Unsurprisingly lame

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

BB&T and SunTrust banks choose their united name: Truist.

I mean, I can’t say I’m the least bit surprised that this ended up being something as lame as this.  Fewer things in the world are as square and soullessly uncool as the entire banking industry.  I mean, it’s an industry that’s basically built on storing the money of people that are not themselves, and finding every single possible way to take cuts and slices from them in order to profit.

I even yawned heartily while typing out that line, that’s how lame the whole concept of banking is.  I can’t believe I worked in the industry as long as I did, and in some degree of retrospect, I kind of have to thank them for being the tools they are and laying me, as well as my entire department off, because they kind of did me a favor of getting out of the banking industry.  I mean seriously, it paid the bills pretty well, and I would’ve have free parking for years during Dragon*Con, but I have to say that it wasn’t a whole lot of fun saying I worked for SunTrust; as large as it was in Georgia and the eastern seaboard, it was still a regional bank and it was the equivalent of saying that I worked for like, Habib’s Fuel & Automotive in the grander spectrum of the world.

But back to the point at hand, with the name of the unholy union being established, that means that without any further question, the home of the Atlanta Braves is soon to become Truist Park.  I had to wiki it to make sure that it was going to be the de facto lamest name in all of Major League Baseball, but since I’ve completed my quest to visit all 30, I’ve fallen a little to the wayside when it comes to ballpark names.  And as gargantuan-ly lame as Truist Park is, I think there is some stiff competition when it comes to comparing to Guaranteed Rate Field (Chicago White Sox, replacing “The Cell” US Cellular Field (the worst park in MLB)) and RingCentral Coliseum (Oakland A’s, who are always plagued with bad names).  Ultimately, it’s like comparing herpes to chlamydia and gonorrhea, because no matter which name you have, it sucks.

Given the propensity of the Atlanta Braves to always go in the direction of profit > style, it’s no surprise that they’re going to be perfectly at home playing at a place called something as boring, vanilla and lame as Truist Park.  But damn if they aren’t going to get rich cashing in on those naming rights, despite the fact that the product on the field isn’t going to benefit one iota from said proceeds.  A bunch of old white guys need to take their slice of the pie first, as well as their seconds, before the Braves have any chance at possibly getting a little bit of forward investment to maybe succeed. 

I hear winning is pretty lucrative, but the risk-averse Braves don’t really seem the type to risk possibly finding out.  But misery loves company, and I think it’s pretty safe to say that pretty much any team not the Houston Astros seems pretty content on sitting on cruise control and cashing in on revenue sharing, and if they happen to win, great, but if not, that’s perfectly okay as well.  Fuck that, and fuck Truist Bank.  Need to figure out a simplistic and punny name for the new park, because “ScumTrust” is running out of time.

Black Mirror S5: I think we’re out of ideas

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m sure it’s a shock to those who know me, but I’m pretty staunch about the order in which I watch things.  Nowadays, content is released so frequently and there’s so much of it, there have literally been nights where all I do are surf through previews on Netflix and just add things To My List, but then don’t actually watch anything, because I’ve just spent 45 minutes combing through content and now it’s 11 pm and I need to think about going to bed.

Black Mirror however, is one of the few shows in which I’ll pretty much drop whatever else I’m watching and fast track it to the front of the line.  It’s a series that I’ve often extoled my general love and admiration for, and all the way up to Bandersnatch, I’ve always been a fan of the risks they take and the creativity they express when making the show.  The writing is strong, and the acting is often consistently strong, so it’s an easy show for me to have fallen in love with.

Season 5 of the show, understandably “short” on account of the fact that Bandersnatch kind of folds into it, was but a mere three episodes outside of the aforementioned choose your own adventure.  As a whole, I enjoyed the season, as I often did with all preceding seasons, but by the time I got done with it, I couldn’t help but have this sentiment that, I think the show is running out of ideas.

I stumbled across this specific article when Googling the show after watching the season, which is often times the norm after I watch a show, and it basically mirrors my exact thoughts about the season; the writing is still strong, the acting is still good, but in terms of storyline, the plots aren’t really as … innovative as episodes from earlier seasons have been.

Make no mistake, Striking Vipers is the unmistakable star of the season; every season has one, like how U.S.S. Callister shone through season 4, and Nosedive was for season 3, and at least for me, White Bear and Fifteen Million Merits were for seasons 2 and 1, respectively.  It was the one episode that wasn’t just the most outlandish, as lots of Black Mirror plots kind of are expected to me, but it’s one that provokes a tremendous amount of thought and debate on how the viewer(s) should feel.

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I’d be all in if this actually happened

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All.  In.  If the Braves were to rename the ballpark after Waffle House.  100%.  Maybe even get a season ticket package of some sort.  It would be the perfect catalyst for anyone to go balls deep into, or back into Atlanta Braves fandom, because the time couldn’t possibly be more appropriate given the talent movement going on with the club right now.  I just need a little push, or a little nudge.. or just that slight positive association of the greasy spoons where I’ve never had a bad meal in my life where I could feel comfort knowing that the restaurant I like to go to the most after drinking is partnered up with the sports franchise that makes me want to drink.

Although the possibility of something like Waffle House Field coming to fruition is like as likely as my job not sucking any time soon, the logic behind the really is a solid.  I didn’t think for a second that upon the collection of ScumTrust by BB&T, that the conglomerate would even consider for two seconds to give up the naming rights to ScumTrust Park.  I just, and still assume that whenever the transition is complete, it’s just going to remain something as soulless and corporately square like “BB&T Park” and continue existing as the vanilla mass of land in which baseball is occasionally played while they soak in accolades and praise from equally square and vanilla white people who think they know something about architecture with character.

But imagine a world in which the Scum&T blob decided that paying the Braves millions of dollars to slap their name on a stadium that exists outside of Charlotte, North Carolina.  Or the Braves actually growing a spine and deciding that it would be nice if their ballpark were named after an actual Georgia company, instead of a banking company that turned tail and ran towards the money.  What better business would there be to take the keys to the ballpark than Waffle House?  Sure, Coca-Cola comes to mind, as does Delta Airlines or The Home Depot.  And as Oprah-rich as those businesses are, they’re still businesses that some people still have to stop and think about to remember that they’re companies based out of Atlanta.  Waffle House is definitively, a symbol of the south, which is something that the Braves often try to declare themselves, regardless of the cultural clash between representing the south versus hoarding money like a true Wall Street grub.

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I wonder if there’s any coming back this time

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

MomoCon was this past weekend, and I didn’t go at all, even despite future wife and I having free badges, courtesy of a friend who worked for the con.  We had a lot of wedding decorations to do over the weekend, which consumed pretty much the entire three-day weekend, but the thing is that even if we had no plans, I can’t say that I really would’ve gone anyway. 

I didn’t really know of that many people who were going that I’d have wanted to hope to run into.  And frankly, I had little desire to fight the traffic to go into Downtown Atlanta on a holiday weekend, and I didn’t really feel much desire or inspiration to get my camera out and take pictures of costumers.

The thing is, this time last year, I was in a position where I had wanted to go to MomoCon, but couldn’t, because I had to entertain guests in from out of town.  I had undeniable FOMO as the weekend trucked along and I wasn’t there and I was disappointed that I didn’t get to go when the weekend had passed.

However this year, I felt no FOMO at all, and I simply didn’t care that didn’t go.  I thought maybe it’s because my weekend was so booked up was why I felt that way, but as I said, there’s no guarantee that I would’ve gone in the first place even if I had the free time.

What I’m getting to is that I think I’m over conventions again.  I say again, because for those who’ve known me for a long time, might remember a stretch of time where I was kind of burned out on conventions, and I really stopped going and actively sought out alternative things to do during them so I could deliberately distance myself from them.  There was part of me that was just being a hipster about things growing in popularity, and there was another part of me that was growing jaded by the increasing notion that conventions were turning into vehicles for attention-starved narcissists to be fake, and some really unsavory clique culture forming.

I eventually got excited about them again, because I had a lot of friends who started becoming the people that ran them, and gave me a little bit of preferential treatment if I showed up to them, and that I also had other friends who were very inclusive of adding me to their costume groups and gave me real drive and objective to wanting to participate and attend.  For a couple of years, cons were fun again, and I was enjoying them again.

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Why I don’t really think AEW is a threat

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Watching highlight packages of AEW’s company-launching pay-per-view event, Double or Nothing, I definitely thought the company has a pretty solid roster of wrestlers to build upon, but I couldn’t help but feel this suspicion of a lot of things that I think are going to hold them back or just be plain detrimental to their budding fed.

As much as the quality of the wrestling was fairly competitive to the talent in the WWE, ROH or NJPW, it’s mostly the way the company presents itself that makes me feel dubious that AEW has more possibility of being the next TNA and not the next WCW, as someone who really has a chance to stand up to the WWE and really compete.

And I don’t bring up WCW without reason, because as much as WCW really did rise and compete with WWE, in the end they still fell apart and ultimately suffered an end worse than defeat, which was being assimilated into the machine, getting purchased for pennies on the dollar, mostly so that the WWE could have the rights to their tapes archives over the vast majority of any actual living human talent.

But it’s because so much of Double or Nothing felt like they borrowed the WCW playbook for Monday Nitro #1.  From the very start of the show, with “Good ‘ol JR” Jim Ross welcoming viewers to the show, to Justin Roberts doing the announcing in the ring, it was the exact play WCW did using Bobby Heenan and “Mean Gene” Okerlund to be their voices and kind of trick casual fans into getting a feeling of familiarity and hopefully stick around.

Then came a really convoluted battle royale featuring their young and mostly lesser-known talent, peppered in with, former WWE guys like Tye Dillinger.  Even not knowing who 80% of the competitors in the ring was, it was still highly predictable to guess who was going to be the last few guys in the contest, and when Hangman Adam Page hit the ring, the winner was all but decided, because anyone who follows wrestling knows Adam Page is a part of the clique that basically made a mass exodus from New Japan in order to create AEW.

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What’s old is new again

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Once upon a time, I got a replica of the WCW United States championship, and that was my first ever championship belt.  Then one day, I got a WWF European Championship, and then not long after that, I sniped an ECW World Championship on eBay.

Around this time, I made a goal for myself that five would be the number of belts I would aspire to get, because at the time, I had this perfect corner shelf for championship belts that had five spaces, and I thought it would look great with every shelf occupied.  Eventually, I tracked down an attitude-era WWF World Championship belt, and after one fortuitous trip to Las Vegas, my brother and I each got ourselves a WCW Tag Team Championship belt to signify our life-long unity.  The shelf was now full.

But then one of my best friends got married, and I just so happen to track down a set of WWF Tag Team Championship belts, so I decided to signify that life-long unity with another belt.  Then, I just so happened to be farting around on eBay, and stumbled across a WCW Big Gold belt replica.  And then for whatever reason I was on eBay again, and came across an ECW Television Championship and threw out a fairly low best offer, which was miraculously accepted.  And then Cody Rhodes bust out the white strap Intercontinental championship which inspired me to go look on eBay, and I came across an egregiously low-priced classic WWF Intercontinental Championship and it was unavoidable.

I actually don’t remember the context to what made me look for them, but I came across a pair of ECW Tag Team Championship belts, and I purchased them, and gave one of them to my brother.  I’m pretty sure it was as a birthday gift.

This put me at ten belts.  A nice round number.  It seemed like a good place to stop.  My shelf was long since full, and I’d actually been keeping an eye out for another one just like it, and had come close a few times at a few antique markets in my area.

But then one of my close friends gave me access to his WWE Network account, and I started watching NXT.  And then I saw Andrade Cien Almas vs. Johnny Gargano and suddenly I really wanted to get an NXT Championship replica.  Shortly after that, I started watching some New Japan stuff after hearing all these things about this guy named Kenny Omega, and the legendary match he just had with their world champion, Kazuchika Okada.  And then I really felt like an IWGP World Championship was something that my collection needed.

By now, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that there’s probably never going to be a formal “end” to my collection, and thankfully because I display them on the wall, there’s not going to be the same challenges of limited shelf space to limit the growth of my collection.

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It could only have ended poorly

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I was in the third grade, I used to “read” Choose Your Own Adventure books by deliberately making the worst possible decisions possible in order to get to a The End as fast as I could.  And as soon as I got myself killed, about to be killed, or in a position to eventually die, I declared the book “read” and entered it into my Pizza Hut-sponsored Book-It reading list, where every 4-5 finished books meant a certificate for a free Pizza Hut pan pizza, which meant a perfect excuse for my parents to take me to Pizza Hut, which undoubtedly contributed greatly to my childhood obesity.

I abused the hell out of this system, until my teacher caught onto my little system, and eventually prohibited me from reading anymore Choose Your Own Adventure books, at least as far as the Book-It program was concerned.  I eventually began reading them more thoroughly, and enjoyed a vast number of them throughout their publication, but the point is, the whole thing started with me reading like six pages of the book in total, and deliberately making all the worst choices, in order to get to an ending, regardless of if it were good or bad.

So that being said, Game of Thrones.  The series is now, officially over.  For better or worse, considering the putrid manner in which the series ended.  I’m still mentally deliberating on where GoT’s ending falls in comparison to other shitty endings out there, and I think I’m a place where it’s somewhere in between Mass Effect 3, and the series finale to Dexter.  Needless to say, that puts in pretty rarified air of being especially terrible, and a lot of it probably has to do with the fact that all aforementioned series’ churned along swimmingly at various points and collected large numbers of dedicated fans, sucking up emotions and commitment and dedication for several years, before taking all their hopes and dreams for a good ending, stabbing them in the heart, boating them into a hurricane and synthesizing them with machines.

I mean, I can’t say for a second that I didn’t see this coming.  Endings are the hardest thing in the world for any story, and the list of popular, epic and legendary stories that have shitty endings is longer than the equator.  Plus, the dumpster fire that episodes 4 and 5 steered the story going into the finale all but sealed the series’ fate as just another story with a shitty ending incoming, because they simply went past the point of no return in episode 5.  The question really was, how shitty the finale was going to be, because at this point, the vast majority of people I knew who watched the show had all resigned themselves to the obvious notion that it was going to suck.

And boy, did it ever suck.  I found myself predicting just about everything that occurred in the episode like 10 seconds before it happened, like particular characters saying certain things, doing certain actions, or predicting very obvious outcomes.  Getting back to the point of talking about Choose Your Own Adventure books, it legitimately felt like the entire season 8 was one live-action Choose Your Own Adventure story, where there was one linear plot that consumes the majority of the season, but when it comes time to start winding down, there was literally nothing but a whole bunch of shitty and rushed endings, where not a single one of them is capable of making the viewer not seem I’m not mad, just disappointed.

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