MJF

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

/ 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. 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.