The unnecessary aggravation of League of Legends

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s no secret that I tend to play a lot of old shit.  I played Left 4 Dead long after the heydays passed by, and the public servers were reduced to long queue times and dwindling players whom began to all look familiar as players gradually disappeared.  On my phone, I still play Pokémon Go and Fire Emblem Heroes despite the fact that the OCD generation of gamers have already flocked onto at least 2-3 other more recent and time/money sucking mobile games.  And, with some regularity, I am still playing League of Legends.

Oh, League of Legends.

I can’t honestly say that I believe that they’re still the world’s most played video game anymore, what with the Overwatch League really gaining momentum, and Fortnite seeming like today what my nightly L4D sessions were 8-9 years ago (really, that long ago?).  Despite my general interest in both games, I have an issue with first and third-person perspectives where they make me a little motion sick and it takes me some time and reps to break through until it doesn’t bother me, and despite the fact that I overcame them in the past with L4D, Resident Evil and Mass Effect titles, I just don’t really feel like investing the time yet to do it again.  So, I still continue to play League, which hasn’t totally alienated me like it pretty much has with all of my other friends and mythical gf, all of whom I used to play with on a very regular, nightly basis.

That is until my most recent losing streak, which hit eight games last night.  And put me in a really dejected, and salty mood, that lingered up until this morning, even after a night’s sleep.  The thing is, this isn’t even my worst losing streak ever (14 consecutive losses), but at the current combination of game interest and the stage of my life in general, this particular losing streak really left me feeling with a completely disillusioned feeling that I’ve completely wasted my time and debating on whether or not I should just stop cold turkey, and go find something more constructive to do with my time.

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If the John Cena-Nikki Bella split isn’t a work, it should be

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I have to admit that I’m a little surprised at how much mainstream media coverage the breakup between John Cena and Nikki Bella has been, because no matter how big or small wrestling gets, performers in the industry seldom make any mainstream media unless it involves them dying or they’re The Rock.

I can’t say that I’m the least bit surprised that this happened because ultimately I don’t believe that people are really capable of change without some traumatic or life-altering instances happening in their lives, and considering John Cena’s life and career has been mostly the same over the last decade, I’m pretty sure that regardless of what ear candy he’s said about having changed towards the ideas of marriage and children, he really hasn’t.  As much as sucks for Nikki Bella or any person who has to endure a breakup with a long-term love, it’s hard to say that John Cena wasn’t being transparent about his attitudes towards certain things, for quite some time now.

Sure, it’s probably a dick move that he proposed and let this roller coaster ascend to the heights it did mostly because of the fact that Cena is a moment-junkie, in the sense that he’s completely sold on the notion that Wrestlemania is where “moments are made,” and he probably went a little too far in the pursuit of a moment and proposed marriage despite the fact that he was against marriage, but frankly as much as it sucks right now, it’s probably for the best that they ended things now instead of after being married and possibly with kids that also Cena would have been against in the first place.  Sure, Cena would have obviously protected himself with a pre-nuptual, because he wouldn’t even let Nikki move in without any sort of contract, much less married her, but divorce regardless is undoubtedly messier than a breakup between non-spouses.

At first blush, my knee-jerk reaction to this news was that it was the seeds to what could possibly be the first real swerve towards an audience beyond just the wrestling fanbase, considering that both John Cena and Nikki Bella have transcended the wrestling industry with movies and their reality television shows.  If the WWE played their cards right, it would be a golden opportunity to get people outside of wrestling fans to possibly tune into flagship programming and/or tie themselves into WWE Network subscriptions, because they’re drama junkies eager to see the blurred reality of the fallout of their breakup – but in the ring.

Now more level-headed thinking probably understands that this is probably more on the side of reality, since despite his in-ring persona, John Cena is barely anything other than a robotic tool, moldable to promotion and malleable to anything that can continue to make him look like a superstar, and getting married and being strong-armed into having kids would definitely compromise his stardom potential.

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If this is what constitutes acceptable design, I need to change careers

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

what the fuck is this shit

Were the exact words that my brain said when I looked at the new Creative Loafing Atlanta website.

I thought maybe the site had been hacked or something, and whatever Russian or Chinese hacking organization was deliberately using a 4-bit retro Oregon Trail looking interface as their ransom page demanding some Bitcoins in exchange for control over their website again, but after a few minutes, not seconds, of figuring out how the new navigation worked, it was pretty much confirmed that this was in fact, the new Creative Loafing Atlanta.

To cut to the chase, this is basically the worst redesign that I’ve ever seen in my entire life.  It’s worse than when Pepsi tried to use the Golden Ratio and the Vitruvian Man to explain their logo, which was pretty bad considering it literally cost Pepsi $1.4 million dollars for a PowerPoint so inflated with bullshit that it could have incinerated Palo Alto if it caught on fire.  But that’s just a logo, on a line of products that lots of people otherwise enjoy to indulge in regardless of what logo was slapped onto the bottles.

Creative Loafing Atlanta was already a publication in more or less rag status, and they’re an entity that can’t really afford to fuck up on design when whether people admit it or not, love to judge books by their covers.  And yet, here we stand, with a website that looks like an unintentional glitch, or your monitor fell face first and when you propped it back up, pixels are dead and busted, resulting in the horrific interface that currently loads.

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Final Thoughts on Wrestlemania week

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been completely slammed at work, so I haven’t really had much of a chance to write about my thoughts about the grandest show of them all™, but on the other hand, with the entire week now behind us, I’ve had more time to play catch up with everything from the pre-pre show (NXT TakeOver), the pre-show, the entire five-hour clusterfuck that was Wrestlemania itself, highlights from both the following Raw and Smackdown, as well as the first NXT show post-Mania.

Needless to say, I have opinions on all of it, otherwise this post wouldn’t exist.

It goes without question that NXT TakeOver: New Orleans was the clear superior show over the last week, and I’m really beginning to question the WWE’s methodology of pairing TakeOvers with the big four PPVs of the year.  According to multiple sources (wrestling personality autobiographies), it’s been stated that Vince McMahon himself and his production team have this idea that crowds have a finite number of “pops” AKA crowd reactions per night, and that certain wrestlers have been discouraged from saying certain things or doing certain moves that would elicit a pop at a point of the show that would be one less pop for during the main event.

Although the terminology is kind of silly, there’s no denying the idea that crowds do have finite amounts of energy, and that it is entirely possible to burnout a crowd with shows that go too long, or there simply being too many shows to catch.  That being said, all of the aforementioned shows occurred in the same two venues within New Orleans, and sure thousands of people converge on a city whenever Wrestlemania is in town, but it’s safe to assume that the same people are often times the ones hitting up all of the shows all week long.  I love wrestling as much as the next smark does, but I for one have zero desire to go to that many shows in a week.  Give me TakeOver, and I’ll be content to watch the rest of the programs on my projector from the comfort of my cushy leather recliner.

Back to the point, I think WWE isn’t maximizing their pop potential by pairing TakeOvers with the big four shows of the year; if anything at all, it’s almost counterproductive to the logic of burning out crowds, especially when the facts have been that the NXT roster has been routinely outperforming their main roster counterparts for the better part of the last two years now.

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The zero-sum gain of jobbing Asuka

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Because I was out of town during Wrestlemania, I didn’t get home until the show was pretty much over.  Miraculously, I was able to stay away from the shitshow cancer of social media and somehow avoid all of the shitty live posting that people I know tend to do, but at mythical gf’s advice, I decided to watch some of the matches that I really wanted to see and not get spoiled to, instead of going to bed immediately after getting home.  There wouldn’t have really been any way to have avoided spoilers the following day, considering aside from the wasteland of social media commentating on everything, mainstream outlets like ESPN now like to cover wrestling as well these days.

Needless to say, among the two matches I was most intrigued about going into Wrestlemania, one was the AJ Styles vs. Shinsuke Nakamura match, and the other was Charlotte vs. Asuka.  Those were the only two matches I bothered watching immediately when I got home; and although I am glad to have gotten through both of the matches without getting spoiled, when the night was over I was disappointed in both, for slightly differing reasons.

Styles and Nakamura completely failed to capture the magic of Wrestle Kingdom 10 in Japan from just two years ago, leading to a fairly uninspired and lackluster match that makes me feel like both have aged past their primes and it was painfully apparent and/or the fact that WWE has the miraculous ability to hinder and suppress the talents of even the most capable wrestlers on the planet.

But obviously, the bigger objection I had from the entire show was the [spoiler alert] decision to have Charlotte defeat Asuka, thus ending her undefeated streak, the single most valuable commodity that the WWE as a whole had left.  As silly as it sounds to be willing to wager on a fake sport with predetermined outcomes, I would have wagered money that Asuka was going to defeat Charlotte, take the blue Women’s Championship, and then held the belt for at least another year, before her streak would have come to an end.  Along the way, they would do some shitty technicalities like having her lose in a tag team match, lose via countout or disqualification, before she would eventually have the last bastion of claiming that she had never been pinned or forced to tap out, preferably sometime in 2019, where she would eventually lose to someone completely deserving or qualified.

However, WWE seemed to have different plans in mind, and just like that, Asuka’s streak is over, and she’s now just another member of the women’s roster with nothing special except superior workrate, deep arsenal and international flair.

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The NXT North American Championship seems like a waste

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As much of a wrestling smark as I can sometimes be, I’m not going to pretend like I knew much about Adam Cole prior to his arrival in NXT.  I knew of his name, and that he was a guy that was pretty big in Ring of Honor, but frankly I didn’t even know what he looked like.  When he showed up in NXT and superkicked Drew McIntyre, my knee-jerk reactions was that he was kind of a Shawn Michaels clone, in look, ring presence and the fact that he whipped out a superkick as the very first thing on screen.

Over the following weeks, I watched Cole with interest and naturally read up on his career up to date on Wikipedia, but I had this suspicion that he was probably going to be an entertaining guy to watch.  Between all the matches he had jobbing to Aleister Black, War Games and his other sporadic appearances, it’s safe to say that I felt that he was a really good talent, and was among the guys I looked forward to seeing the most on episodes of NXT.

When NXT announced the creation of the NXT North American Championship, and that the inaugural champion would be crowned during a six-man ladder match, I kind of cringed when I saw that Adam Cole was tabbed as one of the contenders for the new belt.  But at the same time, I had a sinking suspicion that he was the one most likely to win the belt, because the whole Undisputed Era stable seemed like one of the things going to be relied upon to carry the brand over the next calendar year, and there would be no more serious way to bolster them than to have Adam Cole himself getting his hands on some hardware.

And true to prophecy, Adam Cole did win the North American Championship, and I was a combination of happy to see a guy I enjoyed watching win a title, unsurprised because I kind of figured this was going to happen, but at the same time a little bit disappointed that Cole won it.

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You know what fucking sucks?  Live tweeting

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It was Sunday, April 9th, 2018.  I was sitting in an airport terminal waiting for my flight from Orlando to Atlanta to start boarding so we could begin our journey back home.  Mythical gf and I had just spent a lovely weekend at Disney World where we couldn’t possibly have gotten any better weather than we did.  We dined on a lobster bake at Disney Springs, imbibed in refreshing beverages at the Hangar Bar.  We leisurely ate around the floral world at Epcot’s Flower & Garden Festival, and I caught a Heracross in Pikachu Game, the South American exclusive while there.  And due to some strategic planning on account of some typical Florida rain, we managed to ride the Avatar ride that typically has anywhere from a 3-4 hour wait with regularity, in under an hour.

It was a lovely trip.

However, Sunday, April 9th 2018 was also the same day that Wrestlemania 34 was scheduled.  Obviously, seldom am I ever going to prioritize a wrestling show over mythical gf, and I didn’t even bother crosschecking when WM was going to be when we planned our trip, not that it would have impacted anything in the least bit.  But the fact of the matter was that I still wanted to watch the show when I got back home and had a good 3-6 hours of free time because when taking into account of TakeOver and the pre-show and all the promos, who really knows how much time the ‘rasslin is going to account for.

This is often how I keep up with wrestling these days, watching things after they’ve aired, so that I can really flesh out the main storylines and plots without having to sit through all the commercials and extraneous fluff.  Obviously, I run the risk of encountering spoilers on a regular basis, but seeing as how WWE programming runs every single week, and multiple times a week, and the fact that personally I don’t know a tremendous amount of people that are really still into wrestling, it’s typically never really a problem to indulge in wrestling the way I do.

Except, when it comes to the big pay-per-view shows; like Summer Slam, the Royal Rumble, or, Wrestlemania.

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