(Probably the wrong forum for this, but I intensely dislike some of the Vince nostalgia happening in pro wrestling fandom at the moment. Yes, corporate monopolies are bad and create very specific problems, but Vince wasn't the counter to this)

Via monopolies, technologies, and political economy TKO are charging what the market rate is for elite events. See F1, stadium gigs, World Cup. There's a whole entertainment economy produced for a very rich global elite. Vince would have gladly done that 30 years ago, the conditions didn't exist.

Vince McMahon wasn't charging cheaper tickets because he was a populist who understood the entertainment was working class, he was charging comparative prices for entertainment and would have charged more if he could.

Two weeks of teaching left after a three week Easter break, I don't think these are going to be all time classic seminars, guys.

I like it when read a fashion guide that says something like "Kangol hats are back this spring" and that's how I discover something I've been wearing for a decade has not been cool (but is now!)

Pep uses similar Spanish-isms allllll the time, he's just managed to deliberately or by accident stumbled on a way of speaking that makes him almost impossible to clip up or quite from lol

People willfully pretending that "fire" is some indecipherable word in the context he's using it in is up there with English sports journos pretending that the Cantona trawler comment was deranged poetry.

I'm happy to get involved in the pettiness of it all, so whatever, but the idea that Artera has been making these wild and weird statements in press conferences is so obviously manufactured.

But also the speed with which this has been embedded into everything is pretty unprecedented, it feels like. It must be! My messenger apps now encourage me to use AI to compose interpersonal comms, that's wild.

Marvin's When Old Technologies Were New is good for this! Home telephones were pretty aggressively pushed, particularly to the middle class, in ways people weren't always comfortable with from memory!

3 quarters of women don't want to date men who support a political project implicitly and explicitly about scaling back the rights they have won over the last century. So intolerant!!!

Costa does sound like it could one of his early Hollywood films tbh!

I got hungover after a pint the other day, this doesn't get easier. But on the plus side you really don't need the thing you walked into a room to get but can't remember.

I am going to see Akira at the IMAX later!!!!!

I think Trump is the only heel who would feasibly work for a Pope babyface turn, but I'm still not sure I buy him in that role, there's just too much history of him doing evil shit.

If you gave me infinite money and a dedicated research lab I don't think I could create a better model of a tinderbox economy than the one we have.

I love this article, I still think about it all the time.

It's a bit of culture that confuses me every time I see it. I can process someone spending £500 on a t-shirt, and I can process someone wanting an old Matrix t-shirt, but I can't process the two things together.

There's a Japanese luxury fashion brand that sells t-shirts that look like old vintage pop culture t-shirts but sells them for £465.

And by wonder I really mean it's quite funny how much that must piss him off.

I try not to feel much for Mike Pence, but I do wonder what he, devout evangelical, makes of the fact that a mob literally tried to execute him, Trump pardoned them all at the first opportunity, and that some AI slop is the thing that crossed the line for his fellow believers.

(Very aggressive subtweeting that might not make any sense out of context)

The old ghoul would have loved Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin when positioned against an imagined global left.

I dislike the "old Tories were good and sensible" takes here. The contemporary populist and reactionary right is fully rooted in Thatcherism, an ideology that supported tyrants in the global south and stamped out feminists and queers and non-whites at home.

Yes, the next step is them cutting my workload. (Though panicked about talking about this in public so deleted original tweet).

"the pope is weak on crime" is just going to be one of those Trumpisms that rattles around my brain for a decade when everyone else has forgotten about it.

Does JD Vance wanna do me a favour and do Arsenal's pre-match talk next Sunday?

Screening Controversial Cinema book cover.

Rich and I have turned the Child's Play episode of Ill Effects into a book chapter for this very exciting looking collection. I don't think we do anything wildly new with the material, but I do think we give a good and readable account of how social contexts produce "controversial" texts.

I'm also incredibly amused to think that Rogan, thinking deeply for a year or two, has decided that the answer to all of the great social problems of today is a politician somewhere precisely in the middle between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.

Though it does remind me of a pal who wrote something about Twitter very early on in Twitter's life, and any time anyone wrote about Twitter for the next decade they got a citation.