toprope.tv – Delivering subscription content from professional wrestling
I also continue to maintain The East Village Magazine and Pure Pro Wrestling, which we recently redesigned. I’m working on a redesign for The East Village Magazine, which is rather long overdue.
Top Rope TV is a division of Pure Pro Wrestling that is gearing up to launch thousands of hours of video content for a subscription audience. Though it’s not nearly ready for launch, it’s online and ready for early registration.
Pure Pro Wrestling was more than ready for a redesign as the last iteration was built on the Wix website builder and had many, many thousands of lines of theme overburden, coupled with very slow server response times, and a high monthly cost for a basic and static site. The new design is more dynamic, lighter, more device independent and allows the non-technical staff manage their own content.
The Meridian Weekly is a woman-owned publication based in Ovid Michigan that has operated for over 30 years producing and delivering a newspaper that serves Clinton and Shiawassee counties. They really only wanted to be able to publish the .pdf version of their paper, but they are starting to publish articles and utilize social media to create new advertiser opportunities and reach beyond their physical limitations.
So, with some of these projects launched, I’m starting to see a pathway to being able to start new projects and take on more work in my off-work hours.
There is an article, or rather, short story that I keep looking for and keep losing. Here’s “Sort By Controversial.” This fairly well explains the revolting developments of the last 3 years
This dude has been posting the same dinner on Instagram for six freaking years (thx fipilele)
Byte, from the Vine people is out of beta and ready for regular schmucks. “good. because TikTok is a cancer” – Verge commenter
Here’s a Vox article which articulates what we mostly all already knew. They have literally obscured reality with dense fabric of complete chaos and bullshit. “…democracy cannot function without a shared understanding of reality…”
The presidential assassination that no one talks about
So, you wanna be a SoundCloud rapper? Well, Pharrell Made Only $2,700 In Songwriter Royalties From 43 Million Plays Of ‘Happy’ On Pandora
This is a typical news brief. I did many hundreds of these over the years. Whatever I was reading, that I though was interesting, or that I picked up along my travels, I would capture and drop into a list for others.
Since October 2018, we’ve been on the road wrestling, training, and putting on shows. Dash has wrestled in front of thousands of fans, learned about the business of professional wrestling, and has performed at over 50 live shows.
Pure Pro Wrestling and it’s owner Joe Byrd (Xavier Justice) have become part of our extended family and most of the entire company as well.
We’ve been training kids for over 14 months now and our program has grown from six to nearly forty students. Some of the kids are definitely not going to be ever “picked for the team” and have long been ostracized from organized athletics programs. But, at Pure Pro Wrestling’s Jr Grapplers program, they are welcomed.
I’ve watched kids swell with confidence, enjoy the benefits of fellowship, improve in school, and live out their dreams in front of a live audience of hundreds of people. Some of them doing so well, that they are growing beyond our own hopes. Some of them, having disabilities, have finally found something that they can do and have been accepted into unquestioningly.
Professional wrestling, often dismissed, looked down upon, or even ridiculed, is one of the last pure forms of performing folk art around. The work they do, the love that wrestlers have for their craft, and the real risks they endure at each performance and practice are very real.
I think that a proper analog for this form of athletic art could be considered as “athletics theater.” In fact, there are many parallels with traditional live performing theater. There is plot, a written script, sets, costumes, a great amount of effort in setup, and the actual performance.
I couldn’t be happier with my wrestling family and I couldn’t be prouder of our entire organization. If you’re in Michigan, please come out and see our next show. You can buy tickets in the box below.
We launched the Meridian Weekly website a couple of days ago. There were a number of difficult things to overcome, but it’s live. Also created facebook and twitter accounts for them to begin using.
The Weekly is published in Ovid Michigan by a small staff and is living proof that print not only isn’t dead, it lives in small and almost unnoticed segments in our society. It’s just not what we think that it is, or rather what our idea of it was.
Anyway, check them out, give them a follow. Support your local media content producers.
He was one of the reasons that I started my career in computers. I met him at a computer club meeting at Mott Community College in Flint, MI. We spent a lot of time early on in the x86 days with early versions of DOS, Windows, and the first releases of Linux. He was among the most knowledgeable computer people that I have ever met.
He was a gifted systems engineer, software developer, and a great overall computing enthusiast. He embodied all that was fun about computing for the early era of home computing. He was an avid gamer, made original midi compositions, and published several freeware applications.
He supported himself, in small part, by providing technical support to his friends, family, co-workers, and small business. Mostly for a nominal fee. He did much more than he was compensated for.
He was a gifted chess player. I witnessed him win several tournaments, perform demonstration matches against 12 opponents simultaneously, and he developed software and hardware for computing chess applications. At the time of his death, he was a well ranked player and State of Michigan seniors champion in 2018.
I was happy to hear that Gary had returned to organized chess. He was well-known for many years with the Michigan Chess Association
I’ll miss my friend Gary, whom I have many, many stories about and a great lot of love for.
2/29/20: Edit: Gary was very, very funny. When I think of something, I’ll drop back in here and write it up.
Here’s one:
Gary told of a health-related party, or some alternative medicine (likely a product promotional) gathering he was attending. The hostess asked him, “Gary have you ever had a high colonic?” Gary said he replied, “Oh no, I never drink.” To which the lady blinked wordlessly and wandered away.
Edit: 3/22/21, here’s another, in fact, enema-related story:
Once, we were eating at the US Coney Island on Dort Hwy and Bristol Rd near Flint, MI. He started telling me the story of his hospitalization following a motorcycle accident. He went into great detail of his being in traction and not being able to move. He was impacted, apparently at some point, and described in great detail the enema procedure. “That nurse was thumping that tube with her finger as hard as she could… it felt like it was connected to my spine!” and how the removal process was like, “She was trying to start a lawn mower!” Needless to say, the couple behind Gary in the adjacent booth left, and the couple to our right moved across the restaurant. Sometimes, he was less self-aware than even me, or at least pretended to be for the effect of humor. Sometimes he knew exactly what he was doing.
Now, mind you… the story was less about the fact that he may have been in hospital and may have been in some sort of situation with a nurse and an enema tube, and more about the fact that they were giving us the stink eye as we smoked. They were seated in the smoking section, but were not smoking themselves. Gary was a dedicated tobacco enthusiast. Unapologetic, and militant toward even the slightest hint of smoker shaming (for lack of a better term).
He told that story to make them squirm as if the smoking was not bad enough.
I’ll keep dropping stories here as I think of them. Hopefully, they won’t all be enema-related stories. They might, however. In the meantime, I’m archiving his website, for storage here. After that is complete, I’ll let the ais.org admins know that he’s passed.
1997 Hunter S. Thompson – On internet journalism, “Well, I don’t know. There is a line somewhere between democratizing journalism and every man a journalist. You can’t really believe what you read in the papers anyway, but there is at least some spectrum of reliability. Maybe it’s becoming like the TV talk shows or the tabloids where anything’s acceptable as long as it’s interesting.”
The brains behind the ‘Aha!’ moment – Something that has fascinated me my entire life. There are regular “Ah-ha” moments, they happen all the time. Then there are revelations, less common, but they should happen a few times in several years. Then there is the unicorn of enlightenment, “The Epiphany.” Which we’re lucky if we have one. Ever.
Please read this epic obituary of Vivian Nicholson – The “Spend, spend, spend” lady was an epic person, who had an amazing life, and owes nothing to anyone, least of all an explanation.
The Age of Hubble a (2015) Documentary about Space – [50:01] – An army of high-tech telescopes, led by Hubble in space, has delivered an unprecedented chain of discoveries about how galaxies took shape, how stars live and die, and how life arose. What are we learning about the universe and ourselves in this Age of Hubble?
(So, every few days, I like to put links to things that I read, see, or that you’ve linked in your world. I hope you enjoy, I’ll try to keep them going)
