Author: dannyhong

No Ian, we won’t

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Long story short: Major League Baseball is still in lockout; Cubs’ outfielder Ian Happ “hopes the fans understand what they’re fighting for”

Here’s the actual quote:

The players are so heavily committed to getting this thing back on track and we hope that the fans understand what we’re fighting for.

As the subject of this post says, no Ian, we won’t.  We will never understand what baseball players are fighting for, because we all know it’s just money.  It’s always money, it’s never anything other than money, and anything else that is ever mentioned is just another roundabout way of saying money.

So no Ian, we the fans will never understand why baseball players whose league minimum salary for the even shittiest player on the 25-man roster is practically $500,000, are trying to get even more money.  Especially considering every team’s MLB Players Association rep is usually a veteran player who probably makes anywhere from $4-32 million dollars a year, and is somehow trying to bilk even richer assholes who run the league and the teams out of more money, while prices for parking, food, apparel and tickets continue to rise and rise for the fans that actually fund all this entire racket in the first place.

Up to this point, I didn’t really care that baseball was still in a strike.  Over the last few years, it seems like every major sports league seems to go into some sort of strike, be it players or referees, leading to all sorts of shitshow bullshit, and then the conflicts are settled, and things go back to normal, to the point where it’s no real surprises anymore when some other sport league goes into a strike anymore.

I figured that eventually this MLB strike would end, players strong arm the league and the owners out of more money, who will then turn their losses onto the fans; millionaire players and billionaire owners end up making more money than ever, while the fan experience gets more expensive and the sun rises in the morning. 

We then have a chaotic season where there ambitious players who workout privately and/or go apeshit on performance enhancing drugs while testing is off the table are ready for the work stoppage to end and put up ridiculous numbers and highlights through the season, while on the other side of the coin there are lots of lazy players who take their job for granted get out of shape, and get shelled through a season but manage to keep their jobs because baseball teams are suckers for sunk cost fallacy. 

And there are lots of injuries because people are out of shape, or their bodies are in turmoil from going apeshit on performance enhancing drugs while testing is off the table.

But I didn’t really care that the strike was going on.  I’ve got enough on my plate to where baseball is unfortunately an afterthought, as much as I do love the game, in spite of how critical I can get towards it, but it’s because I care, damn it.

But then seeing Ian Happ’s remarks about hoping fans understand why they’re going on strike just set me off, because it’s just a perfect example of how tone deaf baseball players themselves can be when they stop realizing how privileged they are to be making money at all for playing a kid’s game at an incredible level.

Take Happ himself for example.  The guy is set to make $8 million dollars in 2022 that will undoubtedly be less than that because the stoppage.  The guy has already made about $8 million dollars in baseball salary alone at this point, and if he has any bit of IQ outside of baseball, could probably very easily live out the rest of his life very comfortably at the age of 27.

And he wants more money.  All of his MLBPA compatriots want more money.  And the funny thing is that Ian Happ is a pleeb, in comparison to some of the other guys on the MLBPA that is “fighting for,” more money. 

Like Max Scherzer – this guy is legitimately contractually obligated to be paid $43 fucking million dollars in 2022 alone, for throwing a baseball over and over again.  His current career earnings from baseball alone have already exceeded $139 million dollars.  If he stopped playing at the end of his current contract, he will clear $300 million dollars.  And because baseball is full of laughably stupid, idiotic contracts, even if he were to retire in 2024, he would still make $60 million dollars over the following four years because of deferred payment from the Nationals and Dodgers.

This guy wants more money too.

Make no mistake, the end goal of this strike benefits nobody but these greedy fucks who think baseball is absolutely indispensable in the grand spectrum of the world’s needs.  I love the game, and I’ll always love the game at this point, but I’d love to see the owners and commissioner’s office hold their ground, and the season grinds to a full halt. Laughably it would only apply to the MLB season, and as 2020 showed, when ‘Murica needed baseball to watch, they simply outsourced that need to Korea, and ESPN started broadcasting KBO in the states.

Furthermore, Minor League Baseball wouldn’t be affected by this, and if you don’t think television rights to broadcast the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs, the Rocket City Trash Pandas, Montgomery Biscuits, Toledo Mud Hens, Modesto Nuts and all the other gaudy but still competitive minor league baseball wouldn’t suddenly be hot tickets, the Major Leagues would become a fast afterthought.  Casual fans and lovers of the game will find their salvation in the minor leagues, and MLB can go choke on a bag of dicks.

It wouldn’t happen, because at some point, one party is going to blink, but it’s fun to imagine the global baseball power shift if MLB comes off the table at their own greedy volition.

Thoughts on Terminus 2

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

For the longest time, I’ve been trying to go watch live wrestling.  A few months ago, I went to a really small show, Championship Wrestling From Atlanta, and it turned out to be a lot of fun despite the fact that I knew maybe like two names on the entire card.  The venue was small, the attendance was low, and I was sitting two rows from the ring and had a great view the entire night.  Unbeknownst to me, a lot of the talent featured that night were all fairly notable names on the indy or not-WWE/AEW world of professional wrestling, and I took the time to educate myself and realize just how out of touch I had become with the industry over the years.

The experience ignited a newfound want to seek out smaller shows, because I’ve done Wrestlemania twice, and several other large WWE and WCW shows back in the day, and as much as I appreciate the big times, I’ve learned that it’s just so much more fun at smaller shows.

But after seeing Championship Wrestling, the last few months have been a comedy of errors at trying to go see moar live wrestling.  I had secured tickets to NWA’s Hard Times 2 show, which I was looking forward to immensely due to the card being pretty stacked, but due to the rise of the Omicron coronavirus variant, my tickets were cancelled.  At least I got a pretty cool consolation prize out of it.

Mythical wife had gotten me some really baller tickets to go see WWE’s Day 1 pay-per-view show, and I know I had just said I was kind over big WWE events, but these were some prime seats that probably would’ve made the event worth it, but then my household was exposed, and I had to punt on going to the show that ended up being pretty noteworthy in that Brock Lesnar ended up winning the WWE title that night.

And then I heard about this show that ran in Atlanta, literally the night after it had occurred, called Terminus, which was apparently being run by the current Ring of Honor World Champion, Jonathan Gresham.  Looking at the match list, I was kind of awe-struck at just how stacked of a card it was, and I bemoaned my bad luck at not knowing about it in advance and trying to go check it out.

Fortunately for me, Terminus already had plans to run a second show in February, and with a main event of Gresham against AEW’s Mike Santana already established, it sounded like the perfect event to scratch the itch for some live, smaller-crowd wrestling.

Continue reading “Thoughts on Terminus 2” →

Re: the Shoresy teaser

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m sure Shoresy is going to be an entertaining show.  He was obviously such a popular part of Letterkenny to where Jared Keeso flexed the spinoff into fruition, and even went so far as to produce an entire fluffy phone-in of a season in order to help establish it.  And the 30 second teaser of the show is about everything I’d have expected from a show where Shoresy will be getting the entire spotlight, except for the very ending of it.

Spoiler alert, the teaser does the one thing that is never done throughout all of Shoresy’s appearances in Letterkenny.  I mean it was inevitable that it was going to happen, considering the show is now entirely about Shoresy and not just a cameo where he makes crude sexual jokes about Jonesy’s and Riley’s moms.  And everyone knows that it’s Keeso playing a second role, but still there’s something about the premature reveal that I feel as if the show has already given away a layup of a buzz maker.

Or maybe they’re just that confident that the show will succeed, to where they don’t feel the need to bother trying to play the conceal game any longer.

Either way, I’m definitely going to watch the show when it eventually drops.  I’m no hockey expert by any stretch of the imagination, but seeing as how the last three seasons of Letterkenny were all leading up to this and they were still interesting, I figure Shoresy will be much of the same without any of the other residents of Letterkenny needing any screen time.

All the same, impressive flex by Keeso to have gotten himself another gig, especially considering Shoresy was probably a joke at first, but really snowballed in popularity to where all of this could even be possible.

I feel as if I’m being disrespected

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

True to my word, I have begun hitting the gym again, beginning the journey to combat the give-up-on-life body that I have transformed into over the last two years to hopefully get to a point where I can have the less flabby dad bod that I had back in 2020.

The fitness center in my building is fairly bare, with mostly machines, but there are still enough dumbbells and other tertiary equipment available for me to still have adequate workouts and work on getting back in shape, regardless of the fact that I won’t really be able to do the true squats and deadlifts anymore without there being any barbells available.  But it doesn’t cost me anything, towels, shampoo and soaps are all included, which makes is super convenient for me.

The best part about it, though, is that the place is practically deserted.  Whether it’s the pandemic, the hybridized schedules that the company is utilizing or perhaps a combination of both is that there’s hardly anyone in the gym, and in just the few times I’ve been inside it, I’ve had plenty of time in which I’m literally the only one in there, free to workout in solitude.

However, I use phrases like practically and hardly, because in the two workouts that I’ve done to shake the rust off and go through the requisite soreness of exercising for the first time in an eon, despite the general quiet of the fitness center, I’ve still come across other human beings.

The first day, a duder walks in, about a half hour into my own workout.  Our eyes meet, and I give him a nod.  The nod is not reciprocated.  He changes clothing and comes back out and promptly begins his workout on the rower, which I think is very appropriate seeing as how he looks like Donald Trump, Jr. and is about as white.  As I’m changing in the locker room I can hear weights being dropped, confirming the douchebag I thought he was for not returning my nod.  He was also unmasked.

Day two, I enter the gym, and there’s a different guy, limbering up, prior to getting onto the treadmill.  As I begin lifting, he has an even more pitiful adventure on the treadmill than I had just days ago, and I don’t think he even ran more than five minutes, and had to take numerous breaks.  He then proceeds to get on a mat, and do some crunches.  As he heads back to the locker room, our eyes meet and I give him a nod.  The nod is not reciprocated. 

He emerges minutes later, back in work clothes, and the time it took indicates that he also didn’t shower.  This guy is also white as Reindeer Games.  He too was unmasked.

At this point, I’m feeling like I’m being disrespected by these guys that aren’t acknowledging my acknowledgment.  This is the epitome of a first-world problem, but at the same time, I don’t think I’m asking for a corporate bailout or anything, I’m just trying to be polite and acknowledge the respect for other people trying to better themselves through exercise.

It doesn’t happen often, but I’ve got the opportunity to organically relate to Gordon Liu and the entire aesthetic of my brog, because this treatment over the last two days has made me think about the scene in Kill Bill, where David Carradine waxes poetic about Pai Mei, and how he murdered a Shaolin temple solely based on the fact that a monk failed to reciprocate a nod when crossing paths.

Pai Mei…in a practically unfathomable display of generosity,
gave the monk the slightest of nods.

The nod…was not returned.

Now, was it the intention of the Shaolin monk to insult Pai Mei?
Or did he just fail to see the generous social gesture?

The motives of the monk remain unknown.

What is known…were the consequences.

The next morning, Pai Mei appeared at the Shaolin temple…
and demanded of the temple’s head abbot that he offer Pai Mei
his neck to repay the insult.

The abbot, at first, tried to console Pai Mei.

Only to find Pai Mei was…inconsolable.

So began the Massacre of the Shaolin Temple,
and all sixty of the monks inside, at the fists of the White Lotus.

I like to think these two clowns didn’t acknowledge me because they’re racists, or because I was wearing a mask which is still kind of a little racist in a way, but there’s also the possibility that they’re just being territorial pricks and annoyed that their gym is needing to be shared with someone else.  Joke’s on them though, there’s literally nobody more dedicated to going to the gym than I am, and they will be seeing me just about every single office day I have, health and schedules permitting.

Of course Patrick Ewing wants to get rid of the handshake line

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Sportsmanship?  What’s that?  NBA legend and current Georgetown Hoyas coach, Patrick Ewing opines that the tradition of the post-game handshake line be eliminated

In all fairness, I don’t really disagree with Ewing.  This whole discussion came into question after an incident where former player-now coach of Michigan, Juwan Howard took a swipe at a Wisconsin assistant after losing to the Badgers, it’s probably not the worst idea in the world to keep two teams apart from each other after a game ends, especially since society today is full of sore losers who can’t handle defeat.

It’s an antiquated custom that creates more room for conflict than it does at preventing it, even if it is an attempt to curry the notion of sportsmanship in the game.  It’s the kind of thing that’s practiced at the junior, junior, kids level, but considering basketball is still originally a children’s game, I understand why they try to force it onto participants even at a level as high as D-I collegiate.

But this post comes to fruition because it’s Patrick Ewing who came out and said this, and it’s just such a low-hanging fruit easy opportunity to clown on Ewing, because as many players have proven throughout history, it’s just so easy to dunk on him.

And as the subject of the post said, of course Patrick Ewing wants to get rid of the handshake line – since he’s taken the reigns at Georgetown, the Hoyas have gone 26-48 over four years in the Big East, so that means Ewing and his players have had to go through a whole lot of post-game handshake lines as the losing squad.  It’s no wonder Ewing wants to get rid of the handshake line, because he’s been getting owned way more than doing the ownage, and he’s tired of it.

The funny thing is that in doing the cursory fact-checking for this post, I had no idea that Georgetown actually won the Big East conference championship last year.  The Hoyas went 7-9 in conference play, but then used a Game Genie during the conference tournament and ended up winning the whole fucking thing from the 8th seed.  That was four straight critical games in which Ewing was actually on the winning side of the handshake line, and fairly recently, so I’m surprised to see that he’s still against it.

Oh shit, but then I realized what I was looking at wasn’t factoring in this season, and at the time I’m writing this, the once vaunted Georgetown Hoyas, are an abysmal 0-16 in conference play this year.  FFfffffuuuck, no wonder Ewing is completely over the handshake line, after all.  Poor guy just can’t stop getting owned, he might want to consider leaving the industry if he ever wants to stop getting dunked on.

WTF is Capcom thinking with Street Fighter 6’s logo?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I started seeing people posting about the recent Street Fighter 6 teaser, the very first thing I thought was that it was a fake and/or a joke, because there’s no way that this was going to be the logo for one of the most iconic franchises in video game history.

Ohhh, but it turned out that it really is.

Honestly, I couldn’t give two shits about the game itself, I’ve been so long out of video games in general, much less Street Fighter, that there’s a very high probability that I’ll never even play it in my lifetime.  I never played SFV once, and I only played SFIV a handful of times before I got pissed about there being a quick released SFIV champion hyper turbo or whatever new edition that made my version obsolete, so I never played it again.

But that doesn’t change the fact that I can’t sit on my pedestal and judge logos.  And SF6’s logo is fuckin’ godawful, and it really makes me wonder just what the fuck Capcom is thinking when they phoned it in and “designed’ this shitty piece of clipart and decided it to let it represent the franchise that basically made them who they are today.

I couldn’t even get home from work to point out how turrible the logo is before other sites had already sunken their teeth into the same observation, and a few have already gone as far as to call out the obvious low-effort low-key plagiarism Capcom has done in creating this “logo” that basically says all the same things that I would say.

Seriously though, this isn’t just another case of resisting change for the sake of resisting it.  Street Fighter’s general wordmark has been recognizable and iconic throughout every iteration of the series, and there are common elements and a color palette that continuously make it work no matter the number of sequels they put out.  The gritty, violent-looking delivery of brush strokes to create the words, to the signature yellow-to-orange gradient palettes used in every iteration up to SFV.

And then SF6 phones it in with this lame rip off of some Adobe clipart, and then typing out “Street Fighter” in a jersey typeface that appears to have been modified slightly so they don’t get sued to oblivion by the original font creator.  It’s a sad and insulting edition to an iconic franchise that doesn’t look like it’s real, but it is.

I know I already said that the likelihood of me ever playing SF6 isn’t very high, but I most certainly judge books by their covers, and seeing what is becoming of Street Fighter from the logo alone, would probably give me pause to give it a whirl, even if I were still avidly gaming.

Steph Curry hit 16 threes in a game

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Sure, it was an all-star game, where nobody plays any defense, but still.  In the span of a single 48-minute basketball game, Steph Curry still sank an astounding 16 three pointers.  Now if you’re doing the math, that means he scored 48 points on treys alone, so it’s funny to see that his final score was still a ridiculous 50 points, meaning that aside from all the three pointers, he made just one singular two point field goal.

Numbers like these will never fail to astound me, because I grew up as an NBA fan in an era where John Starks sinking six threes in a game is a rare occurrence, Dennis Scott going nuts and draining nine was bonkers, and then Kobe Bryant hitting eleven threes in a game was flat-out ridiculous.  50 points in an all-star game was unheard of, and I remember the last time the all-star game was in Cleveland, Glen Rice won the MVP after scoring 26 points and hitting a paltry four threes.

So seeing that a guy hit 16 three pointers in a single game is definitely something that makes my face contort and say really, because that’s just flat out ridiculous.  I’m pretty sure I didn’t hit 16 threes in a single game of NBA Jam, even with the fire cheat code on, because the quarters were like two minutes long and I simply didn’t have the time to launch sixteen threes.

The more I think about it, the more it’s clear that Steph Curry really did change the entire sport of basketball, arguably more than any other guy before him.  To a degree, even guys like Kobe Bryant and LeBron James were evolutions of Michael Jordan, who were all dominant scorers and utilized strong post games and mid-range shooting to amass their points.  But then Steph Curry came along playing like he were a video game character, and launching twenty three pointers a game, but the thing was that he was still hitting like 8-9 of them every single game and next thing you know he’s cleared 25 points on threes alone.

I used to root against the Warriors because I’m resistant to change and I had a hard time accepting the Golden State Warriors as championship material, and then I rooted against them because nobody likes seeing top dogs continue to succeed.  But regardless of how ambivalent I am towards the NBA in general, there’s no denying that rooting for or against the Warriors, Steph Curry is a phenomenal talent, and seeing him drain threes from all over the floor is truly awe-inspiring and never isn’t entertaining.