Books Games Wrestling vol 1

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

/ 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

A certain podcast was quoted on the back. 👀

— No Page Unturned Podcast (@nopageunturned.bsky.social) 2025-10-29T21:31:39.628Z

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. 1 – Noodles, Knights, and NJPW

/ Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

I’m not going to give a long explanation yet to what this is or why I’m writing, because before I know it, I’ll have a thousand words, and that’ll be this entire post before I get to the point of the thing. To sum it up, I want to write about what I like in a shorter format than my book reviews on Geeklyinc.com or on No Page Unturned. I love books, I love video games, and I love wrestling, hence Book, Games, Wrestling. I hear the Aesop Rock song Food, Clothes, Medicine when I say it, but here we go before I get off track again.

Book – Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

My review will be up soon enough, but I have to say, my reading habits this summer have been such a mess. My To-Be-Read pile has grown too tall this summer, yet my reading habits have been subpar. Fall and Winter are such better reading seasons for me as someone who doesn’t do well in the heat.

Automatic Noodle, though, has been a book I’ve been thinking about since I first heard about it. The premise is essentially set in an unidentified future, where robots want to, for once, serve good food to their patrons and are given an opportunity, out of sheer luck, to open their own noodle shop. It’s labelled as cozy, but there is definitely a cloud of desperation hanging over most of the plot, both from the bots, the humans, and the overall world that is in the vibe of a dystopian future run by megacorporations that we seem to be getting a lot of, gee, wonder why? The feeling of dread and oppression is not what I would call cozy, but I’d still recommend it regardless.

I mean, just because it’s marketed as cozy but doesn’t mean it’s not an interesting read. The oppression of sentient robots is a subject I’m sure will be explored more as technology advances and more rights get taken away in the United States and beyond. I will admit I’m holding back for my review, pretty sure, but I really enjoy how Newitz makes each of the bots distinct.

Game – Hollow Knight – Team Cherry

Silksong is real and will be out as of this post in a little over a week. I’ve done everything but the Godmaster DLC on the Switch edition of Hollow Knight because by the time it was out, I was already finished with Hollow Knight, at over 100%. Plus, in 2018, on the Nintendo Switch, I remember being kind of insane, as well as my life at the time being kind of insane. When I bought a Steam Deck last August, Hollow Knight was one of the first games I bought during the next Steam sale because, quite honestly, though it had been six years since I played it, I still felt it was one of the greatest games of all time or at least one of my greatest games of all time.

Now that Silksong is coming out, I felt it was time to play it on PC/Steam Deck. It was like riding a bike again to be honest, and I was aiming to get that achievement of beating the game at 100% under 20 hours. I got very close at about 20 hours and 23 minutes, so annoyingly close. I do not remember there being achievements on the Switch edition; it probably had in-game quests as the equivalent, but it’s not quite the same. Take or leave achievements, I do often find them fun, even if Steam achievements feel lesser than other platforms. I’ve left just enough time between Hollow Knight playthroughs that the challenge remains thrilling, yet not so much that the backtracking feels tedious, while retaining enough memory to avoid repetition. I’ve already beaten it, and once I did, I thought to myself, “Oh shit, it’s still not September 4th.” I started a new file, intending to hopefully get that achievement this time, and also to leave Zote to die, the ungrateful little shit that he is.

Wrestling – AEW x NJPW Forbidden Door 2025

The build to Forbidden Door was messy, it’s always messy, and to be quite honest, even with the mess I still do find it fun. However, a lot of MJF’s creative ideas I do not find fun, and it felt like, with the stipulations he had forced Hangman to agree to under the pretense that he was going to light Mark Briscoe on fire, that I’m being forced to watch Triple H from the early and mid 2000s reborn. In 2023, I was annoyed with MJF, but in 2025, I’m just tired of it. His promos to all his opponents feel the same; his nicknames for his opponents are all terrible, not in a fun way, but in a way that makes me want to look at my Steam Deck and continue playing Hollow Knight. It just feels all the same. But Josh, you might ask, isn’t that just what heels do? Well, I’m not sick of what Kyle Fletcher and the Don Callis family are doing, nor since All In am I sick of what Jon Moxley and the Death Riders are doing. Ricochet with the Gates of Agony is quite interesting, and Christian Cage, who often has the same edgelord shtick as MJF, quite frankly does it better because he’ll do enough to at least give me the illusion of changing it up. Except for Christian, the difference between a lot of those heels and MJF is that they actually wrestle quite frequently. Maybe if MJF took up so much TV time wrestling as well as promos and segments I might feel different but as of right now, I’m quite tired of MJF.

This isn’t about MJF, though; it’s about Forbidden Door, and despite Max’s terribly convoluted idea for a finish, yes, I am one hundred percent sure it was his idea because it reminded me of the era of WWE I know he loves. Hangman’s world title defense against him, I thought, was excellent before that. It’s how I felt about the pay-per-view overall, quite good overall. Hiromu Takahashi looked great against Kyle Fletcher. Toni Storm defeated Athena in what I thought was a very good match, but I thought they might be holding back for a future rematch. I took a break during the beginning of the tag title match and came back just in time to see some mysterious masked men drive the Hurt Syndicate back to the airport before Bandido could even get the pin on whichever member of FTR was pinned (I think Dax? Don’t correct me, I do not care.). Bozilla, Persephone, and Alex Windsor all showed out for the four-way against Mercedes Mone for the TBS Title, impressing me with ideas I don’t think I’ve seen in four-ways before, and it felt like Mercedes made sure to make them all look good in defeat. Swerve versus Okada might have bee my match of the night. Say what you want about Okada’s efforts I felt he really put his all or at the very least 90% into his defense of the Unified Title against Swerve. The main event lights-out cage match, was both fun and intense, and if this is the last we see from Ospreay and Swerve in a while, it was a great showing by both of them.

Was it my favorite Forbidden Door? No. Was it the best Forbidden Door? I don’t think so either but I felt happy watching it, and when it was over, I was more curious about what was going to happen next rather than worried about the direction AEW was going.