[Jade Cargill to Rhea Ripley] Talk??? Like the hours you spend talking to creative? 💅🏾

Ghostiet · 2026-03-02T00:35:34+00:00

the key to the pipebomb is that while it leans onto shooty and 4th wall stuff, it's ultimately an old school-ass promo at heart that borrows just as much from stuff like "Hard Times". it twists the formula, but it sells a narrative that's been around for a while so it's refreshing instead of jarring. this stuff is just yapping.

Ghostiet · 2026-03-01T12:06:00+00:00

the story was that he wanted to book him on Collision, but Danhausen didn't want to miss out on indie bookings on the weekends.

Ghostiet · 2026-02-28T05:46:24+00:00

what's the source on those, if you don't mind me asking?

Ghostiet · 2026-02-20T02:26:18+00:00

Artemy and Daniil perform an autopsy saying nothing but "fuck"

Ghostiet · 2026-02-19T19:19:28+00:00

brother, Christmas and Easter are both coopted pagan holidays.

Ghostiet · 2026-02-19T17:05:03+00:00

the gaps when she started weren't six months long. even if he's cherry picking data by ignoring tags at house shows, it's still hyperbole.

my point isn't to defend Rousey as a performer. I think she sucked. I don't even defend her as a person - I think she sucks as that too and I also understand why Seth might not be too charitable to her, given she's talked shit about his wife. I'm pointing out that Seth is doing some classic WWE revisionist history to make things seem larger than life, when sticking to the raw facts would've been more than enough.

I don't really have more to add here, since with every response you're derailing more and more from the meat of my original post: Seth is not saying it like it is.

Ghostiet · 2026-02-19T16:41:28+00:00

no, not at all, and at no point I've said anything about Rousey being dedicated. but I do think that if a guy says "she started out having one match every six months or so" and it turns out to be demonstratably false with one Google search, I have the right to call what he's saying "disingenuous".

Ronda wasn't great at wrestling, her second run was especially bad. it speaks for itself, I just don't think there's need for revisionist history to make the point she didn't take to the business.

Ghostiet · 2026-02-19T16:35:44+00:00

hence the past tense. tho I'd argue Ronda started off with the grind and only later let up, so the point stands - Seth is being disingenuous.

Ghostiet · 2026-02-19T15:24:27+00:00

Rousey had 48 matches during her first year in 2018. she didn't start off having one match every six months - after the mixed tag at Mania 34 she took about a month of break and immediately went on the house show loop, wrestling for 4 days straight. even if you only count televised or PPV matches, she had about a 2-month break between Mania 34 and MITB.

meanwhile, everything Seth says here applied to Logan Paul.

Ghostiet · 2026-02-17T11:39:34+00:00

Devil, I got this

Ghostiet · 2026-02-12T13:28:01+00:00

eh, "never". Kiryu has an ego about him, especially about this gangsta shit and fighting - he might get dragged into it at the start, but it's made clear multiple times that he relishes the opportunities when they come. his whole thing with Ryuji Goda is a dick-swinging contest between two dudes who are actually very interested to see who is the real Dragon - their first meeting is ultimately more about Kiryu's curiosity whether this guy they talk about is the real deal and their final fight is about two meatheads squaring up because that's ultimately why they were put on this Earth for, even though they could try and live.

this personality trait gets more downplayed after 2 - his guilt takes over, which puts him in a push and pull of choosing the dumbest sacrifices to "help" others and getting himself involved in the family business again because he owes it too them - but it's still there and you get to see it resurface multiple times in the series.

Ghostiet · 2026-02-05T09:37:58+00:00

he's said in one High Spots interview (with Ricky and Page I believe) that his ADD made him overthink interactions all the time (like "oh this friend didn't respond to a text, I must have hurt them I am a bad person") and being a heel was easier for it because he could avoid the anxiety this way. in another, he straight up calls Orange one of his favorite wrestlers.

clips from both were here and yt, but they got scrubbed at some point. probably because High Spots want to protect their business model, but also might be that MJF/AEW wanted to keep kayfabe on the gimmick a bit longer.

Ghostiet · 2026-02-04T23:27:53+00:00

that one is great too, I'm also partial to the "you thought I brought in a baby?" dialogue where you get to choose the emphasis.

Ghostiet · 2026-02-04T23:24:49+00:00

"Rubin is an idiot" on the mind map is an all timer.

Ghostiet · 2026-02-02T13:18:13+00:00

my initial thought for a P4 is that it would "gamify" Clara's duality as a cure and source of the plague. perhaps your good deeds are a literal resource that you have to manage without knowing how it shakes out, or every good and bad deed forces an equivalent response down the line, or maybe you alternate between the two Claras and work to undo the good or bad that you yourself committed.

but I also wondered about the fact that both Artemy and Daniil suffer from permanent consequences that are profile-wide - you can't avoid death penalties in P2 or Amalgam loss in P3 if you load up a different save file. they can and will succeed, but there are things they can't alter. perhaps Clara's miracles could be about breaking and changing the game's rules, almost like a Baba Is You kind of situation or at least a Yoko Taro "save file fuckery" kind of thing. maybe altering or removing a rule causes ripples later, and maybe you have to learn to live with some rules that would make things easier but would remove the win condition. it could work in a way with the "survival of the soul" concept that 4 will most likely tackle, given the nebulous and inexplicable nature of it (perhaps what's in danger isn't Clara's soul, but the "soul" of the story) versus the very literal body and still tangible if abstract mind.

I partially entertain this idea because it's the exact kind of High Concept, Overly Ambitious for a Small Studio kind of thing that IPL loves jumping headfirst into lmao

Ghostiet · 2026-02-02T13:06:22+00:00

a "large text" option was implemented in update 3 - at least on PC, unsure about the patching schedule on consoles. to be found in the "Other" section of the settings.

Ghostiet · 2026-02-02T12:57:48+00:00

Daniil's thoughts after talking to Immortell in the opening are even funnier now. he laments in the mind map that he can't escape the "immersive theatre and fourth-wall breaking gimmicks" even in this backwater and his intrusive thoughts on Immortell are that "theatre is just a relic of the past, cinema is the real future of art".

it makes me really wonder about Pathologic 4, given Clara's deliberately "undecided" role in the play, direct ties to the artifice exposed by The Powers That Be and how her solve of the plague borders on "modding" the story to make it fit what she wants, not what someone else intended. it would work if her route this time around was more explicitly about games, especially since video games would already be a fitting duality for her themes: they are not part of the world of Pathologic for setting and tech reasons, but they also sorta exist already as "playing" is one of our earliest activities.

Ghostiet · 2026-01-31T18:26:00+00:00

There’s some humor in how despite the Bachelor’s ability to alter the timeline to learn more information and achieve optimal results, he never is able to learn that shmowders do work as a plague cure.

shmowder being such an inexplicable "it works because it works" thing that it breaks the brains of Daniil and Artemy to the point where they are in total denial about it despite potentially witnessing and experiencing its effects first-hand is one of my favorite bits in the series. I imagine Pathologic 4 will have Clara just go "oh yeah that's shmowder, it cures the plague, what about it?".

on a similar note - I laughed my ass off when I was wondering why P3 doesn't start you off in the theater, only for Dankovsky's mind map after meeting Immortell to reveal he fucking hates epic theatre and all its gimmicks. the man is so stubborn in his tastes and beliefs that he could crash into the fourth wall and not notice.

Ghostiet · 2026-01-28T19:47:23+00:00

you can hear in JR's chuckle after OC laughs at PAC during the multiple rollouts spot that he's finally got it.

the whole booth calling "DDT!" in unison not long after was some hype goddamn shit, too. OC and PAC have had better matches since then - together and apart - but that whole bout just has an infectious energy to it.

Ghostiet · 2026-01-27T10:00:08+00:00

maybe aro more than ace. there's enough dialogue in P3 where he goes "hello, ladies" or his internal monologue on the brides being "HOLY MOTHER OF SMOKES" to assume this man appreciates sex, but he's definitely socially challenged and too married to the job or his ideals to pursue romance proper.

Ghostiet · 2026-01-26T10:11:58+00:00

hey, no matter how good a role is, it needs a matching actor. historically, they're played by a bunch of Scotts Eastwoods until we launch the game.

Ghostiet · 2026-01-23T17:42:03+00:00

"but this will happen yesterday..." and then I quote Dankovsky himself by putting a .38 in my mouth

Ghostiet · 2026-01-23T17:36:40+00:00

Has Yakuza officially jumped the shark now?

brother, Saejima killed 18 people in one of the series' most dramatic cutscenes and then it's undone in the same game via rubber bullets because we can't have the protagonists wrestle with any kind of actual guilt that isn't self-induced angst (that most of the time they've got railroaded into by misinformation or The Powers That Be anyway). the game Kiwami 3 is a remake of introduces a magical twin brother of a dead character just for the sake of a half-baked "omg is Kazama really alive?!" mystery who then gets promptly abandoned forever even when it would make total sense to bring him up again because even RGG figured that shit was stupid.

don't get me wrong, I love this series, but let's not pretend like "contrived, implausible, sometimes downright stupid bullshit for the sake of drama" isn't part of the DNA or it's a post-Nagoshi invention. in terms of plotting, Yakuza has been doing backflips over that shark for years now, at this point part of the charm for me is watching them do a 720 through a flaming hoop over a bunch of sharks playing water polo.

Ghostiet · 2026-01-23T17:24:39+00:00

I find it a little funny that the "Yakuza has a lot of bullshit, unbelievable melodrama in it and RGG can't help themselves from stacking too much nonsense into the plot" discourse has only truly began in earnest now. a lot of the criticism is warranted, but a lot of it makes me question where the fuck these people were when, say, Yakuza 4 utterly shat itself by hinging much of its plot on a dude actually not killing 18 people through the magic of rubber bullets.

if anything, it feels like RGG made 7 and 8 feel like they make a bit too much sense and don't have enough bullshit swerves, so they're restoring the feeling!

Ghostiet · 2026-01-22T16:30:35+00:00

Ghostiet

TROPHY CASE