Sting's retirement, Oscars, and a midweek recap (no.7)
God it's Thursday already?
Welcome to another stream of consciousness pouring out of Rent’s Due! This week has been (and continues to be) a little busy for me, but it shouldn’t be anything too crazy from giving y’all a another two-fer of articles this week.
I *might* be switching to one article a week as I start the dive into researching some juicy long-form stories for the site, but I’ll let you know when that’s actually the case. Give a sub if you like and read on with your eyes and/or hands.
Damn, Sting’s really gone now.
If you’re someone like me who casually revolves around what’s going on in wrestling, you probably have already heard and/or seen Sting’s final match at AEW Revolution 2024. I wanted to give myself some distance when talking about this to see if my initial thoughts about Steve Borden’s sendoff had changed since I watched the PPV1, and it’s safe to say that it hasn’t: in that it was possibly the best retirement match that’s ever been booked in an American wrestling company. It was more eventful than Cesaro vs. Regal, and shockingly less deadly than Ric Flair’s (actual) final match, which says a lot considering a dude threw his back onto a sheet of real fucking glass™. You’d think that for an undefeated tag-team (with freshly-won titles to boot) match, the reasonable assumption going into this would be that the Stinger would want to put over a team like the Young Bucks and give them a whole new reason to be hated that’s not tied to CM Punk, but they didn’t do that. Instead, they let him and tag partner Darby Allin come out with Sting’s two sons (one as Wolfpack Sting, the other as Surfer/Destiny 2 live-streamer Sting), and get the win to solidify an impeccable tag team run and uninterrupted title reign. They gave the vet a happy ending in a sold-out sendoff show, a massive rarity in the industry, and no one deserved that more than Sting.
As pointed out by Trevor Dame’s Twitter thread, we’re beyond lucky that the guy was able to keep going and cap it on his own terms at 64. He could’ve retired after WCW fell, maybe do some stint on the indies or ROH, but he became one of TNA’s flagship stars at a time when everyone thought that WWE would be the only big dog on television. He could’ve left after putting over Nick Aldis on Impact!, but finally jumped ship for what was a disappointing WWE run that was handled by petty leadership. Most of us thought he’d be definitively gone after the buckle bomb injury, but here we are, nine years later, with the old man wrapping up a memorable final run that made the most out of pro-wrestling’s most iconic pillars. So here’s to you Sting! I’ll still get chills watching you walk out to Seek and Destroy live in a packed-ass London stadium.
Oscars: the real one
Hey, this year’s Oscars weren’t half bad!2 It was a fairly predictable race to the awards in terms of who was going to win what (RDJ rightfully winning Best Supporting, Oppenheimer for Best Picture), while still having some genuine surprises (Emma Stone’s win for Best Actress, much to the shock of Emma Stone). I still think that there’s more that the Academy can do to respect the medium they’re supposed to celebrate, like giving Best International Feature an equal amount of slots with Best Picture and having less of a focus on jokes that shit on movies, but I also can’t complain *too much* about the good that came with this year’s telecast (see: the well-deserved technical wins for Godzilla: Minus One and Zone of Interest, a film that had perhaps the bravest speech ever said on this show when Jonathan Glazer accepted its win for Best International). The 2023 nominees were a great crop of films that will hopefully get more eyes now that they’ve got some Oscar gold on them, but, as I tried to convey in my nOscars special last week, I hope the normies who saw some of the films that were showcased during the show will also check out some other great films that didn’t get the same love.3
and the rest.
- I’m still not-quite-over revisiting DBZ shit in the wake of Akira Toriyama’s death, but this endeavor has finally gotten me to check out some of the movies that I never got around to before. Dead Zone’s fun and has a drunk Gohan who’s joined by a random dinosaur (also drunk) as they fuck around in some weird palace that I don’t think the movie ever explains where it is. Fusion Reborn is a visual marvel that I wish had more of Fat Janemba go “heheheheh Jenemba heheheheh” while he destroys the afterlife or something. Path to Power was a nice refresher for someone like me who never watched the original Dragon Ball, and it actually gave lore to things that just existed in the background in Z like Frankenstein’s Monster Android and the tortoise who talks like Tommy Chong. It felt good to forget about the stress in my life and spend some time with characters I love.
- Before everyone in the YouTube drama sphere jumped on the various accusations against a bunch of Minecraft YouTubers, a lot of my chisme past-time was spent on the controversy going on with Sweet Baby Inc. I guess in the wake of the disastrous launch of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, some people online began to dive deeper into finding a reason for why the game was so bad, and found Sweet Baby’s involvement (a consulting firm that specializes in creating a more diverse ecosystem in the games industry) with its narrative to be *a* key reason for why it tanked so bad.
Now trust me, I KNOW I’m leaving out a ton of other important information4, and it’s mostly because I’m tired and haven’t gotten enough sleep. But I’ll say this about “Gamergate 2” or whatever the fuck we’re calling it: this is emblematic of a mix of frustrations that will continue to get worse in the games industry; frustrations that most people haven’t really been talking about in the discourse I’ve seen. Game developers are getting fired left and right as companies do whatever dumb shit they can to recoup costs. Games like Suicide Squad and Red Fall, an *online service* title that costs *$70 fucking dollars*, can’t even work properly at launch despite its years of development. Is the problem in gaming “wokeism” and politics for some people? Yeah, and that’s never going to change because they’ll always be people like that who will bitch at anything. But is the problem really something bigger, like corporations trying to implement exploitive practices and incredulous-sounding marketing tools to get more of our money, only for those projects to fail so hard that innocent developers get shafted as a result? I think so, and I think that Sweet Baby mostly serves as a scapegoat for the real companies at fault for the state of this industry.
- Last thing: I just finished Feud: Capote vs. the Swans today, and I’m pleased to report that it’s another banger season of FX television. There’s a lot it’s trying to do for an 8-episode run, telling yet another part of classic Hollywood drama while also semi-adapting Truman Capote’s famous unfinished book, Answered Prayers. I think for a season about lonely souls in an era of high society that’s quickly changing, it’s well worth the watch on Hulu/FX. It also scratches the itch I have for overly-dramatic rich white people chisme content, so there’s that. More to say about Feud this Sunday.
Do yourself a favor: until somebody figures out a streaming deal for this company, save yourself the money and don’t buy their shows on BR Live. Their interface is slow as shit, you can’t cast it on any screen, and in my own special cases with the Ring of Honor shows as of late, the live feed doesn’t even give me the option to rewind what I paid $50 bucks to WATCH. Get yourself a VPN and pay for the show on YouTube Canada where it costs like $28 in total.
Aside from the host, most jokes, the insistence of cutting people off mid-speech, highlighting stunt people while also ignoring giving out an award for them. You can’t have it all ig.
Hey have you heard about BlackBerry?
One of Sweet Baby’s members calling for a mass reporting on a Steam account who made a list of games they were involved with, a lot of verbal strays thrown at “GAMERS” and journalists in the field, etc. There’s this great explainer of AI Saul Goodman that should properly get you up to speed.
Great read, thank you!