Archive for the ‘anarchyroll media’ Category

Emo AJ? I think Not

Posted: October 13, 2013 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
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potatoshooterlogoby @anarchyroll
10/11/13

Stop calling AJ Styles Emo AJ, that hair is clearly Scene.  The emo title is clearly warranted for kayfabe heel Dixie Carter, living proof that acting isn’t as easy as the greats make it look.  Oh Total Non Stop Action Wrestling what has become of you?

In the fall of 2009 you were as consistently entertaining as any wrestling product since the end of the Attitude Era.  AJ Styles was defending the World Title against Chris Daniels and Samoa Joe, Kurt Angle was in a personal feud with Nigel McGuiness, Amazing Red and Homicide were going at it for the X Title, and the tag division saw the Dudley Boys wrapping up putting over Beer Money, the Motor City Machine Guns, and the British Invasion.

Now, what?  What exactly has Hulk Hogan and Eric Bishoff left behind? What can still be blamed on Vince Russo? EV 2.0, Fourtune, Immortal, Aces and Eights? They rely on faction warefare like Michael Bay relies on explosions. Name me the top five contenders in each division? Can the top five be named across every division? Belts don’t matter you say, okay. Name me the three storylines that Bound For Glory IX is being built and hyped around?

Hulk Hogan’s highlights in TNA were recently shown, not counting the pyro included in his entrances can you count how many on more than one hand? How many total highlights/successes were there in four years of his tenure?  I can’t believe how much good will that TNA and Dixie carter have spoiled over the years.

I used to be such a fan, such a defender, such an apologizer for TNA. I’ll still put their years 2005 and 2007 against WWE month by month, match by match, angle by angle.  But it isn’t the same company anymore, literally, it’s Impact Wrestling now.

Chi Bears Cave Rotting from the Inside

Posted: October 13, 2013 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
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@anarchyroll 's sports writing blog

by @anarchyroll
10/10/13

I’m very happy that I picked the Bears with my heart before the season started as opposed to with my head. My head didn’t do me much better since I picked the Atlanta Falcons to go all the way, please if you have a heart, light a candle for Tony Gonzalez, he deserves better.

The Bears are having a good season so far, regardless of what talk radio in Chicago would have you believe. They are tied for first place in their division, and have been since the season started.  Their offense has entered the modern era, and the defense hasn’t skipped a beat after the departures of Lovie Smith and Brian Urlacher.  Devin Hester and the special teams unit have been producing their now expected high quality results.

However there is a sense of doom and gloom beyond the perennially toxic talk radio scene in the Chicagoland area.  The Bears have lost their two starting defensive tackles and their offensive line appears to be regressing enabling Jay Cutler to follow suit. At least Cutler nailed his performance in The League on FXX, and by him, I mean his wife.

But in all seriousness, or as serious as talking about sports in an age of record high poverty and infrastructure crumbling, if the lines on both sides of the ball crumble, the rest of the team will fall like a house of cards.  If that happens, much like Kevin Spacey’s stream show of the same name, the Bears won’t be receiving any awards for their work no matter how hard they try.  Much like the Best Drama Series category, the Bears play in a stacked division which makes the situation worse.

Offense wins games, defense wins championships, and franchises are built from the inside out. Inside out means from the offensive and defensive lines out to the skill positions. The Bears are legit stacked at all of their skill positions. They have a franchise quarterback, two running backs, a tight end setting the league on fire, three reliable wide receivers, an all time great return game, franchise best kicker, pro bowl linebackers, and corners that create turnovers in mass.  All of those are players and franchise qualities the fans of Jacksonville would sacrifice Tim Tebow to the sun god for; but if you’re team is getting dominated in the trenches you don’t have a chance to win the in the NFL.

Steroids can give the appearance of strength, and can satisfy the ego’s thirst of vanity.  But the muscles are just for show and put the test are prone to break and tear. A high powered offense and a defense that scored looks great, fantasy owners can’t snatch up Bears skill players fast enough. But without strength at the line all the Bears will be able to do is score points in the regular season while watching the playoffs from their homes in Florida and Arizona.

Inspiration via Devastation: Part 3: Chelsea (Bradley Manning)

Posted: October 4, 2013 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
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by @anarchyroll

What a patriot Chelsea (Bradley) Manning is! What a hero of journalism! Someone who walked the walk as opposed to talking the talk. A person who has sacrificed all freedoms for what they believe in. A human being who without resorting to violence, went to war with the Military Industrial Complex. In the information/ knowledge worker age, Manning took the protests, sit ins, and whistleblowing concepts out of the 20th century, combined them, and brought them all screaming into the 21st century by innovating or at the very least popularizing hacktivism.

Chelsea changed many of my personal perceptions. I have always been pro equal rights for gays and lesbians. However, the T in LGBT has always been a source of a source of hypocrisy for me, Chelsea Manning will be my turning point on that issue. I have wanted to be a journalist and/or media writer, but after years of conglomerate media ownership/takeovers I feared there was no more journalism. Chelsea Manning restored my faith in both the existence and power of the fifth estate. I believed that Barack Obama was an advocate for changing government and voted for him with a sense of pride, feeling I was making a difference. Chelsea Manning’s prosecution as a spy under the Espionage Act showed me Obama is nothing more than the same prototypical politician in a different wrapper, with better public speaking skills.

I planned on referring to her as Bradley during this blog and most future blogs. While doing my research and brushing up on some facts, I found it impossible to do that. Chelsea’s attorney, reading her statement after the verdict was handed down, had me feeling bad for even considering such an action. Even typing Bradley Manning into search engines had me wincing, with the knowledge I had made a mistake. Chelsea has earned the right to be called whatever she wants. She has endured hell on Earth via years of solitary confinement in a military prison, all before receiving a 35 year sentence. All in the name of government transparency.

Chelsea Manning made me want to write again. I had only been writing for academic purposes. It was symbolic of how I lived me life for so long. Using negative assumptions dictate my reality. Living my life through a series of  mental movies with stressful situations and outcomes scare me from taking action in the direction of my dreams. I would be creatively inspired by movies, music, television, paintings, and drawings but the good vibes would fade almost instantly. I felt like I needed to be inspired, that the inspiration needed to last. A self fulfilling writer’s block played out amongst many other issues. I was living my life as a weak coward. Chelsea Manning helped me find my bravery, helped me find consistent desire to write.

Chelsea taught me that we can’t afford to be afraid to move in the direction of what we believe in and what we feel is right. Just because we don’t act, doesn’t mean the World stops spinning, doesn’t mean that others aren’t taking action in place of us. She is a living, modern day example of many things that I have read about in books that are half a century old at least.  She helped dissolve my fear of being lost in the shuffle. She helped me feel enthusiastic about putting my talents and abilities into practice, rather than leaving them in thought and regret. Chelsea Manning made me want to write again, Edward Snowden made me feel like I needed to be writing again…

Anarchy JC #2: Inspiration via Devastation

Posted: October 3, 2013 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
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Part One: My Life
by  @anarchyroll

I used to write poetry, a lot of poetry. That was my entre into blogging in the first place back in the MySpace days when I started posting what I would write on cocktail napkins, scrap paper, copy paper, waste paper, and in notebooks. I had been writing poetry for years, over a decade in fact. People told me it was good, but I often wonder if they meant it or if they were just worried that if they gave me their honest opinion I would slit my wrist. For a number of years they would have been right in that assumption, and no I did not listen to scene music.

I was creatively inspired by negativity, and because I was a depressed anti social at the time, I wrote a lot. I could find the darkness in anything, like any immature negative asshole can. I did a lot of writing, it made me not happy, but feel less shitty to turn the negative feelings I was constantly feeling into something constructive and productive. Back then, that was the only constructive thing I did other than work a day job. Much of what wasn’t burned the day I graduated high school can still be found at darkdawndiaries.com.

When the creative writing well ran dry for the first time since before puberty, I freaked out. Silently, likely creating tumors made of suppressed negative emotions. Even worse, I tried being creative so counterproductive I’m amazed I didn’t create the world’s highest rated sitcom. My 26th birthday brought a literal explosion of creativity, many of those are posted on the above listed website. I started a couple of short stories that day that I was never able to finish because trying to create fiction seemed like trying to speak Mandarin, in search of a metaphoric or literal Rosetta Stone.

During this time I was going to school, pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Media Communications, walking the path of Chris Farley’s character in Tommy Boy. So although I had writer’s block creatively, I was still writing for academic purposes on a weekly basis for a majority of the year. Not only was I writing but I was also receiving training in writing for news, writing for media, audio broadcasting, video production, public speaking, script writing, communication theories/styles, the history of theater, radio, film, and television. I was maturing as a person and as a writer, whether I knew it or not, whether I wanted to or not. This saved me.

I was constantly thinking about writing but not doing it because of my self fulfilling prophecy of writer’s block even though I was routinely getting high marks on lengthy, research based term papers. I saw friends and classmates actually taking action towards their career aspirations and media and achieving them. Me? I just kept riding my hamster wheel of reoccurring personal issues. My journey towards handling and solving those issues through consuming knowledge and applying lessons is being documented in my Stimulus Space Response articles.

What got my actually writing again? I reached a tipping point in many areas of my life. After my grandmother died and my job of eight years went bankrupt I dipped back into full fledged depression. Didn’t leave my bedroom for days (except food & bathroom), didn’t leave my house for weeks. I dropped out of school, stopped exercising, stopped even thinking about writing, stopped anything productive. I was lost in the woods at night, if my life was a building, it was a pile of smoldering rubble destroyed from a fire within. With much help from family and friends I went back to school, started listening to nonfiction audio books routinely, lost forty pounds, got my BA, moved into a house with a friend, started journaling, started reading amateur blogs, started talking with people in the media industry, and started posting blogs.

Why do I write and why did I start in the first place? I love writing, I really do. I’m no longer going to question if I’m also actually good at it or the people who tell me that I’m good at it. I’m going to believe in myself, my ability, my talent, and take action from there. If I am not inspired to write poetry or short stories like I once was, then it’s a good thing I have a formal education and degree of higher education in media writing. So I am going to write about the news stories that I am passionate about while trying to break new stories that are within my circle of influence to do original reporting on. I must write to stay sharp, to improve, and to build a portfolio of material.

What makes me want to keep writing, professionally, with a multi tiered content presentation style in the spirit of VICE and UPROXX? Three things; Syria, Bradley Manning, and Edward Snowden. More on those next time…

Inspiration via Devastation: Part 2: Syria

Posted: October 3, 2013 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
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by @anarchyroll

I first started paying attention to the civil war in Syria when the body count was 3,000. Back then it wasn’t yet a civil war, there was no Free Syrian Army to begin with, so it hadn’t yet splintered off into seven separate factions. I had heard that essentially the Syrian people were trying to do what the people of Egypt did during the Arab Spring of 2011. The difference in this case was, the president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad ordered his military to open fire and execute all of the protesting civilians. I noticed each day the body count went up by the hundreds, not by the dozens. I noticed when the body count exceeded that of 9/11/01.

I never stopped paying attention to Syria, anyone who frequents my Twitter account would certainly agree with me. The sheer numbers of dead, wounded, and refugees has never ceased to boggle my mind. What happened in Libya and Egypt definitely led to me focusing even more on Syria. I think, without judgment, those two had the opposite effect on most people. I understand completely the fatigue of the American public after over a full decade of seeing wars in the Middle East. Afghanistan and Iraq, each day a new bombing, another dozen or more dead, more money spent (or missing) abroad, more fear mongering at home. I empathize rather than demonize the public who just seem to not care about Syria, after all there is no oil there.

The American public’s desire to not care about Syria was only aided by the fact that the main stream media didn’t focus on the country’s civil war, despite the staggering body count, until after the sarin gas attack last month. If you get your news from the internet, then you can’t not know about Syria for at least a full year. Even the websites of NBC, CBS, FOX News, and CNN have had regular stories about the conflict, the television stations they are subsidiaries of however, did not. If you get your news from newspapers or magazines, you’ve known about Syria since maybe the beginning of this year. TIME magazine, the New York Times, and Chicago Tribune have all had front page stories on Syria that I have seen with my own eyes.

Now, in September of 2013 only the young and the ignorant don’t know about the situation in Syria. It is the lead story online, in print, and on television. Local news, national news, cable news are all leading with Syria. I am happy that the light is finally getting shined on this very bleak and black news story. The death and destruction match any conflict in recent memory. Syria’s civil war is not an indie band that  just got signed to a major label, I’m not proud that I was calling for US intervention before it was cool. But I am a supporter of US intervention.

I was not a supporter of Operation Desert Storm or it’s much less successful sequel. I was a supporter of  intervention in Kosovo. I was not a supporter of invading Afghanistan after 9/11 since it was not a country that attacked the United States. I was a supporter of the small scale, special operation, tactical assassination of Osama bin Laden which I believe should be the blueprint for all of the military presence of the United States in the Middle East for the last decade should have been. I was not a supporter of our involvement in Libya. I am a supporter of the intervention in Syria.

I wish I had a year and a half backlog of blogs and articles to show the consistency of my stance on this issue, but I don’t. I wish all of my writings on the topic would give me some credibility with anyone who reads this article, but I don’t. I haven’t been writing for anything other than academic purposes for the last two years. Syria is a major factor in changing that. I thought the United States military should have intervened over a year ago. We have after all, along with the United Nations, been arming the rebels. That is going half pregnant, either we support the rebels or we don’t. Since Obama has proven to be just as much a supporter of the Military Industrial Complex as his predecessors, then let’s put that machine to use when literally hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians are being slaughtered.

I long for the day we as a country are officially isolationist, with an eye on the military operations of other countries akin to what is happening in outer space. The money we need to pump into our schools, bridges, roads, and social safety net programs is being spent on a rubber stamped military industrial complex budget every year. I will be the first to say spend that money at home and not abroad. I’d love to have an embassy in every country and not a military base. Until that day comes, and by day I mean peaceful upheaval of basically everyone in power in national office, America is the World Police. If we are going to play World Police so we can control the price of oil, then we can play world police for thousands of innocent civilians being slaughtered every day.

What should be and what is, believe it or not aren’t always the same thing. I think it is the right thing to do to get the chemical weapons from being used against civilians, and we should do something to help all of the refugees. I’ll have much more to write on Syria, so I won’t write a novel’s worth of material in this one post. I am happy to be in a position where I both want to and can go on writing for a long period of time. It was a long trip to get to this point. I needed to reignite the fire within me that had dimmed to a searing hot coal. I needed flames, the situations involving Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden applied the gasoline after Syria stoked the ambers…

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