What I've been up to, a little about my dad, and where you can find my stuff

 We’re on the road to WrestleMania, recovering from an all-time great pay-per-view in Revolution, and generally getting ready for spring. What a time to be alive! This here's a bit of an update, a bit of a recap, a bit of sentimentality, and a bit of a reboot as we look ahead to things to come. Check a look!

Writing feels like a real job now!

I haven’t been using this blog as much as I did last year, in part because the blog did what I hoped it would and got me published at several different sites! Wrestling, Inc. was the first to give me a shot, and I had fourteen list-based features published over there before the Features section went quiet. I’m holding out hope for a return appearance over there, but either way I really appreciate the opportunity they gave me.

From there, while I was getting into a schedule and just getting used to referring to writing as a job, I tried to get my name out there to other websites. I applied to several, but so far only one bit - Tilt Magazine, an offshoot of gaming site Goomba Stomp. I’ve written two pieces for them so far, one on WWE’s Elimination Chamber winners, and the other a recap and opinion piece on how AEW can keep their good momentum going after Revolution’s great reception.

My delightful editor at Wrestling, Inc. was nice enough to toss my portfolio over to our sister site, SlashGear, and they recently added me to their roster as well. I’ve had one piece published there so far, on the most well-known 2003 Lamborghini Murcielago in the world.

A D.I.Y. Wrestling Universe

On top of all this, I’ve started an incredibly niche, incredibly low-budget (and, arguably, low-quality) YouTube page. It’s a weird passion project that started with WWE 2K22 create-a-wrestlers and evolved into the Let’s Watch Some Wrestling channel, and more specifically, Pure Action Wrestling Superstars - PAWS.

It started with a few created wrestlers. Myself, my wife, and a few pals. Halloween came and with the spoopy season came my own created characters, horror stars that I didn’t see in a search of the 2K22 servers. I made Candyman, and that was downloaded several times; I also put together Ash from Evil Dead.

After that, we started creating people from my wife’s animal hospital in the game. At first, it was just a few friends because I wanted to see what I could do. But after a while, we just kept adding people, my wife giving me a one sentence description of people I hadn’t yet met and me using Facebook and website photos to make quick approximations of dozens of people. After a while, running 30-person Royal Rumbles in the game was fun, but I wanted to use all these created characters for something more, and decided I’d try my hand at streaming the game. I’ve watched a bit of wrestling in my time, you know, so I figured I’d try my hand at performing commentary while the game played itself. After my wife mentioned that the schedules at her hospital are (obviously) all over the place, I decided YouTube was the better option over Twitch because I could try to keep a regular release schedule, but also not require people to watch live. (It also allowed me to edit out the more egregious of my errors, which I make SO MANY OF.) So we started the show, a weekly four or five match thing. We even got permission from the animal hospital to use their logo, and created a fictional arena that existed in the hospital’s parking lot. 

We also learned during those first few weeks that people became really invested in the thing! It was a blast hearing from people happy to see themselves performing in the ring, and I came up with some fun storylines and tournaments. Unfortunately, I didn’t secure the permissions of everybody that was created, because after a while we just decided we’d create everybody who worked at the hospital. That was a mistake, and somebody got grumpy, leading to the whole thing having to be shut down.

So that sucked. But it also got a lot of people to rally behind the product, so my wife and I dusted ourselves off, came up with a new storyline where we bought a vacant lot near our home and rented out the gym, and secured the permissions of nearly everybody at the hospital on our new Facebook page (somehow FB was the preferred method of communication? I’m a Twitter guy myself, although that place is also quickly becoming a dumpster fire.)

I sure would like to be more consistent

If there’s a problem, it’s with me. I’m lousy at scheduling, and with two sites to try to produce work for as well as the YouTube show, this here blog, and my house, I’m just not putting the time aside that I should. But I’m working on it, and we’ll figure out a schedule soon. For now, I’ll keep doing the show until after our version of WrestleMania, Rex Manning Day. Then I’ll take a week or two to reboot and figure out some tech issues, and see if people are still interested. I also might try to get my wife to join me for GM Mode - a mode in WWE 2K games that involves running rival shows by booking matches, signing talent, and budgeting. I’m sure she’ll destroy me if she gets into it, and it looks like you can run that mode using only created characters - so an all-PAWS version of GM Mode may be in our future.

Remembering my dad

I really want to make the writing thing work, due in no small part to the fact that one of the last good conversations I had with my dad was him telling me he was proud of me finding something I enjoyed doing. I miss him every day, and it’s both frustrating and heartbreaking the ways my brain reminds me of him. I’ll just turn on the TV and catch a hockey game, or smell coffee that stayed on the burner too long, or a memory will just pop in my mind and I’ll start to tear up. I’ve never been much of a cryer, aside from when I watch movies – we can chalk that up to toxic masculinity, or faulty tear ducts, or the years in which my personality developed – so this is all pretty new to me. I told my wife the other day I’d like to sit down and write about him. I think part of me is worried that if I don’t, I may start to forget things. I’ve always had the memory of a goldfish, and I think it’s only getting worse as I get older. And at 43 I’m not exactly a spring chicken!

that's Dad at my wedding, back in 2011

Speaking of my old man, if you happen to wonder why there’s a “Good morning” at the beginning and end of all the YouTube videos, he’s the reason. He worked odd hours, especially when he did overnights at Target, so he would sometimes just be awake at, like 2am when we were stumbling home from the bars in my younger days. He’d always be happy to see me and my goofy crew, coffee cup in hand, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He was just…nice, you know? He never really got mad, he knew we were good because he raised me and my sisters well and, well, we wouldn’t hang out with people who weren’t. He’d offer us a coffee and a “Good morning” no matter the time. My wife picked up on that, and shared with me that she uses that line whenever she greets anyone at the 24-hour animal hospital she works at because “it’s always morning for somebody there.”

Good morning!

Anyway, I’m rambling now. It’s nearly time for Dynamite, which I’m really excited to watch after the amazing Revolution show. I’m in the middle of a Switch piece for SlashGear, and I’m working on a good WrestleMania pitch for Tilt. Or maybe something on the new game. WHO’S TO SAY?

It was nice to get some of this stuff out, and I hope I didn’t ramble on too much. I’ll try to keep up with this blog on a more regular basis - I owe it that much, since it basically launched my “career.” Wait, no. No quotes. My career. So I’ll talk to ya soon. Good morning!