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Submitted by Degenerate on Tuesday, November 20, 2007 at 9:15 PM EST
 Welcome, peeps. Don't be shy. Come on in, have a beer (or non-alcoholic beverage of your choice), sit and chill. It's time for one more edition of Struggle For Power with yours truly, Degenerate. I'm glad you took the time to not only click on the link for this column, but to stick by and read some good ol' fashioned wrestling stuff. Thanks for doing that. I know a lot of people have already noticed that I tend to write a lot about my work. Not because I like my job (I really don't, but it pays well enough to keep the computer and the Internet access necessary to write this column), but because it's really a big part of my life. Anyone who's involved in computers needs to almost live this industry and keep up with everything unless you want to be left behind. So I'll continue to keep on rambling about technology in general, probably at the expense of boring some people along the way. Why do I say all of this? There's a simple reason: this column will also be about my job, so while I go on and continue to get the title of LordsOfPain.net's "Geekiest Main Pager Columnist Ever", I hope you all learn a little something along the way. Let's do it, now! * The code was finally broken... Chris Jericho is finally a part of the WWE once more. Well, we all kinda knew about it for the past month or so. But we just had to see it to believe it. I don't care if I already knew about the surprise beforehand, I always get a kick out of seeing a returning (or debuting) wrestler get the crowd, both live and those watching on TV, all worked up in a frenzy. The atmosphere is just electric, and one of the true great pleasures of being a wrestling fan myself. However, as far as Jericho is concerned, I wonder how long he's going to stick around. Like so many wrestlers popular outside of the wrestling world, they usually have absolutely no need to be wrestling full-time. So let's hope he's around for a nice run, and we can enjoy another dose of Y2J. I'm sure a lot of people needed it. * I missed Survivor Series this year, but that's nothing new. This is usually the only one of the "Big 4" Pay-Per-Views that I don't bother trying to watch. It's like it lacks the "Big Match" feel of the Royal Rumble, Wrestlemania and Summerslam. Also, what made the show stand out in the back in the day - the traditional Survivor Series matches - have all but disappeared. I remember watching old Coliseum Video tapes of the Survivor Series from the late 80's and early 90's, and almost all the matches back then were 5-on-5, even 10-on-10 in some cases. Yeah, I guess variety is best, but just don't throw away all the old stuff. Nostalgia in small doses can work wonders. * The only reason why I caught TNA Impact this past week was to see the debut of Booker T. While watching him in the ring for the "contract-signing", I couldn't help but be annoyed by T's attitude. He was all smiling, seemingly almost crying when the fans were chanting for him, making it seem like he was in hell and is now in heaven. Bullshit, I say. While his reason for leaving the WWE was due to alleged politicking backstage, I doubt he was 100% unhappy. I'm sure he was getting paid rather well. He achieved basically everything any WWE wrestler could possibly do, including a World Heavyweight Championship reign. So really, all these ex-WWE wrestlers coming to TNA, proclaiming how awesome that place is compared to 'up north', they should just stop it. I'm sure they would come back running in an instant if the WWE gave them a shitload of money and/or a lighter schedule. It's all just hypocritical to me. * So the rumors are running rampant that my fellow countryman Carlito is unhappy at his current role and wants out. To further fuel the rumors, all of his merchandise has been placed in the discount bin of WWE's Internet store, usually reserved for wrestlers who have been recently let go or on their way out. As seen last night on Raw, he's still not fired. But of course, he lost to little ol' Hornswoggle. Just like the merchandise, embarrassing losses are also reserved to wrestlers out of the company. Oh, and guys who have TV tapings in their hometown. I remember back when the Carlito Caribbean Cool vignettes started to air, I went to a Puerto Rican forum and posted that Carlito wasn't going to be one of the company's biggest superstars. Of course, I got my ass chewed out from people who "knew he would be World Champion one day". Well, I partially ate my words, as Carlito was, at one point, the next big thing (sorry, Brock). But his push died out abruptly (maybe political reasons, maybe his work ethic isn't all that great, who knows why) and he was pushed back - way back. If he leaves, I'm sure he'll be making a big mistake in the long haul. But whatever his reasoning to ask for a release is, maybe he find happiness in that. * Kristal Marshall finally broke her silence today, giving her side of the story on why she was released from the WWE after participating in one of Smackdown's most prominent storylines of the year. According to her, she had refused to take part of a storyline involving Edge. This falls in line according to the news released shortly after her released, where it was speculated that the WWE wanted to do a storyline with Kristal being the sexy vixen alongside Edge, just like Lita was. I commend Kristal for taking her stand and talking so nice about Lita (more on that in next week's column). Also, repeating a recent angle doesn't seem a wise move at all, especially for a proven Main Eventer in Edge. But personally, I say she probably deserved her release. When a pro wrestler signs to the WWE, they should already know that they'll be asked to participate in the weirdest shit possible. With women, the 'weirdness' factor is raised exponentially. WWE Divas are the ones who need to pull off the sickest stuff possible. Some examples that come to mind: Trish Stratus being totally submissive to Vince McMahon to the point where she had to strip her clothes, get on her knees and bark like a dog, and Dawn Marie and Torrie Wilson in an apparent lesbian angle, not to mention all the WWE Divas Vince has kissed on air. So if you expected not to be put in "morally degrading" storylines, you're one stupid girl. Like I mentioned in the very beginning of this column, technology has changed a lot over the past years. Of course, everyone has noticed the technological changes everywhere. We now have hybrid cars that run with electrical motors. We have small, portable music players that carry our entire CD collections and even DVD collections. We have a trillion cable channels, while still bitching there's nothing to watch on TV. But the most important technology shift in recent years, probably since the invention of the wheel by cavemen, is the Internet. It has changed the way we do most things. It changed out way of buying things, thanks to places like eBay and Amazon. It changed our way of finding information, leaving us to forget where our local libraries are. It's even changed the time-honored tradition of trading porn tapes with your buddies. Hmm... Maybe it has changed everything. Personally, I usually like reading about historic facts on the things that fascinate me the most. Two of those things are professional wrestling and the Internet, particularly the programming aspect of it. As such, whenever I get the change to read a book or watch a video on these subjects and their past, I usually do so. Any schmuck can know about current facts, but you never really know how far things have come until you read where those things actually came from. A lot of people know about the Internet and wrestling from recent years, but fail to know anything about the eras before they watched wrestling or logged on to the 'Net. Whether it's because they're way too young or just don't want to learn anything about the past, your pal Degen is here to fill the void. ARPANET - Precursor to the modern Internet Just because you used the Internet back in 1999 or 2000, doesn't mean that it was always that way. In fact, the first "Internet", named ARPANET, was developed way back in the 1960's and 1970's by the U.S. Department of Defense. It wasn't the Internet as we know it today, as in no porn was readily available (at least that's what they say...), but it was a network that connected computers (mostly government and academic institutions) that are far apart. At the very core, that's what the Internet is. It's much more complicated than that, but I won't bore the few readers who have stuck with me with the technical details. ARPANET was just a very 'simple' (by today's standards) network of few computers that were able to transmit data from and to different points across the U.S. It was so simple, that this is a logical map of ARPANET in 1977 - nine years after the first successful transmission between two computers in the network:  Yes, that was the entire Internet back in '77. Just like ARPANET was simple, professional wrestling was very simple, too in the 50's, 60's and 70's. Well, not too simple, since everything was split into territories and there was no definitive territory that ruled them all, a la WWE nowadays. But the action inside the ring was very, very simple. No gimmicks (except being really, really strong), no flashy moves, no classic entrances, no nothing. It was just two people in the ring kicking each other's asses, at least in the very basic sense of the word.  The matches were so simple, they were even seen by the live audience in black and white like that picture above. Wait... No, my bad, it's the picture that was taken originally in black and white. Anyway, the picture captures the essence of the simplicity back then. If you had told one of the mustachioed bald strongmen to get on the top rope and perform a corkscrew plancha, they would first look at you funny, then lock an armlock that would leave your arm as strong as cooked spaghetti. The beginning of the porn-infested Internet we know and love today In the 80's and 90's, the basic concept behind ARPANET was beginning to be used in a more global manner. Although still in its early stages, the Internet was beginning to become known outside of the same inner circles who used the product (government agencies and universities). The World Wide Web was announced. Of course, only people like scientists, geeks and government officials know about it, although the first couple of web sites were being developed. Even web browsers were created for the first time, thanks to operating systems now having graphical interfaces. The most popular one was a browser called Mosaic.  Yeah, it looks like shit compared to the websites of today. But if you lived in the 80's and wanted to use a computer, all you would find would be old terminals that only displayed white text in a black background (or green text in a black background, if you were lucky). So seeing all these glorious colors must have been awesome for those back then. I'm sure soon after these colors were shown, the porn started appearing. After all, it's hard to decipher the woman's anatomy when you have text-only interfaces. I'm sure people back then had very vivid imaginations. Wrestling fans didn't have much of an imagination back then either. They couldn't have, with no gimmicks or storylines (outside of champion vs. challenger, from what it seems). That all changed in the 80's, when a young Vince McMahon took the basic concept of wrestling and expanded that view all over the U.S., squashing all competition in his way. Those meaningless matches? Throw them away. Now there were storylines in place (Andre ripped the cross from Hogan's neck? NOOOO!) and gimmicks galore (Adrian Adonis and Junkyard Dog... enough said). The leader of the bunch was the most charismatic of them all:  Look at that picture. How can a young boy not like that? A huge, musclebound rock-star wannabe. Screw Dusty Rhodes, that's the American Dream right there. And the picture is in COLOR! No more bland black-and-white pictures. Still, like the Mosaic browser above, that looks like shit compared to the wrestlers of today. But compared to the wrestling cards before that, this was just glorious entertainment. Yes, Hogan did take the world by storm afterwards, but those were just the initial steps for something bigger down the road. Dot-com Bubble - Millionaires Galore In the mid-90's, rapidly increased growth of the Internet lead to many people taking the plunge, building their business off this previously-unproven platform. There were a number of factors that lead to this, the main one being that a lot of people were creating multi-million dollar companies seemingly overnight. A lot of the huge companies we know nowadays, like Yahoo and PayPal, all started during this period. Hell, even this very site was created in the midst of this time-frame. That has to count for something. As part of this era, websites went from colored text to brightly-colored backgrounds and layouts. Weird backgrounds, banners galore, animated GIFs, moving marquees - this was all the rage, make your website as flashy as possible. Here's a sample of such a website:  Note: The saddest part about that picture is that it's a screenshot I took of a live website, most likely built back in '98. Take a look if you want to see the 'cool' animations, and if you want your browser to crash or eyes to bleed due to the ugliness. The main fuel for this era was due to the accessibility of personal computers. Anyone could sit down and learn the basic usage of a computer and log on to the Internet. Before anyone tells me that computers are difficult, they're not. Computers back in the '60s? Those were extremely difficult. I'm sure such pioneers like Douglas Engelbart would've loved a graphical user interface. You're probably just scared that by pressing a wrong combination of keys your computer will self-destruct. But I digress. Also during this era of easy computing, professional wrestling was riding the wave of an incredible boom. Wrestlers started exhibiting more personality than just silly gimmicks. The presentation of the shows were much flashier than before. But the main component of the boom was simply one person. In '97, a character named Stone Cold Steve Austin was starting to grab the attention of not only die-hard wrestling fans, but a whole lot of outside fans as well. In '98, he was one of the biggest stars of all time.  Yes, that's beer, or at least I hope it is. Since he was a kick-ass beer-drinker and always facing adversity from his boss, this was a character people could relate to. And I'm sure a lot of people enjoyed Stone Cold's antics, wishing they could do the same to their bosses, living vicariously through the character on TV. This, in turn, lead to increased revenue all over the board, and many wrestlers got rich of this rise in popularity. After all these years, simple is simply better There comes a time when all that seemed cool before is just annoying nowadays. I admit I always enjoyed watching these websites chock full of Flash animations and the like. But that quickly became seriously annoying. I'm sure a lot of people did to. So Internet companies (at least those still alive the Dot-com Bubble Burst - sadly, Pets.com didn't survive) started scaling back on these tactics and creating simple websites. Probably the most visited website currently, Google.com, has the simplest website possible:  Of course, it's simple, but it's functional. You go the site, there's a clear text box field for you to write what you're searching for, plus two buttons to get your search results. Nothing else. This is the current rage, at least to web developers like myself. And to tell you the truth, it works. I rarely go to sites like Yahoo anymore because of all the stuff it has in the main site. Some of the most popular web sites that people can work with are simple to use, like Wikipedia and YouTube. A balance between simplicity and elegance has been found. When people go to Google, they want to search for something specific, not have a ton of links or news bytes telling me how "The Bachelor" ended. After the Attitude Era in wrestling, things slowed down considerably. Clearly, people have gone to other things, and didn't want to follow the same formula in wrestling. Some newcomers in the industry were appearing - companies like Ring Of Honor and TNA. What do these two companies have in common when beginning? They featured a more old-school type of wrestlng. Gimmicks or storylines didn't get in the way of the action. They were wrestling promotions, and when fans came to the shows, they usually wanted wrestling, not a bunch of gimmicks. While the WWE still has its fair share of gimmicks, we're now in a period of time where there have actually been less full-blown gimmicks than previously. From Doink The Clown to The Headbangers, The Oddities to a gay Rico, these characters of the past are just mere afterthoughts. Most all wrestlers nowadays are just themselves, just acting more off-the-charts than they legally could. With guys like Kurt Angle, Rey Mysterio (are masks gimmicks?), Triple H, Shawn Michaels and Batista kicking ass in the ring, they need nothing else to shine through. Like I said, there are exceptions (King Booker, anyone?), but for the most part, it's just the wrestlers without any make-up or costumes.  Okay, that might be the crappiest Kurt Angle in-action picture I could find. But he's smiling - that should make him real enough. The Internet and professional wrestling have come a long, long way in a relatively short period of time. Where are we headed now? It's difficult to say. For the Internet, there are rumors that we are in the beginnings of a second "Dot-com Bubble", dubbed "Bubble 2.0", of course. Seeing that Google's shares were over $700 each at one point this past week or so, it may be true. For wrestling, there's a lot of proof that the business is cyclical, and another "wrestling boom" is bound to happen sooner or later. Whether that's true or not, just enjoy what you have on TV now. You'll never know when someone writes a column saying the wrestling in your era was simple and bland. I really hope I didn't bore the hell out of no one during that column. I really find the comparisons between wrestling and society to be intriguing, to say the least. There isn't much more to say from me, so I'll go ahead and plug away my beloved Columns Forum as usual. The Lost Files--#1: Razor's Edge By SUPERFAN! While on the topic of the Internet, are you ever curious to read how wrestling columns would've been written back in May 1996? I was very curious too, but never could find one. WAIT! There's some column that somehow survived. Great read, considering its age. I hope that Razor Ramon dude does something for himself in the wrestling business. Shuffle Up and Deal: Vol. 8, Wargames By Jetsetpoker Like I mentioned earlier in this column, the traditional Survivor Series matches have all but disappeared. But at least those types of matches have survived. Another kick-ass gimmick from back in the day, dubbed Wargames, is extinct nowadays. If you have never heard of this type of match before, I suggest you head on over to Jetsetpoker's great read on what it was, along with asking if that match would fly in today's environment. Breaking the 4th Wall #13: I'm a Survivor, but..... By EB4 Even more Survivor Series goodness this week, maybe since it was the rage until two days ago. With 21 years of Survivor Series shows gone by, EB4 puts in his views on the changes Survivor Series has made over the years, and how this year's edition will stack up. That's it for now, peeps. As usual, send your cool feedback my way through E-Mail at dennmart@gmail.com, or through my own feedback thread. It's all about the choices, just like the choice you made of sticking with me until this, the very end. Thanks for reading. Have a Happy Thanksgiving, peeps. Remember not only to stuff your faces and spend time with family, but also remember to give thanks for all the blessings you've had. 'Til next time, Degenerate ***DIRECT LINK*** Shelly "Selenas" Martinez VERY VERY HOT TNA PPV Debut!! Must See!
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