Punchsport Pogada

It's a new year and we have some big news.

In 2022, in a Discord server set up when our ancestral home of Something Awful appeared to be on the brink of being shut down by the then owner Matt, Neal, Carl, Jessica, Eric, and a few other unnamed friends had the silly of idea of putting together a printable zine covering combat sports in general.

In the midst of this idea being slapped together, we quickly decided to put together a webpage so we could more easily write to our hearts content on a sport’s genre we all deeply loved to talk about. The name was “Fight Island” and this was mostly built on a meme made out of the UFC’s desperate attempt to ignore a global pandemic, at risk of their own selves and well everyone else they ever would come in contact with. Something we all gleefully mocked as idiotic and insanely selfish at the time. “We’re going to do all of our international fights on this island.” said Dana White, and by god they were gonna build the infrastructure to do it, come hell or high water.

We all imagined how hilarious the idea of an island in some indescript location was home to a mass of fighters all specialized in their own fighting style. Pretty much the opening plot to the 1995 Mortal Kombat movie was what we all imagined.

In reality, it was a building on the UAE’s Yas Island, a sports focused entertainment center. So, we were kind of off on that one. Either way, we loved the visual concept of Fight Island so much that it was stuck in our heads long enough for us to eagerly adopted the name for the our collective writings.

Now, you may have noticed we decided to use a name already in use (and more importantly filed as a trademark under the USPTO). That, really, didn’t stop us. We just decided to keep it until basically we received a cease and desist and then we’d shift to a new name.

Good news, we didn’t get an angry letter from the UFC about us using the Fight Island name while yammering about combat sports. But we have decided to drop Fight Island as our name. Really, this was inevitably going to have to happen and we just decided to rip the band aid off now rather than later.

The new name of the site, as you may notice, is Punchsport Pagoda. This is meaningful name for us for two main reasons. First, the name is from our beloved subforum for combat sports discussion on Something Awful. A web forum that is important to us because, well, that’s where we all met talking about the wacky and wild world of fake sports and professional wrestling.

Second, the name is pretty clever and unique and gives us a quick and simple name that’s relatively easy to remember. Plus the alliteration helps. In fact, you may have noticed we were already using the name for our podcast, so again that just helps too.

Nothing really else is changing. Just this name and a quick URL change which shouldn’t affect anything on the reader’s end. We just wanted to explain why it happened and why the new name works for us.

Thanks.