Books Read 2021

  • Green Arrow: A Celebration of 75 Years

  • Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold

  • Palestine: A Socialist Introduction by Sumaya Awad

  • Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America by Russ Baker

  • Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte

  • Small Magic: Short Fiction, 1977-2020 by Terry Brooks

  • The Last Druid by Terry Brooks

  • I Remember Death By Its Proximity to What I Love by Mahogany L. Browne

  • Star Trek: Alien Spotlight by John Byrne

  • The Watcher and Other Stories by Italo Calvino

  • Into The War by Italo Calvino

  • The Road To San Giovanni by Italo Calvino

  • Marcovaldo by Italo Calvino

  • Under The Jaguar Sun by Italo Calvino

  • If I Were Another by Mahmoud Darwish

  • Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas by Henry Dumas

  • Knees of a Natural Man: The Selected Poetry of Henry Dumas by Henry Dumas

  • Rifqa by Mohammed El-Kurd

  • Black Lives Matter at School: An Uprising for Educational Justice by Jesse Hagopian

  • Ibsen's Selected Plays by Henrik Ibsen

  • They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie Jones-Rogers

  • We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Abolitionist Papers) by Mariame Kaba

  • Transformers: The Manga Volume Three by Masumi Kaneda

  • Eternals: The Complete Collection by Jack Kirby

  • The Battle For Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists by Naomi Klein

  • Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin

  • Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language by Seth Lerer

  • Legends of Localization: The Legend of Zelda by Clyde Mandelin

  • Transformers: All Hail Megatron Volume 1 by Shane McCarthy

  • Transformers: All Hail Megatron Volume 2 by Shane McCarthy

  • Transformers Historia by Chris MxFeely

  • Thick: And Other Essays by Tressiue McMillan Cottom

  • The Wrestling Observer Yearbook '93: The Year of Major Beginnings and Major Endings (Wrestling Observer Newsletter) by Dave Meltzer

  • The Wrestling Observer Yearbook '97: The Last Time WWF Was Number Two by Dave Meltzer

  • The Major Works by John Milton

  • Strong In The Rain: Selected Poems by Kenji Miyazawa

  • Milky Way Railroad by Kenji Miyazawa

  • Night On The Galactic Railroad and Other Stories by Kenji Miyazawa

  • Night On The Milky Way Train by Kenji Miyazawa

  • Once and Forever: The Tales of Kenji Miyazawa by Kenji Miyazawa

  • Growing Up with Manos: The Hands of Fate: How I was the Child Star of the Worst Movie Ever Made and Lived to Tell the Story by Jackey Newman

  • Only the Ball Was White: A History of Legendary Black Players and All-Black Professional Teams by Robert Peterson

  • River of Fire: My Spiritual Journey by Sister Helen Prejean

  • Straight Edge: A Clear-Headed Hardcore Punk History by Tony Rettman

  • Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing by Stuart Schrader

  • The Monsters and the Critics: And Other Essays. J.R.R. Tolkien

  • Star Trek: Way Point by Dayton Ward

  • Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism by Jillian York

  • Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary

  • Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Episode 84: WWF Royal Rumble

A lot of wrestling games don't hold up that well, but WWF Royal Rumble is a fairly solid game. Let's start an annual tradition of covering a wrestling game every April!

Instead of a Patreon, consider donating to our Extra Life charity drive. We are raising money for Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. We raised $445 in 2020. So far in 2021 we have raised $11.

On Thursday nights around 7pm I stream old and new games until around 9pm. Check out my Twitch page for more information and a tentative schedule.

We are also on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and Stitcher. You can also download episodes from the Internet Archive.

You can view our game ranking list here.

Weekly Reader

Sacrilege also fully embraced the Discharge "d-beat" sound (although it wasn't referred to by that name yet), which no one in New York was playing, and only a handful of American bands (almost all in California) were playing at all at that time. Besides Discharge, influences included other English bands like Disorder and Chaos UK, Scandinavian bands like Anti-Cimex and Appendix, but very few American influences (such as Crucifix). Sacrilege also kept their lyrics serious, leaving behind the sometimes humorous and bad taste songs that Hellbent had occasionally played, as well as the more fun-oriented covers. Although other bands of the time in the New York area had extreme looks (Misfits, Genocide), or anarchist or left wing lyrics (Reagan Youth, False Prophets), no one had combined the extreme punk look, serious political lyrics, and d-beat European punk sound previously in New York. With Clay and Tim being NYC newcomers, the band were considered oddities by some, although Vic also being in Reagan Youth and Adam's past with Murphy's Law and Agnostic Front kept them from being complete outsiders.

It’s not fair to judge a writer by her juvenilia. But, as she developed into a keenly self-aware writer, the habit of bigotry persisted in her letters—in jokes, asides, and a steady use of the word “nigger.” For half a century, the particulars have been held close by executors, smoothed over by editors, and justified by exegetes, as if to save O’Connor from herself. Unlike, say, the struggle over Philip Larkin, whose coarse, chauvinistic letters are at odds with his lapidary poetry, it’s not about protecting the work from the author; it’s about protecting an author who is now as beloved as her stories.

What does that look like? For starters, more marginalized people need to be brought into promotions across the board. Not just as performers, but as bookers, producers, announcers, and so on. Promoters and fans need to come to terms on a real, actionable code of conduct and accept that whatever minor losses there are at the gate due to that code will be worth it for a safer, less hostile working environment for marginalized performers, and a better time for fans. Promoters and wrestlers need to listen and act of their own volition when someone in the industry is outed, and not just when it comes to future bookings. If an abuser’s work is in your video archive, remove them. When the commentary on women’s matches makes your performers uncomfortable, re-record and re-release them. When you’re booking someone new to your promotion, don’t just do it based on a GIF or a match, do some research, make sure their reputation is good, and move forward in good faith. This is difficult work, but it is necessary if wrestling is to survive as a form of entertainment and a kind of labor. A better professional wrestling is possible—I wouldn’t have dedicated so much of my life to it if that wasn’t the case. How bad do we want it? What are we willing to do to get there? Those are the questions. I hope we’re able to answer them together.

Since 2001 the terrorist has come to be imagined almost exclusively as Muslim or Arab. This confusingly ill-defined minority has been made the domestic subject of the War on Terror and is subject to its devices, including indefinite detention, the No Fly List, extraordinary rendition, and extrajudicial killing. For example, in 2011, President Barack Obama ordered a targeted drone strike to kill sixteen-year-old Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen from birth, while he was in Yemen. Leading up to this act of preemptive state violence, the teenager was not charged with—nor even suspected of—having committed or supported any acts of terrorism. But his father, Anwar Al-Awlaki, was charged with providing material support to terrorists and killed two weeks earlier in a targeted drone strike. The young Al-Awlaki was the second (his father the first) extrajudicial killing of a U.S. citizen via drone strike. Violence against children is common practice in the house that counterterrorism built: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was also a creation of the post-9/11 Department of Homeland Security, and so the migrant children being abused and dying in U.S. custody today are also victims of the furious rush of resources and energy into fighting terrorism.

These fellow enthusiasts would forever remain invisible; all I ever had was a near-complete save file assuring me that someone else out there cared about Secret of Mana, Breath of Fire 2, Final Fantasy 6, and other classic RPGs that my peers knew little about. Their names ranged from mundane "BEN's" and "JOE's" to whatever curse words were filthy enough to spell out with five or six letters. "FUCKER," wherever you are, I appreciated your Dragon Warrior 3 save file and I hope you're doing well.

Whatever my patron was named, my routine was to get as far into my rented RPG as possible before my time was up. When the deadline loomed, I'd latch onto the hero of the first save file and eliminate the Mana Beast, Dark Gaia, or whomever else I was up against. It was a good strategy that served me well. Yes, I could re-rent an RPG and try to power through it myself, but that wasn't always possible since my brothers and I took turns renting games from week to week. My older brother gravitated toward hockey and basketball games. He didn't care if I had the Mana Beast on the ropes and needed just a little more time to polish it off.

Weekly Reader

Read In 2019

  • The Story Of Crass by George Berger

  • The Western Canon: The Books & Schools Of The Ages by Harold Bloom

  • The Stiehl Assassin by Terry Brooks

  • We Created Chavez: A People's History of the Venezuelan Revolution by George Circcariello-Maher

  • A Penelopean Politics: Reweaving The Feminine In Homer's Odyssey by Barbara Clayton

  • Atari To Zelda: Japan's Video Games In Global Contexts by Mia Consalvo

  • The Odyssey of Political Theory: The Politics of Departure and Return by Patrick J. Deneen

  • Titan Screwed: Lost Smiles, Stunners, and Screwjobs by James Dixon

  • I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie by Roger Ebert

  • K-Punk: The Collected & Unpublished Writing Of Mark Fisher by Mark Fisher

  • Transformers: Regeneration One Volumes 1-4 by Simon Furman

  • Soccer In Sun & Shadows by Eduardo Galeano

  • Radioactive Man: Radioactive Repoository by Matt Groening

  • GI Joe Volumes 1-33 by Larry Hama

  • My Hero Academia Volume 1-3 by Kohei Horikoshi

  • Death Of The Territories: Expansion, Betrayal, and The War That Changed Pro Wrestling Forever by Tim Hornbaker

  • The New Testament As Literature by Kyle Keefer

  • Ajax, The Dutch, The War: Football In Europe During The Second World War by Simon Kuper

  • Marvel Masterworks: The X-Men Volume One by Stan Lee

  • Kill Shakespeare Volume One by Conor McCreery

  • Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

  • One Piece Volume One by Eiichiro Oda

  • Mega Man 3 (Boss Fights) by Salvatore Pane

  • Football For A Buck: The Crazy Rise & Crazier Demise of the USFL by Jeff Pearlman

  • Shakespeare and the Middle Ages by Curtis Perry

  • Electronic Literature by Scott Rettberg

  • Capitalism: A Ghost Story by Arundhati Roy

  • Where We Go From Here by Bernie Sanders

  • Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics by Richard Seymour

  • Essays by Wallace Shawn

  • Night Thoughts by Wallace Shawn

  • 1923: A Great Depression Memoir by Harry Leslie Smith

  • Harry's Last Stand: How The World My Generation Built Is Falling Down and What We Can Do To Save It by Harry Leslie Smith

  • Love Among The Ruins: A Memoir of Life and Love in Hamburg, 1943 by Harry Leslie Smith

  • Strike For America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity by Micah Uetricht

  • The Unknown Odysseus: Alternate Worlds In Homer's Odyssey by Thomas Van Nortwick

  • Never Any End In Paris by Enrique Vila-Matas

  • The Future of Our Schools: Teachers Unions and Social Justice by Lois Weiner

  • A Politics of Love: A Handbook For A New American Revolution by Marianne Williamson

  • Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genuis of Dutch Soccer by David Winner