-happy culture.

“There is also in America this situation with everyone suing everyone else. So that was a problem,” he explained to the Miami New Times in 1995. He was using the same kind of foam technology normally used to put out airstrip fires. “I didn’t want a million people suing me because they slip in the foam or get wet clothes,” he said.

Ultimately he decided to have patrons sign a disclaimer before entering the South Beach nightclubs Warsaw Ballroom, which pumped 3,000 liters of foam into the club every Saturday night, and (yet another club named) Amnesia, where he promoted foam parties on Tuesday and Thursday nights. Amnesia’s would often attract a thousand randy patrons per night to the two-story complex with a massive, open-air dance floor in the middle.

While the Ibiza foam parties had always been an excuse for rowdy behavior, on South Beach the transgressions were kicked up a notch, with the foam acting as a bubbly veil for topless, and sometimes bottomless, men (and, occasionally, women). “Kissing. Petting. Rubbing,” wrote the New Times, with reporter Steven Almond reporting on a conga-line of coitus. “Because the foam froths up waist high, it acts both as a lubricant and camouflage.” Amnesia’s emcee, a local-legend drag queen named Kitty Meow, would officiate over the parties, yelling at the many jock-strap-clad men to behave themselves.

This was the still height of AIDS fears in America, especially among the gay community. Eventually, with the urging of the Health Crisis Network, Di Lena had to add Safe Sex Lifeguards, musclebound men strolling around the nightclub spraying children’s squirt guns at those patrons getting a little too frisky. (Di Lena continually insisted all the complaints about his foam parties were being spread by rival club promoters, jealous of his success.) It hardly mattered.

“This is my second foam party in four days. It’s just sensational, like slithering around in a giant bubble bath,” claimed one foam fan at the time, while another bluntly noted, “From what I could see, the whole thing is basically an excuse to get fucked in public.” Or perhaps fall in love, something a future presidential candidate, Senator Marc Rubio, claims happened to him when he met his wife at a South Beach foam party in 1995 — though many have questioned the veracity of that story.

Soon, Di Lena started getting requests to bring his foam parties to other cities. He started flying his liquid and machines to New York, Chicago, and Atlanta, kicking off foam party scenes in those respective cities. Gradually, the trend began spreading to smaller, less trendy areas across the U.S.

By the late 1990s, it had jumped off the contiguous 48. “I had a buddy in Alaska who owned a club there and wanted to do a foam party,” recalls Glen Kitchin, who, back in 1999, was a construction worker and part-time DJ. “I told him, ‘I think I can help you out on that.’”

He didn’t like the available equipment at the time, finding it too loud, too messy, and a little pathetic — the foam would only go up to your ankles. He used his construction know-how to build stainless steel and aluminum machines that would overwhelm partiers with foam. He also made it smell like Piña Colada.

“I wanted something truly memorable,” he explains. “With my version, you could make people disappear all the way into the foam.”

Kitchin’s foam parties were a hit locally, but he never imagined 21 years later he would still be in the foam business. It just seemed like a one- or two-year trend. Today, however, Kitchin is known as “The Foam Guy” (motto: “Wanna get…wet?”), the founder and face behind the largest touring foam party in the nation. He’s done events in every state but Hawaii, sometimes four or five per weekend these days. In other words, he’s a true professional, with no tolerance for all the fly-by-night operators that continually spring up and ultimately hurt the industry’s reputation — and its patrons.

Like at Antalya, Turkey’s luxury Venice Hotel, where in 2008 several partiers were injured and two died when the foam caused them to get electrocuted. Or at a University of Georgia frat party where a reveler slid on the foam and destroyed her jawbone in the ensuing crash.

“The problem,” Kitchin says, “was the backyard chemist who wanted to throw something together on the cheap.”

Foam party injuries became so ubiquitous by the 2000s they were being written up in medical journals, Psychology Today, and by the Centers for Disease Control. As Dr. Howard Mell, a spokesman for the American College of Emergency Physicians, noted in 2012, “I question any party where you’re intentionally going to put together alcohol, slippery surfaces and blinding people to their visual surroundings.” Often the problems with foam parties were more mundane, though — too much foam causing short people to get lost on the dancefloor.

It wouldn’t be injuries that would eventually cause foam parties to lose their luster, however.

It would be Paris Hilton.

Fittingly, perhaps, foam parties’ shark-jumping would happen back in Ibiza, where Amnesia is now the only club still hosting them, every Sunday night. In 2013, Hilton was signed to a five-year DJing residency there, with some reports saying she was pulling in as much as $1 million per gig.

“Every single night I play in Ibiza is crazy,” she told Fox in 2015.

At her party, called “Foam & Diamonds,” she would DJ every Sunday between 4 a.m. and 6 a.m., before changing into her signature pink bedazzled Herve Leger bikini, operating a balcony-level cannon, and helping blast foam all over the party peasants below, some of whom had paid upwards of €700 per person for VIP tables.

Even with Paris’s residency over, and despite the fact that most people now consider them kinda played out, it seems foam parties will never go away, either in Ibiza or the world at large.

“Foam parties are without a doubt the most successful and popular Promotional activity within the Night-club Industry (sic),” touts the website for The Entertainment Biz, Barlow’s current company, which currently offers five different foam-generating machines, including the Colossus used at Amnesia.

Today Whincup lives in Florida and runs Galaxy Multi-Rides with his son, mainly producing unique inflatables and mechanical bulls for bars and nightclubs. Despite being long out of the foam party game, even he doesn’t see them ever going out of style.

“I think it’s one of those things that, at a certain time of your life, you’ll always want to do. It’s become a staple entertainment. I think they’ll go on for as long as there are nightclubs,” he says.

“I mean, who doesn’t want to play with bubbles?”

The article The Twisting, Turning, Slightly Dirty History of the Foam Party — and Its Enduring Global Appeal appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/foam-party-history/

[johnboothus]

The Twisting Turning Slightly Dirty History of the Foam Party and Its Enduring Global Appeal

Around 2 a.m. on June 3, 2012, guests started spilling into the parking lot of Loft 59 Nightclub in Naples, Fla. Many were vomiting, some had chemical burns to their skin and scratched corneas, others had head injuries and broken bones that would eventually render a few wheelchair-bound. Soon epidemiological officials from the Collier County Health Department would descend on the gruesome scene.

The culprit? Foam.

“It smelled like soap and it was mostly dripping from the ceilings,” one victim told Naples News. “I put my trust in the club owners. I thought they knew what they were doing.”

The nightclub industry, in fact, seems built on club owners not really knowing what they are doing — beds in bars, for example —but surely hoping they accidentally stumble upon the next gimmick that will get partiers into their bars. Now, the idea of injecting foam into a club may seem pretty strange, as it did when it was introduced in the early 1980s, but it would create an immediate local sensation, then form a cottage industry of nightlife that, remarkably, still prevails across the globe today.

It started with much more humble origins.

Espuma, literally meaning “foam” in Spanish, started in Ibiza at a club called Amnesia, the birthplace of acid house music and the oldest nightclub on the island (having opened in 1976). The then-open-air terrace club started foam parties with basic fire hoses.

“The fire department would literally go into the street, put a hose into the hydrant, and run it through the club and upstairs until you filled the whole dance floor below,” recalls Robin Whincup, who first encountered a foam party while on vacation in Ibiza in the mid-1980s.

Jane Bussman, the author of “Once in a Lifetime: The Crazy Days of Acid House,” and a visitor to Amnesia in its early espuma days, claims the mostly British tourists back then would “flail around [in the foam] like very drunk puppies in their first snowfall.”

It was a far less cute sight by morning. “The problem was it left a lot of water residue on the floor afterward,” explains Whincup. “I had to come up with a better idea.”

Whincup was a bounce house operator and new father at the time. He took what was essentially a vacuum cleaner motor, screwed on a mesh sock, then connected a half-inch-diameter plastic hose. Reversing the vacuum’s suck function to blow, the fluid would squirt into the sock right in front of the air stream, then shoot out, leaving a mere 1 percent of the water buildup on the floor.

He called it the Foam Cannon.

“Before me, no one had ever had a foam party in the U.K., and it caught on very quickly,” he claims. He started a new company called Big Fun, this time for an adult audience.

Whincup used his background in bounce houses to add inflatable perimeters to dance floors, assuring no foam would escape to the main areas of the club. He created an oil-drum-sized device that could “pre-foam” an entire dance floor in the 30 minutes before partiers arrived. A typical party would have four Foam Cannons shooting at once, soapy streamers arching 20 feet along the nightclub ceiling.

“It was such a blizzard of foam with all the lights shining through it,” he explains. “It looked really cool.”

Whincup would tackle the north of England, renting and selling his equipment to some of the era’s biggest nightclubs like Mayfair Ballroom in Newcastle, which hosted a weekly Roman toga night in concert with the foam. He partnered with a buddy, Roy Barlow, who would handle the top spots in southern England like The London Hippodrome. For a good chunk of the 1990s, the U.K. became the epicenter of foam parties.

Whincup reckons he must have sold over 500 $3,500 Foam Cannons and made well over $1 million during those seven or eight years. Unfortunately, he never got any sort of patent or trademark on the Foam Cannons — he claims people simply didn’t protect their IP as much back then like he would have today. He is proud of how much cleaner and safer his foam parties were than the ones that soon followed.

“We went through a lot of effort to get a detergent that wasn’t going to hurt people’s eyes,” he explains. “But it was just never 100 percent safe, and it still isn’t today. You’re crawling home at stupid o’clock, you’re not going to shower before hopping into bed, and if you have sensitive skin, you’re almost certainly going to get a rash.”

A rash would be the least of the worries of foam-party patrons as foam parties became more prevalent across the pond.

Whincup started selling Foam Cannons to America in 1993, partnering with another bounce house purveyor based in Orlando. By then, however, he was ready to get out of the foam party game, as he was starting to become concerned about liability issues. Someone else would have to take on the challenge in the States.

“‘Oh no no, this was done in Ibiza years ago, it won’t work!’” Yves Di Lena recalls being told when he tried to bring the foam party concept to Miami. The then-40-something Frenchman had also partaken in Ibiza’s foam scene in the mid-80s and then introduced them at a Paris restaurant he owned. He immediately realized they could be a sensation in America as well, but he, too, feared our sue-happy culture.

“There is also in America this situation with everyone suing everyone else. So that was a problem,” he explained to the Miami New Times in 1995. He was using the same kind of foam technology normally used to put out airstrip fires. “I didn’t want a million people suing me because they slip in the foam or get wet clothes,” he said.

Ultimately he decided to have patrons sign a disclaimer before entering the South Beach nightclubs Warsaw Ballroom, which pumped 3,000 liters of foam into the club every Saturday night, and (yet another club named) Amnesia, where he promoted foam parties on Tuesday and Thursday nights. Amnesia’s would often attract a thousand randy patrons per night to the two-story complex with a massive, open-air dance floor in the middle.

While the Ibiza foam parties had always been an excuse for rowdy behavior, on South Beach the transgressions were kicked up a notch, with the foam acting as a bubbly veil for topless, and sometimes bottomless, men (and, occasionally, women). “Kissing. Petting. Rubbing,” wrote the New Times, with reporter Steven Almond reporting on a conga-line of coitus. “Because the foam froths up waist high, it acts both as a lubricant and camouflage.” Amnesia’s emcee, a local-legend drag queen named Kitty Meow, would officiate over the parties, yelling at the many jock-strap-clad men to behave themselves.

This was the still height of AIDS fears in America, especially among the gay community. Eventually, with the urging of the Health Crisis Network, Di Lena had to add Safe Sex Lifeguards, musclebound men strolling around the nightclub spraying children’s squirt guns at those patrons getting a little too frisky. (Di Lena continually insisted all the complaints about his foam parties were being spread by rival club promoters, jealous of his success.) It hardly mattered.

“This is my second foam party in four days. It’s just sensational, like slithering around in a giant bubble bath,” claimed one foam fan at the time, while another bluntly noted, “From what I could see, the whole thing is basically an excuse to get fucked in public.” Or perhaps fall in love, something a future presidential candidate, Senator Marc Rubio, claims happened to him when he met his wife at a South Beach foam party in 1995 — though many have questioned the veracity of that story.

Soon, Di Lena started getting requests to bring his foam parties to other cities. He started flying his liquid and machines to New York, Chicago, and Atlanta, kicking off foam party scenes in those respective cities. Gradually, the trend began spreading to smaller, less trendy areas across the U.S.

By the late 1990s, it had jumped off the contiguous 48. “I had a buddy in Alaska who owned a club there and wanted to do a foam party,” recalls Glen Kitchin, who, back in 1999, was a construction worker and part-time DJ. “I told him, ‘I think I can help you out on that.’”

He didn’t like the available equipment at the time, finding it too loud, too messy, and a little pathetic — the foam would only go up to your ankles. He used his construction know-how to build stainless steel and aluminum machines that would overwhelm partiers with foam. He also made it smell like Piña Colada.

“I wanted something truly memorable,” he explains. “With my version, you could make people disappear all the way into the foam.”

Kitchin’s foam parties were a hit locally, but he never imagined 21 years later he would still be in the foam business. It just seemed like a one- or two-year trend. Today, however, Kitchin is known as “The Foam Guy” (motto: “Wanna get…wet?”), the founder and face behind the largest touring foam party in the nation. He’s done events in every state but Hawaii, sometimes four or five per weekend these days. In other words, he’s a true professional, with no tolerance for all the fly-by-night operators that continually spring up and ultimately hurt the industry’s reputation — and its patrons.

Like at Antalya, Turkey’s luxury Venice Hotel, where in 2008 several partiers were injured and two died when the foam caused them to get electrocuted. Or at a University of Georgia frat party where a reveler slid on the foam and destroyed her jawbone in the ensuing crash.

“The problem,” Kitchin says, “was the backyard chemist who wanted to throw something together on the cheap.”

Foam party injuries became so ubiquitous by the 2000s they were being written up in medical journals, Psychology Today, and by the Centers for Disease Control. As Dr. Howard Mell, a spokesman for the American College of Emergency Physicians, noted in 2012, “I question any party where you’re intentionally going to put together alcohol, slippery surfaces and blinding people to their visual surroundings.” Often the problems with foam parties were more mundane, though — too much foam causing short people to get lost on the dancefloor.

It wouldn’t be injuries that would eventually cause foam parties to lose their luster, however.

It would be Paris Hilton.

Fittingly, perhaps, foam parties’ shark-jumping would happen back in Ibiza, where Amnesia is now the only club still hosting them, every Sunday night. In 2013, Hilton was signed to a five-year DJing residency there, with some reports saying she was pulling in as much as $1 million per gig.

“Every single night I play in Ibiza is crazy,” she told Fox in 2015.

At her party, called “Foam & Diamonds,” she would DJ every Sunday between 4 a.m. and 6 a.m., before changing into her signature pink bedazzled Herve Leger bikini, operating a balcony-level cannon, and helping blast foam all over the party peasants below, some of whom had paid upwards of €700 per person for VIP tables.

Even with Paris’s residency over, and despite the fact that most people now consider them kinda played out, it seems foam parties will never go away, either in Ibiza or the world at large.

“Foam parties are without a doubt the most successful and popular Promotional activity within the Night-club Industry (sic),” touts the website for The Entertainment Biz, Barlow’s current company, which currently offers five different foam-generating machines, including the Colossus used at Amnesia.

Today Whincup lives in Florida and runs Galaxy Multi-Rides with his son, mainly producing unique inflatables and mechanical bulls for bars and nightclubs. Despite being long out of the foam party game, even he doesn’t see them ever going out of style.

“I think it’s one of those things that, at a certain time of your life, you’ll always want to do. It’s become a staple entertainment. I think they’ll go on for as long as there are nightclubs,” he says.

“I mean, who doesn’t want to play with bubbles?”

The article The Twisting, Turning, Slightly Dirty History of the Foam Party — and Its Enduring Global Appeal appeared first on VinePair.

Via https://vinepair.com/articles/foam-party-history/

source https://vinology1.weebly.com/blog/the-twisting-turning-slightly-dirty-history-of-the-foam-party-and-its-enduring-global-appeal

[isaiahrippinus]

The Twisting, Turning, Slightly Dirty History of the Foam Party — and Its Enduring Global Appeal

Around 2 a.m. on June 3, 2012, guests started spilling into the parking lot of Loft 59 Nightclub in Naples, Fla. Many were vomiting, some had chemical burns to their skin and scratched corneas, others had head injuries and broken bones that would eventually render a few wheelchair-bound. Soon epidemiological officials from the Collier County Health Department would descend on the gruesome scene.

The culprit? Foam.

“It smelled like soap and it was mostly dripping from the ceilings,” one victim told Naples News. “I put my trust in the club owners. I thought they knew what they were doing.”

The nightclub industry, in fact, seems built on club owners not really knowing what they are doing — beds in bars, for example —but surely hoping they accidentally stumble upon the next gimmick that will get partiers into their bars. Now, the idea of injecting foam into a club may seem pretty strange, as it did when it was introduced in the early 1980s, but it would create an immediate local sensation, then form a cottage industry of nightlife that, remarkably, still prevails across the globe today.

It started with much more humble origins.

Espuma, literally meaning “foam” in Spanish, started in Ibiza at a club called Amnesia, the birthplace of acid house music and the oldest nightclub on the island (having opened in 1976). The then-open-air terrace club started foam parties with basic fire hoses.

“The fire department would literally go into the street, put a hose into the hydrant, and run it through the club and upstairs until you filled the whole dance floor below,” recalls Robin Whincup, who first encountered a foam party while on vacation in Ibiza in the mid-1980s.

Jane Bussman, the author of “Once in a Lifetime: The Crazy Days of Acid House,” and a visitor to Amnesia in its early espuma days, claims the mostly British tourists back then would “flail around [in the foam] like very drunk puppies in their first snowfall.”

It was a far less cute sight by morning. “The problem was it left a lot of water residue on the floor afterward,” explains Whincup. “I had to come up with a better idea.”

Whincup was a bounce house operator and new father at the time. He took what was essentially a vacuum cleaner motor, screwed on a mesh sock, then connected a half-inch-diameter plastic hose. Reversing the vacuum’s suck function to blow, the fluid would squirt into the sock right in front of the air stream, then shoot out, leaving a mere 1 percent of the water buildup on the floor.

He called it the Foam Cannon.

“Before me, no one had ever had a foam party in the U.K., and it caught on very quickly,” he claims. He started a new company called Big Fun, this time for an adult audience.

Whincup used his background in bounce houses to add inflatable perimeters to dance floors, assuring no foam would escape to the main areas of the club. He created an oil-drum-sized device that could “pre-foam” an entire dance floor in the 30 minutes before partiers arrived. A typical party would have four Foam Cannons shooting at once, soapy streamers arching 20 feet along the nightclub ceiling.

“It was such a blizzard of foam with all the lights shining through it,” he explains. “It looked really cool.”

Whincup would tackle the north of England, renting and selling his equipment to some of the era’s biggest nightclubs like Mayfair Ballroom in Newcastle, which hosted a weekly Roman toga night in concert with the foam. He partnered with a buddy, Roy Barlow, who would handle the top spots in southern England like The London Hippodrome. For a good chunk of the 1990s, the U.K. became the epicenter of foam parties.

Whincup reckons he must have sold over 500 $3,500 Foam Cannons and made well over $1 million during those seven or eight years. Unfortunately, he never got any sort of patent or trademark on the Foam Cannons — he claims people simply didn’t protect their IP as much back then like he would have today. He is proud of how much cleaner and safer his foam parties were than the ones that soon followed.

“We went through a lot of effort to get a detergent that wasn’t going to hurt people’s eyes,” he explains. “But it was just never 100 percent safe, and it still isn’t today. You’re crawling home at stupid o’clock, you’re not going to shower before hopping into bed, and if you have sensitive skin, you’re almost certainly going to get a rash.”

A rash would be the least of the worries of foam-party patrons as foam parties became more prevalent across the pond.

Whincup started selling Foam Cannons to America in 1993, partnering with another bounce house purveyor based in Orlando. By then, however, he was ready to get out of the foam party game, as he was starting to become concerned about liability issues. Someone else would have to take on the challenge in the States.

“‘Oh no no, this was done in Ibiza years ago, it won’t work!’” Yves Di Lena recalls being told when he tried to bring the foam party concept to Miami. The then-40-something Frenchman had also partaken in Ibiza’s foam scene in the mid-80s and then introduced them at a Paris restaurant he owned. He immediately realized they could be a sensation in America as well, but he, too, feared our sue-happy culture.

“There is also in America this situation with everyone suing everyone else. So that was a problem,” he explained to the Miami New Times in 1995. He was using the same kind of foam technology normally used to put out airstrip fires. “I didn’t want a million people suing me because they slip in the foam or get wet clothes,” he said.

Ultimately he decided to have patrons sign a disclaimer before entering the South Beach nightclubs Warsaw Ballroom, which pumped 3,000 liters of foam into the club every Saturday night, and (yet another club named) Amnesia, where he promoted foam parties on Tuesday and Thursday nights. Amnesia’s would often attract a thousand randy patrons per night to the two-story complex with a massive, open-air dance floor in the middle.

While the Ibiza foam parties had always been an excuse for rowdy behavior, on South Beach the transgressions were kicked up a notch, with the foam acting as a bubbly veil for topless, and sometimes bottomless, men (and, occasionally, women). “Kissing. Petting. Rubbing,” wrote the New Times, with reporter Steven Almond reporting on a conga-line of coitus. “Because the foam froths up waist high, it acts both as a lubricant and camouflage.” Amnesia’s emcee, a local-legend drag queen named Kitty Meow, would officiate over the parties, yelling at the many jock-strap-clad men to behave themselves.

This was the still height of AIDS fears in America, especially among the gay community. Eventually, with the urging of the Health Crisis Network, Di Lena had to add Safe Sex Lifeguards, musclebound men strolling around the nightclub spraying children’s squirt guns at those patrons getting a little too frisky. (Di Lena continually insisted all the complaints about his foam parties were being spread by rival club promoters, jealous of his success.) It hardly mattered.

“This is my second foam party in four days. It’s just sensational, like slithering around in a giant bubble bath,” claimed one foam fan at the time, while another bluntly noted, “From what I could see, the whole thing is basically an excuse to get fucked in public.” Or perhaps fall in love, something a future presidential candidate, Senator Marc Rubio, claims happened to him when he met his wife at a South Beach foam party in 1995 — though many have questioned the veracity of that story.

Soon, Di Lena started getting requests to bring his foam parties to other cities. He started flying his liquid and machines to New York, Chicago, and Atlanta, kicking off foam party scenes in those respective cities. Gradually, the trend began spreading to smaller, less trendy areas across the U.S.

By the late 1990s, it had jumped off the contiguous 48. “I had a buddy in Alaska who owned a club there and wanted to do a foam party,” recalls Glen Kitchin, who, back in 1999, was a construction worker and part-time DJ. “I told him, ‘I think I can help you out on that.’”

He didn’t like the available equipment at the time, finding it too loud, too messy, and a little pathetic — the foam would only go up to your ankles. He used his construction know-how to build stainless steel and aluminum machines that would overwhelm partiers with foam. He also made it smell like Piña Colada.

“I wanted something truly memorable,” he explains. “With my version, you could make people disappear all the way into the foam.”

Kitchin’s foam parties were a hit locally, but he never imagined 21 years later he would still be in the foam business. It just seemed like a one- or two-year trend. Today, however, Kitchin is known as “The Foam Guy” (motto: “Wanna get…wet?”), the founder and face behind the largest touring foam party in the nation. He’s done events in every state but Hawaii, sometimes four or five per weekend these days. In other words, he’s a true professional, with no tolerance for all the fly-by-night operators that continually spring up and ultimately hurt the industry’s reputation — and its patrons.

Like at Antalya, Turkey’s luxury Venice Hotel, where in 2008 several partiers were injured and two died when the foam caused them to get electrocuted. Or at a University of Georgia frat party where a reveler slid on the foam and destroyed her jawbone in the ensuing crash.

“The problem,” Kitchin says, “was the backyard chemist who wanted to throw something together on the cheap.”

Foam party injuries became so ubiquitous by the 2000s they were being written up in medical journals, Psychology Today, and by the Centers for Disease Control. As Dr. Howard Mell, a spokesman for the American College of Emergency Physicians, noted in 2012, “I question any party where you’re intentionally going to put together alcohol, slippery surfaces and blinding people to their visual surroundings.” Often the problems with foam parties were more mundane, though — too much foam causing short people to get lost on the dancefloor.

It wouldn’t be injuries that would eventually cause foam parties to lose their luster, however.

It would be Paris Hilton.

Fittingly, perhaps, foam parties’ shark-jumping would happen back in Ibiza, where Amnesia is now the only club still hosting them, every Sunday night. In 2013, Hilton was signed to a five-year DJing residency there, with some reports saying she was pulling in as much as $1 million per gig.

“Every single night I play in Ibiza is crazy,” she told Fox in 2015.

At her party, called “Foam & Diamonds,” she would DJ every Sunday between 4 a.m. and 6 a.m., before changing into her signature pink bedazzled Herve Leger bikini, operating a balcony-level cannon, and helping blast foam all over the party peasants below, some of whom had paid upwards of €700 per person for VIP tables.

Even with Paris’s residency over, and despite the fact that most people now consider them kinda played out, it seems foam parties will never go away, either in Ibiza or the world at large.

“Foam parties are without a doubt the most successful and popular Promotional activity within the Night-club Industry (sic),” touts the website for The Entertainment Biz, Barlow’s current company, which currently offers five different foam-generating machines, including the Colossus used at Amnesia.

Today Whincup lives in Florida and runs Galaxy Multi-Rides with his son, mainly producing unique inflatables and mechanical bulls for bars and nightclubs. Despite being long out of the foam party game, even he doesn’t see them ever going out of style.

“I think it’s one of those things that, at a certain time of your life, you’ll always want to do. It’s become a staple entertainment. I think they’ll go on for as long as there are nightclubs,” he says.

“I mean, who doesn’t want to play with bubbles?”

The article The Twisting, Turning, Slightly Dirty History of the Foam Party — and Its Enduring Global Appeal appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/foam-party-history/ source https://vinology1.tumblr.com/post/612114631830437888

[theteenagetrickster]

TLC's 'CrazySexyCool' at 25: The scoop of the game-changing R&B standard

Atlanta georgia triad TLC came in on the arena in 1992, yet it was actually 'CrazySexyCool', their game-changing 2nd album, that bound their tale, launching the globe to fly female fashion trend as well as swinging brand of message-driven R&B, while performing factors not one other lady team had performed previously. T-Boz and Chilli talk to NME about the landmark cd as it celebrates its own 25th wedding anniversary

Tender Loving Care's' CrazySexyCool 'is actually 25 today" Our team were all resting there certainly like, 'This is awful ',"claims Tionne"T-Boz "Watkins, giggling as she recollects the opportunity bandmate Lisa"Left behind Eye "Lopes turned in her knowledgeable for their initial Amount One single,'Creep'."She essentially composed an anti- 'Creep' rap. When it came to shooting the 1st video clip we took the rap off of it. And since we carried out that Lisa put tape on her oral cavity as a protest so she could not sing the track."

"As well as not frequent strip," includes Rozonda "Chilli" Thomas. "Our experts're speaking about the gray tape you apply a container at the UPS retail store, right stuff that may take your skin off. We possessed to go to the trailer as well as attempt and talk her into taking it off."

According to T-Boz, Left Behind Eye, that tragically passed away in a cars and truck accident in 2002, wasn't a fan of the topic concern of 'Creep'. In amongst the monitor's jazzy horns, funky drum stops and also wishing synths were actually lyrics like: "I'll certainly never leave him down/ Though I could play around/ It is actually merely create I require some devotion," which she dreaded her then-boyfriend, NFL vast recipient Andre Rison, might obtain the incorrect idea.

"They possessed among those genuine sensitive, jealous-type partnerships so she didn't desire him to think that she was cheating," she describes. "But it possessed nothing to perform along with their genuine relationship, it was really a private circumstance that occurred to me."

Bearing In Mind Left Behind Eye and the "charming and odd" ways she will pen her raps, T-Boz says: "She used to go in the restroom as well as write in the stall along with her little of grass. She used to sit certainly there and smoke cigarettes, and write sidewards on the bathroom along with her feet up on the wall and her back versus the stall." And also those raps were an integral part of the results of 'CrazySexyCool'.

"Left Eye generally wrote an anti-'Creep' rap due to the fact that she really did not just like the topic. Our company were all sitting certainly there like, 'This is actually terrible ...'"-- T-Boz

Accredited 12-times platinum eagle in the United States and selling over 23 million copies worldwide, the album observed Tender Loving Care happen to come to be the initial girl group to ever before be granted ruby status due to the RIAA. Bagging them a couple of Grammys, they were likewise first black show ever to win the desirable Online video of the Year award at the MTV Video Recording Songs Honors for their outbreak smash hit, 'Waterfalls'.

A lot more than sales as well as honors, 'CrazySexyCool' paved the method for the next creation of woman teams. Taking what they had picked up from watching those that came prior to them -- such as the likes of SWV, En Vogue and R&B boybands like New Version and BBD -- TLC packaged an innovative brand-new attitude as well as distinct swagger that influenced the following surge of girl power. A few of the enthusiasts who grew up listening to the team happened to take facility stage on their own: All Saints, Minimal Mix and, on a much bigger scale, Serendipity's Child and also the Seasoning Girls -- something Mel C acknowledged in a meeting with last year.

TLC:( L-R) Rozonda "Chilli "Thomas, Tionne"T-Boz" Watkins and also Lisa "Left Behind Eye"Lopes of TLC" Our team had a great deal to prove keeping that second album," claims Chilli."It established us en masse that was actually gon na be actually right here for a long period of time as well as it

showed our experts weren't merely a gimmick. "" As well as I think it is actually doing what our experts wished it to accomplish still to this day "T-Boz incorporates."It's merely good music that possesses no age and also interest everybody, irrespective of colour. It does not matter what sex, creed or race you are, it is actually only great songs and also that's what I really love regarding it. It is actually enduring."

Enduring is an absolutely a great way to explain 'CrazySexyCool', as is, unsurprisingly, the cd's label. Designed through Left Behind Eye, Spicy pepper mentions the title -- which exemplifies the private individualities of the team (Crazy [Left Eye], Alluring [Chilli], Trendy [T-Boz] -- was become pregnant while on a vacation to Europe.

"It's so comical due to the fact that when Lisa formulated it I was personally a little upset," details Spicy pepper. "I thought Tionne should have been actually sexy. All of us can possess participated in crazy as well as sexy however I understand I am actually great-- I'm the trendy one. I was actually confused in order to why I would certainly be seductive. I felt like, 'That is actually certainly not me, that is actually Tionne!' I simply failed to take a look at myself like that."

Giggling, T-Boz states: "Lisa slapped her benefit her scalp as well as was like, 'Lady, you much better acknowledge!'"

"I thought Tionne must possess been 'gorgeous'. All of us can possess played 'outrageous' and 'sexy' however I understand I am actually 'awesome'. I am actually the great one!" -- Chilli

It was obvious from the minute you initially pressed play on 'CrazySexyCool' merely just how much of a departure it was actually from the group's 1992 debut, 'Ooooooohhh ... On the TLC Suggestion'. Combining ardent gouges as well as sensuous riffs with edgy hip-hop beats and moving away from the preferred sounds of brand-new jack swing, they took what Mary J. Blige was actually performing at the moment along with her signature brand name of hip-hop heart, mixed in some Atlanta georgia festoon, and also provided something brand-new as well as distinctive for attenders to wrap their ears around.

Tackling more severe subject matters than in previous years, the album was a coming-of-age minute for TLC. From AIDS as well as gang physical violence to sexuality and romanticism, regardless of the topic there was a newly found peace of mind as well as youthful confidence on display screen all over the album's 16 monitors. In the erotic bounce of 'Allow's Do It Once again' as well as 'Take Our Opportunity', the trio showed a more aggressive edge to their art while verifying they were fully comfy along with the more explicit edge of self-expression.

TLC's'CrazySexyCool'

has actually offered over 23 million copies worldwide. Joining several of the very same manufacturers who worked with their launching cd, Dallas Austin, Jermaine Dupri as well as Babyface got on hand to aid assemble the important basis of 'CrazySexyCool'. Organized Noize, Chucky Thompson as well as the then-named Drag Father filled out the remainder of the creation roster.

Puff's job was to look after some of the cd's interludes, which at opportunities, be it unexpextedly, offered some comic relief. 'Sexy' starts off apparently illustrating phone sexual activity just before turning right into a prank telephone call as Chilli seductively talks to Puffy to pass her some tissue ... so she can rub her ass.

"Me and Puff resided in the display together as well as I was expected to, you know, speak alluring," describes Chilli, chuckling to herself. "And I needed to turn it lucky unusual because I found it weird talking sexy throughout. I could not cease giggling so our team found yourself must take it in that instructions and merely make it extra like a laugh."

Puffy also produced the only cover on the album, 'If I Was Your Girlfriend'. Initially created by Royal prince, it is among the rare events that the Purple One provided yet another performer permission to cover his job.

"Getting consent to carry out it was in fact simpler than creating the song," says T-Boz, including that she couldn't believe Prince even permitted all of them to perform it.

The album's trademark track, and most likely the group's too (some may say that 'No Scrubs' is entitled to that honour) is 'Waterfalls'. Created by Left Behind Eye, Marqueze Etheridge and Organized Noize, with some effect coming from Paul McCartney (properly, maybe), and also including support vocals coming from Cee-Lo Veggie, it didn't merely hint the album over the edge, it released it into another stratosphere. Accomplishing mass international success, it arrived at top of Advertising board's Very hot 100 chart as well as kept there for 7 weeks, while likewise topping graphes all over the planet, topping at Amount Four in the UK.

Originally claiming that she positively understood the tune will be actually a hit, T-Boz then quickly back-pedals. "Really, no I didn't," she says. "I wished that it will be, yet moreover I simply hoped that folks would certainly comprehend it considering that our team were discussing some challenging circumstances. I undoubtedly recognised the potential that it had."

"It was the kinda track that required a video clip to make it happen to life," she includes, mentioning the song's significant spending plan online video. Directed by F. Gary Gray and fired in the very same pond where Jaws was filmed, 'Waterfalls' features the team in liquefied form walking on water as they perform about the consequences of the controlled substance field and also the risks of possessing vulnerable sex.

Coming out with to include that it was "game over" once the music video clip went down, Chilli reviews the song's topic issue. "It was regularly essential for our team to chat regarding things that were actually definitely happening," she describes. "Therefore along with AIDS being such a significant thing our team intended to deliver understanding to it since people were referring to it however they weren't really referring to it."

"We would like to defend things that was essential however perform it in a way that was actually musically exciting as well as never preachy," includes T-Boz.

As well as while 'Falls' might have been actually the initial Leading single ever to mention HIV, it wasn't the first opportunity Tender Loving Care openly marketed safe sex. In the video for 'Ain't 2 Honored 2 Beg', a singular from their debut cd, the ladies can be viewed using unopened prophylactics as style accessories, pinned to pants, braces and put inside glasses lens.

TLC were actually the 1st dark act ever to succeed Video clip of the Year at the MTV Video Songs Awards.

"Regrettably, all right stuff our experts discussed at that time, and even on the brand-new album, is actually still going on today," points out Spicy pepper. "Our experts still possess concerns along with folks not utilizing prophylactics and with secure sexual activity in standard. Whether the updates yearns for to speak about it or otherwise, it is actually still there."

Yet another intense minute on 'CrazySexyCool' is actually cd nearer 'Sumthin Wicked In This Manner Arrives'. Participating in like a 'What's Happening' for the hip-hop creation, it includes a knowledgeable from a young André 3000 taped just before OutKast released their debut album. Spicy pepper remembers hearing his vocals for the very first time.

"I was only like, 'Oh my gosh'," she says, gushingly. "It's hilarious considering that he wasn't even André 3000 yet but you simply recognized he performed his means. His voice, it was actually so unique."

"He had not been even André 3000 but-- yet you felt in one's bones he performed his technique. His vocal, it was actually so exclusive" -- Spicy pepper, on a specific then-unknown 'CrazySexyCool' guest performer

Other songs newsworthy feature: 'Traffic signal Unique', the seductive slow-moving jam created to acquire factors entering the bedroom; 'Diggin' on You', the Babyface-produced crush anthem that features perhaps the absolute most beautiful bridge in current R&B; and also 'Scenario of the Fake Individuals', which the ladies both wish they will discharged as a single during the time. "I looked at it as our 'What Concerning Your Friends' sequel," points out Chilli.

As fresh currently as it remained in 1994, 'CrazySexyCool' remains for good in fashion. Like Paradise's 'Nevermind', Janet Jackson's 'Rhythm Country 1814', Royal prince's 'Violet Storm' or Madonna's 'Like a Prayer', its own patterned technique to creation and unflinching cultural commentary keeps it appropriate no matter time.

Today, TLC are actually still The United States's biggest-selling gal team. T-Boz and also Spicy pepper remain to visit-- they've simply announced they'll be going back to Greater london upcoming year-- as well as in 2017 they released a self-titled album, their 1st center cd in 15 years. However 'CrazySexyCool' is going to constantly be that album.

Searching for the most ideal method to define the album, after tossing out phrases like "timeless" and also "game-changing" T-Boz talks to if she can phone it "torch-worthy".

"We are actually the biggest lady group of everlasting in The United States and also our experts are actually still keeping the light, so the cd's torch-worthy." Can not argue with that said.

The blog post TLC's 'CrazySexyCool' at 25: The inside account of the game-changing R&B standard seemed initially on NME.

This content was originally published here.

[torentialtribute]

WORLD OF RUGBY: Suddenly Eddie Jones has a glut of great No 7s

Sale versus Bath was a direct match with an intriguing sub-plot which will give Eddie Jones food for thought. It was a night of the jackals which showcased a positive problem for England.

For years, the national team struggled with a shortage or breakdown specialists, now here was a club fixture featuring three of them.

Tom Curry is England's incumbent No. 7 and Sam Underhill is fit again, back in the Bath side and ready to challenge his Sale counterpart for a place in the Red Rose back row. Ben Curry – Tom's identical twin – has not been on Jones's radar but he should be.

England's incumbent No 7 Tom Curry snuff out of a Bath attack on Friday night

The contest between these magnificent rookies was absorbing, which was certainly not the rest of the match in Salford. The fact that Sale won 6-3 was down in large part to the impact of their brilliant brothers. And the fact the score was so low was down in large part to all three junior jackals.

They did their jobs well – perhaps too well; getting over the ball, poaching, spoiling and ending promising attacks. It started with Underhill winning a turnover in the second minute, despite both Currys doing their best to shift him. Just before the break, the Shark Twins joined forces to win a ruck penalty.

In the closing stages of the game, the influence of the trio reached a peak .. Underhill won another turnover 10 minutes from time to halt Sale's charge towards Bath's line. He repeated the trick with his side under siege in their 22 five minutes later.

Then Tom Curry played in kind in the 78th minute and the final act of the match was Ben Curry's tackle forcing an Underhill fumble and Tom Curry clearing the ball off the pitch to seal the home win.

Both Tom Curry – a stand-out star of the Six Nations – and Underhill will surely go to the World Cup, even if England only take five specialist back-rowers.

And there's no reason why Jones can't consider playing them in tandem; deploying two opensides together and do to other teams what Wales did to England in 2013, when Sam Warburton and Justin Tipuric combined to deadly effect.

Bath's Sam Underhill is fit again – he is a tackle machine and an improved carrier

The pair have complementary attributes. Underhill is a tackle machine and an improved carrier, while Curry is a dynamo in defense and attack; an athletic, dexterous link man, who can also become a decent lineout option.

By rights, Ben Curry should be in the World Cup mix too. He has a similar repertoire to his brother, similar presence, relentless energy and consistency.

His time will come later, but just as the jackal role is coming under threat on safety grounds, England have real clout in this critical area. If it comes down to either-or-choice at openside, Tom Curry holds the aces for now, but just imagine the havoc he could wreak with Underhill – or with his twin.

The way this Premiership season has unfolded presents a strong argument for doing away with the play-off semi -finals. Whether course, the fairest system or all would be a reversion to the traditional league model, but sadly that ship has long since sailed.

Exeter and Saracens are currently operating on a different level to their rivals. They should go head-to-head at Twickenham for the title and they probably will, but if there was a freak result the week before, it would represent a major miscarriage of justice.

It won't happen, but they should do away with the semis. Maybe there can be a 'plate' prize for the teams finishing third and fourth – with their own decider at Twickenham prior to the main final. Make it pay well and clubs would take it seriously enough.

EDWARDS COULD BE THE MAN TO LIFT LES BLEUS

What a time to be Shaun Edwards. Wales' latest Grand Slam – and the manner of it; founded on defensive resilience – has been served as a timely means of polishing his golden CV and made him the subject of a stampede.

Wales want to keep him. Wasps were pursuing him. So were Leicester. Now it appears that France wants to hire him, having confirmed that Fabien Galthie will take over as head coach after this year's World Cup.

Just imagine what wonders Edwards could work across the Channel. There is certainly plenty of scope for improvement.

One day, if the French can be a coaching staff to truly bring the best out of them, they can be a global force again. Being part of that would be an appealing prospect. It would be understandable for Edwards to be sorely tempted …

France want to hire Wales" Grand Slam-winning coach Shaun Edwards

Can anyone recall the last time Alex Goode had a bad game for Saracens? Seriously. The full-back is a phenomenon.

The champions' artful dodger set up a try against Wasps with the sort of effortlessly nimble, visionary assist which have long leg his trademark. He is up for the European Player of the Year prize and by rights he'll be on all the domestic award shortlists too.

Welsh rugby's Judgment Day double-header at the Principality Stadium featured the UK trial of a new gimmick; posts lighting up green or red, to indicate whether a kick was successful or off-target.

The concept appeared to draw a mixed response from those watching in the stands or on TV, but in a large arena, it seems like a good way of visually engaging the audience – especially those sitting furthest away from the action .

If the color-coded verdict is delivered swiftly, it is a bright idea in every sense.

Saracens' domestic dominance doesn't just apply to the men, as their women's team sealed a second successive Premiership title on Saturday, by beating Harlequins 33-17 in the final at Franklin's Gardens.

It was a shame that just 2,590 spectators attended the showpiece fixture. The women's game is strong in this country and hopefully public recognition will follow, as it has in France, where big, partisan crowds turn up to support the national side.

LAST WORD

Leicester's 23 -20 defeat at home to Bristol on Saturday means they still haven't ensured their Premiership survival.

With Newcastle's cause appearing increasingly hopeless, the Tigers will surely stay up, but another demoralizing result confirmed that Welford Road's fortress status lies in ruins. In 15 games there this season, Leicester have lost nine times.

That's a shocking affront to their heritage. The post-season review must be lead to profound, top-to-bottom change. The Tigers won't rebuild their fortress until they rebuild their pack.

And the sight of Harry Thacker – who was allowed to leave – scoring the decisive try to continue his outstanding season for Bristol emphasis the urgent need for Leicester to once again prioritize developing local talent and keeping hold of it.

Leicester's defeat at home to Bristol means they still haven't ensured their Premiership survival

WEEKEND ROUND-UP

Impatient sledge

Harlequins prop Joe Marler was frustrated waiting for Exeter's scrum-half to box kick from the base of a ruck and yelled: 'Hurry up! You're f *** ing boring me. "

Sign of progress

Officially they are" Benetton "but this column will persist with calling them Treviso – but whatever they're called, they've become the first Italian side to qualify for the Pro 14 playoffs.

Damning verdict

After playing on the artificial surface at Kingston Park, Northampton flanker Jamie Gibson tweeted pictures of his bloodied knees and said: "Still not sure I'm much of a fan of the 4G."

Fast start

Ollie Devoto claimed Exeter's first try against Harlequins just 83 seconds into the match, after a thunderous blast through the midfield by the Chiefs' powerful flanker, Dave Ewers.

Fast exit

Poor Ben Moon was only on the field at Sandy Park for a few seconds when he was sin-inned. The England prop was the scapegoat as Exeter conceded a seventh scrum penalty.

Scoring streak

Until recently, huge Wallaby lock , but after a brace of tries against Quins a month ago, he struck in glorious, galloping fashion at Wasps.

Try of the Week

Lima Sopoaga went over for Wasps after Marcus Watson brilliantly claimed a high ball and cut loose, then Joe Simpson charged-down and Kearnan Myall off-loaded well.

Pass of the Week

If Northampton ever have all their hookers fit, Reece Marshall is fourth choice, but he was first rate on Friday with a surge and wrap-around off-load to set up the Saints' second try against Newcastle.

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[jasonitalic-blog]

12 Weeks Of Smashness - 12 - Jigglypuff

One last character to go, folks. That’s right, it’s the very end of the 12 Weeks Of Smashness! E3’s technically started thanks to EA, so what’s up for our final round?

It’s Jigglypuff, viewed from the front!

So, Jigglypuff is a bit...all over the place. But first, history. They’re another Pokemon character, obviously one of the original 151. Jigglypuff is most well known for their singing voice, which along with their big endearing eyes, can rapidly ensnare a target and lull them to sleep. Originally a strict Normal type, they’re now Normal/Fairy in the actual games.

It’s really the anime that defined Jigglypuff and helped decide their place in Smash, though. There, there’s a Jigglypuff who spends most of the series going in vaguely the same direction as Ash and his friends, always trying to sing their song and get people to enjoy their singing...but of course, a Jigglypuff’s song inevitably lulls people to sleep, much to the eternal frustration of this one. This status as a quite popular recurring character helped cement Jigglypuff’s place in this series...

As did, well, their similarity to Kirby in design. I’ve said before how 3/4 of the secret characters are heavily built on existing assets, and Jigglypuff rounds that out. They’re not just heavily built on Kirby’s ball design, they share a fair few of his animations, sitting here as a semi-clone of the original pink puffball.

Of course, Jigglypuff’s special moves couldn’t be more different from Kirby’s. While Pound is pretty basic and carries some similarities of its own, and Sing is pretty crazy as a move that can, uniquely in this game, put opponents to sleep, it’s Rest that really marks Jigglypuff’s trademark tactic. Voted “move you most likely had no idea how to use as a kid” by I Made This Poll Up, it’s a very fiddly little thing that really takes some knowhow to properly utilize. Basically, Rest has Jigglypuff take a little nap...but right when they do, there’s this little pulse right on Jigglypuff themself. If that pulse hits an enemy, it does big damage and big knockback, forming one of the cornerstones of Jigglypuff’s game plan when it’s properly used.

And you’re going to need it, because one of the other defining traits of Jigglypuff is how little knockback their other moves have. While that means you can really rack up the damage, you’re going to need to figure out a solid endgame, especially since Jigglypuff is the lightest, floatiest character in the entire game. Without a solid plan to actually get that killstrike in, you’re just going to be wailing on the opponent forever.

Oddly enough, while they’ve never been actually cut, Jigglypuff is the only one of the original 12 to have been close to losing a spot. The most obvious place to see this is in Brawl, where the barely-made-it-in trio are the only ones you can’t unlock just playing through the story mode.

From a competitive perspective, at least in the original game, Jigglypuff is pretty firmly around the middle of the pack, sitting around 8th place in the Japanese version and squeaking up right into 6th for the international release. Good combos and a solid recovery give them tools, but then their incredibly light weight makes them just too fragile to get up to the top...though that doesn’t mean there haven’t been some really solid Jigglypuff showings before. Now we can only hope they get that kind of solid placement again, instead of being just about the worst character in Smash 4.

Of course, before we go, that leaves us with two things to talk about. And for the last round of the 12 Weeks Of Smashness, what better stage to end on than Final Destination? It’s THE classic competitive stage, the one we all joke about. One single big flat platform with nothing above or below it. No tricks, no gimmicks, just a singular plane. Later the competitive scene would come around to the idea that this is a platform fighter, and so platforming is part of the game, but most people’s first brush with ‘fairness’ usually comes from playing here. ...in the later games, that is.

Here, it’s a 1P exclusive stage, and in fact, unlike all the others, it has weird scripting tied up into it that makes it impossible to load it purely like a VS mode stage. Its background transitions won’t work, and it still thinks you’re in 1P.

This may be connected to the way the game’s set up to load Master Hand, the final boss of the game. Here heavily implied to be the hand of the child playing with the toys, Master Hand is an entirely unique character within 64. First, they use HP, something that would only later come through Stamina Mode. Second, they’re not based on any other character assets. And all of their attacks are just all over the place, crazy things that half serve to take them out of the line of fire and half to actually attack you. While heavily based on Wham Bam Rock from Kirby Super Star, they’re even entirely original to the Smash series. While no game has ever intentionally let you play as them, various debug modes and glitches have made it possible...but could Smash Switch be one to buck the trend? We might just find out on Tuesday.

And that’s a wrap! Only time will tell if I’ll do another crazy thing once the game’s actually revealed and we have solid data to work with, but this has been a fun way to keep the excitement train rolling. Though we know little, it’s fairly safe to say these 12 characters are almost certainly in the upcoming game. But with so many more potential returning veterans, and shiny newcomers, I can’t wait to get to explore it with you all. So here’s to a fine E3, and in a few months, a Smashing good time!

[amtushinfosolutionspage]

DGB Grab Bag: Kessel’s Hot Dog Hockey Card, Shootouts, and a Puck to the Dome

Three stars of comedy

The third star: Joe Thornton and Brent Burns – When they’re not challenging WWE tag teams, they’re mastering the weirdly specific sub-genre of commercials that involved them just randomly yelling at people.

The second star: Jonathan Ericsson – Just be a nice guy and toss a puck to a fan, what’s the worst that could happen?

(Via r/hockey.)

The first star: Phil Kessel’s hockey card – It was tempting to give this week’s obligatory Phil Kessel spot to this or maybe this, but instead we’ll go with his new hockey card featuring his day with the Cup. Yes, that one:

At some point, we’re going to have to disqualify Kessel from future appearances in the three stars. That moment is currently scheduled for one day after I write my last column. Besides, he had to be first star because everyone in his family is winning stuff this week. Hey, speaking of which…

Debating the Issues

This week’s debate: Wednesday’s women’s gold medal game between Team Canada and Team USA was an all-time classic. But should Olympic gold medal games end with shootouts?

In favor: No, of course not.

Opposed: No, of course not.

The final verdict: No, of course not.

The NHL Actually Got Something Right

The NHL does not award the Stanley Cup based on the results of a shootout.

Trivial Annoyance of the Week

The women’s gold medal game ended in a freaking shootout.

OK, I think the point has been made. But we all agree on this, right?

Actually, it seems like we do. In the moments before and after Wednesday’s shootout, the reaction was pretty close to unanimous. Just about everyone was dreading the way that game ended. American media. Canadian media. Analytics guys. Legendary American players. Canadian Olympians from entirely different sports. Me. You, assuming you’re a decent person.

So why did the game have to end in a shootout?

That’s not a rhetorical question; I’d really love to know why you’d ever use a shootout in a gold medal game. In the round robin or earlier playoff rounds, sure—maybe you don’t want one team to get trapped in a six-period marathon that hurts them for the rest of the tournament. But the gold medal game? Why?

It’s not about keeping the rules consistent, since they already make overtime longer in the final game. It’s not about needing the ice for the next game, since there isn’t one. It’s not about fatigue, you’d think, since it’s the last game. Or is it? That’s the only option that makes sense. But not much.

Sure, players are going to get tired in long games. We saw that on Wednesday, when Team Canada looked absolutely gassed as overtime went on. But that’s hockey. Conditioning is part of the sport. So is bench management. The shootout probably didn’t change the result of the game, since a Team USA win was looking inevitable the longer it went.

But that’s the problem—they deserved that win, a real win, not a gimmicked one that gives Canadians an out. Wednesday’s shootout was just about as good as a shootout can possibly be, with some dramatic stops and truly great goals. Jocelyne Lamoureux’s winner will become an iconic goal in international hockey history. But it was still a shootout. Shootouts suck. Sometimes they’re a necessary evil, maybe. But gold medal games are never one of those times.

The Canadian men will play for gold this weekend, and while there’s no chance they can match the drama and intensity of the women’s final, here’s hoping they at least get to settle the biggest hockey game of their lives by playing hockey.

And if at some point in the future, somebody tries to invoke Wednesday’s classic as a reason to consider using the shootout in the NHL playoffs, load them into a bobsled and slide them into a lake.

Obscure Former Player of the Week

It’s been an interesting week for Montreal Canadiens fans. Their current captain, Max Pacioretty, is expected to be traded before Monday’s deadline. And the guy who held the job before him, Brian Gionta, was the captain of Team USA at the Winter Olympics.

Not many players can say they’ve worn the “C” for the Canadiens; it’s a list that includes legends like Rocket Richard, Doug Harvey, Jean Beliveau and Newsy Lalonde. In recent times, the honor hasn’t been quite as prestigious, with names like Mike Keane, Vincent Damphousse and Pierre Turgeon taking their turns. But the Canadiens are so enamored with their own history that just holding the job confers a certain type of fame on a player. You wouldn’t think it would be possible for there to be any obscure former Habs captains.

But then you’d be forgetting this week’s player: Walter Buswell.

Buswell was a solid defensive defenseman who started his NHL career with the Red Wings in 1932. He spent three seasons in Detroit, racking up 13 points in 140 games, before being traded to the Bruins as part of a deal for future Hall-of-Famer Marty Barry. Boston flipped him to the Canadiens two days later for Roger Jenkins, and Buswell spent the next five seasons in Montreal.

Those seasons weren’t very good. The Habs missed the playoffs for the first time in a decade in Buswell’s first year, then lost in the opening round in each of the next three. It was a tumultuous time, with Montreal burning through five coaches and three GMs. By the 1939-40 season, Buswell was one of the oldest players left on the team, and was given the captaincy after Babe Siebert retired to become the team’s latest coach.

It ended up being a forgettable year; Siebert never coached a game because he drowned in Lake Huroan during the offseason, the team had a stretch where they won one game out of 20, and the Canadiens finished dead last, a feat they haven’t repeated in the almost eight decades since. It was also Buswell’s last as captain, and as an NHL player. Toe Blake took over the honor and held it for most of the next decade, while Buswell headed to the QPHL and was out of hockey entirely by 1941.

Be It Resolved

The trade deadline is now just three days away, and while the market is picking up, it’s still been fairly slow. That’s a bit of a surprise, given that there are a decent number of sellers this year. And you’d think there would be more draft picks in play, since this year’s crop is considered to be a relatively weak one. But so far, GMs don’t seem to want to move their 2018 picks.

But maybe there’s a way around that. And the key may be hidden in this week’s least interesting deal: The one that sent Eric Fehr from the Maple Leafs to the Sharks for a seventh-round pick.

Most Leafs fans’ reaction to the trade was something along the lines of “Wait, we still have Eric Fehr?” And they only kind of did—he’d been loaned to Anaheim’s AHL team, so he wasn’t even playing for the organization. But the Leafs wanted to free up a roster spot and a bit of cap space. The Sharks needed some fourth-line veteran depth, so they coughed up a late pick.

And it really was a late pick, because the Leafs don’t get the choice until 2020.

It’s relatively rare in the NHL these days to see a draft pick traded more than two years in advance. But maybe it shouldn’t be. Maybe that’s the way to loosen up the market a little bit. If NHL GMs are going to be tightwads with their next bushel of draft picks, then let’s start trading ones for future drafts.

Like, way in the future. Forget 2020. Who wants a 2024 first rounder?

There’s actually plenty of precedent for hockey trades involving far-off future picks. It happens in junior hockey all the time. Check out this year’s biggest CHL deadline trades; they’re full of future picks. Here’s a team trading nine draft picks that stretch all the way to 2023. Here’s a team giving up three picks, none earlier than 2021. Here’s a team trading their second-round pick in 2026. That’s eight years in the future. That’s so long that the Sabres might even be good by then.

How much fun would it be to see NHL teams trading picks from 2026? Do you know how to properly value a draft pick that far down the line? I don’t! I bet NHL GMs don’t either, which would lead to all sorts of unpredictable results when they sat down to work deals. Plus imagine tracking the ups and downs of a rival team, knowing your team owned their first rounder a half-decade from now. It would be great.

Granted, junior hockey isn’t the NHL. Draft picks aren’t as valuable, and teams go through cyclical and relatively predictable stages of contending that make trading away future picks a little easier. But it’s not like an NHL GM has never thought of acquiring future picks. In fact, it was pretty much the trademark of the best GM ever, Montreal Canadiens’ legend Sam Pollock. He built a dynasty out of ripping off dumb teams, stockpiling their future picks and then turning them into guys like Guy Lafleur and Larry Robinson.

If Pollock could do it, couldn’t the GM of your favorite team? Well, no, because they’re not as smart as Sam Pollock. But you think they’d be willing to try. And even a dumbed-down version of the Pollock strategy could probably break a few logjams.

So be it resolved, let’s stretch out the event horizon for NHL trades. You can’t give up your precious third-round pick this year? Fine, give us your second from 2021. You probably won’t even be the GM by then, so let’s get this done and hit the bar.

Classic YouTube Clip Breakdown

With the trade deadline looming, GMs all across the league are sitting in conference rooms with their front office staff, plotting out the moves that will impact their teams for years to come.

But what do those highly private conversations sound like? As it turns out, we have at least some idea, thanks to one team that figured it would be a good idea to film a crucial decision and put it on the internet. Spoiler alert: It would not be the only bad decision they made that week.

It’s June 29, 2013, with the draft and free agency just days away. These fine folks you see here are the assembled brain trust of the Boston Bruins, who’ve just finished up their second Stanley Cup final appearance in three years. Everything is going well. Let’s see if we can pinpoint the moment that changes.

The star of our clip is, of course, then Bruins GM Peter Chiarelli. He also looks really miserable throughout this entire clip, which makes me wonder what he must look like today with the Oilers. Has anyone seen him lately? Are we completely sure he hasn’t gone goth on us?

Things start off with what seems like a reasonably straightforward problem: The team wants to re-sign Nathan Horton, but as Chiarelli puts it, “we’re having difficulty.” That was true; Horton was basically stringing the Bruins along, waiting out the clock to get to free agency. We eventually found out he wasn’t happy with the Bruins waiting to negotiate, but at the time, the whole thing was a bit of a mystery.

Still, it’s Nathan Horton. Good player, but he’s not going to make or break your team. No need to panic, right?

Yeah, not so much. As Chiarelli explains, signing either Horton or a reasonable replacement will mean they’ll have to move a player, and the guy he’s focused on is Tyler Seguin. At this time, Seguin is 21 years old, three years removed from being the second overall pick, and has already led the Bruins in scoring. But he’s coming off a disappointing playoff run, and now he might be on the block. Chiarelli opens the floor to feedback.

First up is Keith Gretzky, making his second ever YouTube section appearance. He apparently isn’t much a Seguin fan, accusing him of not wanting to pay the price. He’s followed by director of player personnel Scott Bradley, who suggests Seguin isn’t physical enough and relies on his skill.

“Sound familiar?” Chiarelli asks, in a pretty transparent reference to Phil Kessel. “Yeah, it does,” Bradley replies, and then there’s a weird jump cut where something is clearly edited out. I’m assuming it was somebody else going “It sounds like Keith’s older brother, somebody remind me if he turned out to be any good?” and then being dragged out of the room and thrown down an elevator shaft.

We see a shot of Chiarelli talking to Don Sweeney, which ends up being a bit of ironic foreshadowing given how this all plays out. Meanwhile, we get a voiceover by Denis Leary, which is weird, because I don’t even remember Bill Hicks doing this bit.

Chiarelli calls “Paul,” which is Horton’s agent Paul Krepelka. We only hear one side of the conversation, but we can tell from Chiarelli’s reaction that he’s not hearing good news. “Done,” he tells the group. We then cut to a shot of Jim Benning making the exact same face that every Canucks fan made last week when they found out about Jim Benning’s extension.

We skip ahead a day, and now Chiarelli wants everyone to weigh in one a potential Seguin trade. Bradley’s up first, and this time he’s done being subtle; he just buries Seguin. So does Bruins legend and team president Cam Neely. If there’s a dissenting voice in the room, we don’t get to hear it—these guys clearly don’t like Seguin, and they want him gone.

I mean, can we just take a moment to appreciate how insane it is that this was all filmed and released? As a fan I love behind-the-scenes stuff and as media I want as much information as possible, but it’s crazy that the Bruins would let this see the light of day in a league that obsesses over bulletin board material. The only saving grace is that surely everyone involved learned their lesson and never let themselves be filmed talking trade ever again.

All that said, now I kind of want to know what the Kessel trade conversation was like in 2009. I’m guessing it was just Chiarelli taking off his jacket Ric Flair-style and elbow-dropping a photo of Kessel over and over.

Chiarelli goes to work the phone, talking to an unnamed GM about first round picks and prospects. That’s where our clip ends, although you can watch the rest of the episode here. That clip doesn’t give us any additional insight into the eventual trade, which saw the Bruins send Seguin to Dallas as part of a seven-player deal for Loui Eriksson and prospects. We just skip ahead to Eriksson meeting Cam Neely, touring the rink, and waving a watch in front of Benning while repeating “You will sign me to a terrible free agency contract in three years.”

The epilogue: Seguin immediately blossomed into a point-a-game star, and is the sixth-leading scorer in the league since the trade went down. Eriksson, who’s never been anyone’s idea of a physical player, lasted three years in Boston. All in all, not good.

So what happened to the brain trust in the meritocracy-based NHL? Well, three (Chiarelli, Benning and Sweeney) are currently running teams, and two more (Gretzky and Bradley) have since been promoted to assistant GM. But at least they all learned a valuable lesson about the dangers of trading a top pick from the 2010 draft.

Have a question, suggestion, old YouTube clip, or anything else you’d like to see included in this column? Email Sean at nhlgrabbag@gmail.com.

DGB Grab Bag: Kessel’s Hot Dog Hockey Card, Shootouts, and a Puck to the Dome syndicated from https://australiahoverboards.wordpress.com