Books, Games, Wrestling Vol. 18 – Bye, Winter

March 24, 2026March 24, 2026 / Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

This winter has been too damn cold with too much damn snow. It has also been difficult at times to get out of bed. I’m so ready for Spring, maybe I’ll even go to Double or Nothing in May.

Wrestling – AEW Revolution

Overall, I think last weekend’s AEW Revolution was entertaining, but some weird choices overall. I’m not even talking about the main event as the possibilities in Hangman’s story going forward are interesting to me. I imagine this will likely be the story for Hangman the rest of the year, considering it was basically a verbal/handshake agreement to not challenge for the men’s world championship again. There are going to be multiple temptations to break his promise, and we’ll see how he navigates that.

The Young Bucks losing in front of their family to FTR, whose title run has been carried by this match and the Brodido match, just to set up the return of Adam Copeland and Christian Cage doesn’t feel great. However, the possibility of FTR dropping the titles to Cope and Christian, then C&C choosing the Bucks to retire against instead of FTR once again, will be hilarious to me as an FTR hater. Plus, even as an FTR hater, I have to admit that the match was incredible (thanks to the Young Bucks).

It’s Jon Moxley beating Konosuke Takeshita for the Continental Championship that really makes no sense to me. What the fuck are we doing with either of these stories? So Don Callis Family and the Death Riders have a feud where the Death Riders are the tweener babyfaces, and the DCF are the heels, setting up the Takeshita v. Moxley match, where Moxley wants to make up for his loss in the C2 and the time limit draw. Takeshita wants to beat Moxley without ganging up on him before the match, a fair fight if you will. The path of this story is clear to see. Kazuchika Okada screwed over Takeshita at World’s End, but loses the C2. He remains International Champion, so obviously, after screwing Takeshita, Takeshita would win the Continental Championship, then face Okada to unify those belts again. Oh, what’s that? Takeshita lost and looks like a nerd now? Jon Moxley just won clean?

At the end, Mox and Takeshita shake hands, then Will Ospreay returns looking for revenge on Moxley from his attack at All Out. Moxley and Death Riders allignment since the C2 has been confusing. Moxley himself has been more of a babyface, while Claudio, PAC, and Danny have been more like tweeners then Marina and Yuta have been leaning more heelish. So now what, with this Ospreay feud, is going to happen? It is unclear in a kind of negative way, as while Hangman’s future seems unclear with many possibilities, the future of the Death Riders seems unclear in a what-the-fuck-are-we-doing-here? kind of way.

Everything else on the card went pretty much how I thought it would. I do think everyone should check out Bandido vs. Andrade El Idolo. Since returning to AEW, Andrade has been incredible and this match is no different. I’m excited for where this Swerve Strickland / Kenny Omega feud is going with them having their rematch on AEW Dynamite next week already. I suspect Kenny is going to win but who knows?

Book – Super Nintendo by Keza MacDonald

I heard about this book on the Aftermath Hours podcast the author was on. It made me realize how different video games are to my age versus nearly everyone younger than me. The NES came out just six months after I was born. I basically grew up with Nintendo, so some of the events detailed in this book I just experienced as a part of video game history. There is an extensive chapter on the struggling development of The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time, whose delays is my first experience with getting video game news and might have been my first online message board experience discussing the delays on America Online’s video game channel. Back then, a game getting delayed for three years was an astronomical delay, and Zelda 64, as it was called in the beginning, kept getting delayed over and over again. I learned about this through issues of Nintendo Power, which my grandma had gotten me a subscription to as a birthday gift. The book provides more details about the causes of those delays, including quotes from developers I had never seen before. That’s pretty much the balancing act of the book I’m experiencing as someone deep in the weeds of Nintendo knowledge; the book reiterates a lot of what I already know or have lived through, but also new insights. I’ll have more to say when I finish it.

Games – A Hodgepodge of Switch games.

I’m reaching a wall in Pokémon Pokopia where I’ve done all the regions and am near the end of the story of the game, but don’t want to quite finish it yet. There are still some habitats in the city area I’ve yet to devolop and the enviromental level there is still kind of low. I don’t want to rush to the end now that I’ve been in each biome so I’m taking my time.

Pokopia has made me go back to other Switch 1 & 2 games I’ve been meaning to play again. It’s the 40th anniversary of The Legend of Zelda, but I likely would have been playing Skyward Sword HD, Wind Waker, and Tears of the Kingdom regardless. I really hope by the end of Switch 2’s lifecycle that all the 3D Zeldas are on it.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is a weird one for me. It came out just days after Skyrim and felt like the beginning of Nintendo’s worst period to me, where their games were constantly hand-holding in games with menus and pop-up instructions that interrupted the flow of games on both the 3DS and the Wii. It was also the first Zelda game that I’ve ever DNF’d before. Wii Motion Plus just did not work well for me at all, whether it was my distance from the TV due to my poor eyesight or something else, playing Skyward Sword just felt like a chore. It was the last game I ever bought for the Wii, and I pretty much played exclusively on Xbox 360 after that until 2016-2017 when I bought my first gaming PC and the Nintendo Switch.

Jump to 2021, everyone was flabbergasted when they announced a Skyward Sword HD for the Switch, and no Wind Waker or Twilight Princess HD. I wanted to give the game another shot, and I remember July being pretty barebones. I’m going to be honest, I don’t remember my original thoughts on the game when I first played it, except for the fact that I liked it, I finished it, and then immediately accidentally saved over my completed game. I hadn’t touched it since then, not because of that, but simply because there have been a lot of great games from 2021 – present coming out. The pandemic might also have something to do with it.

Now, as I’m playing it, I’m thinking about its role in the connective tissue between Ocarina of Time and Breath of the Wild. Majora’s Mask, Wind Waker, and Twilight Princess are, in a sense, spiritual successors to Ocarina of Time, building on the foundation that the original 3D Zelda started, but Skyward Sword feels like balancing the line between trying something completely new and continuing what has always worked with 3D Zeldas. Also, this version of the game looks beautiful. I don’t remember the original looking this good. I think perhaps because I’m playing on a screen with a higher refresh rate, I can actually notice the consistent FPS the game has now.

Metroid Prime Remastered is also another game I’ve returned to. I didn’t finish it when it came out because I was so annoyed by the Chozo Ghosts constantly respawning when I leave and reenter a room. Now I’ve returned to it progressing to my first encounter with metroids in the game, getting the power bomb, grapple beam, and the plasma beam. I don’t know how mucb more of the game I have left. I believe there is maybe two more powerups I need to get and all of the Chozo artifacts that unlock the final boss.

Books, Games, Wrestling Vol. 17 – Seasonal Affective Disorder

March 13, 2026March 13, 2026 / Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

I’m doing something a little different and writing about all books, games, and wrestling together, rather than in separate sections, for a particular reason; you’ll see why in a moment.

I don’t know if it’s SAD, depression, or just the state of the world, but I’ve found myself retreating into games more and more over the past year. Recently, though, since about January, I’ve found myself less excited to read or watch wrestling, and I’m struggling to figure out if it’s me or not. I’ll watch a great match or an exciting turn of events on AEW Dynamite, which my brain will register as a great match or a good part of a feud or story, and I’ll just feel no excitement when I think about it.

Two examples I can think of are this MJF/Hangman Page feud going on. I feel like it’s going well. Hangman has set stakes that feel important while giving me a stipulation that I actually want to see MJF in. On the other side, MJF feels like he has been on his best behavior, avoiding anything too edgy or obnoxious. I’m curious to know what MJF in a Texas Death Match is going to be like and how violent it’ll actually get compared to Hangman’s previous TDMs with Swerve and Moxley. Yet, I’m feeling just like, not excited for some reason. If Hangman loses, which I think he might, I’m very intrigued where they could go from there and how they can write themselves out of that corner. Yet when I sit back and think about it, I’m just kind of feeling nothing. Everything leading up to AEW Revolution 2025 is feeling similar. I am anticipating Jon Moxley vs. Konosuke Takeshita to be a killer match, and the possible fallout if Takeshita wins, within both the Death Riders and the Don Callis Family, has story threads I’m interested in. Yet, that usual feeling of anticipation isn’t really there.

A more recent example just happened on Dynamite this week. Speedball Mike Bailey and Kyle Fletcher have this unbelievable chemistry in the ring, and the match they had this week was incredible, and I knew it was incredible. I even said to my friend in the voice chat, “Oh my god, this match rules,” but it didn’t really hit me like I knew it should. This has been happening to me a lot. My brain is saying, “I like this,” and then basically not feeling kind of neutral about it. My attention span has also taken a massive hit somehow. Fingers crossed it is just how fucking cold it has been here in New York this winter.

I’m in a similar situation with books. I have a lot of great books on my plate right now, I know, a great problem to have. Oh no, Josh has a lot of books that are good before they come out, but besides what I’m reading for the podcast, I’m struggling to sit down, read, and stay reading. Maybe now that spring is practically here, that’ll change soon, fingers crossed. One thing I am reading and simultaneously listening to is the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. It’s one of the okayest series I’ve ever read, basically how I feel about it. I can feel an underlying righteous anger in Carl, the titular character, over the entire dungeon-crawling system and the corporations in charge of it. Brief aside, that is another reason I’m struggling reading books as gigantic mega corporations controlling society and making it horrible for everyone seems to be an ongoing theme in a lot of new books recently, and it doesn’t exactly feel great, don’t know why, hmmm. The jokes, specifically the jokes in the achievements Carl and friends unlock, are so fucking bad. Each time they pop up it makes me want to stop reading the book or turn off the audiobook for good. I’m trying to stick with it cause it’s what I read or listen to at work, but I don’t love it. It’s pretty okay and has some fun moments and fight scenes.

I finished Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth on PC right before Resident Evil Requiem came out. It’s basically my second playthrough, even though I stopped at the temple on PS5, but this second time around, and experiencing the final act has me completely reevaluating not only how I feel about the remake trilogy. When I finished it I felt an emotional gut punch that left me unable to play any other game with any enthusiasm for a day or so. Not the way I was talking about earlier, but sort of the residual emotional drain afterwards when something impacts you deeply. It made me really want to go back and play the original again, though, as the first time I experienced it was sneaking into my sister’s room when she was out to quickly play it on the PlayStation her then boyfriend had gotten her (which she hardly ever played) at an age where I didn’t really appreciate the story.

Finishing Rebirth also has me reevaluating where it sits on my top 2024 list. I’ve edited my backlogged list to put it above Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth now at #2, just below Metaphor ReFantazio. This year, I hope to finish my second playthrough of that game, and then we can reevaluate if I still believe that was my number one game of 2024. Less on that and more on 2026, though. Let’s start with the negative. After all the drama around Yakuza Kiwami 3, I returned my preorder to Steam and used that money to buy Resident Evil Requiem instead. Maybe I’ll play Kiwami 3 in three years when I buy it for fifteen dollars on a Steam sale, but right now, not spending my money with RGG is the only real power in this situation I have. It was the right choice because if not for one other game, RE9 might be my game of the year.

Requiem feels like a love letter to a lot of the previous Resident Evils. Grace’s section feels like they included a lot of what was best from seven and eight. Now, while I don’t hate Ethan Winters, Grace might be the best Resident Evil character in many iterations, and her as a protagonist in the more survival horror section was excellent. As someone whose first Resident Evil game was four, I’m a huge Leon fan and was excited to see him return in the action-oriented sections. The Leon sections feel like a combination of the remakes of two and four. My one criticism of the game is that just as I’m getting into the groove of one character, it switches to the next. I wouldn’t want a Resident Evil game to ever be long, but maybe an extra half-an-hour to an hour for each character would be good. The way it ends has me really curious about both the direction of the story of DLC they have planned and where the next game is going, as this feels like closing the book on a lot of the series’ past.

The game that supplants it and has been eating all my time, my surprise game of the year so far, Pokémon Pokopia. Combine Dragon Quest Builders, whose team worked on this game, Animal Crossing, and Viva Piñata with Pokémon. There is an element to this game that I think is missing in the main games. There is always a mini game that has you interacting with your Pokémon in the main games that is supposed to increase your bond with them. They’re not really characters or your friends, though. In a away the Pokémon are more like toys or tools that you use. This game makes them into real characters, since you’re a Ditto transformed into a human, you can talk to them. The premise is quite sad. All the humans have disappeared, and the Pokémon are missing. As a Ditto, you wake up and miss your trainer, so you transform into them and go around restoring Pokémon habitats where all of them seem to have been sleeping for a long time. A lot of them are talking about natural disasters hitting certain areas and humans running out of food or having to leave. I don’t know quite how it ends yet, but I get the feeling it’s not going to be one hundred percent a happy ending. I don’t think the humans are coming back, to be honest. It’s up to the Pokémon to rebuild the world, and rebuild the world I have been doing so for many hours. It’s now my most-played Switch 2 game, not counting the upgraded versions of Tears of the Kingdom, Breath of the Wild, and New Horizons.

The one thing I will say about it is I don’t know if I feel the pull of creativity with it as much as I did with New Horizons. Everything I do is to facilitate getting more Pokémon or putting my favorite Pokémon in a house I built. Once that is over, I don’t know if I’m going to want to just keep building and editing the towns for hours like I did with Animal Crossing. The effect both Resident Evil Requiem and Pokopia have had is to make me want to play the other games in the series. I interact with the Pokemon and I want to battle again. I visit Racoon City as Leon and want to be young Leon again on the first day on the job.

Books, Games, Wrestling Vol. 16 – Lords, Links, and Lulls

February 3, 2026 / Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

I haven’t written on here in awhile and the format in draft form is all wonky now. I have no idea what is going on. If it looks weird, font and size-wise, it’s not my fault.

Wrestling – Truckin’ along.

Here’s the thing. I thought MJF as World Champion was going to eat up a lot of time on TV and have a lot of edgelord bullshit that made me not want to watch the show. Instead, he has, ultimately, been super boring, and the least interesting part of any feud has been in it. Surely he has something else right beside the two poles of problematic and boring, right?

Honestly, I don’t have much to say about what is going on in the world of wrestling at the moment. Tanahashi’s retirement match against Okada was very emotional. I’m happier that Yota Tsuji has brought back the V4 IWGP Heavyweight Championship than I am the fact that he is champion. I think he’s good, but his matches don’t quite excite me as much as bringing back my favorite championship of all time. I’m still watching AEW and enjoying it, but it’s like, just my little show I watch every week with friends. I am excited about Kenny Omega wrestling more singles matches and going after the AEW World Championship, but I think I’d have more to yell about it if I thought he had any chance of winning. All the stuff involving Hangamn, Swerve, Andrade, and him is fun. It feels like the ranking system back without actually showing the rankings on screen (I will always wish we still had the rankings and AEW used them better for storytelling). That’s just sometimes how it goes.

Books – The Boys (Fellowship) are back in town.

So, I don’t know how it started, but my friends and I started watching The Lord of the Rings Extended Edition movies, and I was giving little commentary about information that is in the books but isn’t in the movies at their request. I think I wrote on here that around December, I used to start Fellowship a lot because Christmas Day is the date the Fellowship takes off from Rivendell. Well, I did start it last year, but didn’t commit. Now I’m committed as I’ve already finished Fellowship and moved on to The Two Towers. I even broke out my pocket editions, which I usually keep in my car. It’s a nice feeling when you have a niche interest in something, and your friends are like, “Yes, let’s hear it. We want to hear it.”

This is just an aside, but I prefer volumes of The Lord of the Rings to be three separate books rather than just one large volume. In hardcover form, that is few and far between, but still, that is my preference.

Games – A Bundle of Swords

All the jumble of games I’ve been playing feel sword themed. I put in a lot of hours into the remastered Oblivion, completing all of the Thieves’ Guild, the Mage’s Guild, and the Dark Brotherhood. All I have left is the Main Questline and the Fighter’s Guild before I go to the Shivering Isles. I’ve finished all of Silksong Act 2 for the second time, and I’m trying to beat Grandmother Silk while cursed for probably the last achievement I’m going to go for in this game. The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker is available on the Nintendo Switch Online service for the Switch 2, and I’ve been surprised how well that game’s look has held up. Whatever upscaling they’re doing, if they’re doing any, makes the game look amazing on my Switch 2. However, I’ve never played the Wii U’s HD remake of that game and, in fact, have barely seen it. I wonder how that looks?

A Keyblade is a kind of sword, and I’ve set up a Steam Deck Dock near my treadmill and have been going through Kingdom Hearts 1 while I walk. There was a game I started on Steam Deck on the treadmill that I had to stop because I wanted to play on my good PC, Lies of P, a game I bought on sale but have had on my backlog for a while. I think I’m past the point where it’s like, emulating Bloodborne too much and has become its own thing. The last sword game I’ve been playing is Final Fantasy VII Rebirth on my PC which, man, that game looks a lot better on PC than my PS5, especially the faces, where sometimes on the PS5 the lighting made their faces look weird. I get people being mad about some of the open-world aspects, but I love this game. The battle system is definitely my favorite of the new non-turn-based battle systems Square has tried to use recently in FF games.

Books, Games, Wrestling Vol. 14 – Most Holiday Vibes

December 30, 2025 / Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

As I write this I’m here preparing for Christmas, doing some last-minute cleaning, some last-minute gift buying, checking out the Steam sales, thinking about the three main categories of this site that have the most Christmasy/Holiday feelings without being explicitly about the Holidays. The first one, books, is easy.

Books – The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien

In the year 3018 of the Third Age of Middle-earth (S.R. 1418 if you’re using the Hobbit calendar) at the Council of Elrond on October 28th, it was decided that Frodo would take the One Ring to Mordor, and his companions, chosen, formed the Fellowship of the Ring. It was on December 25th that the Fellowship departed Rivendell on the quest to destroy the ring. J.R.R. Tolkien knew what he was doing when he picked that day.

Wrestling – Coming Together

Obviously, over the years, there has probably been a Christmas-themed plunder match. The New Day were known for this kind of thing, so I imagine they were involved where all sorts of Christmasy types of weapons were used, like big candy cane decorations or whatnot, but that’s not what we’re going for here.

What part of the wrestling has those Christmas vibes? It feels like it’s about coming together or those moments of eucatastrophic moments where the babyfaces, who previously had been at odds with each other, have a united front against the heels and triumph. It could be when the underdogs who everyone expected to lose get the surprise victory, like getting that surprise present you wanted but had no expectations you’d actually get. The parts of wrestling that probably feel the most like Christmas are the ones that feel straight from a storybook. The lone wolf babyface who used to be a heel is struggling to overcome the odds, but finds out they have unexpected allies after all. Reunions also have that kind of Christmas magic to them with tag teams, factions, or groups that have long since broken up, having a reason, even if temporarily, for one night only, to get back together.

Games – The North Wind Howls

Batman: Arkham Origins, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and Parasite Eve all take place during Christmas, but obviously, the games (and books for that matter too) that probably have that feeling of Christmas are the ones that you received on the Holiday and cherish. As an adult looking back, I feel pretty lucky to have a dad who worked many Thanksgivings and many Christmas Eves to make sure we received the presents we desired which for me was video game consoles. So many Christmases my parents would be like “Sorry you didn’t get many presents the game console you wanted was expensive (or previously, it took Santa a lot of work to make the game console) and I’d be like “It’s cool this is what I wanted! Video games are awesome!”

Games like Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, Street Fighter II Turbo, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Star Fox 64, Bomberman 64, Metroid Prime, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, and others I received on Christmas I’ll forever associate with those Christmasy vibes.

1996 was like the Holy Grail of Video Game Christmases for me. From my parents I received a Nintendo 64 and Super Mario 64, my grandmother gave me Sonic and Knuckles, and my godmother/aunt gave me Super Mario RPG and it was one of those Christmases, if I remember correctly, where it was in the middle of the week so the school district had no choice but to give kids two weeks off. One of the best Christmases ever and not just cause of video games.

As far as vibes though, something about Chrono Trigger’s fairy tale like storytelling gives Christmas vibes to me. If the developers had put a quest to save Santa in it, it would not feel out of place. Neither would any Dragon Quest game to be honest. It’s those sword and sorcery traditions that give me that feeling.

Likewise, I can’t quite put my finger on it, I associate Raiders of the Lost Ark with Christmas time, maybe that’s when I watched it as a kid, but Indiana Jones and the Great Circle I’ve now played mostly in December likely for the same reason.

Books, Games, Wrestling Vol. 11 – The Hands of the King

November 14, 2025November 14, 2025 / Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

I pretty much know what my game, book, and wrestling match of the year are as far as number ones, it’s everything else underneath I’m not sure of. I’m working on an article/review for GeeklyInc.com on what I think is my favorite book of the year. The part of the end of the year, even though I only do this for fun, that I have a tough time balancing is finishing the last releases I haven’t finished yet, finding time and space for writing, and getting ready for the Holidays. Hence why I mentioned wanting to make more use of the library in previous volumes.

Books and Video Games – The Lord of the Rings and Metaphor ReFantazio

You might not know this, but the date the Fellowship of the Ring leaves Rivendell on the quest to destroy the ring is December 25th. Therefore, I tend to associate at least the first book of The Lord of the Rings with the beginning of November to the end of December season. It has been a while since I’ve read through this book, probably since 2017-2018. It’s one of the few books I insist on reading a physical copy despite owning it digitally in multiple places. I’ve read it all the way through six times, so I wonder if this time away, I’ll observe something new from it. I will say, to anyone reading it for the first time I think you can skip the Concerning Hobbits prologue chapter until at least finishing The Fellowship of the Ring. As much as I love it, it does feel like it slows down the pace immediately.

Credit to https://www.tumblr.com/katschneider

On my mind is the connection between finishing Blood for the Undying Throne, rereading The Lord of the Rings, and replaying Metaphor ReFantazio in the form of a quote from Tolkien’s book itself, “The hands of the king are the hands of the healer.” In College, with my thesis advisor, we’d discuss the connection between William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and how the kings, such as Macbeth, The Witch-King of Angmar, and Aragorn, affect the land positively and negatively. This obviously has biblical roots, which I am no expert on, so I won’t delve into it, nor the real political implications that monarchies believing themselves to be divine have had on our history. This is more the exploitation of the idea of the king in terms of mythology and fantasy. Major Metaphor ReFantazio endgame spoilers ahead.

In Metaphor, the king dies, and a contest is held to determine who will be the next king. In the game, there is a connection between the king, magic, anxiety, and the “humans,” who are abominations in the game based on artwork by Hieronymus Bosch. The magic that Euchornia has turned into an industry, called magla, turns out, towards the end of the game is revealed to be the physical manifestation of anxiety. If a person succumbs to their own anxiety, magla can actually turn them into a human. Louis, the main antagonist, wants to do this to everyone, and whoever can survive, aka overcome their anxieties, will be part of the new world with him as king. The protagonist you play ends up being the other character vying for the throne to improve the inequality in Euchronia. It’s all a cycle; you and the main character are trying to break it as there are multiple tribes of humanoids, and they don’t all get along. The game surmises the prejudice the different tribes feel towards each other is rooted in anxiety, thus creating more magla, thus creating more opportunity for people to turn into humans.

The death of the previous king and the absence of a replacement will lead to increased anxiety and tension between the tribes, thereby increasing the likelihood that people will succumb to their anxiety and transform into a human. Therefore, the protagonist becoming king will heal the land by healing the people’s anxieties. If the main character makes the serious changes in society the party and he intends to throughout the game as they meet more people and make more connections, this will ease the anxiety of the people. The connection between you and the protagonist is through the royal magic the previous king had cast, which is revealed at the end of the game, connecting you to the protagonist to guide them. Therefore, it is you, the player, who is also the king with the hands of a healer who heals the land by easing the anxiety of its people, including the main character you play and his party. This and many other reasons are why Metaphor ReFantazio was my game of 2024.

Wrestling – Blood and Guts 2025

Straight off the bat, while Blood and Guts is my preferred War Games style match, it has never been my favorite match stipulation. The need to do it every year doesn’t help at all, either, though I know it tends to be a ticket mover. With two different Blood and Guts this year, a Men’s and Women’s, they were always going to be compared, and while the Men’s Blood and Guts was good, the Women’s blew it out of the water.

It comes down to urgency and hatred. The participants in the Women’s B&G showed they had an urgent desire to get their hands on each other with real hatred. The build to this Blood and Guts was odd, but it had the roots of several feuds, giving it heightened tension. Like a spider-web, there is a line of connection each team member had with the other team throughout the year, and continuing past Blood and Guts into the Women’s World Tag Team Championship Tournament. I think AEW did its due diligence towards the event with matches between the two sides, but it definitely needed some more time and promos. Can Jamie trust Toni Storm, given their history? Have Willow and Kris buried the hatchet with the help of Harley Cameron? How did they talk Mercedes into joining the team? Questions that should have been asked and answered but it did not affect the quality of the match.

It had proper violence between Kris and Mercedes. It shortly ended at Willow and Kris communicating before the heels ruined it. Harley Cameron got to display both her silliness with the Mercedes puppet and equal violence in the match. Marina Shafir, whose wrestling matches I have never been impressed with, absolutely showed out. The key to all this is the speed at which they did this. A lot of these Blood and Guts matches have moments where they stall the action to set up a spot, but this one didn’t feel like that at all to me. The ending I thought was the best heel ending to a Blood and Guts yet, with the heel team forcing a lot of the big guns out of the cage and the Triangle of Madness forcing Toni Storm to surrender to save Mina Shirakawa. This will surely come up again in the tag team tournament.

For the Men’s Blood and Guts, all I have to say is never sleep on Kyle O’Reilly again. I will say, though, I think I loved the Hangman Page vs. Powerhouse Hobbs Fall Count Anywhere match better than either of these two Blood and Guts matches, and am of the belief Hobbs should have been Hangman’s Full Gear opponent instead of Samoa Joe, but I think I’m in the minority on this.

https://www.tumblr.com/allelitewrestlings/800064297134948352?source=share Gif by allelitewrestlings.tumblr.com

Books, Games, Wrestling Vol. 10 – A Touching Reunion

November 7, 2025 / Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

It’s November, and to be honest, I’m terrible at doing end-of-the-year writing, but this year I’m determined to do some posts on here and GeeklyInc.com in the “…of the Year” variety. There are only eight weeks left of the year, but I’m not against talking about the best or favorites of 2025 into the first weeks of 2026. Wrestling is the easiest to talk about because most of my matches of the year have already happened, but with the Continental Classic, one Ring of Honor PPV, and two AEW PPVs I don’t want to write off the potential of those shows. I don’t think anything will top my number one book, game, or wrestling match of the year, but it’s everything underneath that is up for grabs.

Wrestling – Random AEW Musings

I don’t have one particular topic in mind, but I do have some thoughts. Between All Out and now, AEW has been relatively good to very good. I’m enjoying myself even if I have some criticism of the booking here and there. For example, and keep in mind this is someone who relatively enjoys the C-show that is Tony Khan’s Ring of Honor TV, but there is no reason for Yuka Sakazaki to be wrestling on ROH and not be appearing in AEW, especially with her new presentation and music. As a big fan of hers, at first I was just happy to see her back from injury and wrestling regularly, but her team-ups with Alex Windsor have been good enough that I am left scratching my head as to why they’re not on AEW TV or having Yuka in singles matches on Dynamite or Collision. I am hoping they’re just spinning their wheels with them before having them on TV, since Women’s Tag Championships will need contenders.

I miss Will Ospreay and Swerve Strickland, but Bandido has been filling that void they have left for me. It’s between Hangman and him, for me personally, for wrestler of the year, but I must admit I have been watching far less of other companies this year than in previous years. It’s one of my goals for next year to watch more CMLL, Stardom, and TJPW. Perhaps some NJPW as well, but it has not been hitting for me much this year except for Goto’s tite reign and Konosuke Takeshita.

Games – From Xbox 360 to PlayStation 4

If you’ve read enough of these entries and came back with the thought “Josh might have undiagnosed ADHD,” I would probably agree with you because I went from a theme of Xbox 360 games to PlayStation 4 games as I was sucked into God of War (2018) full throttle to the point that I beat every Valkyrie and completed the game. That somehow transitioned to me diving deep into another of my personal PS4 mainstays, Final Fantasy 7 Remake, which I played to completion, but I find the having to choose different options in Chapter 9 to unlock different quests to complete every side quest in the game so tedious that I attempted it once, got annoyed, closed the game, and uninstalled. Completing both has left me excited to start God of War: Ragnarok and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth on my new, fancy PC, but I might play more Silksong first, as well as replay Metaphor ReFantazio on PC, which I previously played on PS5.

Lastly, I’ve been delving briefly here and there into some DS Pokémon games such as SoulSilver, Platinum, and Black, with the latter being the first time I’ve ever played that generation. I think the release of Z-A and every gaming podcast discussing it to different degrees led me to have Pokémon on my mind.

While I was editing this, and since I’ve been playing Platinum, I was reminded that Piplup might be top five favorite Pokémon ever, and the YouTube algorithm decided to remind me of this.

Books – In Between Books

I am at the moment in between books, having finished both Blood for the Undying Throne by Sung-il, Born of an Iron Storm by Anthony Ryan, and a rereading of The Incandescent by Emily Tesh. To be honest, I’m not exactly sure what I am going to read next, but I’ve definitely felt the pull of reading this autumn that I did not feel in the summer. It has been a while since I have reread The Lord of the Rings, which used to be an annual event before I started expanding my fantasy library, and there has been this illustrated edition that came out a few years ago that has been sitting on my shelf waiting to be read.

I also have some advanced reader copies for next year that maybe I should get the jump on, but I am unsure and would not be able to talk about them here, making this section very short and boring. We’ll see. The podcast will be reading Network Effect, the fifth Murderbot Diaries book, soon, which is the full-blown novel of the series rather than a novella. It is my favorite book in the series. Murderbot has to go off planet with Dr. Mensah’s teenage daughter, and hijinx ensue that force it to bond with a teenage girl on a deserted space station. It feels like a culmination of the first four novellas and the starting point of the rest of the series.

Books, Games, Wrestling Vol. 9 – Everything Old is New Again

October 30, 2025 / Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

I want to use my local library, specifically, I want to walk to my local library, which is only about a ten-minute walk away, and write these on my laptop at the library. I had planned to work on it Monday through Friday, but one thing after another kept happening, so I ended up skipping a week. The theme of this one is in the title, as I’m rereading The Incandescent by Emily Tesh, released last April, I’m playing games that I played in the Xbox 360 era on my PC, and in AEW, a lot of the men’s feuds seem to be continuing to mixed results.

Books – The Incandescent Reread and Blood for the Unyding Throne Release

The urge to re-read The Incandescent by Emily Tesh from earlier this year took over me about a week ago, and I just finished it again. That may be my favorite book of the year, even more so than The Devils by Joe Abercrombie, who is one of my favorite authors. I don’t often describe a book as beautiful, but to me, that is a beautiful book. Particularly this time around I find Dr. Walden’s meeting with Nikki Conway just heartbreaking. A teenager, barely an adult, is thinking of turning down a great opportunity to be the support system to her friend, who, like her, has no support system in a world where money can determine everything you have in life. Through this conversation, Dr. Walden has to kind of reassess the privilege she has had, which the character of Laura Kenning pointed out before she lost her job. It’s honestly such a great take on the British magical boarding school; it’s going to end up being one of my favorite books ever.

The terminology of academia may seem like an obstructing wall of jargon—and sometimes, perhaps, it is—but far more often than that, it is a set of keys. You cannot understand the forces you are dealing with, still less wield them meaningfully yourself, unless you have the words to set around them. The language of power is the handle on the knife.
The Incandescent by Emily Tesh

The hardcover for Blood of the Undying Throne came out this Tuesday and I didn’t want to say anything about it when it was on my advance reader copy but the official copy has a quote from my podcast No Page Unturned on the GeeklyInc podcast network. If you don’t know, often praise for the previous book of a series will be quoted on the next one from various sources who talk about it. I didn’t know this was happening and was quite shocked in a good way to see this. It means a lot.

Games – Xbox 360 Games Come Back Around and God of War (2018)

It seems, without realizing it, I’ve wandered back to my Xbox 360 era with the games I’m playing recently. I already mentioned Mass Effect: Legendary Edition in the last volume. Still, I’ve been crafting a private list on my Backlogged of my personal best 100 games of all time, and I came about to a discussion with my friend Hiro about how Batman: Arkham Asylum is essentially a Metroidvania. So that discussion has me playing it, to see where in 2025 it falls on my list, and it holds up amazingly well, especially the combat system, considering how many games have taken it and evolved it since then. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work on my Steam Deck, but its sequel, Arkham City, does, so I’m also playing that on there bit by bit when I am lounging on the couch, taking a break from reading, or lying in bed in the morning. It’s also October, so I installed the Dead Space remake from last year onto my desktop. That’s another Xbox 360 era game I played a lot. Now that I think about it, weirdly, the last year has been filled with throwbacks to the 360 days.

Almost a year ago the first Red Dead Redemption came out on PC.
Sega put out that remake/remaster of Sonic Generations that added Shadow content.
Valve updated Half-Life 2 last November for the 20th Anniversary and put it out for free.
Dead Rising came out with that Deluxe Remaster last September.
Castle Crashers put out new DLC and updated all the art for that game.
Oblivion received a remaster earlier this year.
Gears of War Reloaded was released for the Playstation and PC.
A new version of Ninja Gaiden II was released called Ninja Gaiden II Black

All of this brings me to say, where the fuck is a new Peggle?! Also Capcom, make vanilla Street Fighter 4 on Steam playable again, thanks. Back to the subject of my 100 greatest games list, I don’t know where they fell on the list, but Batman: Arkham Asylum and God of War (2018) were, I believe, close together, so somehow playing Arkham Asylum led me to installing God of War and sinking my teeth into it once again, and deep.

Oh, wait, I remember now. I was listening to a gaming podcast where one cast membner said they haven’t replayed the new God of War games because they’re only fun when Kratos is fully kitted out, which I fundamentally disagree with. After playing twenty-two hours of the PC version, I vehemently disagree with this. It’s still amazing how good that axe feels in it, when you swing, when you throw, when you bring it back to your hand. The incredible feeling of it never goes away, even after seven years, three if you’re talking Ragnarok. When our family received money for our possessions in our house that were lost in the fire in 2017, I, on a whim, bought a PlayStation 4 Pro and God of War (2018). In a weird way, those two purchases for a time represented all the systems and games I lost in the fire, which was not a small amount, going back to my childhood.

Wrestling – AEW Forbidden Door to Full Gear.

AEW Wrestledream was great, but I think I missed my moment, personally, to write about it when I skipped writing about it last week. The only comment I will make is that I didn’t love the main event so much that Samoa Joe versus Hangman Page shouldn’t have been a main event, but I also am not Darby’s biggest fan. I’m sure what is coming out of it will be great, but I’m going to be perfectly honest, Samoa Joe v. Hangman and Darby Allin v. Jon Moxley really didn’t need to continue.

I said the other day I kind of miss when AEW only had four pay-per-views, and that’s not completely true. The truth is, the spacing for Forbidden Door to All Out (or vice versa with All In mixed in) to WrestleDream to Full Gear to World’s End is kind of a mess as there are so few weeks in between those to build feuds. It doesn’t help that sometimes a Dynamite after a PPV can be the real end of the feud, with Dynamite acting as a sort of fallout for the final match of the feud on PPV. Neither do the specials like Blood & Guts, Ring of Honor PPVs, Grand Slam, Anniversary episodes thrown in the bunch there. It’s all kinda messy. I say this, when in fact I’m not unhappy, really, with AEW at all right now, but it does feel like the late summer to fall to winter lineup needs some sprucing up especially when you compare it to Revolution to All In.

Personally, I think World’s End is a cursed pay-per-view. The first one was not only boring but represented a lot of what was wrong with MJF’s first title reign and his vision for AEW. The second one, even with the Continental Classic finals, was tarnished by Jon Moxley’s terrible idea for a four-way with AEW top guys at the time, where the Death Riders just made them look like idiots, and then Adam Copeland returned to make them look even more like idiots. Throw it in the bin, put WrestleDream in that spot on the calendar, have the C2 finals there, and move Full Gear up by maybe a week or two to give space between it and WrestleDream. You can have whatever special TV episodes you want, like Blood & Guts, Grand Slam in NY, etc, between All Out and Full Gear when WrestleDream would originally take place. Forbidden Door would maybe benefit and be seen as more special if it were biennial. That’s one solution to the too-tight schedule that is AEW’s late August to December, but I’m sure Tony could come up with a different or better plan if he tried, perhaps.

Books, Games, Wrestling Vol. 6 – Hadez II Hangman

October 2, 2025October 2, 2025 / Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

This is the second week in a row that I’ve released this on Thursday instead of Wednesday, but unlike last week, I purposely delayed this one because I wanted to compare my original thoughts when I wrote this on Monday to what I thought after AEW Dynamite‘s 6th Anniversary episode. If you get the reference from the title, congratulations, you’re old like me.

Games – Hades II

Hollow Knight Silksong and Hades 2 are probably going to be talked about together a lot, despite being very different games. Metroidvanias and Roguelikes share some common ground in that they often have a high difficulty scale, they’re both sequels to successful games in the series, and they’re both developed by independent studios. After twenty hours of Hades II, I have to say I, as in me personally, find it more difficult than Hollow Knight Silksong. The thing about Silksong‘s difficulty, to me, is that it is the same level of difficulty as the first game and requires a skill I had to remember in the process of playing it: patience. Most of the time when I would lose to a boss, it was because of two reasons: first, I didn’t have all the information about the boss’s attacks, and second, I would grow impatient and get too greedy with attacks, hoping to end the fight. With Hades II, you get better at it the more you play it. You develop a muscle memory for the attacks, just like with Silksong, but it requires me a lot more luck, hence the fun of roguelike, and a lot more awareness, which I don’t seem to have. Sometimes I’ll take damage in Hades II, and I do not know why.

Let me back up, though, because I don’t want you to get the impression that I dislike this game. I absolutely love this game. Not once has a run made me feel like I’ve wasted my time. No matter how far I’ve gotten, there has always been something, some kind of resource, some kind of story beat, some kind of future unlockable that I didn’t have before. While I miss aspects of the first one, I am absolutely having a ball with the second one. Without any spoilers, I have had five successful runs so far, four going down and one going up (the first chance you get to go up, you should go up), and the weapon I’ve been most successful with is the Sister Blades, but goddamn do I love the Umbral Flames and the Moonstone Axe. I love all but one of the bosses, not because of any difficulty or anything, but I just find them kind of annoying and uninteresting. The stakes of this game are much higher than those of the first Hades, but it has enough callbacks to the first game that it’ll satisfy returning players. It feels like they both upped the ante of the first game while streamlining so much of it. The fact that doors will tell me if that is where I need to go to get the resources I need is a godsend. If this were any other year but the year Silksong came out, this would probably be my game of the year. Currently, I have it third after Donkey Kong Bananza, but I think it’ll quickly rise to second before too long.

This coming out so soon after Silksong has only one little ember of an idea growing in my mind: Supergiant needs to make a Metroidvania. That’s how I know Silksong is my game of the year, because when I’m playing other games that are also great, whether it’s Hades II, Trails of the Sky 1st Chapter remake, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, or whatever else, I’m still thinking about how I want to play more Silksong.

I’ve been removing and redownloading TikTok on my phone a lot this year. Mostly because I will open, and my time blindness will activate, and I’ll lose hours to scrolling videos. Recently, I’ve seen a lot of people reacting to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and I have to say I feel quite envious of the people who love this game. It could be with some of these content creators that they’re being entirely performative but from the ones I’ve seen, I doubt it. I just don’t love the story, especially now that I’m in Act 3, where it feels like, without spoilers, too much Clair Obscur and not enough Expedition 33. It feels to me like two stories duct-taped together in a way that isn’t quite working for me, but I still find the battles so amazing. It just doesn’t move me in that way, but then I realized at work what hits me similarly that I can compare it to. What they’re feeling is what I feel in the climax of the Pacifist Run of Undertale and, more specifically, this year’s Chapter 4 of Deltarune. The story, the music, the characters all hit me right in the gut, where I keep my feelings, and I can say I may not feel the same way about E33, but I understand that feeling.

Wrestling – Hangman’s WrestleDream Opponent before and after AEW Dynamite’s 6th Anniversary

Today, Hangman Adam Page is teaming up with two members of the Opps, Samoa Joe and Powerhouse Hobbs, to take on the Death Riders after Daniel Garcia took out Katsuyori Shibata. I imagine Hangman’s championship defense will develop out of this, and I am worried it’ll be a turning heel Samoa Joe. A lot of the people available to be top heels in AEW are either out injured or have already faced Hangman. Don’t get me wrong, in my opinion, Samoa Joe versus Hangman Adam Page will be a fantastic match, but the setup for Joe’s turn feels like shit, we’ve got no one else right now, rather than organic in any way. What reason does he have to turn besides wanting the Men’s World Championship and being Samoa Joe? I’d much prefer Joe just be like “You know, Hangman, you’re right, I did help you win that belt at All In so do me the favor of facing me at WrestleDream.” I hope they make it work either way.

However, while not as high profile, I’d much rather it be someone else. I don’t like fantasy booking, really, because if it doesn’t happen, people tend to be disappointed when an event that was never going to happen doesn’t happen. Still, I’m going to do it here. The Bastard PAC returned to AEW at All Out to the Death Riders with a fresh, shortened haircut and a shirt on his back, unusual for him, but PAC and Hangman were one of the original feuds in AEW, both of them wanting to be the first person to be All Elite Wrestling’s Men’s World Champion. Today’s episode of Dynamite is the 6th Anniversary, so why not run it back? PAC may not be the top guy we wanted him to be when AEW started due to injuries and the pandemic hampering his momentum, but he’s still an extraordinary wrestler, and Hangman, who was already a great wrestler, has only improved since AEW started. That is what I’d like to see at WrestleDream: The Bastard PAC vs. Hangman Adam Page for the Men’s World Championship. It’s probably not going to happen, so I write it here just to get it out of my head. I will not set myself up for disappointment but find joy in what they’ll actually give me.

So, this is me, post-Dynamite, and I have to say I did like the setup for Hangman vs. Joe at WrestleDream. The setup for this was slightly silly, but to be honest, it was completely realistic in how some people act. A more senior employee feels like they’ve been disrespected by their younger colleague, who maybe has been given a bit more, and suddenly they go off the deep end and completely overreact because deep down they’re envious that the younger colleague has something they want. Essentially, and don’t take this as a comment on Joe because Joe rules, but in this specific scenario, he’s got boomer energy going on. So in a way, I found this quite funny, but I’ve also been on short-form video platforms enough to know people can act like this and be harboring this negative energy that they’ll unleash real quick. Safe to say, I thought AEW Dynamite‘s 6th Anniversary was awesome, and WrestleDream is turning out to be a must-see PPV, and so quickly after All Out? FUCK.

Credit to JJ Williams for this photograph.

Anyway, this is starting to get wordy, but having Hangman Page and Kris Statlander as my AEW World Champions, two of my favorite wrestlers, is amazing. I love Kris’s new gear, which she debuted tonight. The one bummer of the show was how many times ICE was advertised on HBO Max, and I’m not the only one unhappy with it. I left my feedback asking for them to no longer show these advertisements, and you can too in the link below in Hangman’s Bluesky post.

Books – Born of an Iron Storm by Anthony Ryan and Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders

I’m seventy percent of the way through Born of an Iron Storm by Anthony Ryan, and I can already see in my head where the story is going, and I’m excited to see how Ryan subverts those ideas by doing something completely different or going in a direction I didn’t expect. The character Ruhlin is in such an interesting spot as someone who never thought of himself as a leader and has been forced to be one. In fact, now that I think about it, all the point-of-view characters are in that position to some extent. I can see the thread of plot that will lead these individual storylines to interweave where they are forced into an alliance against a common foe, just like in John Gwynne’s The Bloodsworn Saga, another high fantasy series from the past few years that I love.

After getting those fancy hardcover editions of Fonda Lee’s The Green Bone Saga, I have the itch to delve back into that series with a highlighter and a pencil for a close reading of my previous copies. I love both a close reading and a reread, which is probably why I like doing my podcast so much.

I’ve also been reading Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders, and the way it plays with grief, magic, and the kind of academia I wanted to be a part of at one time is really hitting me in a good way. It has been a while since I’ve lost time to reading this year, probably since Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent or Joe Abercrombie’s The Devils in the spring.

Speaking of books, the latest episode of the book podcast I’m on, No Page Unturned, is out now. We’re currently covering The Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir, up to the second book, Harrow the Ninth but we’ve also done all our A Chorus of Dragons by Jenn Lyons, which you can go back to and listen to.

Also check out my co-host Christina Ladd’s review of Daedalus is Dead by Seamus Sullivan.

Daedalus Is Dead Review: No Gods, No Monsters

Books, Games, Wrestling Vol.5 – SAVE the World Championship

September 25, 2025September 25, 2025 / Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

My first late edition. Most of this was written enough to release it on Wednesday, but I was struggling to find the words to express my feelings about Undertale‘s 10th Anniversary without sharing too much or getting wordy, but still making it feel personal. I don’t think I nailed exactly how I feel, but I did the best I could.

Games – Undertale 10th Anniversary

This year is Undertale’s 10th Anniversary, Toby Fox has been celebrating it with Fangamer in their first of a couple of streams with some unique things inserted into the game that have the fandom going wild and putting every detail under a microscope. I haven’t had time to watch the whole stream, but I have taken in a lot of what Toby Fox has had to say about it. I usually write most of these on the weekend or at least have a lot written in my head before I login to my WordPress account, but I’ve been struggling to articulate what this game means to me without going insane with the word count here. 2018 was a rough year for my family and me after a house fire destroyed our home and nearly all our personal possessions, but my community of friends, both online and offline, had my back and were kind enough to raise money so I could get back some of what I lost, including a Nintendo Switch. The kindness of people and that Nintendo Switch, which I still own, got me through what was one of the lowest points of my life. The games that I bought and played that year mean a lot to me, and Undertale was one of those games.

The only information I knew about the game was not to kill the monsters if I wanted to see the full story, and I didn’t listen. I can still picture myself sitting on the floor because I didn’t own a chair, my back against my mattress, and the rented bed frame the homeowner’s insurance got for us in the rental home we were going to be in for a year while the house had to be rebuilt. I had killed Toriel because I didn’t realize I could spare the bosses, too, and I felt so awful about it when Flowey the Flower reminded me I could actually reset the game, so I did, and then didn’t play the game for another three months. I don’t remember which song, but it was hearing a song from near the endgame that got me back into it, and then it blew my mind when Flowey called me out for resetting the game after killing Toriel so much. I stayed up all night in bed, doing the entire pacifist run to ungodly hours. Something about the situation I was in, the friends and family that supported me, and that finale of the pacifist run that just opened the floodgates when I played it. I’ve never teared up at really sad moments in stories. It’s those moments of triumph, overcoming overwhelming odds, when hope returns, that really gets me emotional, like when Gandalf arrives with the Rohirrim at the Battle of Helm’s Deep. That moment at the end of the game still gets to me. Just hearing “Hopes and Dreams” to “SAVE the World” to “His Theme” brings me back to the moments lying in bed thinking of everything I’ve been through from November 2017 to November 2018. The game will always be very special to me for that. It is a game about our connections to other people, and connections were very important to me in that year. Happy 10th Anniversary, Undertale.

Wrestling – Post- AEW All Out ‘25

Here is the thing about AEW pay-per-views, I haven’t watched one without my friends since Revolution 2020 and since then there have been maybe four of them that have been bad vibes, AEW All Out 2020 due to Matt Hardy getting concussed and them continuing the match, Double or Nothing 2022 because CM Punk winning the world title felt like the worst call you could make, World’s End 2023 because it might have been the only AEW PPV I would call boring, and World’s End 2024 because Adam Copeland was the least exciting return to take on the Death Riders after a weird fourway main event that made everyone in it look dumb as hell. All Out 2025 started out weird with Christian and Copeland vs. FTR in what I would describe as a main event of WWE Raw in 2019. In other words, this match fucking sucked, and I am so ready for Copeland to retire. I’ll sacrifice Christian retiring to not get more of this bullshit. I don’t care if he’s retiring or their history, I don’t want to see references to John Cena, Defender, and Best Friend to Sex Trafficking Vince McMahon on an AEW show, get the fuck outta here. The entire layout of this match screamed WWE-produced, and I was not here for it. It was not a great start for the show, but luckily, it was the worst match on the show. Even the Hurt Syndicate, which I do not give a fuck about, nor do I want to see MVP wrestle, gave us something better by at least losing to Ricochet’s new faction, The Demand.

The show felt all uphill from there for me. The return of Eddie Kingston, Mark Briscoe getting a victory over MJF, and Riho having a great showing against Mercedes, showing some ego against the TBS Champion, that I greatly enjoyed so much that I’d love for them to run it back. The three-way match between Okada, Takeshita, and Mascara Dorada, if not for the main event, might have been my match of the night. I hope we get Takeshita vs. Dorada, Okada vs. Dorada, and of course, Takeshita vs. Okada sooner than later. Jon Moxley vs. Darby Allin’s Coffin Match was the kind of violence I desired after the high-octane match for the Unified Title, but I was pretty surprised to see Darby lose his first coffin match in AEW. I’ve been championing how great Kris Statlander is since she joined AEW in late 2019, and I was hooting and hollering when she did Chuck Taylor’s seatbelt pin to win the AEW Women’s World Championship against Toni Storm, Jamie Hayter, and Thekla. I recalled at that moment when Wheeler Yuta pinned Chuck Taylor with that same pin while Orange Cassidy was on commentary and Orange just saying, with sadness in his voice, “Chuck taught him that pin.” Speaking of Orange Cassidy, it was greatly hinted at that his return would be this Wednesday in a segment during the show, which added to the hype for me. Finally, the ladder match for the tag titles was insane, terrifying, and awesome. AEW could have pulled the trigger on giving Jetspeed the belts, or return them to the Young Bucks, but I was glad we’re continuing with Brodido, who were equally insane, terrifying, and awesome in this match.

Finally, the main event. I’ll never get tired of seeing Hangman Adam Page being the top babyface, the guy, the man, the world champ, and backing it up in one of my favorite matches of the year against TNT Champion Kyle Fletcher. I had no doubt going into it that Hangman was going to win, but the match gave me just that small amount of doubt that made this even more exciting. Kyle Fletcher is definitely going to be World Champion sooner than later, probably via beating Will Ospreay two years from now, but the chemistry between Fletcher and Hangman was top-notch. The poetry of Fletcher not getting the Tiger Driver ‘98 off, but Hangman Page being able to do Swerve’s Big Pressure was chef’s kiss. This is on my list of matches I am going to rewatch from this year, the first chance I get.

Books – Summer Reading Slump

It’s officially autumn here in the Northern Hemisphere, and I’m hoping my summer reading slump isn’t turning into a Fall one. Something about this year has been making it difficult to sit down and lose myself in reading like usual. I’m not reading any slower,r but carving out less time to read than I usually do. It honestly feels like a reflection of current events. I want to read more. I’m not enjoying reading any less. Hopefully, now that summer is over, I will get back into the reading swing.

I realized in the writing of this that I’m not taking my own advice. People who find out I read a lot of books often ask me how, and I often give the advice I first read in Stephen King’s book On Writing, you have to choose to. If you want to read a lot of books, you have to make the time in whatever part of the day you can, waiting in line, on the toilet, right before bed, right when you wake up, while eating breakfast, etc. Writing is this way, too. You can’t just wait for the perfect time or wait to be inspired you have to take the time by force and use it.

Books, Games, Wrestling Vol. 4 – Blood, Silk, and Builds

September 17, 2025September 17, 2025 / Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

Books – Blood for the Undying Throne by Sung-Il Kim, translated by Anton Hur

Now that I’ve gotten the Silksong obsession out of my system, I am going to spend the time between now and the end of September catching up on some books I’ve been meaning to finish, including ones mentioned here, and starting the sequel to last year’s Blood of the Old Kings (which the first book is out on paperback now if you want to pick it up yourself). I have my copy of Blood for the Undying Throne, but I haven’t started yet. I’m literally planning to sit down and start it as soon as I finish this book, but what I expect is more of the mystery of how the Empire in the book got its iron grip over this world, and more resistance against it. The Bleeding Empire series so far somehow feels like a throwback to the late eighties – early nineties style of fantasy books, and also a breath of fresh air. One of my cohosts of No Page Unturned, our book podcast, said they can’t wait for me to read this book, as the new country they go to will remind me of Jorat in The Name of All Things by Jenn Lyons, which is one of my favorite books.

Just a little plug, we did do an interview with the author and the translator, who were both a joy to talk to, and I learned a lot about translations and other subjects from them. If you want to check it out.

Games – More Hollow Knight: Silksong and Hades 2 1.0 announced.

I have been positively obsessed with Hollow Knight: Silksong. As of writing this, I have done everything to do in the base game one hundred percent, except for one optional boss I missed in the middle part of the game, which I didn’t know was available. I have every mask, every skill, every tool, every crest, and beat the final boss literally like thirty minutes ago. This is definitely one of my top Metroidvanias of all time, and might be one of my favorite games ever. There was only one boss that I became frustrated with after completing Act I, but it always felt like it was on my part rather than the design of the boss itself. I don’t know if others are the same or different, but the patterns of bosses often take me multiple times to catch up, I think perhaps due to my not-so-great eyesight. Like, first try, I’ll see oh this attack causes this attack to pop out, oh I can pogo that I didn’t know that, or I can deflect this attack and get under them, and so forth. The last last boss definitely tested me a lot, and it took quite some time for me to finally beat them, and even then, I think I just barely squeaked by. When I beat them, I didn’t go, “Oh, I’m so glad it’s over.” I wanted to try again and see if I could do it better with different tools and different crests. No such luck so far, but like I said, I just beat it not that long ago.

I don’t want to go into detail about the story or the ending, but I do think I love the story and the characters more than the first game. Hornet’s dialogue is so good, and her interaction with the characters nails what I think her character’s voice and personality based on what we knew of her from the first game. Without spoiling the ending, I do think Team Cherry isn’t done with this franchise or Hornet, and I am looking forward to what they do next. The story of difficulty continues to be a discussion, and I’m firmly in the camp of, just like the FromSoftware games, that difficulty options should be in the games, especially accessibility options. Easier modes should be an option, but if you are able to, normal mode should at least be tried, even if you go through the game on easy mode first. That being said, I am forty now and definitely have had to take breaks from Silksong to rest my hands so they didn’t hurt later, and anyone with accessibility issues should be able to enjoy a game like this with the options available.

Anyway, I had to open my big mouth. I believe I mentioned it here, but as soon as I said Silksong was going to be my game of the year, a Nintendo Direct aired shortly afterward and announced that Supergiant’s Hades 2 was coming out of early access and into 1.0 on September 25th. That’s just next Thursday already, after Silksong has just come out on the 4th! That’s absolutely crazy, but I don’t think personally it’s going to topple Silksong or Donkey Kong Bananza from my top 2 games simply because, quite frankly, I don’t really care for roguelike games in general. There are only two I’ve liked, Hades and Dead Cells, and Hades 2 is about to become the third, most likely. Meanwhile, Metroidvanias and 3D Platformers are some of my all-time favorite genres, but my heart is open to Hades 2 being number one.

I meant to mention this last year, but some games had to get their releases out of the way when Silksong came out, and to be honest, some of them I had not heard of before it was reported about their delays. The one that stood out to me was called Demonschool, sort of Persona 1–2 meets Fire Emblem kind of deal. I think it looks really cool and just wanted to give it some love since they had to delay til November.

Wrestling – AEW All Out 2025

AEW’s All Out is this weekend, and I am excited, as 95% of the time, AEW pay-per-views are outstanding, with the occasional, but I won’t deny the build for some of the show has been a little wonky. I feel bad for Wardlow who was injured on his return and was penned in to get the AEW Men’s World Heavyweight Championship match against Hangman on the PPV, but as someone who was down on Wardlow after Double or Nothing 2022 the guy is a TV defense at beast. I much prefer the idea of TNT Champion Kyle Fletcher challenging Hangman as a fun parallel to last year’s Jack Perry (TNT) vs. Bryan Danielson (World) match. Not only that, but I’ve liked that they played with the history of Hangman at All Out by bringing up his championship match against Chris Jericho at the first All Out. Honestly, it only occurred to me this week, but the list of top heels available right now to challenge Hangman seems kind of thin, almost to a point I understand why they didn’t pull the plug on MJF’s contract for a world title match, but it doesn’t change how I feel about how dogshit that angle was before Forbidden Door.

Likewise, the build to this four-way for Toni Storm’s AEW Women’s World Heavyweight Championship has been kinda thin, especially for Toni Storm. However, women’s fourways in AEW have a long history of overdelivering, and it is another parallel to how Toni Storm won the title for the first time at All Out 2022, which also included Jamie Hayter. I’m always rooting for my girl and Long Island’s own Kris Statlander, but I am not quite sure if this is how I want her to win, nor am I too keen on her turning heel again and joining the Death Riders. Her face turn last year was badly done, but it felt like she was gaining momentum as a face after facing Mercedes Mone twice for the TBS Title in some outstanding matches from both of them, then they spent months of Kris trying to find some resolution with Willow Nightingale that never went anywhere. So, it’s not like the heel turn wouldn’t turn out well, it’s more like I feel like they’ve wasted the potential of what they were building with her as a face the past year, after an unnecessary face turn. I’d almost be more excited if it turned out Jamie Hayter was the one turning heel and joining the Death Riders, as she is hard-hitting and has a lot of history with Toni Storm. Just in general, I’d like them to do more with Statlander and Willow for the next year.

I’ll have more on All Out in next week’s post, but I will tell you that I have absolutely not given a shit about this Cope and Christian reunion against FTR. Christian is the only person in this match that I care for. Cope has been so uninteresting since his return at last year’s World’s End, and while much more entertaining as heels FTR still only does so much for me. If this match is the main, I’m going to be annoyed as either of the world champions are much more deserving, although I do prefer it being Hangman vs. Fletcher, we’ll see what happens.