Hello and welcome everyone to my new blog, The Total Bounty! I’m Salty Paris, former Australian fighting game pro and professional Twitch streamer, but I’ve decided to take a step back from all that stress and anxiety and relax a bit more, and get back into some of my old hobbies, primarily wrestling, but it turns out I’m not capable of being into anything a normal amount, and I’ve been now watching an absolute shit ton. This blog will be a place for me to dump all my thoughts about those events without having to get involved in any of the insane tribalist arguments on Twitter, and also occasionally post about other stuff I’m up to, like travel or food. I’ve been wanting to be less present on social media for a while now, since all the rage bait and toxicity has really been ramping up, and it either depresses me or consumes all my self control to avoid commenting on it, so that was the primary motivator behind making this blog. The other motivator was to practise my programming abilities, since I coded this whole thing from scratch in Python, using Django! That’s been a hassle, but also fun, so you’ll probably see some upgrades coming over the next few months or whatever as I learn new things I can do.
So, some background about my love of wrestling. When I was a kid, my aunt was dating an American man, named Joe, or as I called him, Uncle Joe. He was very American, so he got me into WWE and WCW by recording tapes for me to watch later. Because it was purely up to him what I saw, I mostly watched a bunch of late 80s WWF, peak Hulkamania stuff, and current WCW. I loved Andre the Giant, because he was huge, the nWo for being cool and edgy, Goldberg because he was the strongest in the world, and Sting because he was Sting. It's kinda funny how fickle kids can be, because I always hated Hulk Hogan, but I loved Hollywood Hogan. Just that easy to impress young Paris, I suppose. I spent many, many hours as a kid playing WCW/nWo Revenge, making my OCs like Diamond Dallas Paris, and spamming the battle royale mode because I didn’t really know the controls all that well so it was the easiest for me to win. One odd thing I think looking back is that Scott Steiner never really caught on with young Paris, I feel like Big Booty Daddy should’ve been real over with me as a kid but somehow, was just ambivalent. Not big enough, maybe?
Eventually, my uncle and aunt broke up, and I never saw him again. As such, my wrestling viewing mostly just became whenever my parents would let me get a WWE tape and later DVD at the video rental. This also resulted in me not really realising that WCW ever died, since my sporadic viewing meant I missed the whole InVasion arc, and I just assumed the video store didn’t carry WCW for whatever reason. It wasn’t until, as an early teen, maybe 13-ish, I got to see Goldberg and got suspicious. Being the ‘Japanese soldier who doesn’t know WW2 is over’ for the Monday Night Wars has given me an unending nostalgia for WCW, and I can’t stop myself from fantasy booking ways that they could’ve maybe survived (most of which are ‘don’t give Hogan total control’).
I followed WWE up until Big Dog Roman Reigns started taking over, and eventually fell off wrestling entirely. It took me a long while to work up the interest in getting back into it, feeling so burned by Roman’s booking, that no matter how much people told me ‘he’s pretty good as a heel at the moment’ I would refuse to believe it. I can now finally admit, he is pretty good as a heel, but it still pisses me off how much stoppages there are in his matches. The news of Vince being kicked out the first time was what gave me the willpower to get back in, but I was still only really scratching an itch, until this year when I really dived back in.
These days, I watch Raw weekly, Smackdown sometimes, and follow all the WWE and AEW PPVs. I’ve also been finally getting into joshi, mainly through Marigold and Stardom, after years of watching clips and going ‘yo that looks cool as hell’, occasionally looking at Stardom’s website that inexplicably looks like it was made in 1998 and going ‘eh I don’t care that much’. Finally, I’ve been watching old WCW PPVs to see what actually happened vs what I remember happening. That’s way more wrestling than one person should be watching, so you can see why I need a blog to dump my thoughts. I also thought it’d be cool to try coding a little table where I can view my own personal ratings and link them to my full blog pots, so ideally in the coming weeks that tab should be basically a mini-Cagematch for me, personally.
In non-wrestling stuff, I do still occasionally play fighting games, and I’ve been travelling a lot more lately to try and experience the world, all that jazz, so I’ll probably also post that here to make a little album, we’ll see how much of my limited cloud storage space that ends up taking up, though. I also have been getting really into working out, so if I hit a point where I feel particularly proud of my progress, I might talk about that. Lots to think about.
Anyway, that’s probably enough of an introduction. This is my blog, its half blog, half coding project. I’m a fighting game player/wrestling fan who plays mostly large men and women in fighting games, thanks to a love of Andre imbued in my childhood. Hope you enjoy it!