#10 serpentwithfeet: GRIP

Hold you closer, closer than those damn gloves
Kiss you longer, longer than a opera
If we keep on dancin’, we gon’ make love
Hold you closer, closer than those damn gloves
I don’t need no weed, I don’t need no liquor
I just wanna keep grind-grindin’ on my nigga
Whatever’s on his leg, good God, it’s gettin’ thicker
It’s gettin’ thicker

Damn Gloves

Whatever happened to shame? Remember when people had shame? I miss that. We need to bring shame back ASAP. Hey, you know that depraved, ugly thought that you have in your head? Keep it there. The whole world doesn’t need to know about your perversions. Nobody needs to know. Maybe your therapist, but otherwise you should be rightly overwhelmingly ashamed of these dark, sexual thoughts inside your mind.

Remember when you met people in person? Remember when there was a place to go that wasn’t home or work? Remember what it was like when you had, like, four people together, talking face to face? Imagine if one of the people you were with looked you dead in the eye, did not even blink as they took one last sip from their pint, and then loudly and proudly that they believed that all men should want to impregnate 12-14 year old girls because that’s when they’re most fertile. That just wouldn’t happen. Every person would be too ashamed to air these horrendous intrusive thoughts in public, even among friends. And yet @not_reece_brah is confident airing these insane perversions to more than fifty thousand people. Plus it’s on this blog now, so you can add another six or seven people to that.

Mohannad Ahmed Jumaa Azzam

An Embarrassingly Late Review of All In 2024

Yeah, it happened again, And I went again. Then the week after, I had an OISC Level 3 exam for the highest possible accreditation in immigration law. Oh, and between those two things I watched the Magnetic Fields perform ‘69 Love Songs‘ in full over two nights at the Albert Hall, so there’ll probably be a blog post related to that at some point.

“But Alex”, I hear you squeal, though it’s difficult for you to speak through painful wheezes, as you sitting up in indignation is the most exercise you’ve done in eight months, you fat fuck, “Wasn’t it pretty stupid to arrange a trip down the London mere days before the most important exam of your life?” .

And I reply: “Of course it was. But this is professional wrestling, everything to do with it is as stupid as shit”.

Last year I wrote an intimidatingly bloviated three parts and more than sixteen thousand words on the event. This year, there’s going to be one part, there’s going to be significantly less than 16k words, and we’re all going to come out the other end much happier people, I promise.

Even though the 2024 All Innit was a vastly superior show to its predecessor, and must rank amongst the greatest professional wrestling shows ever held in the UK.

whose blog?

Legit Bosses – The 160 Best Songs of 2023

In their 1972 book ‘Psychology of the Arts‘, Hans and Shulamith Kreitler tried to explain the reasoning behind why certain people react in certain ways to certain pieces of art. However, they deemed that to fully explain it, your knowledge of each person would need to “extend over an immeasurably large range of variables, which would include not only perceptive, cognitive, emotional and other personality characteristics, but also biographical data, specific personal experiences, past encounters with art, and individual memories and associations”. Sounds like a lot of work, right? Well, luckily, I’m here to just tell you what the best music of 2023 was, so all that effort behind your own personal psychosis can be sidestepped altogether. Think of it as my new year’s present.

no spoilers on what number this particular classic finished

And there’s one hundred and sixty this year. Maybe one hundred and sixty one. Because there was a lot of great tunes released in 2023. While limiting the Necessary Evil list to just 40 albums still meant there was space for at least one ‘meh’ album and one absolute stinker, over the past week I’ve actually had to really edit this list down to prevent it being ridiculous. And yet here we are: 160. Maybe 161.

I’m also going to be giving shout outs to particular golden moments in certain songs – similar to what I did in 2018 – and for each of those I’m going to be using a picture of one of the greatest moments in the short history of All Elite Wrestling, because… well… I get the horrible feeling that company is cooked and I hope to look back on this list in five years time and laugh at how pessimistic I was.

Can I finish this before 2024 and maybe have some days off before I go back to work?? Let’s seeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!

[Edit: No. No I cannot. Not even close.

You’ve got some playlists though, will that make you happy?? Here’s the countdown on Spotify and on YouTube, minus the unavailable songs on whatever platform]

I REMEMBER NOTHING, SO THERE’S NOTHING TO REGRET

The Biggest Moment of 2023

https://www.redbubble.com/i/hoodie/larry-by-SWITCHSHOP/152034883.VR8OC

I hate this idea that you’re the best. Because you’re not. I’m the best. I’m the best in the world. There’s one thing you’re better at than I am and that’s kissing ass…

I am the best wrestler in the world. I’ve been the best ever since day one when I walked into this company. And I’ve been vilified and hated since that day.

CM Punk’s ‘Pipe Bomb’ promo, 27/06/2011

I thought I’d already written the final eulogy on CM Punk’s wresting career. His firebombing of goodwill and petulant kicking of the pricks surrounding his cot in the aftermath of All Out 2022 sounded the death knell of his comeback to the ring. Surely now, he had burned too many bridges, shown himself to just be too unstable a livewire, for any federation to continue to employ him, and likely for many major wrestlers to want to work with him.

So I look at it like this: November 13th 2022, Punk left this blog.

November 18th 2023? He’s back

i’m trying to run a fucking business here

AEW All In 2023: Proper PPV Review (Part 2: The ACTUAL Flipping Review)

Did you get that? ‘Flipping’, yeah? As in, the PG-friendly expression of mild annoyance you use when your whole body wants to say ‘fucking’ but you remember at the last minute that this is the only hour this month that the court says you’re allowed to talk to your three toddler aged children. But also, like, the review of the flipping flippy dippy wrestlers flipping themselves around? Yeah? Fucking genius. You bunch of cunts. No, please don’t take my kids away again, I promise I’ll behave!

“Oooh, look at that cheeky smile! What have you done??”

Right no more bloviating this time. Quick recap of part 1:

[EDIT: I started writing this on Saturday the 2nd September. That night, or perhaps early Sunday morning, a new part to this story was added which is now going to require some furious editing:

Wish me luck]

Right, we’re all on the same page now.

just saved you reading about 4000 words. you’re welcome

AEW All In 2023: Proper PPV Review (Part 1: the Build Up)

Alright, so we’ve had all the niceties, I’ve given all you sick freaks a few thousand words and what it felt like to watch ‘The Biggest Event In Wrestling History™’ live in attendance, now let’s take a look at the actual show itself. Immediately, this means two things:

  1. The photos are going to be a lot better. But, I dunno, lacking some of that charm, you know warra mean? Not as legitimate somehow? Like, sure, you’ve got your complex autofocus tracking and your high-ISO capabilities, but where’s the heart, y’know? Hey, Isa, if you’re reading this, you’re the real star. And, also:
  2. There’s gonna be a lot more complaining. The Wembley show was an absolute triumph (as I write this intro, I still haven’t watched the PPV broadcast that I’m about to review), but most of the build-up, decsions and angles leading up to it were weak as The Weeknd covering that Skunk Anansie song for seven days straight. Shut up, that line worked perfectly. The card was borderline piss poor on paper, I would suggest that there were maybe (maybe) three matches that fit the historic hugeness of the event, and they were all rematches. OK, maybe four, but Grado v Jeff Jarrett was on the pre-show so I’m not counting it. Hey, I’m a wrestling fan, all we do is complain. If you’re ever forced to go undercover to infiltrate a terrorist group of fat, middle aged wresting fans, make sure you never say that you enjoy wrestling: it will blow your cover immediately.

In fact, I’ve written so many complaints, that I’ve had to split this post into two parts. Here, we’re getting general pre-show thoughts, then the events of Zero Hour before the main show began. Net, I’ll just review the matches, I promise… I kinda promise… and that post will come out over the weekend.

Because I don’t write about wrestling that much on a blog that mainly concerned with psychosexual fetishization of suicidal ideations music, so when I do I tend to write under the delusional idea that non wrestling fans might read it. Hence I often have to stop and explain what an ‘Irish Whip’, ‘Tope Suicida’ or ‘Singlet’ is. I’ll be forced to translate carny sentences such as ‘He ribbed the worker and their shizon with the gimmick before taking a bump himself, a total shoot’ into the proper English (‘He murdered his wife and their seven-year-old son before hanging himself at their residence in Fayetteville, Georgia’) to make sure the normies could keep up. Well, screw the normies: I’m preaching to the perverted in this post and assuming at least a base knowledge of AEW in this post. It’s going to get pretty scary, but we’ll all emerge from the other side as better people.

christ, really need to get started on this

12 Taylor Swift: evermore

2020 #32, 2019 #45, 2018 #59, 2014 #24

Nanananananananana na-na-na, Taylor Swift, Tayor, Taylor Swift! Nanananananananana na-na-na, Taylor Swift, Tayor, Taylor Swift!

Fuck, man, It’s Taylor, you bunch of fucking cunts! Somehow, amongst all the brouhaha, amongst all the controversies and talking points, amongst all the will shes and the won’t she’s and the have shes and the would shes, Taylor fucking Swift has now snuck five consecutive albums onto the Necessary Evil list. For a bit of context, Young Fathers – one of my absolute favourite modern acts – have had three. Radiohead have had two. Her talents are seriously beyond serious debate now, aren’t they?

NO BLOG, NO CRIME

Rumble in the Bumble pt.4

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

I know I promised that I wasn’t going to do another one of these until next week, but over the period of about nine hours yesterday Bumble dragged me on a roller coaster of emotions, potential and of reaching ridiculously over my limits as a physically attractive entity*. I have to assume that you’ve all read Shawn Michaels’s esteemed memoir ‘Heartbreak and Triumph’? Well, that could well be the title of this episode of my delve into the grottiness of online dating. Except that there was very little triumph involved. ‘Heartbreak and Heartbreak’ might work a little better. Except that repeated word is a little functionally unnecessary, isn’t it? Yeah, the book of yesterday on Bumble would be called ‘Heartbreak’. Do you see where this is going?

675946._UY630_SR1200,630_

(* though… maybe… really below… my mental attractiveness…? I don’t want to be cruel… Well… maybe I do, just a little, but as will soon become brutally clear I really need to claw back some self-respect out of this hideous situation)

What’s that? You think I’m far too obsessed with wrestling? Really?? Let’s see if that comes into play.

Continue reading “Rumble in the Bumble pt.4”

The Best Albums of the Tennies (kind of…) Part One

Has this even been a decade? Like, other decades were definitely decades, weren’t they? The 70s were definitely a decade, I’ve seen pictures. It was all flared jeans and Ashton Kutchers. I remember the 80s, it was all primary colours and He Man toys. Except I’m 29 years old, which now unfortunately means I was born in 1990, so I don’t actually remember the 80s. Shame.

Yeah, I know, the Megadrive version was better…

The NINETIES though! Remember the NINETIES?! That was an unarguable ‘decade’! There was a undeniable vibe to the 90s. The 90s was the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air doing the Macarena after scoring the winning penalty against Ginger Spice in the Euro 96 quarter finals. Remember that? It definitely happened and was definitely 90s!!

I turned 16 (or possibly 10) three days before the year 2000, and since then life doesn’t really deal in decades or conveniently distinct periods of time anymore. Every decade, every year, every day is now a seemingly unending trudge through hideous adulthood. Life and popular culture just trundles off in a different direction and your major marking points become all the more onanistic and self-centred. I started getting fucking old. And when you’re fucking old you’re beaten down by capitalism’s endless rat race that you don’t even fucking care what year it is.

Continue reading “The Best Albums of the Tennies (kind of…) Part One”

Money in the Ranked part 1 (22-11)

All 22 WWE Money in the Bank ladder matches ranked. Listen, I thought the title would work better than it does, just go with it, OK?

0001

The Money in the Bank (from hereon in referred to as ‘MITB’, because I’ve got a lot of writing to do and I am a very, very lazy man) ladder match is the best idea that WWE have had since Steve Austin’s turn to the dark side at the end of Wrestlemania 17 in 2001 signalled the end of the Attitude Era and drew the curtain on the last period which wrestling seemed in any way relevant or widely notable. It’s arguably the only good idea they’ve had in that 18 year period. Save perhaps having The Miz replace Ted DiBiase jnr. as the lead actor in ‘The Marine’ franchise from ‘The Marine 3: Homefront’ onward. Yeah, WWE make movies now. And yeah, they’re all terrible.

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There have seriously been 6 of these fuckers

The premise- 5-10 wrestlers battle to use ladders to reach a contract swinging over the top of the ring which allows them a shot at any title they choose at any time they want over the next 12 months- is simple but ingenious, and allows for great storytelling potential and the chance to quickly promote a wrestler into the main event picture. Of course, this potential is more often than not completely squandered, because WWE are generally incompetent and we’re not allowed to have nice things.

Ranking the matches is difficult, because save a handful of amazing bouts and a smaller, Jeremy Beadle sized handful of slightly poorer ones, they’re almost always a similar level of ‘alright, pretty good, I suppose’. However, I am perhaps the greatest blogger of my generation- the ‘Heart Blog Kid’ Blog Michaels, or ‘Stone Blog’ Steve Blogstin, if you will- so I knew I had the ability to do it. I had initially planned to write this list in the build up to the 2018 Money in the Bank pay per view, back when there had been exactly 20 matches, and it would have made so much more sense. Alas, now there are 22 and, to be completely honest, I can’t even promise to finish it in time for 2019’s event exactly two weeks from today. But it’s a cash cow that the WWE are unlikely to put down for a long time yet, so there’s always the chance of a top 24 in 2020. Or perhaps a top 26 in 2021. I mean, I’ve started it now and I’ve already realised it’s going to have to be two parts…

Let’s see how long this takes!!

Continue reading “Money in the Ranked part 1 (22-11)”