Category: Brog

General posting

LOL Dodgers

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

LA Times: Los Angeles Angels of Orange County, Anaheim, California sweep the Los Angeles Dodgers, completing a 6-0 season sweep; also Dodgers fall out of first place, also Shohei Ohtani hits into a triple play lmao

I said it before earlier in the season when the Angels marched into Dodger Stadium and took all three games, the Dodgers will probably be fine, probably still win the division and are probably still the odds-on favorites to win the World Series, but it was still hilarious to see them get bounced so badly, not only at home, but to the crosstown rivals in the Angels, who are not really a good team.

So it bears repeating that it is again hilarious that the Angels have swept the Dodgers for the second time in the same season, but this time at their own home in Angel Stadium, because a lot of the circumstances have not really changed, but somehow, neither did the result. 

The Dodgers were in first place in the NL West going into this series, and the Angels were many games under .500, and nowhere near contention in the AL West much less a wild card spot.  And yet, when the smoke cleared on Wednesday night, it was the Angels who rattled off their sixth straight win against the Dodgers this season, completing the series sweep of the year; and in doing so, knocking them out of first place in the NL West, dropping them a game behind the San Diego Padres.

I like to imagine that the amount salt bubbling up amid the legions of lifetime front-running fairweather Dodgers fans since 2024 is massive, delicious and of course loud as shit because there’s no more sore winners than Dodger fans these days, which means they’re somehow even more butthurt when they’re losing.

To me, the best part about this whole embarrassing flop was the fact that it was kind of punctuated, when Shohei Ohtani lined into an extremely rare triple play, which was on the verge of being unassisted, had the runner at first not had the brakes and turn when he did.  Even the most valuable and popular baseball player on the face of the planet was not immune to colossal failure, and I like to facetiously throw in the face of sports communities to be on the lookout for yet another FIRST TIME EVER statistic to solely attribute to Ohtani, like being the FIRST EVER player with 250+ career home runs and an ERA under 3 to hit into a triple play at Angel Stadium on a night game – and it’s Shohei Ohtani. That’s it.

Like I’ve said many times, I don’t dislike Shohei Ohtani, I think he’s a rather pleasant guy who hasn’t let his superstardom really to his head too much.  He’s too Japanese to have such a flagrant ego.  It’s just I dislike that the media can’t get off his nuts and have forced his existence down the throats of sports people, to where I’m left with no choice but defiance and playa-hatin’.   And by proxy, the Dodgers, which is awkward because I still love Freddie Freeman more than I care about any of the current Braves roster, but it all boils down to the fact that I enjoy seeing the Dodgers lose.

Regardless, I still maintain that the Dodgers will be fine, and their predicted success at the end of the year hasn’t changed.  They’ll still make the playoffs, and they’re still a high-probability pick to win the World Series.  But anything short of glory, and snarky fans like myself can all call back to these two specific series in the season as symbolic foretelling to why they failed.

lol, get owned Dodgers

Wouldn’t it be funny if

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

NPR: America Online to discontinue dial-up internet service which is still miraculously still available in the year 2025

Frankly, I’m astonished that AOL is even still in existence, much less their very specific dial-up internet service.  After Instant Messenger had the plug pulled from it back in like 2017, I wouldn’t have imagined that AOL had any product or asset at all remotely capable of keeping them afloat as a business, but here we are in the year 2025 where they’re not only still alive, but about to pull the plug on the very thing that put them on the map in the first place.

I mean, who among my general age range, didn’t ever have AOL?  It’s basically a rite of passage for elder xennials like myself, and probably most everyone could probably remember their very first @aol.com screen name slash email address.  And everyone was innately aware of the free trial CDs that were just about everywhere, and looking back at it, it worked in the sense that they saturated the playing field so heavily that for a while, internet access = America Online, much like soda became synonymous with Coca-Cola.

But before I can go down the rabbit hole of nostalgia and wax poetic all day about stories involving AOL, I’m just going to get back to the point of this whole post, and finally wrap up the title of this post because I don’t write as often as I want to lately and I can’t get myself sucked into my own vortexes of words instead of getting to the point of the things that I actually do want to write about.

But anyway, wouldn’t it be funny if, with the elimination of AOL dial-up service, it completely turns the tide of the political battlefield in America?  With the obvious implication that GOP supporters are mostly a bunch of antiquated olds who only have their internet access via AOL dial-up, and when the service is taken away from them, they lose their umbilical cord to the modern world, and either shrivel up and die sooner from boredom, or without the bullshit they currently imbibe on, on the regular, their minds actually clear up and break free from the brainwashing they’ve all been subject to over the span of the last few decades.

Like I kind of write this partially in jest, but at the same time, there’s a shred of hope of believing that this might actually come into play in the future.  The numbers (well maybe not necessarily) don’t lie, GOP voters are on average 726 years old, and short of having shitty brainwashed tech-savvier children setting up their internet, I have to make the assumption that there’s a tremendous overlap between Republican voters and AOL dial-up users. 

And since neglecting the elderly knows no political affiliation, there’s no guarantee that when AOL dial-up goes offline in September, there’s actually going to be people readily available to swap these geriatrics onto any form of higher-speed internet, and thus begins the prophetic disconnection with the modern world for these demographics, and it lowers their chances to be auto-right voters come the next election.

Yes, there are a ton of holes in this logic, but all I’m saying is that it would be real humorous to me that come 2028, the next election is seemingly way less dramatic and there’s a surreptitiously noticeable reduction in Republican voters, from a very specific demographic, and I for one will immediately point to this specific news story about how AOL killed their dial-up, and inadvertently changed the fate of the entire country in the process.

/goodbye.wav

Gunther treating the WWE like a day job makes me like him more

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

During an appearance, former WWE world champion Gunther was met by a fan who proclaimed to have driven nine hours in order to meet him.  Usually a lot of workers, regardless of if they’re a face or a heel would probably say something along the lines of ehhh that’s an honor or ehhh I really appreciate that or at the very least, thank you. 

I mean, I’m pretty self-deprecating and am really uncomfortable when any sort of praise is lavished onto me, but even I’d probably say something to express my gratitude and how humbled I am that anyone would want to travel a great distance to see me, and of course, thank you.

But nah, Gunther claims to have told this fan:

Do something better with your time.  Do something that actually benefits you.

And the thing is, I don’t get the impression that he’s playing the heel that he is supposed to be in the WWE character alignment chart.  I genuinely feel like that that’s precisely how he felt about the information, regardless of how well-intentioned it was.  Sure, there’s some murky waters on where this quote is coming from, but if I’m a betting man, I’d wager that this is the real Walter Hahn coming through, and that it’s not that he’s probably not appreciative and grateful that people want to see him, but he genuinely believes that there are more beneficial things out there for people to want to do with their time rather than seek him out for a quick meet and greet.

I’ve read/watched some interviews with him in the past, and if there’s one thing that has remained consistent is how often he has voluntarily opined that he was always dubious that he and the WWE would pair together, because he makes no secret that the general WWE style and his style didn’t necessarily align in the past.  He always credits Japan, specifically strong style as being more of an inspiration to him than anyone in the WWE ecosystem, but he seems intelligent enough to know that for the sake of his future and future well-being, there’s no better place to go than the WWE.

The point is, it’s as if he treats his WWE career like a day job, where sure, he will give his best efforts to the company, do whatever it is that he’s told in order to make as much money as he can in the time that his body can perform, but when the day is over, he will not bleed WWE and be the kind of guy that will be synonymous with the company, ten or twenty years down the line.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a high on Gunther, and I admit that I was not on board when he first showed up in NXT UK, as Walter, looking all doughy and with man tits, and I was not on board with him ending Pete Dunne’s UK championship reign.  I thought his style was excessively stiff, and I couldn’t get over the physical eye test, that this guy was being booked as such hot shit as he was.

But then he had matches with Tyler Bate, carried the fuck out of Joe Coffey, and then the match with Ilja Dragunov in an empty COVID-era BT studios, changed my mind, at just how talented of a worker he was.  He showed up to NXT in America and had great matches with Tommaso Ciampa, and then eventually passed the torch to Dragunov in the highly anticipated rematch.  Then he arrived on the main roster, but in much better shape, and over the months, would improve physically as well as find his groove working main roster.  He won the Intercontinental blet, held it for over 600 days, and proved that he could have a good match with pretty much anyone and I was already a fan by now, and has further ascended in the company hierarchy, where he’s just barely removed from having lost the World heavyweight championship for the second time.

And the whole time, he’s been treating it like a day job, and absolutely nothing more than that, and I really love that that’s the vibe he gives me, because for some reason, I really appreciate guys who operate like that.

One commenter, than more commenters as the story began to circulate, said one thing that stuck with me, and served as the impetus to this whole post, was along the lines of how Gunther was the WWE’s equivalent to Nikola Jokic, the Denver Nuggets’ wunder center, whom it’s so obvious that the NBA is his day job, and that he wants nothing more than to be home in Serbia, raising his horses.  A ton of jokes were had within the last two weeks where footage of him sobbing with happiness at one of his horses winning a race, compared to when he won the NBA championship for the Nuggets, and then basically asked at the press conference when he could go home.

Andrew Luck is another guy that treated his career, as an NFL quarterback, as a tedious day job, that I loved the way he conducted business.  He clearly sat down with mom and dad with a tall glass of milk at the kitchen table, and drew Venn diagrams and wrote down career pros and cons lists and landed on NFL quarterback at being the most fiscally beneficial for the long term.  Otherwise, when not playing football, he was far the fuck away from the sport.

But yeah, Gunther is totally just like Jokic and Luck in the sense that he might be an outstanding wrestler and does give his full effort to the business, but when the day is over, it’s not his passion, it’s not his end-all, and he probably has some interests he’s way more into than wrestling.

A while back, I remember seeing a video of Gunther dancing at his wedding, doing an Indian dance (Bhangra?); of course an athlete of his talent is probably doing it correctly and not looking like an idiot, but the most notable thing about it is the massive smile on his face.  Now I’ve seen a lot of Gunther over the last few years, and he’s had some heel-ish smirks and smiles in his promo work, but there ain’t ever been an instance where he’s had such a genuine or happy looking look on his face as he is dancing with his new bride. 

Man didn’t give in to any sense of elation at winning the NXT UK championship, or when he won the Intercontinental championship, or even when he defeated Damian Priest for his first WWE World title.

WWE Superstar truly is his day job, and the fact that this attitude bleeds out into how he interacts with fans, I fucking love it.  This whole mentality of his only serves to make me like and appreciate him more, and I can imagine that he’s definitely going to be one of those guys that retires way earlier than he would be physically capable of doing, and we will absolutely not see him again, except during his Hall of Fame induction, or any overseas shows where you also know the E had forked over a hefty fee in order to entice him to show up.

So if we are Gunther fans, aside from the fact that we should probably be doing some more productive things with our lives, we should probably appreciate him to the fullest while we have him, because I have a feeling he’s definitely going to retire earlier than lots of balls-to-the-wall professional wrestlers will.

I don’t think the WNBA’s Dildogate is funny, at all

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This may come as a shock to my zero readers and people who know me who think they have me pegged as this occasionally bro-ey, sports guy jock man, who might find humor in the now-barrage, of flying dildos hitting the courts at WNBA games, but the truth is, I don’t.  I didn’t think it was funny the first time, I didn’t think it was funny the fifth time, and I don’t think it will be funny if and when it happens multiple more times throughout the duration of this season.

I get all the jokes, about how Dildogate has ironically been some of the most exposure the WNBA has had since Caitlin Clark showed up, and to some degree there is no such thing as bad exposure as long as people are talking about the WNBA.  To which such observations aren’t necessarily incorrect, logically, but I just think it’s really juvenile and stupid, and to echo what Sophie Cunningham said, there is an aspect of safety being put at risk by it.

And that’s where this whole thing blew up, was the fact that a player acknowledged it, and worse off, attempted to dissuade the behavior, because if there’s one thing that’s never been more prevalent about human nature, is that people do not like being told what to do, and now more than ever, telling someone to not do something is basically like demanding everyone to defy it, because that’s exactly what’s going to happen.

The only joke I will make is that this, is clearly another growing pain the WNBA and their players need to learn, get used to, and adapt about having the increase of awareness to their sport, much like Kelsey Plum needing to understand that autograph hounds are a part of sport, and it might be preferable to be a little weirded out but actually have fans who want autographs in the first place, regardless of what their intentions are with them.

But back to Dildogate, yeah I think it’s juvenile, stupid, and a sad attempt by a bunch of assholes, regardless of their gender or orientation, to shit on the WNBA and actively work against their growth through sabotage and just flat trolling.  Maybe this is just old man thinking, or maturity or whatever, but I guess I don’t think it’s cool to actively put in work against someone else’s livelihoods, especially for nothing more than the sake of the lulz. 

Like, it would make more sense if there were a personal vendetta against the league by those perps flinging sex toys onto the court, but I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that such isn’t the case, as much as it’s just a bunch of clowns who think they’re being funny by doing such.

It’s not only delaying games, I do think it does carry a measure of security and safety risk, because the league is trying to dissuade it from happening by implementing more stringent rules of what’s allowed inside arenas, but as trolls do, they’re exerting more effort and energy into trying to defeat systems and get them into arenas, rather than absolutely anything else productive in their lives.  Obviously, this sets up a lot of easy jokes about those who will get them into the arenas by putting them into themselves, and seeing as how the latest flying dildo occurred after one of the increased security measures had come into effect, it probably has already occurred.

However, one thing I do find amusing about this is the fact that somewhere out there, are people who are either going into sex toy shops or making purchases on the internet, for dildos; they can try to fast-talk about how it’s a joke for the WNBA game that they’re going to, but it doesn’t change the fact that we’ve got, at this point, numerous cases of grown-ass people purchasing dildos, full stop.

Or perhaps, the people throwing them, already had them, and are just looking for a convenient excuse to unload them.  But they still had them.  For whatever reason.

Sorry, even if I did find this whole thing funny and wanted to be a troll and participate, I don’t think I could bring myself to go out and  buy a dildo.

Either way, I hope this dumb meme trend ends soon, but I’m going to guess it’ll probably last the whole season, if not more, but if there’s one thing that the WNBA should take into consideration, and I’ll leave it up to them to figure it out, as sure as telling people what not to do is going to make them do it, nothing kills a meme faster than acknowledging it, accepting it, and owning it.  The power is stripped away from it, and then it’s not fun for the trolls to bother using it further.  The implications of what might need to happen are not pleasant, but then again, neither is repeatedly seeing talk about dildos on sports news on a regular basis.

Dad Brog (#152): I now have a kindergartener

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When people are in high school or college, when they think about kindergarteners, they probably think about kids that are babies, barely out of diapers, a stone’s throw from being out of the womb.  When people become parents, and realize that from the day a kid is born, there’s still around five years before kindergarten comes into play, and it feels like a lifetime before the kid is walking, then is out of diapers and if you’re like my kids, navigating through three years of preschool before entering elementary school.

My firstborn is now a kindergartener, and is going to freaking elementary school now.

I still remember with crystal clarity, the days and nights spent at the hospital with #1 when she was born and was kept at the NICU on account of being premature.  I remember the hospital being closed off to visitors shortly after #1’s birth because the first COVID-19 death had occurred within a day, and began ravaging its way across the entire planet.

I still remember the diapers, the apnea monitor, the first time meetings with grandparents.  I remember the first solid food, the first crawl, the first steps.  The introduction of #2 into the mix.  The revolving door of shitty nannies, feeling like life was nothing but one big shit show trying to raise two kids in a fucked up society.

I also remember all of the extraordinary things, like all the glimpses of intelligence and emotional growth.  Traveling and watching my kids experience the world and new things.  Going into preschool, and meeting new kids for the first time and learning from peers, and seeing the breakneck speed in which she began her educational journey.

And now, kindergarten.  Elementary school.  Five years later, in elementary school.  Five years more, and it’ll be middle school.  By then, she’ll probably be 11 going on 24, thinking she has all the answers to the world.  Three more years, and then comes high school where she’ll inevitably think she has life figured out, and I used to make jokes about how with each life’s milestone achieved, that she should go out and get a job next, but at this rate, such remark will become a reality sooner rather than later.

Similarly recently, I saw some memes about how now is the introduction of the 2020 COVID babies into the school system, and varying remarks about how teachers should be ready, but I can’t really imagine what it is there’s any need for concern over.  Responsible parents kept their kids safe through the worst of the pandemic, and by the time #1 entered preschool, coronavirus was way less a threat than it was initially.  She never had to wear a mask during the height of masking up, and she started preschool at the appropriate time and age, and I don’t think her interpersonal growth was really stunted at all by the pandemic.

Frankly, such a COVID-related designation to be watched and observed really should be the classes of 2032-2035, where those were the kids, already grown, who had to completely alter their school experience, starting school in-school, getting pulled, adjusting to remote learning, and then heading back.  But not my kids, either of them, as far as I’m concerned, they’re as normal as things were pre-COVID.

The point is that it’s absolutely bonkers to me that my oldest child has just started elementary school.  She is now going to school with mythical wife, as she’s a teacher there, and has conveniently placed her where she works, giving our child the ultimate in safety nets knowing that mom is in the building with her, every day.

Which is good, because #1 has expressed nerve of moving onto the next level, because she’s spent the last three years of preschool with widely the same kids every day, and now there’s not a single one of them going to be in the same class with her now.  I’ve reminded her that most of her classmates will also be going through the same thing, and it’s also exciting to be in a situation where there’s going to be so much new-ness across the board.

And it’s not just for #1 too, because of this one step for her life’s journey, is a change for pretty much everyone in my household.  I’m now having to get up even earlier in the mornings to make sure #1 is out of bed earlier and fed, because she now goes to school with mythical wife at the teacher’s schedule, and I’m basically having to make breakfast twice, since #2 is now going to preschool by herself, on a completely different schedule.

Inevitably, that’s what life is, constant change and adapting to it, but in spite of my occasional gripes of having to be the earliest riser and on point with my parenting, there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for my children, and I’m not mad or grumpy about having to alter my schedule.  It’s more exciting to witness the growth of my kids and seeing what comes next in their life’s journeys.

MLB Speedway Classic: great success not

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

FTW: MLB’s Speedway Classic at Bristol Motor Speedway featuring the Atlanta Braves vs. Cincinnati Reds turns out to be massive failure for attendees, sparking comparisons to Fyre Festival

There was a moment on Saturday with the weather being all wet and crappy, where I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be ownage if the Speedway Classic got rained on and the game couldn’t take place?

That’s always the inherent risk with an outdoor sport like baseball, and trying to coordinate a singular, special event game; the one absolute thing that cannot be controlled – the weather.  And almost if I prophesized the event, the weather did come into play at the Speedway Classic, and no matter how much MLB tried to stall, delay and wait out the weather, they only managed to get in a single inning of game in before they threw their hands up and suspended the game, proclaiming the game would be resumed the following day; on what was supposed to be a rare Sunday day off for the Braves and Reds, on account of them altering their schedules to accommodate a special event game.

So, owned.

To the fans in attendance who were probably hoping to watch the game, and either skip town and or make a trip of it on Sunday – also owned.

Television rights having to adjust for the unpredictable schedule change – owned.

However, all this ownage aside, on the ground level, as among the alleged 90,000+ attendees who descended onto Bristol Motor Speedway, hoping to be in attendance for a supposed special event of monumental proportions, there was apparently a whole lot more ownage, which as the angst and frustration grew, many were more than eager and willing to vent to the internet.

And as much as I’m the type of fan who loves baseball so much that I hate it, few things make me arrogantly smirk in satisfaction than whenever MLB fucks things up, which is precisely what happened with how they handle the ground operations at the Speedway Classic.

Most notably, the sheer lack of preparedness when it came to handling the event at the stadium level, with countless gripes about there being inadequate or not enough food available to attendees, primarily summed up by a photo montage of nachos without cheese and hot dogs without buns, with there being some very quick comparisons to the photo of a shitty sandwich that became the photographic embodiment of the notorious Fyre Festival shitshow.

Fans who aired out their frustration were immediately combatted by mostly people who weren’t there who for whatever reason feel the need to defend MLB, the event or venue, but it just leads to an absolute clusterfuck where nobody wins and people like me just want to sit back and watch the carnage like the Michael Jackson eating popcorn gif.

But aside from the debacles revolving around food, there were many allegations of them running out of food and merchandise all before the game even got under way, and lots of piling on to the flop of the logistics of an event scheduled well beyond a year ago, despite the fact that it was at a NASCAR venue which holds multiple races a year without breaking a sweat, and the general consensus that it’s massive egg on MLB’s face for such horrendous planning.

Frankly, I don’t even really know why MLB wanted to do this in the first place.  My guess is that it’s a veiled temperature check to see how the region supports MLB, because between Nashville and Raleigh, there’s always rumor about possible MLB expansion, with that general mid-Atlantic region being considered.  But also MLB doesn’t need any reasons for doing anything other than the fact that they’re greedy cocksuckers who are trying to make money by any means necessary, and holding special events seems like an easy cash grab, no matter how poorly they execute it because fans are gullible and easy to manipulate into forking over their dough.

Make no mistake, this was entirely MLB’s fault for such poor planning, and such poor execution.  And I love to see it, especially since I’m so far removed from my baseball fandom that I was nowhere remotely close to experiencing it.  Maybe a decade ago when I was still pretty hard into my fandom, I’d be tempted to be a part of it, but I’m really fucking glad that I’m where I’m at now, and had no interest in it.

And of course, the Braves won the game, in spite of them giving up a run in the one inning they played on Saturday.  Which kind of stinks from the standpoint of that the Braves will hold onto this meaningless win and inject as much meaning into it as possible amidst a horrendous season, and I don’t want them to have any wins to celebrate, because this team will never truly ever get better unless they hit a bottom that really makes them try to rethink the way they operate.

But whatever, massive lol’s on my end, for all the sheer amounts of ownage that was doled out over the weekend on account of MLB’s pathetic fuck ups.

Las Vegas sucks now, plain and simple

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Every time I come across posts or articles about the general downward trends of Las Vegas tourism, I just scoff and remind myself to hold my tongue and save it for the brog, because I think I’m in the minority now about my feelings and attitude about Las Vegas.

But as the subject of this post says, Las Vegas sucks now, and is a far cry from the place that I used to go to multiple times a year, and it makes me sad to see just how much it’s changed and how I just now have absolutely no desire to go back any time soon.  And like I said, I think I’m in the minority here, especially among my friends who all seem to think the place is still good, regardless of if they acknowledge the changes or not, and as to not be the Debbie Downer, I more often than not, keep my feelings unspoken since I don’t want to be accused of peeing in the pool.

But yeah, Las Vegas sucks now, and I fully understand why their tourism and revenues are trending downwards, and feel little opinion other than the euphemism that this is the bed they made, and they have to lay in it.

Sure, COVID had a lot to do with their state of collapse, as a city so reliant on tourism was absolutely decimated when the whole world was encouraged to stay put, but the whole city didn’t do themselves any favors once things started to return to normalcy.  It’s like the whole place went into this determined recoup-mode, and decided to up the cost of just about everything in sight in order to make up for lost dollars from the pandemic, and as often the case whenever any business raises costs to justify something, once that something has been justified, they grow so used the revenues that they make no attempt to revert or reduce, and as is the case with Vegas, they actually doubled down and kept increasing the cost of everything to further push people to see how much they can get away with.

See, the Vegas I remember and loved, it wasn’t $Fuck you.99 per night to stay anywhere on the Strip, and there weren’t Ticketmaster-amounts of resort fees every night.  Parking was often free, which justified getting a rental car so we didn’t have to get taxis everywhere, and could occasionally explore the city beyond the Strip.  Food, sure, had its upscale joints where you could feel like a baller, but there were also plenty of options where you could get a cheap meal or just enough to satiate hunger, and it not be an automatic $100+ bill.

Every resort had a buffet, and I can say that I’d been to almost all of them at various points of my life, from the Riviera’s, Aladdin’s, MGM’s, Mandalay Bay’s, and my guiltiest of pleasures was the Rio’s Carnival World Buffet, where on two different times, separated by years, I managed to get the same server who had this creepy, Igor-like demeanor, but was still nice and did his job well.  But, they’re all gone now, with to my knowledge, the only ones truly left and worth a damn, being like Caesar’s Palace, Bellagio and Cosmopolitan.

Drinks were plentiful, and thankfully is still the case, free as long as you’re gambling, but for when you weren’t blowing all your money away, a domestic beer didn’t cost $20 plus a tip.

Which brings us to gambling, where across the board, the cost to play has risen to where the last two times I went to Vegas, I was basically done after a single day’s gambling.  I used to be able to bring $500 in cash, and manage to have a pretty fun long weekend; I could be lucky enough to play with some house case from time to time, and when the trips were over, be able to come back with a little left.  Now, $500 can’t get me through a single day, which was almost literal when my last trip was just 24-hours, with gambling time being less than four of those hours.

Casinos hardly bother with fluctuating table minimums anymore, and the lowest on the Strip is like $15, which is a perfectly uneven number to where anyone who wants to play a hundo, has almost no possibly way of playing an exact amount at $15 a hand or spin of anything without having an embarrassing remainder, or need to buy back in, and it makes me think of the New York MTA and how their fares are mathematically strategized so that it’s almost impossible to zero out a fare card, and the city rakes in millions a year on forfeited remainders.

The bottom line is that Las Vegas has completely abandoned even remotely trying to cater to anyone that isn’t at the very least, upper class, or can at least pretend to be for the duration of a trip.  Middle-class and lower schmucks like me can no longer afford to go there comfortably, much less have a good time, when we’re being gauged left and right, having the city wishing they could charge us to breathe.

I’m of the belief that there’s way more money to be made in catering to everyone, and my favorite stories in business are always ones where companies have embarked on such strategies and have found immense amounts of success in doing such, like sports teams that lower their tickets, concessions and accessibility and then they make record profits.  Apps that are released for free, but then rake in millions on ad revenue and in-game micro-transactions.  Look at Wal-Mart, whose last time I checked was #1 on the Fortune 500 for the last 30 years, because they cater to the lower class, and they make fuck numbers of profits every year in doing so.

And Las Vegas turning their back to those under the upper class line, screams of elitism, catering to the wealthy and those arrogant enough to demand exclusivity, I enjoy reading and seeing things about how their numbers aren’t doing as hot as they probably wish they were doing.  I love reading comments full of shade and criticisms from people who feel similarly to how I do, abandoned and resentful, and pining for a Las Vegas that they once loved so much, they used to “joke” with their friends about exploring looking for a rental property.

Like I said, this is the bed that they made, and it’s what they have to lay in, and I hope that one day, Las Vegas can get back to closer to being the city I once loved and hopefully in time for me to have some more memorable trips with my friends and my family.