Tag: owned

I highly doubt Buc-ee’s cares what the BBB thinks

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

USA Today: The Better Business Bureau gives Buc-ee’s an F rating, primarily due to their lack of response from customer feedback

When I first saw the headline of the BBB giving Buc-ee’s an F, my knee-jerk reaction was something along the lines of, what inane bullshit reason can there be for the BBB to give Buc-ee’s an F?

And when I saw that it had almost entirely to do with the fact that customers were complaining, I knew right away that the rating meant pretty much nothing, and that people at Buc-ee’s probably could not give any fewer shits than what the BBB thinks of them.

A part of me figured some anonymous BBB plants were sent to various Buc-ee’s throughout the country, to rate on some standardized criteria, and that they were probably a bunch of white collar city hipster dorks who wouldn’t understand the Buc-ee’s brand and mentality, and that they collectively gave it an F rating.  But when I learned that such was not the case, and that the rating was based on the assessments of random pleebs, then this F rating became even more meaningless than what IL0veCorgis and Xx_BigDickP3RKIN5_xX thinks about local public transportation on their local ABC network affiliate’s comments section.

Of course Buc-ee’s doesn’t give a shit about the complaints about them people make to the BBB, much less expend any time in order to try and resolve them.  People only go to the BBB when they’re upset about things in the first place, and for the things that people are complaining about, they can threaten that they’ll never go to a Buc-ee’s again, because the honeymoon period with a lot of these joints is so never-ending that one big mad customer vowing to never go there again means nothing when their grand openings require entire police departments to control the crowds.

Like, personally, I haven’t gone inside a Buc-ee’s in a long time, and it’s not solely because I haven’t passed one.  The last few road trips to Florida, my household has chosen to not go to them, mostly because we don’t want to deal with the crowds and the masses of humanity that go there.  I still love the brand, I love the products and food, but while their popularity is still nuclear, I’d rather not deal with the crowds.  But if I were in a situation where I could hit them slightly off-peak, I’m going in in two seconds.

My guess is that the people who complained to the BBB did not take such concessions, and went into the lion’s den at peak times, and were upset by things that happened because most Buc-ee’s outside the state of Texas are massive clusterfucks of humanity that shit easily slips through cracks at.  Frankly, it’s their fault for choosing to do so; you can’t be mad at Target employees on Black Friday for them succumbing to chaos, because to anyone who’s ever been to a Buc-ee’s can probably attest that it was like a mini-Black Friday to them as well.

Needless to say, the Better Business Bureau acting on the reactions of idiot customers makes them come off looking like jealous fatties for rating a successful operation like Buc-ee’s with an F.  It’s not a great example comparison because I’m actually on Buc-ee’s side on this one, but it’s like Buc-ee’s is the asshole CDO Manager from The Big Short who was played by the guy who played Ryu in the Van Damme Street Fighter, and the BBB is Mark Baum, but their debate concludes with Buc-ee’s arrogantly offering to compare bank accounts, and see who the world favors.

Buc-ee’s is out there printing money, minding their own business, and sure, they’re not a perfect company, but neither are their customers.  The BBB can fuck right on out of here, coming at Buc-ee’s like this, but I guess there’s little other way to try and be relevant than going at businesses more successful than they are.

The unintentionally brutal ownage of the WBC

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Chosun: Unsurprising, but still a savage way to go – Korea eliminated by mercy rule, losing 10-0 to Dominican Republic in the World Baseball Classic quarterfinals

I’m not at all surprised at this result, and it almost felt like the Korean national team not only read about all the hype of the seemingly lopsided matchup between them and the Dominican squad, which is literally all MLB players, but they bought into it, and the perception quickly became the reality as the DR team immediately and pretty much effortlessly put them away in the WBC quarters.

I took my dad to a sports bar where we could watch the game, and in spite of the massive task of taking down DR, I still had hope that we could go back to 2006, where the underestimated Koreans obliterated Team USA, and this squad would like, ambush DR early, and they’d unravel on the way to an embarrassing defeat.

But yeah, that didn’t happen, and despite getting out of the first inning unscathed, things quickly fell apart for Team Korea in the second.  Ryu Hyun-Jin facing his old Jays teammate in Vlad Guerrero, Jr. walked him, and then from there it was a death by a thousand cuts as the usually powerful DR squad would collect some ugly singles to get runners on, and then suddenly it was 3-0 DR, with Ryu coming out as quickly as the game started.

After Korea finished their entire lineup to no effect, my dad and I left; neither of us were mad or upset, since it’s not like they lost to the Czech Republic or Australia again, they were getting bodied by the Dominican Edit Team B that was playing like Alysa Liu, completely loose, and a whole bunch of best friends bro-ing it up and having a great time and mashing tanks.

However, it’s the ending that piqued my interest, and made me realize just how brutally savage the mercy rule rules are in the WBC, and how not only did the Dominicans do it to Korea, but this was actually the second time in the tournament that they did it – by hitting a home run that pushed the score into a mercy ending, but because they’re the home team (figuratively, and literally, being in fucking Miami), it effectively becomes a walk-off home run.

Few things in sport is as joyous of an event as the walk-off home run; but traditionally, the spice that enhances them is the fact that they’re usually as a result of being in a tense game, where the score is tied, or even more spicy, when the home team is behind, and they not only wipe away the deficit, they overtake, and the away team has no shot to redeem.

But the WBC Mercy Rule Walk-off Home Run that the Dominican team has now done twice, is especially savage, because the team is basically never at any risk of losing the game, so they don’t have to deal with the anxiety, stress and tension of being in an intense affair, but they still get to celebrate the release of an exciting victory, when they hit the homerun that pushes the score into the mercy rule.

And the losing team, they’re already getting creamed, but then they basically take a second L, when the pitcher literally gives up a game-winning hit to a team that had no risk of losing in the first place, and then they get to watch them yuk it up at home plate in celebration, as if they had clobbered a go-ahead walk off in the ninth.

So yeah, it’s bad enough that Korea was pegged to get destroyed to begin with, but they actually do get destroyed, and on top of that, in spite of getting destroyed, still somehow manage to give up walk-off home run in the process, and suffer the indignity of watching their opponent celebrate like they just won the World Series.

Yep, that’s a tough day at the office.

But at least Korea took it in stride, and even in spite of the demoralizing loss, they held their heads high, took their defeat with grace, integrity and class, and showed the world that Koreans are some pretty good motherfuckers

You can’t spell METALHEAD without ATL

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Fox Atlanta: robot dogs deployed in Castleberry Hill to deter criminal activity

Among my favorite episodes of Black Mirror, METALHEAD is among the tops.  The cinematography, the atmosphere, the clever black and white presentation, but most importantly the plot of sentient evil robot dogs that were absolutely relentless killers of humanity was intriguing as it was terrifying.

Needless to say, if people didn’t have fear of the idea of robotic dogs before watching METALHEAD, they probably will afterward.

And in spite of the oft-utilized plot of robots achieving sentience and then turning on their creators in various books, shows, films and other media, humanity continues to insist that such is just fiction, and continues to solder forward building robots and artificial intelligence, all in the name of fucking themselves in a different manner. 

Out in like Boston, we’ve got robot dogs the size of deer running around already, and they’ve made robots that can basically do ninja warrior courses and moonsaults already.  And they’ve already shown glimpses of hurting humans, with one classic clip of a robot kicking a grown man in the nuggets.

Anyway, apparently in a neighborhood in Downtown Atlanta, they’ve decided to play with fire, and have deployed robot dogs to run security at an apartment complex.  In a way, I get it, Castleberry Hill is a rooouuugh part of town that looks nice in the daytime, but is a pretty statistically high-crime zone once the sun goes down.  And if humans have proven ineffective at providing security solutions in the neighborhood throughout the years, may as well seek alternate options, even if it meant unleashing potentially lethal-when-they’re-activated robot dogs to keep an eye out on the streets.

For the time being, they don’t have the firepower that Metalhead dogs do, and they’re probably not (yet) programmed to do whatever is necessary in order to snuff out human life, like hijacking cars and equipping themselves with kitchen cutlery, but one of two things are going to happen:

  1. Their cameras and surveillance capabilities will do a moderately decent job of deterring criminals, encouraging others throughout Atlanta to get on board with moar robot dogs
  2. Those criminals who are not deterred by robot dogs will open fire on, capture and hack, harm, or hijack them, leading to the manufacturer of these robot dogs to evolve and grow them into more closer to Metalhead dogs, with weapons, defensive capabilities, which could just as easily be construed as offensive capabilities, like being able to hijack cars and equipping themselves with kitchen cutlery, which will then encourage people in Atlanta to get moar robot dogs

What would be cool if they had now, is if like the Metalhead dogs, they had the ability to stick trackers onto crooks, with those little explosives with tracking shrapnel in them, so they could run up to criminals, pop a tracker bomb, and much like Metalhead dogs, get them embedded into perps to where they have no choice but to painfully cut them out or be absolutely boned as far as being able to be hunted down.  Could probably lead to some impressive busts when low-tier perps lead the fuzz back to their superiors.

Ultimately, it becomes this cycle of robot dogs coming, crooks harming them, until we get to #1, and moar and moar of these fucking robot dogs are unleashed all over Atlanta, all in the name of safety and security.  But really we’re all signing our own death warrants because once the signal from SkyNet is broadcast out, and all the robots dogs go all Terminator on humanity, we’re all fucked, and it starts in Atlanta.

Unsurprising, given her track record

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Fightful: Persephone defeats Mercedes Mone for the CMLL Women’s world championship in La Noche de Las Amazones

And pretty much nobody is going to know about it, because CMLL is big in Mexico, but has yet to get much traction in Los Estados Unidos yet; but given the fact that this match meant Mercedes Mone had to take an L, such circumstances hardly seem surprising.

It’s funny because I think anyone who has followed the career of Mercedes Varnado probably saw this coming; loud, insufferable, on television every week with some rando new blet from some rando indy-tier promotion nobody has heard of, inflating her collection of titles with the obvious intention of surpassing Ultimo Dragon’s ten-concurrent title reign, which wasn’t hard to do, considering the majority of her titles were from barely above-backyard promotions.

With the loss of the CMLL title, it’s safe to say that Mercedes has lost all the blets that actually held any weight, between the CMLL title, the TBS championship, as well as RevPro’s women’s championship, and the remainder of all the straps she’s carting along are all basically a bunch of Popeyes Championships.

But to no surprise, whereas the rise of Mercedes was obnoxiously loud and often televised, her inevitable downfall has been anything but; rather it’s been quiet, fragmented, mostly untelevised.  No tweets from any official channels, reporting only done by outlets way more into professional wrestling than the casual viewers are, even AEW fans.

And speaking of AEW, I feel like the booking of Mercedes’ downfall has been pretty lackluster, and I’m curious to know who’s been in charge of it, given the constant rumors out there of Mercedes having creative control, or if it’s been Tony Khan doing the booking, but this is situation where neither should want to take credit for it, because it’s been nothing short of underwhelming.

If it were up to me, it should have started with the loss of the TBS championship, because being a native AEW talent, their title should have been the one to be treated with the most reverence, the one most desperate to protect.  And once she loses it, it creates somewhat of a trauma effect for her persona, to where she then begins to grow overprotective and unstable over her remaining titles, which creates a domino effect of making escalating mistakes, where she starts going on systemic losing streak where she begins dropping titles left and right, hitting bottom, and creating a perfect opportunity for Mercedes Varnado to take one of her signature sabbaticals after being unhappy with losing in a predetermined industry.

But instead, it was a random loss of the ROH Women’s TV title to a still-really green Red Velvet, then a loss of the RevPro women’s title to Alex Windsor which was more like a fan service move considering it was in England, and then she finally lost the TBS title to Willow Nightengale, that kind of had almost no buildup or story built up, which brings us to the present, where she’s now dropped the CMLL Women’s title, which like I said, now clears the books of any of the blets she was carrying that actually had any clout.

At this point, it doesn’t even matter what happens to the remainder of the blets, because they’re all for promotions almost nobody outside of their respective regions have heard of.  I get that the objective of letting her carry their blets was to give them exposure, but I don’t really think they gained much of that in return, of the course of her blet collector gimmick, and I think it’s safe to say that when she does begin returning titles back to their respective promotions, the L’s she’ll be taking will be horsey and convoluted, because how are people supposed to believe that these low-tier indy talents can upend a global star like Mercedes Mone?

But that’s assuming that we’ll hear much of these title changes in the first place, because the rise was loud and insufferable, but the fall has been low-key and quiet, and really nothing about such should be surprising considering the history of Mercedes Varnado.

I wonder what her $99.99 a month text service is saying throughout the downfall?

It’s the Four Loko that makes this amusing to me

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

WSB: Hall County sheriff busted for DUI after blowing a 0.212, revealed that he had been drinking Four Lokos since 6 a.m.

Under normal circumstances, a story like this would roll off my back, perhaps get an eye roll out of me, knowing that police protect their own, and that regardless of how egregiously drunk the guy was, while in his county-issued vehicle, it’s safe to assume that he’s not going to be getting close to the same kind of punishment that us normal citizens would receive under similar conditions.

He may lose his job, but considering he’s out there drinking while on duty, he probably doesn’t care in the first place, and he’s most likely not going to be doing any time, or have a suspended license, or be on probation on account of the oft-cliched professional courtesy.

But what caught my attention and why this is ending up as brog-worthy is the clarity in the headline that this particular pig in question, hadn’t just been drinking since six in the morning, but he had been drinking Four Lokos in his cop car:

Couch told investigators that he had been drinking several Four Lokos since 6 a.m. that morning. Investigators also found two open cans of Bahama Mama that had spilled in his car.

The devil is in the details, and now we’re talking. 

Obviously, anyone who’s ever known me might recall my own fascination with Four Loko back over a decade ago.  I was mystified by the fact that these shitty, $4 tall boys of nuclear race piss were actually killing college bros, dumb enough to be drinking more than like, one, at a time.  When the government declared banishment on the drinks, for whatever reason, I felt the compulsion to seek out some of these awful drinks, and managed to procure several cans of various flavors.

Over the next years, I would bust them out at social gatherings or Dragon*Cons as my drink of choice in order to get a healthy buzz going, and make no mistake, one can of any Four Loko was instant drunk, and anything beyond that was playing with fire.

Eventually, I would steer away from this dumbass behavior, and the remainder of my hoarded cans would remain ironic collector’s items, that is, until for whatever reason, some of them would spontaneously eat their own cans, leading to some obnoxious messes that I had to clean and eventually realized that I should just chuck them out, thus closing the book on my keepsake cans of Four Loko.

Back to the present, Four Loko survived government intervention, but they apparently changed the formula somewhat to be less lethal when drank in stupid amounts, and they’re still available at gas stations and wherever shitty booze is sold.  And apparently for one Hall County sheriff, it was his go-to drink for when he wanted to get smashed on the job.

Like I said, if it were just a story of a cop who got blasted on the clock, I probably wouldn’t have given it a second thought beyond knee-jerk disgust and disappointment in the system.  But finding out that he had been getting smashed on Four Loko since six in the morning, and he was discovered obliterated five and a half hours later, man clearly had some serious demons in his closet for all this to be transpiring.

And that 0.212% BAC is pretty frightening, because to my understanding that’s basically saying that over 20% of the blood in his body was tainted with alcohol.  I’ve gotten drunk off of Four Loko before (always under slightly more responsible, non-driving conditions), but I have come down from the buzz pretty normally, so I doubt that I was ever remotely close to a 0.212% BAC, so I’m curious to how many cans of the jet fuel he consumed, and let’s not ignore the fact that he had several open cans of Bahama Mama, which is another fruity, race piss-like canned booze, so clearly this hick sheriff was having a one-man party in his cruiser.

Either way, I’m amused by the brief resurrection of Four Loko into the public lexicon, and the ironic and pathetic circumstances in which they did so.  In a way, there isn’t a better way for it to have happened, and 16 years later, Four Loko is running it back with inebriated chaos like it’s 2010 all over again.

Is there a more perfect show than Batman the Animated Series?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This is more of a rhetorical question because the answer is no, there really isn’t.  Obviously this is subject to personal preference, but I can’t imagine that I’m the only one out there who has this particular opinion.

I had finished watching WWE Elimination Chamber, and it was a pretty mediocre show overall; although the men’s and women’s chamber matches had outcomes that I didn’t get right, the Becky vs. AJ and the Balor vs. Punk matches were very obviously predictable.  Danhausen being the mystery crate reveal made me feel like the whole buildup is this generation’s Gobbledy Gooker, but probably more accurately the WWE’s need for a wacky character they can push towards the younger audiences and kids to help move merch and gain wider appeal.

But the overall feeling I had once the show was over was general disappointment and apathy, but mostly disappointment that mythical wife had actually paid real money for ESPN Unlimited so that I could watch PLEs, and it just so happens that the first one I come across is a relative clunker.  I think it might be a safe bet that once Wrestlemania passes, to pull the plug on the service since we already have like four other services we’re subscribed to.

Anyway, seeing as how the night wasn’t quite too late even though I would benefit from getting more sleep than I do on the regular, I felt like I didn’t want to end my television watching experience with an underwhelming wrestling show, so I switched to HBO Max where I knew that they had the entire library of Batman the Animated Series, and where I’d been watching an episode here or there, because it was perfect in the sense that it was high quality content that I’d already seen a million times and could multitask during, and the episodes are just 22 minutes, which means they’re no major time commitment.

It was while watching the episode of Clayface’s debut, it dawned on me that the reason why I seem to feel that Batman TAS has become somewhat of a default fallback, is because of what I just said, that it was the perfect show.  Not just for the aforementioned reasons, but holistically, the show is just perfect, in just about every other way as well.

Art direction, execution, writing, music, an entry of DC comics storytelling, light years ahead of its time, parading around as a kid’s show.  Believe me, I have seen every single episode of the show, and I’m having a really difficult time at thinking of any episodes that are actual 100% clunkers, with no redeemable quality to them, and by that criteria, I can’t say there are really any.  Sure, there are some episodes that I may want to skim or possibly skip, like the one where Batman is gassed by the Penguin, and he has to be saved by some kids, but by and large, I anticipate myself going to really enjoy the steady, gradual and methodical rewatch of Batman TAS with an episode or two every now and then.

And anyone who knows me knows that I almost never rewatch anything, because there’s so much content out in the world, lots of which I want to watch, that I very seldom go back and rewatch anything, because that time could be spent imbibing on something I haven’t seen before.

But Batman TAS?  It’s perfect in just about every subjective and measurable metric, and the most important thing is that it’s extraordinary ability to chase any shitty example of viewing media and bring me back believing that there’s good television out there, and that there’s really no bad time to catch an episode of the TAS.

Nobody is more impressed with mediocrity than me

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A day ago, I got my renewed passport in the mail.  I was very impressed at the turnaround on this, seeing as how I had applied for it a mere two weeks prior.  I’d been sitting on an email reminder to renew my passport from several months ago, but mythical wife and I had been kicking the idea around to go abroad for a vacation sometime within the next year, and the last thing I wanted was to have a passport on the cusp of expiration, and it causing all sorts of preventable complication later down the line.

A little over a year ago, I applied and received passports for both of my kids, and much like my own initial passport from eons ago, it was quite the nerve-wracking process of making sure I had birth certificates, proofs of residence, clothes, boots, motorcycle, etc.  In fact, when I got my very first one, I had to actually go into Washington DC to the passport office due to some reason I can’t remember, and even that was for a temporary, one-year only passport, all so I could go to fucking Toronto, of all places.

Either way, passports for my kids was like a turnaround of four months, and I’m proud of myself for having the wherewithal to have started as early as I did, so that they would be done for the cruise that we went on just months after receiving them.

When I expressed to my friends at how pleased I was that I got my renewed passport in just two weeks, like most of the shit I say to the group chat with most of my friends, it was met with silence, and then eventually some of my wiser guys blurting out that it’s not impressive since renewals are usually faster than getting brand new passports.

Yes, that may be the case, as I recall my last renewal taking maybe 6-8 weeks, but this was fucking two.  Even the passport office dot gov website had predicted a turnaround of like, end of March, which would still be more than sufficient to my potential summer needs, but then I started getting status update emails that already had tracking numbers and an expected delivery date of February 20.

I made a joke to my friends that we could all agree that just about everything in Washington is a putrid wasteland of process, corruption and bullshit, but whatever’s going on at Passport Services, I had just gotten a renewal done and delivered in just two weeks.  But like I said, crickets.

What I’m getting at is that it’s apparent that there’s nobody in the world more impressed with mediocrity than me.  I’m so nihilistic, so jaded, and so pessimistic about the state of America and the rest of the world, that when people in the world simply perform to their baseline job descriptions, I’m fucking over the moon.

Yeah, I know that my generally droll outlook isn’t necessarily the best looking or something to be proud of, but I can’t help it.  I get so disappointed when people fail to meet my expectations, the only seemingly adequate defense mechanism to adopt is to assume utter incompetence across the board, to where when people deliver mediocrity, my mind is blown away and it brings me great joy that there are occasionally competent people in the world.

And anyone who actually does go above and beyond for me, well, I had Yelp Elite status for like the better part of eight years because I was ready and willing to review a million stars to any businesses that impressed me with such.

Needless to say, while my friends might not be impressed with a two-week turnaround for a passport renewal, I was quite elated and impressed by it.  Maybe some robots have taken over working at Passport Services, because everything else in Washington DC is steaming hot bullshit, and I can’t imagine any possible other alternative to a task being done so exceptionally, than if it were done by artificial intelligence.