housekeeping notes

News post isn’t coming until much later. Some stuff to fill some space

• I’ve changed the matchfinder slightly. My sense it’s mostly used to find videos, so the default setting is to only include wrestlers who have at least one video in the dropdown boxes. You can still choose an option to get every wrestler I have listed (how it used to work).

  There’s roughly 3000 wrestlers tracked in the database. I’d like to add a lot more, mostly guys who wouldn’t have video in the database, but every one every one I’d add would just make that list bigger and more unwieldy. This fixes that problem for now. There’s further refinements I need to make, and I might as well add ‘narrow down by state’ option since the data is in there now, but it should be stable at the moment.

• In related news, I’ve added lineups & results from Lucha Libre Magazine 28 to 61 into the database. That covers a lot of the 1964 Friday night EMLL shows, whatever other shows they happened to mention that week, and a lot of results from earlier years (mostly 30s) which were reprinted in there. If you’ve noticed me adding profiles on the luchawiki, this is the same as that. I did issues 1-27 as I got them, but decided just storing them up and adding them in bulk would be smoother. I’ve done an export of these data in the past, but I’m not sure if anyone’s really that interested – let me know and I’ll work something out.

  I probably should do some analysis but I talked about a lot of the bigger things in other forms. This took many months to do, but mostly because I was drawn away by other projects. The whole process would go a lot quicker if I just did the Friday results (and those are the only ones reliably printed week to week), but it feels mandatory to go thru all the notes section looking for random info. Sometimes you get incredible things like a note about what the gate was for a show, a lot of times it’s vague information about a show where it’s just not enough to enter in the database but temptingly close enough to make me spend an hour trying to deduce the missing piece. It’s not very efficient on my part.

  I guess I’ll go to do another year of Lucha Libre next – I know I have issues of the magazine thru 1969 at least one drive, and maybe more longer elsewhere. The issues were very kindly donated to me by someone who bought them, but I was made aware that someone farther back in the chain got the issues by something close to stealing them, and that makes me less enthusiastic about the whole project. (I’m the same guy who pirates videos every Tuesday, there’s no real great internal logic here.) On the hand, I finally finished that year, I finished off about month’s worth of recaps, and I finished long term location and spell checking projects so it feels good that I’m actually knocking things off my imaginary task list.

• Speaking of videos and the database, videos from my channels are now being added to the database again after YouTube messed it all up.  I’m current 904 videos behind on other channels (mostly because I just added +LuchaTV to the channels my program checks.) I’ll get thru it eventually.
• I’ll have live coverage of the Lucha World Cup on Sunday – results here, too many posts on Twitter. If they announce the complete bracket on Friday, maybe some sort of predictions? (They only announced ‘first round matchups’ for Friday, which gives me this likely unfounded trepidation that they won’t set the semifinals until during the show.) Maybe a preview here or somewhere else? The things I normally do will get done.