It’s been a while since I sat down and put fingers to keyboard on a blog entry here. Since my last update, I’ve been a little busy – starting work on a new book project (check it out over at www.wrestlingrulebook.com – hoping to get this out in the next year at least, if not in time for Christmas 2012 without putting any dates in stone!), and also finally releasing my first book on Amazon Kindle.
Yeah, it’s a little weird releasing a book on a format that I don’t use – but then again, Wrestling’s Sinking Ship got released on the iTunes’ iBooks store, and I hardly use that either, so go figure! Go search for “Wrestling’s Sinking Ship” if you have an iDevice or a Kindle, it’s well worth the read!
Aside from gratuitous self plugs, it’s been a rather interesting time as of late. I’ve managed to start listening to podcasts once again, and to be frank, the bulk of the shows I have heard have been dross. Be it people who love the sound of their own voice, folks who are a human drop board (to the point where a selection of four sayings are used so often that you daren’t play any drinking games to the show out of fear for your own liver!), or “internet radio hosts” who see themselves as an oracle, but just end up wide of the mark. And that’s just one show!
It’s coming up to two years since Ringside/Ringside Live came to an untimely end. Whilst I have had twitches every now and then about picking the show up again, albeit in a different format, it’s always come down to the same thing: not enough time. When the show was live, it was a case of a 90 minute to two-hour phone call and that was that, although the preparation usually took several hours a day during the week, especially on the occasions that guests were booked. In the pre-recorded days, it wasn’t that much better, as editing had to be done as well as the prep work, although those tended to be done at a more sociable hour, it still was a pain – and although, like Sin Cara, if we botched spots, we could go back out and repeat what was messed up, the annoyance remained!
With that in mind, how anyone can juggle doing any notable show on top of full time employment is a mystery. Let alone anyone doing a whole series of shows every week. Having recently picked up where Ringside left off, I’ve started following JJ’s work over at his self-styled SNS Radio Network – whilst there probably wasn’t much of a clamouring for a return of Ringside, it’s not really worth the work when there’s other shows out there that hit the spot. Even if it is a little long, check out their August 22nd edition of WNL for a fantastic interview with “Rowdy Roddy Piper”. Whereas some paid-for sites only gave you 20 minutes with Hot Rod, this one went for over an hour and leaves you hanging on his every word.
Apart from that, there’s not much else going on – Madden 12 is trying to get in my PS3, as will FIFA 12 at the end of the month, and WWE 12 come the end of November. In a few week’s I’ll be sampling the Eurogamer Expo – perhaps there’ll be some observations from there, if there’s much worth reporting on that isn’t covered to death elsewhere online!