Tag: blets

Someone teach me how to pull the trigger

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Whenever I want to spend money on things that I know are things that I really don’t need and would usually be considered frivolous, I often times open them in a tab.  And then on almost a daily basis, whether I do it myself or it refreshes on its own after a restart or a browser reset, I look longingly at it, but don’t pull the trigger.  And then after enough time, the good in question inevitably sells out or goes unavailable, and I am left empty handed, and wondering why the fuck I just didn’t pull the trigger and buy it.

It’s not like I don’t have the disposable money in order to get it.  I have cash earned through survey apps, funds saved up from gifts from the past, and I’m sitting on a nice chunk of change in the form of Visa gift cards that I’ve earned throughout the last few months.

But maybe it’s the Korean in me that doesn’t like to spend money, but so often times is the case, I just can’t bring myself to actually pull the trigger on any of these frivolous things that I want.

There was this Freddie Freeman bobblehead that I had the tab open for like three weeks that I never pulled on, and now it’s sold out, and now that he’s moved onto the fucking Dodgers, this is now a true collectible and I won’t get one when they release.  I had my eyes on some Pakistani replica blets that were very reasonably priced that I just couldn’t bring myself to pull the trigger on, and they’re now unavailable currently, with no idea when they’ll ever, if at all, come back.

Numerous virtual runs that I intend on doing, now that I’ve gotten back into exercising, I’ve sat on them and probably missed out on at least 3-4 price increases; I know I want to do them, why the fuck am I waiting until the price increases, multiple times, before I actually get my ass in gear and register?

These are all things that I want and can afford to purchase.  But for whatever reason, I just have the hardest fucking time when it comes to pulling the trigger and parting with any of my actual money, regardless of if it’s for something I want.  Somewhere along the passage of time, I’ve become crippled at the ability to impulsively purchase things, which isn’t necessarily always a bad thing, but considering the fact that I’m actively missing out on very easily available things because I wait, or I end up paying more for things, because I wait, I’m just fucking myself, repeatedly.

Sure, there are all sorts of jokes about Koreans being cheap, or me being a cheapskate, but it’s like there’s a part of me that is so anti-stuff, that I struggle to bring myself to actually spend money on things that will just take up more space in my house.  Or I’m always preparing for the next unexpected expense or debt, that I have completely lost sight of the present, despite the fact that such a cost would usually come from a different bucket anyway.

Or perhaps this is just some sort of mental condition, the inability to be decisive when it comes to spending money on frivolous shit?  Either way, I feel like I need to be shown how to pull the trigger, because I certainly can’t seem to do it on my own very well these days.

NXT Champion Dolph Ziggler makes me happy as a fan

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know why, but I love crossovers.  In comics, shows, video games, and of course, wresting.  I casually learned that Dolph Ziggler had been appearing in NXT(2.0), and thinking hmmmm now that’s interesting; contrary to my general lack of impression from the whole branding and breaking of Triple H’s baby promotion.

Considering the circumstances of his cameos, I figured Ziggler would go down to make a talented but green horn like Bron Breakker look good and give him some instant credibility working and inevitably succeeding against a reputable name like Dolph Ziggler.  And Ziggler, being the consummate company guy would do his job, and march on raking in fan empathy that he should be a bigger star than he is, to which I agree.

Which is why I’m of course surprised, but also pleased and happy with the company’s decision to actually have Ziggler go over Steiner Jr, and win the NXT Championship.  Now I’m pretty out of touch and I can’t really predict or fathom the long game booking like I used to, and Ziggler may very well be used as a transitional guy to move the belt to someone else.

But much like the Miz’s short world championship reign a year ago, I’m still pleased to see a known company guy who has a lot of respect from fans and peers, actually be publicly rewarded and have a major title put on them. 

Ziggler is and has always been a fantastic worker, company guy and regardless of his endless heel status, a pretty chill personality that I have a lot of respect for as an entertainer, so I’m very happy to see him get a little bit of a championship run, with the NXT Championship.

Who knows if this reign will last a month or go as long as Mandy Rose’s title reign, but I like the general idea of slapping the main NXT titles on underutilized main roster talents, and let them be the ones to pass some torches onto the future stars that 2.0 is trying to usher in. 

If anything at all, we’ll have the memory of Dolph Ziggler getting to celebrate a major title win, that wasn’t practically a decade ago.

Year two of forever (Dad brog #080)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Under normal circumstances, I would’ve liked to have written something on the actual day.  But mythical wife and I were at Disney World with #1 celebrating her second birthday, so appropriately understandable, I just wasn’t around to take the time to write and reflect.

And just like that, my first child is two years old.  Naturally, the passage of time has felt like a blip, and I can still remember lots of the finer details of raising my daughter, and the world she grew up in and has been living in, still amazed at just how things have progressed in that span.

Over the last year, between first and second birthdays, a lot has most certainly occurred.  Not long after turning one, my daughter really kicked it into gear and began crawling like a speed demon obsessed, which was a might’ve been considered a little late in the development game, but honestly that part didn’t last long at all, because before we knew it she was suddenly upright, and it was barely a month after turning one, did she take her first steps and frankly, she hasn’t stopped running around since then.

#1 basically eats everything in sight now, and she went from being introduced to solids to not just inhaling everything that’s put in front of her, but now an innate curiosity and determination to utilize utensils and not just eat everything with fistfuls jammed into her mouth.

Obviously, one of the more substantial occurrences to have happened within the last year was that even though she was just one year old, #1 became a big sister already, when #2 was born in July, and my household had to deal with the harrowing realization of being a house with two under two, and the hard mode of life we were about to embark on.

In spite of everything I may have written detailing the difficulty and hell that parenting under these circumstances might have been, one of the joys to have emerged from it all has been witnessing just how much my now elder daughter, loves her little sister.  What started off as hesitation and fussing about the new edition to the home, #1 has taken to big sisterhood quite well, and fewer things bring genuine happiness to my heart than seeing her open up her arms and envelop her little sister in big hugs, whenever the opportunities present themselves.

Not a day goes by where I don’t just stop and watch my child at varying points throughout the days, just to see what she’ll do next.  Not a day goes by where it doesn’t seem like there’s some sort of growth or development with her, most of the time pertaining to absorption of the things she’s hearing and her ability to repeat and recollect, which also means that I have to really watch out for using profanity around her, because much like this meme, there’s no doubt that she’ll remember the bad words forever.

But every night while I wind her down for bedtime, I tell her that I love her so much, and it melts my heart every single time, when she repeats the words “love you so much.”  I know for now it’s mostly just repeating the words that I’m saying, but I’m hoping that one of these days eventually, she’ll be saying it as a declarative statement of her own volition and with understanding the meaning of the words.

As much as I love her though, all the same, has arrived the time of toddler defiance; a lot more no’s, a lot more fussiness at being told what to do, and a whole lot more determination to do things herself and her way, and not necessarily how others want her to do things.  I’m guessing this is probably the onset of the suppose terrible twos, but really it’s still just the never ending adventure of raising a child that I’m clearly experiencing first hand for the first time.  Hopefully she doesn’t make my life too hell as mythical wife and I embark on this next chapter of our parenting lives, but I’m confident that our love for our kids won’t waver, no matter how much trolling and exasperation they’re going to inevitably test us with throughout our lives.

Either way, I thought I’d have more to write about this than this, but I am still a tired dad with too much on his plate, and not enough time to accomplish everything he wants to do.  Regardless of the circumstances, a happy belated-in-writing birthday to my first child, whom I love so much, and will always love so much.  I look forward to watching her grow and develop, from the good to the bad, and there will never be a day where I am not thankful to be her dad.

I love what Matt Cardona is doing post-WWE

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I can’t say that I was ever a Zack Ryder fan.  The whole internet schtick, the fist pumps and self-aware but still over-the-top broeyness of his character, he was pretty much no better than Santino Marella, as far as caricatures of wrestlers they were.  I cringed when he had a US title run, and I winced even harder when he actually got a Wrestlemania Moment™ when he won the Intercontinental championship in a ladder match against way more worthy opponents.

When he was released by the company, I didn’t think anything of it, other than the fact that I figured he’d probably end up in AEW, because at the time everyone who was leaving the WWE whether it was a forced release or future endeavored, was usually bound for AEW at some point.

And as expected, he did show up in AEW, under his real name, Matt Cardona.  However, after a fairly uninspired program where he teamed up with Cody Rhodes, he was quietly gone.  Scuttlebutt said that he was only brought in for a temporary program, but for the most part was not #ALLELITE™

A few months later, Matt Cardona’s name came up again, as he apparently had a massively gruesome deathmatch in a fed that I’d just begun hearing about, GCW, since Vice’s Dark Side of the Ring had just done an episode on GCW godfather, Nick Gage.  And despite Gage’s cult-like popularity in the ultra-violent GCW, he had still done the job to Matt Cardona, and made him the GCW champion.

What was pretty astounding though, was how Cardona introduced himself to GCW, which was under a mask, and pretending to be Jon Moxley, which royally enraged the fans, and GCW fans are already maniacal enough in the first place, but Cardona manufactured a perfect heat bomb that got fans nuclear hot about his existence, and the number one rule of professional wrestling is to elicit a response at all, be it cheers or jeers.

But Cardona became the GCW champion, which I shrugged off, seeing as how GCW would probably rank as like the sixth or seventh noteworthy promotion in North America, so it really didn’t seem like much of a big deal.  However, I did take amusement of this new persona of his where he was apparently feeding off of the hate for Zack Ryder, fans like the ones of GCW were, and basically trolling the entire promotion by doing shit like declaring himself king of death matches, and switching their belt for an obnoxious John Cena-like spinner variant.

Eventually, he’d lose the GCW title to the actual Jon Moxley, who supposedly showed up to an event to watch it, but was somehow roped into performing and then going over as champion, which kind of disappointed me since I was beginning to curry favor with Matt Cardona.

But then he shows up in Impact weeks later, to get involved with a program with their champion, Moose, and the guy who used to be Big Cass in WWE.  Next thing you know, he’s in a world title program on Impact, even if he would eventually lose in a triple threat against Moose and Morrissey, but it was more of the same.  Fans someone have become conditioned to dislike Cardona, for what I’m guessing is because they all still see the obnoxious Zack Ryder character.

Somewhere along the way, Cardona also shows up at an NWA event, to jump their champion, Trevor Murdoch.  When I find out about this, I am salty, because this was actually an event that I had tickets to go to, since it was taped in Atlanta, but due to the rise of omicron, my tickets were cancelled and I didn’t get to go, but again, same story, unexpected appearance, jumps a world champion, gets nuclear heat from the crowd.

Now, I’m a big fan of what Matt Cardona is doing, and I don’t think there’s any wrestler out there that’s capitalizing on a career post-WWE than he is.  Sure, he touched AEW like most guys do, but when that didn’t work out, he didn’t quit and go get a job at Walmart like his old tag team partner did.  Instead he got extremely creative, and is low-key blazing an entertaining trail in lower promotions, but raising his stock all the same.  This is some Chris Jericho-like creativity in reinventing himself; he might not be making WWE money anymore, but he’s definitely in world title pictures in three different promotions, with nobody really being able to predict where else he’ll show up next.

Just a week ago, he was back in GCW, where he defeated Rhino; and because Rhino was the last ever ECW TV and World champion, Cardona declared himself the new ECW TV champion, and I have no fucking clue to where he procured the blet, but he still celebrated with it, all the same.

At this point, I’d lose my shit if Cardona shows up at a New Japan Pro Wrestling show, seeing as they’re currently touring North America right now.  Or maybe he’ll lay low and then show up at Ring of Honor in Dallas in April when they start their shit back up again.  Frankly, I’m surprised he didn’t show up at Final Battle in December.  Hell, maybe he should wander down to Mexico and appear at a AAA event, and mix it up with their Mega Campion.

Nobody is embodying the potential for fun and excitement in this current wrestling atmosphere like Matt Cardona is.  The industry isn’t just the WWE and AEW, and their insufferable tribalistic fans.  There are so many other options out there, and with the sheer volume of talent that was cut loose from the WWE primarily, the indy scene is ripe with potential for all sorts of creative, fun and new possibilities, and there’s nobody capitalizing on all this potential than Cardona is.

I never really cared much for Zack Ryder, but I absolutely love what Matt Cardona is doing these days.  He’s trolling fans in promotions left and right, but staying relevant and at the tops of cards everywhere he goes.  And I hope he keeps it going and finds some real success doing it, because I think what he’s doing is awesome.

A wrestling analogy I’m proud of

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I can’t say that I’ve ever watched much Impact Wrestling in my lifetime, whether they were NWA-TNA, TNA, TNA-Impact, Global Force Wrestling, or whatever iteration the promotion ever was under the ownership of the Jarretts, Dixie Carter, or whomever.  The peak of my viewership of the product was when a distant acquaintance and former schoolmate of mine, Sonjay Dutt was a regular performer, and I was curious to see a guy I went to grade, middle and high school with, live out the dream he always had as long as I had known him, in being a professional wrestler.

But in this day and age when professional wrestling seems to be doing pretty well, with the WWE and AEW sitting comfortably on top of the industry, there are all sorts of tiers beneath  the top of the mountain, and if I had to make a pick, Impact Wrestling would probably be the #3 promotion in North America.  Followed by other promotions like the NWA, maybe Ring of Honor again one day, along with a litany of even smaller independent promotions.

Much is being made these days with all the talent that’s been liberated (read: fired) by the WWE, and how AEW is hoovering up many of the names as soon as their non-compete clauses expire.  Personally, I think AEW’s roster is bloating to unstable proportions, but they’ve yet to collapse under the weight of their talent and their payroll yet.

I saw the card for Impact’s Hard to Kill PPV, and thought that damn, that’s a pretty loaded card.  Numerous championship matches, and what I really like is how Ring of Honor champions are just kind of randomly showing up at other promotion’s shows, to defend ROH blets, and Jon Gresham only adds to the credibility of the card.  In a different point of my life, I’d literally drop what I was doing and hop on a flight to Dallas to try and watch this with my brother, that’s how decent of a show I think this has the potential to be.

AEW has been doing a lot of impressive stuff over the last few weeks, and I hear the chatter, but as I’ve made fairly clear that I just have a hard time caring about the things they’re doing.  In all fairness, I have a hard time caring of what the WWE is doing lately too, but the difference is that I still have Peacock access and can see their PPVs.But despite my general ambivalence towards Impact historically, I’m finding that I’m rooting for them in the midst of all these wrestling promotional battlegrounds.  And I made an analogy that made more and more sense the more I thought about it, and I have to say that I think it’s pretty accurate.

The WWE is obviously the Yankees; they have money, they have history, and they’re the biggest baddest franchise in the business.  AEW is the Dodgers, who are blending all sorts of new-school strategy and flinging obscene amounts of money out on the market to bring in top-tier talent to bolster their roster, even to excess.  But that makes a promotion like Impact, the Oakland A’s, a cash-strapped promotion that does well enough, but has to really maximize the value out of every asset they have and try and play smarter than the richer competition in order to survive.

And when it comes to sports fandom, who doesn’t appreciate the plucky underdogs, especially when going up against the big bad rich opposition?  Hoping for Impact to do well has no consequence or conflict to any allegiances if I had any, and when the day is over, the successes of other promotions outside of the WWE and AEW are better for the industry as a whole.

Whenever wrestlers are released from WWE, most of the time I’m usually like, man that guy/girl would be perfect for New Japan, or Impact, but just about everyone ends up in AEW, due to the money they’re flinging.  I don’t hide that I have these general ideas about promotions, and I think most big white oafs always stand a chance at being the next big bad foreign heel in NJPW, and if there’s one thing that Impact has always done well historically, is that they’ve always cultivated good women’s wrestling.  Even long before the WWE did, Impact doesn’t get enough credit for their contributions to women’s wrestling, and Hard to Kill has some pretty good women’s matches on deck that I most definitely wouldn’t take a piss break through.

Almost makes me think I should perhaps seek out some replicas of the Knockouts Tag Blets, so that my girls can be double champions.

A 2021 year-end post

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Looking back at all my old posts on a near-daily basis through the On This Day plug-in I use, I realize that I’ve written a whole lot of year-end posts throughout the years, which makes me feel somewhat obligated to write one for this year as well.  Initially, my thought was “fuck, ain’t nobody got time for this shit,” but then I stopped to actually think about the year 2021 as a whole, and realized that making one, really shouldn’t be that difficult.

Seeing as how in my double dad duty life, I’m typically always in search of the path of least resistance, “shouldn’t be that difficult,” pleases me.

Although plenty of things happened both in my own little bubble, as well as the rest of the world, for me, the year really can be summed up pretty succinctly as a tale of two halves.  The first half of the year was spent preparing for the birth of #2, where my job made me miserable and was sucking the life out of me.  And then literally halfway through the year, #2 arrived, embarking on the second half of the year where my job still made me miserable, but it was compounded by the ever-living difficulty of parenting two under two with insufficient help.

All while the coronavirus pandemic that plagued most of 2020, still raged on throughout the entire 2021, regardless of how stupid, arrogant and ignorant the rest of the world seemed to become because we’re all a bunch of selfish fucks who can’t understand the importance of quarantine and distancing, and have to be out in public events and crowded restaurants.  Vaccinations came into fruition, and smart people got them, but it didn’t make everyone suddenly invincible, as much as it dulled the fatality capabilities of coronavirus.  But that was good enough for everyone, and I stopped pondering which was worse between the unvaccinated and the vaccinated who thought they were bulletproof.

On that description alone, it sounds like 2021 may have sucked, and I’d be the first to admit that I did have a tremendous amount of time with dark clouds over me and inside my head.  But none of it has any bearing for the love I have for my children, no matter how hard they’ve made my life in this current juncture, and no matter how much I bitch and write pissy brog posts, they are still my happiness and the greatest things to have happened to my life along with mythical wife.

This isn’t to say that the year was entirely a wash.  It’s just pretty easy to sum up in very broad strokes, that make it sound negative.  Aside from the birth of my second child, she brought baby luck into play, and despite thinking I wouldn’t ever see it in my lifetime, the Atlanta Braves won the World Series.  I mean if that isn’t the very embodiment of baby luck, I don’t know what was, the Braves had 88 wins and had no business making the playoffs, but they did, got hot, and rode the momentum all the way to the Commissioner’s Trophy.

I also got the NXT UK Tag Team replica blet, that I’ve been waiting to come into existence for three years.  That pleased me greatly and was a good way to wind down the year.

Oh, and the new job I secured with the year winding down.  A substantial raise, elevated job title, and for the inevitable future where I have to report back into an office, a shorter commute.  Plus, it gave me the long-awaited departure from my toxic current boss, and I can’t wait to get the fuck away from her.  That shit is really fantastic news too.

But because I’m a nerd that takes general notes on the happenings that interest me, the following things also occurred in 2021:

  • Baked potato worshippers basically tried to throw a coup and invade the Capitol in Washington DC in defiance of the failed 2020 election
  • I took a UX course to try and pivot my career path
  • Got vaccinated, had it kick my ass. Got a booster later in the year, which kicked my ass again
  • Tried the Dr. Now diet from My 600 Lb. Life of eating 1,200 calories a day; I lasted a week before throwing in the towel, but still lost 3.1 lbs.
  • The housing market in America went completely bonkers, and I capitalized on it by refinancing on my house to help ourselves financially
  • Alabama won its 52nd National Championship
  • Tom Brady won his 43rd Super Bowl; but first with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers
  • The Milwaukee Bucks, yes Milwaukee Bucks, won the NBA Finals
  • My upstairs HVAC died in the middle of summer and had to be replaced, causing a very uncomfortable week in August
  • And finally, speaking of deaths, notable passings in my world included: Hank Aaron, Larry King, Screech from Saved by the Bell, Jessica Walter, New Jack, Norm Macdonald, John Madden, Betty White, and most tragically, Sonny Chiba. 

But let’s not end this post talking about deaths.  As droll and depressing some of the tone of this post might’ve read, there is absolutely no reason for me to not be optimistic about 2022.  I have a new job that pays better and gets me away from the toxic situation that shit all over my 2021, and as my girls grow and develop, life should become a little simpler, and pave the way for me to get bits of my own life back, gradually, little by little.

Those things alone carry great weight, and as long as those things can progress positively, not even the dismal state of the world’s handling of coronavirus can drag me down.  And with that, I close the brog book on 2021, and hope for nothing but the best going into year 22 of fairly consistent brogging.

#23: If it had come out sooner, it probably wouldn’t be #23

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Nearly three years after it debuted on television, it was finally released as a replica, and I managed to wait it out until it was nearly $120 off its retail cost to snag it at a price point that I could digest: an NXT UK Tag Team Championship replica blet.

I can finally put this chapter of my collection to rest finally, and go back to pondering on whether or not I’ll ever consider getting moar blets for my ridiculous collection.

The funny thing is that had the UK Tag blet come out sooner, there would probably have been a good chance that I wouldn’t be up to 23 replicas in my collection.  It’s because it was never available, that the itch for new blets was never sated over the last three years, and how I ended up with probably 4-5 more blets than I probably would have considered getting.

Seriously, I wasn’t really that interested in the NXT UK blet, but I ended up getting it anyway, because it was on a ridiculous Brack Friday sale price, and I bit on the sale price fallacy.  Plus, I had gotten really into the NXT UK scene, and wanted to have any blet to represent the brand in my collection.

Same goes for the WWE US Championship, the only reason I ended up buying it was that it was on a Wrestlemania sale price, and I wanted to spoil myself to a little retail therapy to soften the reality check that fatherhood was proving to be.

The NWA and WCW Television blets are prime examples of just wanting new blets for the sake of having new blets to add to the collection, and I probably never would’ve ever searched for them ever if my collection were in a state of satisfaction, but I gave them the old college tries and eventually tracked them down and plunked down for them.

And frankly, the Ring of Honor World Championship, I probably never would’ve made it a unicorn blet in the first place had I had gotten an NXT UK Tag replica to sate the itch earlier.  But once I found out that official replicas of it existed, I knew that I had to have one and some Pakistani knockoff would not suffice.

Lest it not go unmentioned, #22 was also recently acquired, being a white strap WWE Intercontinental championship, which has the dubious distinction of being the first time I’ve basically bought the same blet twice, seeing as how I already had a black strap WWF Intercontinental championship.  The plates are nearly identical in both, and for lack of better term, the only real difference is the strap color.  But it was yet another sale price fallacy, and seeing it nearly 45% off made it very easy to pull the trigger.

Which brings us to the long-awaited UK Tag blet that I’ve wanted for three years.  Now that I have it, in a previous life I would say that my collection is complete, but as I’d already mentioned before, with the gaudy John Cena US Spinner back on the market, I’m only a waiting game away from having #24.  But once that one is acquired, I actually really can say that I don’t know what I’d want afterward, however I won’t say that my collection is complete this time.  There’s always a blet, or an idea for a blet, to make it happen again, where I plunk down hundreds of dollars for these useless toys, no matter how cool I can make them look, all hanging from my wall.

But as it stands, my wall is pretty much full, and nothing short of a massive reconfiguration (a second row) is going to give me the room for expansion that I need to go beyond 23 blets.  Never say never, though.