Tag: fail

Diamond League is a different game

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Much to the detriment of my linguistic aspirations, I admit to getting sucked up into the competitive XP rat race of Duolingo.  My general learning and absorption of knowledge took a hit as I wanted to farm XP as fast and as much as I could so that I could dominate my opponents on the weekly league’s leaderboards, and win, basically nothing for succeeding.  And over the last few weeks, I found myself in a position to where I was finishing in the top-3 every single week, if not winning outright.

After cruising to an easy win in the Obsidian League, the penultimate rank before Diamond, I knew that things were going to be different once I were Diamond, and that I shouldn’t assume I’d be able to get a #1 ranking, not without some genuine effort.  But after one week in Diamond, I’ve come to realize that at this stage of my Duolingo journey, it’s probably not worth competing, unless I happen to be placed into a vastly less competitive user pool, because after a week of actually trying to keep up, I just don’t have the time to commit as the users who bettered me.

The shown graph is my last three weeks, and although it’s not up-to-date, my first week of Diamond was actually my new career-high as far as XP accumulation went.  Whereas my prior two weeks, I notched some 1st place finishes with less XP, once in Diamond, I’ve been shown the realization of just how different of a game it is here.

It really is a blessing in disguise though, because I’ve decided to not try to really compete, unless I see an opportunity.  The good thing is that it never takes long to realize when I’m in a real tryhard group, because like the time I’m writing this, I hadn’t even started for the week, and I was already down 3,000 XP to first place; at my very best, spamming boosts and using gems to extend them, I think I’ve at the most cleared 2,400 XP in a single day. 

Furthermore, I’ve noticed how many people who are the mega-tryhards are utilizing multiple courses, and I get the impression that people are doing this in order to farm XP, because I could just as easily start English and cruise through basic curriculum in order to just boost my numbers.  I’d wager that there are more people like that, than some real polyglots tryharding just to beat others in a meaningless contest.

It will be liberating and probably beneficial to my learning aspirations to take my foot off the XP farming gas, and actually focusing on the content and trying my best to learn and comprehend alternatively.  Don’t get me wrong, I’d still love to win Diamond league one of these days, but I’m already strapped for time as it is, and it’s already sometimes more effort and time sacrifice than I want to make in order to get my generally 45 minutes of lessons in, and I’m already making more mistakes than ever, due to how much I’ve rushed through the curriculum in the last three weeks or so.

My day in the Diamond sun will eventually come, but for now, I’m glad to have quickly learned just how overly-competitive things are at this level, and I’ll bide my time more constructively and take a little more time to learn mi español a little more carefully until it’s go-time.

I miss the pandemic, for real

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, or even posted about it before, but I really do miss the pandemic.  This thought usually crosses my mind whenever I’m in a scenario that wouldn’t have existed during the pandemic, like being stuck in traffic on my commute to the office, or in this most recent episode, whenever an illness permeates its way into my house and waylays fucking everyone, leading to several miserable days for all.

A stomach bug of some sort, was picked up by both #2 and I concurrently, most likely at a birthday party that only we went to on Monday; Tuesday was the customary incubation day for said bug, and by Wednesday in the AM hours, shit hit the fan and we were both victims of near-identical symptoms, all of them unpleasant.  It should also be noted that Wednesday was #1’s birthday, which meant I literally spent the entirety of my own child’s birthday in bed and basically incapable of functioning.

Thankfully, #1 was not ill on her birthday, but what I feared most came to fruition the night prior, which led to this avalanche of thoughts and emotions manifesting into a salt-filled, nihilistic sounding post about how I thought the world was a vastly superior place when a killer pandemic was ravaging through it.  But Thursday was apparently the incubation day for #1, and by the AM hours, shit hits the fan, and then it’s me, of course, at like 70% myself, as the one staying up until 4:30 in the morning catching her vomiting every single half hour while the bug takes its turn with her.

Shit like this, would never have occurred during the pandemic.  The common cold didn’t happen at all, during the pandemic.  It was one of the most glorious years in human existence, 2020 was, where there wasn’t even a single day over the span of a 365-day span except for one exception which I won’t delve into, where anyone in my house was sick.  No questionable mornings where anyone woke up with a tinge in the sinuses, and requiring some preventative care, no sniffles after going out somewhere, not a single cold, much less the flu, any sinus infections or stomach bugs like the one ravaging my house right now.

No god damn sicknesses whatsoever, and it was marvelous.  But in retrospect, there’s no way that would have been allowed to continue, because that would have basically killed the medical and pharmaceutical industries, and can’t possibly have healthy populations when there’s profits to be made for white folks.

But in addition to the sheer lack of sicknesses rewarded to the intelligent who exorcised caution, it was a world where nobody had to commute into offices, remote work was the norm and championed and applauded at the adaptability and fluidity of the workforce, and not politicized and weaponized as it’s been today.

And speaking of politics, it’s the then-administration’s sheer idiocy behind pandemic response that basically united a country to boot out the orange clown from his first dictatorship, and for a brief moment in time, it genuinely felt like the United States were back to becoming America again instead of being shitty ‘Murica.

Naturally, no good thing is truly ever allowed to last, and when the dust settles, Americans always falls back into their self-destructive patterns, and here we are back to dictatorship #2, which has somehow managed to feel even more terrifying than the first one.

At this point, I genuinely wouldn’t mind if some fucking savages at a Chinese wet market started trying to eat some moar bats or some possums or some other feral wild animal, and try to get COVID-29 started up to try and correct the world all over again.  I know many probably think that the parties involved in the original COVID-19 bat-eating scenario are a bunch of hindsight murderers, but frankly I see them as quite the contrary, and wouldn’t mind if that shit fired itself up again, if it would bring us back to the utopia that 2020 really turned out to be in retrospect.

I’m tired of commuting to the office, I’m sick of stupid fucks who go out while sick with no regard for the people around them, and I’m sick to fucking death of those people passing those illnesses onto my families and allowing them into my home.  I know COVID-19 took a lot of people out, but I’m having a real hard time, especially as time goes on, at thinking their negatives actually outweigh all the positives that emerged from the time.

A funny thing happened at the gym today

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

My gym isn’t a very large gym.  Considering the small number of tenants in the building, the people who do come on the regular are pretty familiar with the existences of one another, even if we ultimately have no idea who we are.  That being said, I think it’s never a good idea to exorcise bad habits around people you coexist with on the regular.

Every now and then, I’d come into the gym, and there was typical asshole evidence of gymslobs; weights left all over the place, not putting anything back, most likely nothing wiped down either.  But when you’re the only one(s) there, you feel like you can get away with being a slob, so a slob they were.

This is something that asshole gymslobs can get away with at like an LA Fitness or a Gold’s Gym, gyms so crowded and churning with people, that it would be nigh impossible to pinpoint who the culprits were.  But at a tiny office gym the size of mine, it wouldn’t take long to narrow down the list of regulars who come, especially if one were so determined to run the badge log to see who has accessed the gym on a given day.

Today, I went into the gym, and these two dudes whom I occasionally have overlapped with were there.  Typically, they’re fairly early goers, but I guess their schedule had something that made them be there when they were there today, overlapping with my time there somewhat.  But I noticed the two of them hit the lockers, leaving all of the shit they used all over the place; a barbell laying out on the floor, a few dumbbells left out on a bench rolled into a very inconvenient place.

Normally, I wouldn’t say anything to anyone about it and just grumble internally or blast them amongst my friends in group chats.  Society has conditioned everyone to avoid not just conflict, but just speaking to people anymore, and in doing such, invites people to be dicks and exorcise dick behaviors like being a slob at the gym and not putting the shit they use away like any normal civilized considerate human beings.

But I don’t know, I didn’t feel like letting it slide today, and I thought to myself that if I addressed them calmly and without any aggression, I could at least make them aware that what they were doing wasn’t acceptable.

I happened to catch them on their way out of the locker room, and with my hands, I got their attention by pointing to the area of the gym which they left a mess.  I just simply said to them, hey guys, sorry to bug you, but could you put all those weights away?  I thought you guys might’ve been coming back out, but if you guys are done, could you please put those weights away?

And then the funny thing happened, they didn’t scoff, put up a fuss or show any sort of defiance, they were just like, oh my bad, yeah, and then went to go pick up after themselves and put their shit back; not perfectly back in order like they probably started, but baby steps here.  I said thanks to them, sorry to bug y’all, but thanks.

Granted, after they left the gym, they probably muttered about that fuckin’ Chinese guy on their way and in the elevators, and I’ve probably made gym nemeses now and should probably start considering bringing a lock to the gym to protect my shit from now on, but the point remains, I don’t think I’m in the wrong for calling out poor behavior, and by doing so in a calm and best-as-I-could non-confrontational manner, the poor behavior was corrected.

If I or anyone else never said anything to these guys, the behavior would undoubtedly continue, and honestly, one of these days, someone could get hurt, the gym would get shut down, and everyone loses.  At the end of the day, the people who have to straighten the gym out are the custodians, which are comprised of entirely smaller and older Hispanic women, and they shouldn’t have to be responsible for lugging around 30s, 40s and the 50s that some assholes left on the floor, and I would sooner straighten them out myself before them.

I get that people don’t like being told or even asked what to do, but if they didn’t do shitty things to begin with, then it wouldn’t ever have to happen.  This was entirely a situation where the only reason why correction occurred is because the violation was caught.

I don’t have a lot of faith that this won’t happen again, but at least these guys are aware that if they’re unlucky to be working out when I’m there, it’ll sit in their back of their minds that I just might call them out on their bullshit laziness, and as much as I don’t want to invite engagement, I’m hoping that they’ll want to avoid getting called out again and just do the right fucking thing in the first place.

It only took twelve years

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A long time ago, I wrote a post about how cursive was being phased out of educational standards, and that it was only a matter of time before the ability to read cursive writing would become a viable job, due to the fact that all of the nation’s most critical documents were all written in, cursive.

Welp, twelve years later, and the National Archives are seeking volunteers to decipher the ancient cursive text from documents from the Revolutionary War.  I love their choice of words like “decode” and “decipher” to make it sound like these are ancient historians deciphering hieroglyphics and non-Roman character text like they’re characters from The Mummy or National Treasure, but when you get to the meat of the blurb, it’s more big words to describe a pedestrian objective:

and help make them more accessible to everyone.

In other words, legible to dumbasses who are no longer required to learn cursive writing.

Honestly, there’s no way this is the first real known instance of this occurring, but it’s something I saw that seemingly made it to national news. 

Now the trick is how I can be put into a position to where I can capitalize on this pathetic educational hole and make a little scratch on the side before more older pleebs realize the undervalued skill that really shouldn’t be a skill.

Seriously, everyone should stop volunteering for this shit, and start charging some money for it.  As the image above describes, if you’re good at something, don’t fucking do it for free.  Especially since we live in a country that’s actively at war with itself, with a government as rotten as the bottom layer of a package of strawberries from Kroger.  If they want something from the people, the people should have the wherewithal to realize that they should charge for it.

I suppose it’s now acceptable to put cursive reading and writing on my resume as a viable talent, and I really want to make sure my kids are taught cursive, and want to see if I can get them to utilize in their school work in the future, befuddle their teachers who inevitably didn’t have to learn it themselves, and see if they get reprimanded and called out for using it, so that I can throw in their face that they’re the dumbasses who allowed for such an elementary skill to fall to the wayside because society is stupid and lazy.

But I knew this was going to happen eventually. I fucking called it. 

My 600 Lb. Life needs to go into rebuilding mode

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The other night, I logged into Max and went to My 600 Lb. Life, hoping that there would be a new episode posted.  Season 13 has been a clunker of a season, with no real standout participants for all the wrong reasons, and the show has always had a tendency to start and finish their seasons with the best or worse people. 

Episode 7 Juan was another forgettable episode, and I figured that there would have to be someone better to close out the season, but it’s never easy to tell how many episodes there are in these arbitrary seasons, because it’s never been consistent.  So after I logged in and checked in on the series, it became apparent that Juan was the last episode of the season, and mythical wife and I are just kind of like, oh..

Counting season 12, I think it’s safe to say that the series as a whole has put up two straight clunker seasons.  There have been no real memorable participants, and although it’s the guiltiest of pleasures to see when some of them turn into shitheads and fail spectacularly, an occasional success story is always welcome and leaves viewers like me feeling optimistic and satisfied for five minutes. 

But over the course of the last two seasons, there have been barely any successes, even fewer to actually succeed and get the weight loss surgery, and an increasing number of participants whom never even get to Houston and the episodes are these droll journeys of stock footage of Dr. Now wandering around his clinic or St. Joe’s Hospital lamenting at the dangers of being morbidly obese, and occasional video calls with participants where they’re all super eager to comply and participate, before they hang up and do jack shit.

I know the pandemic made TLC and the show have to pivot and allow for more remote participants, but what was the exception has gradually become normal, and the episodes where you just know that a big motherfucker ain’t going to step foot in Houston and actually get face to face with Dr. Now, where the real charm and magic of the show tends to happen.

In fact, S13E06 Deshaun was probably the most depressing episode of My 600 Lb. Life I’ve ever seen, and that’s really saying something considering the clinging to survival nature of the show as a whole.  The man from Omaha had no goals, no aspirations, no dreams, and no motivation whatsoever, with the closest thing to a want being, getting out of Omaha and going to fucking Missouri.  Like, when the place you want to end up going to is Missouri, you know the bar couldn’t possibly be buried under the ground any lower.

Unsurprising, he like loses no weight, dodges his weigh-ins, so we never get a number of his actual weight, dodges his virtual therapy sessions, is extremely difficult to get a hold of with Dr. Now, and by the time the episode ends, two months early, he’s completely fallen out of contact, and is speculated to have blocked Dr. Now’s office outright. 

As I’m watching this episode, I know all human life is precious and all that, but I genuinely was feeling like this is a person that really has no business, existing.  He probably draws disability, basically exists solely to eat trash and play video games and watch television, but he provides even less purpose to the world than inmates in prison, whom at least have to do some sort of labor to repay society.

I’d never been more depressed watching an episode of My 600 Lb. Life more than I have with Deshaun, and that’s a pretty bold proclamation because there have been episodes where the participants have actually died.

Frankly, I think the show really needs to go back to the drawing board with their format.  It genuinely feels like it’s been on auto-pilot for the last 4-5 seasons, but it’s easier to ignore when you get the occasional gem of a participant who is a total trainwreck, an ass to Dr. Now, which usually takes the shackles off of him to start zinging back, but then eventually goes to therapy, supercharges their mental health and they get on the train and actually lose some fucking weight.

But over the last few seasons, the show has basically been following a template.  Every episodes starts with the participant waking up, lamenting on how they’re surprised to be alive, they have an awkward shower and then eat the mother of all breakfasts before the first commercial break.  Month 1 starts with them all talking about this doctor in Houston that specializes in helping people like me as if we all haven’t seen the last 13 seasons of this show, and depending on where they’re located, either they make a very long drive where you just know every participant is looking forward to the highways of road food available to them and they gain an extra 5-10 lbs before they see Dr. Now, or as has been increasing, they’re just too far away from Houston, and have a mostly pointless video call with Dr. Now, eagerly agree to get started on the program, and then hang up and probably go on another binge once the cameras are off.

Afterward, 9 out of 10 participants completely fail to meet the initial weight loss milestone, and nobody ever exceeds it, and Dr. Now has been too nice and too empathetic over the last two seasons, mostly because his reputation seems to precede him and nobody wants to throw hands with Ali, and he has little reason to be tough in return, and he just tells them the same goal, 70 pound in two munt and they’re on their merry way.

The show then goes into a strange fast forward through the remainder of the months, with sometimes them going back to Houston for follow-ups, and others ducking Dr. Now or their appointed therapy, and if there’s any surgeries, they usually happen in like months 7-10, and that’s only if they’ve managed to get their shit together and lost at least 80% of their goal weight loss, and find a place to live in Houston. 

The endings of every episode feel real rushed and hackneyed, and it’s fairly obvious to me that such is done in order to create separation between the filming of an episode of My 600 Lb. Life versus their eventual Where Are They Now? episode, and I feel like the latter is probably why the prime show has gotten so templatized, because the spin-off has become as much of a mainstay as the prime, and it’s like it’s a means to conserve content so that there can be a follow-up.

Like I said, I think the show needs to take a few steps back and reset their approach to producing.  I get that Dr. Now is like 80, not going to be doing this much longer, and probably on a personal level, doesn’t want to deal with shitheads like the Assanti brothers, and people who give him a colossal amount of grief.  But this shit is television, and we degenerate viewers need to see some shitheads and strong personalities that bring the best-worst out of Dr. Now, and everyone ends up happy when he lights a fire under their asses and drags results out of them.

So we need some real strong participants, that will bring out the Dr. Now fans all love, perhaps some more stringent participant rules and guidelines to ensure we have fewer Deshauns who turtle up the whole episode and more Jonathans (S13E01) who actually manage to do things with his life.  The current format has also been a little deceptive in presentation, because most everyone over the last few seasons fails after their initial consult, and we’re never seeing the diet cheating they’re doing, so that it’s more of a surprise (but it’s not) when they go to their next weigh-in and have only lost like 7 lbs.  It’s like, we know they’re going to fuck up, might as well let us see it.

Fewer remote participants because the journey is already hard enough, but adding insurmountable distance on top it leads to more episodes you just know are going to eventually dead end, and at one point, I found it to be astounding when there was a season where zero people actually got surgery, but now it’s becoming the norm, and this isn’t helping.

I love the show too much to give up on it cold turkey, but we’ve literally had two straight duds of seasons.  Megalomedia, TLC, and the Nowzaradans need to get their shit together, and breathe some life back into the series, because although I might, I can’t speak for everyone else out there, on if they’ll tolerate sitting through a third straight turdy pound turd, especially when we all know what the series is capable of.

WTF is AEW doing #387

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I first saw this shirt, I thought it was a joke, a bad photoshop from some shitty wrestling shitposting meme account or something.  But nope, it’s very much real, and actually available to you for the low, low price of $29.99 plus tax and shipping, which means it’s basically a plain white t-shirt for somewhere just under $40.

Of course I know that there are all sorts of brand name designers out there who have been peddling plain white t-shirts for upwards of $100+, but they’re often times players in the egregious fashion industry, whom most of them have earned the right to hawk their shitty wares for exorbitant prices, and people not smart enough to realize that they’re being fleeced will actually buy them.  But yeah, them, they’re not a professional wrestling promotion, whom most equate their product and their merchandise as tantamount to carny shit, and only exist at that price range solely on the basis of inflation.

Yes, I can see the Property of the Death Riders wordmark on them, anyone (with a magnifying glass) can see it, but the point remains is that AEW’s merch team has basically posted up the absolute bare minimum effort in an actual product available to the public.

In the past, I’ve called out other bullshit cash grab products like Faarooq’s DAMN shirt which is basically just the word DAMN written on the chest in Rockwell Bold, and the B-Team’s signature shirt, which was obviously deliberately shittily made to help sell the fact that Axel and Bo were B-tier talents, but still turned into a screen print and peddled for $30 a pop (plus tax and shipping).

Well, Property of the Death Riders joins that club of some of the worst wrestling shirts in history, without any question at all.  Like, I’m becoming desensitized to a lot of the weird and silly shit that AEW does that I have a hard time grasping because I grew up with the WWE, but to offer up a plain white shirt with the tiniest of logos as an actual product definitely stands out in a sea of weird and silly shit, at least in my mind.

Here’s the funny thing though, as I’m typing this out, there’s a part of me that actually does admire the fact that in spite of the overall bullshit this shirt really is, as far as utility and being able to wear it out in public outside of wrestling shows or flaunting fandom, this shirt actually probably a GOAT.  Being a plain white t-shirt, it’s a perfect undershirt, and the lack of any design whatsoever on it means that there’s zero concern of any design being visible behind an opaque white dress shirt.  And 10 times out of 10, whenever I’d be wearing a plain white t-shirt, it’s tucked into dress pants, and the dorky little Death Riders wordmark wouldn’t be a factor at all.

But I’m not really fan of white t-shirts in general, because white fabric is like this ticking time bomb where they’ll slowly turn yellow from absolutely no other reason than existing, and any exposure to air, water, moisture accelerates it, and even more so when exposed to human oils or perspiration.  I literally had a few white tees that were still in their Ziploc bags, completely unopened and unworn, and when the day came where I felt the need for one, and ripped open the sack, it was yep, yellowed with age.

White t-shirts are basically for weddings and funerals, or any other instances where I’d need a specifically white t-shirt underneath a more priority garment.

Back to the Death Riders white shirt, the jokes just write themselves, as far AEW’s fanbase is concerned.  The schlubs who will be willing to plunk down the cash to get these bad boys don’t have to worry about them yellowing from age, because they’ll rapidly turn from the sweat, nacho cheese from Daily’s Place, and vape juice they’ll be exposed to, accelerated whenever they see Toni Storm, Harley Cameron or Skye Blue.

All these observations, without even having to even scratch the surface of what failure the whole Death Riders faction has turned into, because when they formed, they had a ton of momentum, but as is often the case with Tony Khan booking, there’s no focus, no end game or no execution, and all members of the group have been swirling around doing dick and butt for weeks, with no end in sight.

It really is incredible how Jon Moxley in NJPW took his Death Rider persona and absolutely slayed over there, but bringing the name to AEW and making it a group has been absolute death to the brand and identity of it completely.

And I don’t really get it either, the whole white t-shirt thing was Bryan Danielson’s, and the Death Riders basically smothered him and killed his career, and suddenly Mox picks up the whole white shirt thing, acting like a jacked psychotic Andrew WK or something?

As the subject of these posts goes, jesus, wtf?

I’m not sure all these soft-ass new Dodgers fans even know who Clayton Kershaw is

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

MLBTR: Clayton Kershaw set to re-sign with the Dodgers for his 18th season

Back in 2008 when I was still on my quest to visit every MLB ballpark, my journeys took me out to the west coast, where I was going to hit a Dodgers, Angels and Padres game in one fell-swoop.  I got tickets to the Dodgers game on ebay well in advance, and was pleased to have apparently gotten someone’s season tickets, as they were printed with a design versus the generic Ticketmaster printed tickets.  Little did I or the guy who sold me the tickets, realized the significance of the specific game that I was going to.

My friend and I were having a quick breakfast after landing in Los Angeles, before heading to Dodger Stadium, and we had little idea of what we were in store for seeing.  Frankly, since they were playing the St. Louis Cardinals, we were more excited at the prospect of seeing Albert Pujols, very much still in his prime, doing Albert Pujols things.  Being fans of east coast teams, we had little clue to who this kid Clayton Kershaw was, but was starting that day.  I remember saying to my friend, man, but he has a 9.7 K/9, as a starter, so we kind of had an idea of what to expect.

This Kershaw kid would go on to strikeout the first batter of the game, ultimately pitch six innings while only giving up two earned runs, and although he didn’t get a decision in the game, the Dodgers ended up winning in extra innings.  A few people on the internet told me that I was really lucky to have been able to bear witness in person, to the debut of Clayton Kershaw, but I didn’t really think much of it that year.

In ensuing years, Clayton Kershaw would become the de facto ace of the Dodgers pitching staff, and basically become the best pitcher in all of Major League Baseball.  He was a strikeout artist, with his signature pitch being this cartoon-looping curveball that has paralyzed an entire era of hitters, on top of the fact that he comfortably pitched at 98 mph with his fastball.  He would win three Cy Young awards in 2011, 2013 and 2014, and he was so good at baseball in 2014, that he would also win the NL MVP award, which was a tremendous rarity for a pitcher to take home the MVP.

However, there was a lot of tough luck in Kershaw’s career, where no matter how good he was at baseball, the Dodgers just couldn’t ever seem to get the job done, when it came to winning championships.  Twelve years after he debuted, the Dodgers did win a World Series, but it was the 2020 World Series that receives a tremendous amount of scrutiny over its legitimacy, but for all intents and purposes, Kershaw did get to be able to declare himself a champion, finally.

He technically pitched in 2024, to which if I understand correctly, means he gets to declare himself a champion again, even though he was barely a factor in the team’s overall effort, but the point is, the Dodgers never really amounted to anything when he was the man, and nowadays, as the subject of this post implies, I’m not even sure all the swaths of brand new lifelong Dodgers fans are even aware of who he is, regardless of just how much of an absolute world eater he was throughout the entire 2010s decade.

I may or may not have written about this over the last few months since the Dodgers became World Series champions and spent a gozillion deferred dollars to create a mega roster for 2025 and beyond, but Dodgers fans are an interesting fanbase, in that they’re basically terrible from all criteria sports fans use to judge other sports fans.

They’re fair-weathered, in that they’ve multiplied by 50, coincidentally immediately after they won the World Series.  They’re the sorest winners I’ve ever seen from a fanbase in that they can’t seem to shut the fuck up and be happy that their team just won a championship and are more interested in parroting the same shit to textually barb with fans on the internet.  They’re softer than Charmin in that they are incapable of accepting the criticism and scrutiny that goes with success, and they all seem to go ballistic at any sort of judgment, regardless of the fact that they’re repping the reigning champions.

But on account of the fact that I’d say 69-70% of Dodgers fans decided that they were lifelong Dodgers fans probably three months ago, they seem to be pretty unaware of their team’s general history, or anything beyond November.  They’re all so busy parroting the same shit in their little echo chambers about their stacked roster, that it feels like the news of Clayton Kershaw coming back for one more year, seems to have fallen on deaf ears, despite the fact that he was easily the best pitcher for an entire era, and honestly if he’s remotely healthy, can probably be a legitimate pitcher all over again.

None of these fans seem to care, because the ドジャース Dodgers rotation is pretty shored up with Yamamoto, Roki, Glasnow, Snell and very likely Ohtani will return to pitching this season, so even if they did care, there’s really not any room currently for Kershaw, in spite of his right to be in it.

Sad as it, having written out this summary of events, it kind of seems apropos that Kershaw is in the background of things, considering the fact that such kind of has been the story of his entire career.

However, considering he needs like 32 strikeouts to reach 3,000, I’m sure the Dodgers media machine will work wonders getting their hordes of fairweather fans all educated up on just how legendary of a pitcher Clayton Kershaw is, and by the time he’s knocking on the door, they’ll all be ready with their freshly purchased Kershaw merch, ready to represent and proclaim themselves fans of his entire career, but at least it will afford Kershaw to be in the spotlight where he rightfully belongs, as artificially manufactured as it might be.

Either way, I’ll be happy for him when he inevitably hits it, because unlike a lot of Dodgers fake ass fans, I have been following the guy’s career, and despite the fact that I generally revile the Dodgers these days, save for Freddie Freeman, I’ve always had a soft spot for the guy I just happened to luck into being able to see his major league debut, after all he very well might be the greatest pitcher of my entire generation, and undoubtedly one of the best to ever do it.