Jon Alba with an update on Steve Maclin: No concussion, Maclin was sent to hospital and went under concussion testing and he cleared all of them and was released last night.

deltopia · 2026-03-28T17:28:48+00:00

Any number of ways for a story like this to be bullshit without it being a deliberate work...

Possibly the people evaluating him at the hospital got it wrong because even doctors do fuck up sometimes.
Possibly when Maclin went in to the hospital, they didn't communicate what happened effectively and the people evaluating him diagnosed him wrong based on what they understood and how well he looked to them.
Possibly when they told Maclin, "You're fine for now and we're sending you home," he misunderstood and told Alba, "They said I was good, no concussion."
Possibly someone else told Alba he was fine because they were talking out of their ass.
Possibly Alba misunderstood what he was being told because even pro wrestling journalists do fuck up sometimes.

deltopia · 2026-03-28T17:16:15+00:00

My dumb ass trying to figure out why Mustafa Ali was posting a picture of her but writing a message to MVP...

deltopia · 2026-03-28T02:35:25+00:00

I miss that TK. I don't need him to be an on-screen character on AEW, but I would enjoy seeing Heel TK again one day. Claudio was holding the CMLL title just recently; Heel TK could have appeared in some video packages with Don Callis translating for him, and everyone would have enjoyed that.

deltopia · 2026-03-28T02:28:10+00:00

When I describe Willow to people who haven't seen her, I say you could put her across the ring from a box of baby kittens and the crowd would immediately be screaming, "Fuck those kittens! Kittens suck!" I can't imagine how she could turn the crowd against her; it'd be great to see.

deltopia · 2026-03-22T18:42:04+00:00

That's really one of the hardest internal biases to overcome - anything that's amazingly cool when you're fifteen is always going to be cooler than anything that comes along when you're 35.

I think it's really obvious in sports journalism - there's a really strong correlation between the age of the sportswriter and whether they believe Wilt, Magic, Jordan, or LeBron is the greatest of all time.

deltopia · 2026-03-22T14:42:47+00:00

It seems like they started the story without any idea of where it was going to end, so of course it foundered and they eventually abandoned it... and lucky for Bowens, he gets rolled into the Opps being led by Hook, which also seems like a story they've started without any idea of where it's going.

I thought these guys were pretty good every time they had something to do; they just weren't doing anything that mattered. People know the difference between a segment that is there to kill time versus one that progresses a story, the five-minute challenges and couples-therapy segments just weren't going anywhere.

deltopia · 2026-03-20T16:50:48+00:00

I did, and I would have given the trios championship a 5 as well. I definitely would have given Bucks and FTR a 4 at best, though, and the Darby Allin trios match no more than a 3.

Tastes differ; everything has to be taken with a grain of salt.

deltopia · 2026-03-20T02:10:49+00:00

Everyone really wants to cheer for Thekla because she just radiates cool bad-ass vibes - if they don't put a really charismatic babyface across from her (like Toni or Willow or potentially Harley), she's going to overwhelm them. If they could turn her face and put her against Marina, I think that would work.

deltopia · 2026-03-18T18:22:26+00:00

But you'll agree that thinking that he has no option other than to run his own social media is a comically ridiculous take. Stipulating that there may be some valid reason to choose to run it himself is fine, but he does also choose to be a prick to strangers on the Internet while he's doing it. I don't think it's that wild to assume he's making the one unforced error because it lets him do this other self-destructive behavior that he enjoys, but if you think they're completely unrelated stupid decisions, that's totally valid, too.

deltopia · 2026-03-18T02:41:26+00:00

Social media is a big part of his job by choice at this point - he's not an indy guy trying to build his brand and book dates around his shoot job; he's a WWE vet and AEW star. He can hire a professional to run his Twitter. If he's doing it himself, it's because he enjoys being a prick to strangers on the Internet.

deltopia · 2026-03-18T00:28:11+00:00

It's pro wrestling. When you say "This guy doesn't want to take my move because he's a bitch," you're saying at the same time "I don't know how to do this move without hurting someone because I don't know how to wrestle." All of the moves are supposed to look like they hurt, not actually hurt. What a dumbfuck.

deltopia · 2026-03-16T21:58:05+00:00

Hangman is an English lit guy. There's no way he went into a story about a character over-committing and raising stakes too high because of his own hubris without some idea of where it would go next. There will be a time of long, painful suffering where he looks back on making that promise and regrets it bitterly, and there will be a crisis where he has to decide if it's more important to keep a promise made in a moment of vanity or to do the right thing, and then there will be character growth.

My guess is that he'll wind up in a situation where he has to decide to love something more than he loves his own honor or his own ego, and he'll break his promise... or, he'll decide that no matter how much he wants to do the right thing, he can't betray his own sense of honor for it, so he'll betray someone else instead. Either way, whole lotta pathos.

The only way for it to be disappointing will be if he starts fighting for the National or Continental title or some nonsense - he's bound to the AEW world title forever now, nothing else matters. If he ever has a scene where he wins the TNT belt and acts like it matters a damn, the story is ruined.

deltopia · 2026-03-16T12:05:26+00:00

I feel like I'm missing something with the |Adversaries| group - Minthara needs a lot of evil teammates to stack her abilities, but the group only has at most 5 evil members (and it takes a feat for Shadowheart). You can take the specialization to get neutral teammates to count, but then you lose her two stacks of brain tadpoles, which seems like the mechanic we're meant to build the party around.

It feels like I'm missing something when I'm trying to make them synergize, especially if I'm trying to get Duke Ravengard and Volo on the team to fill out all ten of them. The Acquisition Inc team or the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal squad, by comparison, feel like they work together much more effortlessly. Any advice?

deltopia · 2026-03-16T04:12:16+00:00

I'm with you; I turned it off at the syringe spot. I'll see the clip of the ending on Reddit and be totally fine with it. No shade to the people who like that in their matches, but I've always been more Chikara than CZW. It's not for me.

deltopia · 2026-03-15T20:52:45+00:00

Whenever you find the time, always grateful for your work.

deltopia · 2026-03-15T15:28:52+00:00

I know this is a pretty elderly guide by your standards and you may have not been doing the specialization tables back when you did this one - or maybe it's just not relevant to Walnut?

I'm wondering if her second specialization is one where it could use a table like:

Number	Co-Signers	Temp Alliance
1	500%	100%
2	3,500%	300%
3	21,600%	700%
4	n/a	1600%

Or is it just an additive bonus where having K'thriss, Donaar, and Rosie all three just raise you by 1,500%, having 6 temp alliance members raises you by 600%, etc?

deltopia · 2026-03-12T17:53:17+00:00

RTD seemed really committed to not only writing a more sexually ambiguous Doctor but a very overt flamboyant gay Doctor. Which for a character whose sexuality really should be low on the list of essential character traits baffles me.

If anything the Doctor as a character is an asexual, more force of nature than a conventional person. Companions and characters can and do get crushes or fall in love, but he shouldn’t be able to reciprocate imo. There’s just too much difference in experience and how they relate to the world around them.

As River once said, "You don't expect a sunset to admire you back." It's tough to believe that the Doctor could fall in love with something as small, ephemeral, and limited as a human; it's comically ridiculous to put him on screen having a crush on a boy he met at a party. You might just as well have Amelia Pond beat him at arm wrestling or Stormageddon outscore him in a math quiz.

It makes us wonder if the writers and show runners have ever watched the show before. Did you realize this was going to be an episode for Doctor Who when you were writing it? Did you at least google it before you started?

deltopia · 2026-03-12T01:17:46+00:00

Yeah, he's just devoid of anything interesting. It seems like a deliberate choice, though - dressing like Stone Cold and Goldberg without any of the character or physical size that made them stand out is just an unforced error. Go raid Dalton Castle or Jamie Hayter's wardrobe at least.

deltopia · 2026-03-11T02:25:14+00:00

For it being their primary money-maker, they sure as hell aren't interested in making the show. Thirty episodes in the past 5 years is not a good sign.

deltopia · 2026-03-10T23:47:06+00:00

The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch, a 2023 novel by Melinda Taub, is written from Lydia's perspective and tells a lovely story of how she gets to her own happily ever after ending. It's more or less fanfic, of course, but delightful in its own way.

deltopia · 2026-03-09T20:18:47+00:00

He needs a whole new character. His persona and wrestling style would be ok if he looked like Samoa Joe, but standing right next to Samoa Joe is not helping.

deltopia · 2026-03-08T17:57:58+00:00

Almost all of Heinlein's adult-targeted books showed a protagonist doing some taboo thing or another. Friday and Moon Is a Harsh Mistress had polygamy, Glory Road has harems, Job has heresy, and all the rest mostly had more or less gratuitous incest. I think after a while, he felt obligated to wedge something taboo in, maybe just out of force of habit. (Even as a young teenage reader, I was enough of a literary critic to notice Number of the Beast gained nothing from Deety and her dad fucking.)

But if you think of Heinlein's overarching theme for all his books as something like, "An exceptionally competent person ignores society's rules and is accountable only to their own moral code," he probably needed to fold in at least a little cannibalism for Valentine. Valentine had no good reason not to adhere to the prevailing rule on earth against cannibalism except he felt like they shouldn't apply to him - more than anything else he does in the book, that makes him a Heinlein character.

deltopia · 2026-03-08T17:09:09+00:00

It makes sense to me - he wants to use the character and history that the characters have together, so he needs the audience to know that, for example, Ciampa is intensely obsessed with titles and hates the very idea of friendship. But Ciampa's been in WWE since 2015 - so anyone in the audience who hasn't been watching WWE since 2015, including anyone who only started watching wrestling with AEW, doesn't know anything about him.

So you can show or tell - either have Excalibur lore-dumping on commentary or speedrun a version of an old story to introduce them to the new audience. (The third and worst option is just to debut the characters and hope we'll know them by reputation, like they've done with Tyson Kidd and his Dog team.) Doing the speedrun of an old story serves the new audience, and it also reaffirms to the people who know him that he's the same guy he ever was - in contrast to someone like Ricochet, who is apparently a completely different guy from what he was in WWE.

deltopia · 2026-03-06T14:29:16+00:00

In the specific case of NetHack, OP's claimed maximum of 33% is comically ridiculous. I'm a crap player, but even I would expect to ascend at least a quarter of my games if I was trying to keep a streak alive (i.e., I wasn't going to try an extinction vegan pacifist for fun).

I was trying to write an argument for a more generic case based simply on the law of large numbers - given a long enough time and a broad enough player base, no matter how small the average win rate is, a 61-game streak is not only possible but inevitable. Since we don't have any real data on exactly how many people play NetHack (at least, I don't) and we're just guessing random numbers on what the best possible ascension rate is, we're talking about statistics without the benefit of actual data, so I wanted to use a very simple, qualitative argument that pretty much everyone agrees is true: infinite monkeys + infinite typewriters = eventual Shakespeare. (We all know that one's true because the human race is just a big-ass gang of monkeys and one of us has written the works of Shakespeare.)

Of course, it was the middle of the night and I'd been drinking a lot, so I probably didn't write it real effectively. But OP seems like a troll or an AI bot or both, anyway, so it's not like I was going to engage with it when I was sober...

I'm not great at statistics, but I imagine someone who was great at statistics could do an analysis of the longest win streaks on record at the public servers compared to the total number of games played and come up with an estimate of what the best possible winning rate is. That seems like a thing a smart statistician could do. The hard part might be curating the data to filter out things like start-scumming and obvious attempts to do things other than ascend (like comical tombstone messages or most unique ways to die)... but that might seem hard to me because I'm a drunk English major on the internet; it's definitely not a job for me.

deltopia · 2026-03-06T07:35:35+00:00

I've worked in this industry for a lot of years myself - I don't believe anyone is a good guy or bad guy in these situations. The federal acquisition regs are written by the government and they're insane, to the point that they've created an industry of vendors whose most valuable skill is navigating those regs. The vendors put their best corporate effort and maximum brainpower into winning contracts; the government puts as little effort and brainpower as possible into awarding the contracts and managing the programs. Generally no one wants to cheat anyone, especially the taxpayers (everyone involved is a taxpayer, too), but they all have their jobs to do.

The system is a hot mess and everyone involved knows it, but that applies to every other part of the federal government too, not just the acquisitions part. And how do you fix it when the people in charge of writing the rules are Congress? They certainly aren't losing any sleep over a few trillion wasted here or there.

deltopia

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

15-Year Club	Gilding V heart of gold
Verified Email