Tag: television

Of course there’s a BTE Championship blet

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s funny: despite Cody Rhodes’ insistence that he doesn’t believe in mid-card titles, he sure helps run a fed that seems to be utilizing a whole lot of mid-card titles.  Like most wrestling federations, AEW has a world champion, tag team champions, as well as a women’s champion.

But in addition to the trademark blets, AEW also has a TNT championship which I’m still not entirely sure of the logic behind it but is somehow more regarded to than the world championship.  Despite the fact that it doesn’t really count for anything, Brian Cage is running around wearing Taz’s old FTW championship blet from ECW, and despite the fact that they keep saying it’s not recognized by AEW, everyone knows it’s only a matter of time before it’s going to trade hands and suddenly become a thing.  Because Billy Corgan sucks and has basically killed the NWA, Serena Deeb is representing and defending the NWA women’s championship on AEW, and by virtue of regularly appearing and performing, has surpassed their own women’s championship, much like the TNT blet.

More recently, because AEW has interestingly enough opened the doors to collaborations with other feds, TNA Impact’s tag team champions, Karl Anderson and Luke Gallows have been usurping screen time on AEW programming to promote Impact shows.  And even more recently, KENTA from New Japan Pro Wrestling has shown up to advance his feud with Jon Moxley over the IWGP United States Championship, which has yet to physically show up on AEW, but has been referenced as the justification for KENTA’s run-in.

And although it’s not a blet, let’s not forget the AEW Dynamite Diamond ring that is a low-key title, twice held by MJF, and has won by virtue of a battle royale, that everyone is desperate to win.

Oh yeah, Kenny Omega is also Mexico’s AAA champion, and has brought that belt onto Dynamite, to antagonize Rey Fenix, the man he defeated to win it. 

So, for those keeping count, outside of the traditional standard championships in AEW, there are six seven titles-not-midcard-titles floating around in the AEW atmosphere right now.

For those who like to criticize the WWE universe for having too many blets, at least there are some fairly defined lines and separation between the jurisdictions of them, and six different weekly shows in which they are circulating between, and not one weekly show, and one YouTube show.

But speaking of YouTube, add one more blet to the mix of AEW-related championships, because of course there had to have been a BTE World Championship blet added into existence, because nothing is more epitomizing of the importance of BTE than giving it its own championship belt.

Continue reading “Of course there’s a BTE Championship blet” →

Probably how Screech would have wanted to go out

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Not necessarily the dying at age 44 part, but most definitely the part where everyone* on the old Saved by the Bell cast is probably left feeling like a bunch of assholes.  Regardless, it was unfortunate, and sad to hear that Dustin Diamond AKA Screech from Saved by the Bell, passes away from lung cancer, despite the fact that he alleged to never have been a smoker at all.

*except Mario Lopez, who seems to have been the only member of the old cast to ever have reached out to Diamond to make amends prior to his passing

I’ve made no secret that I loved Saved by the Bell.  It was definitely one of the shows of my childhood, and I can to this day, with great clarity, make SbtB references and analogies to even the most obscure episodes.  There’s nary a week where I don’t make at least one Jessie Spano on caffeine pills SO EXCITED reference, and the general cast are almost biblical characters in how often they can be compared to, when describing other human beings.

That being said, it’s also been no secret that since the heydays of Bayside’s finest, the alumni of the show have not been particularly nice to Screech since everyone went their separate ways.  The popular narrative, as told mostly by Screech himself, is that among the cast and the crew, he was the youngest of them all, and was therefore systematically alienated and left out of the cool kids’ club throughout their time on the show as well as all traces afterward.

Dustin Diamond clearly held sour grapes to his Bayside brethren throughout the years, and unfortunately that kind of vitriol seemed to poison everything about his post SbtB career; whereas Zack maintained an acting career even to this day, Kelly went onto 90210, Slater went onto be the male morning talk personality, Jessie did Showgirls and even Mr. Belding parlayed his career into all sort of personal appearances and cameos, it’s hard to really say what Screech did afterward.

He certainly spent a lot of time trying to tear down the posse that shunned him, with projects like the tell-all Beyond the Bell, and the Lifetime-released Unauthorized Saved by the Bell Story, and when all else seemed to fail, he resorted to celebrity boxing and even released a porno, thus feeding the age-old narrative that people really will, pay to see just about anyone, fucking on tape.

For the most part, the rest of the SbtB crew no-sold the shit out of Screech’s attempts to deride them, which in itself is sad on all parts; it was clear that Screech just wanted to be a part of the gang, a lifelong member of Zack Attack, but was going about it in the worst possible manner; and as a result of the antagonization, the rest of the crew gleefully went about their lives, continuing to shun and deny Screech from anything and everything potentially related to any sort of SbtB reunions.

With the coup de grace being a legendary skit on Jimmy Fallon, where pretty much the entire crew, minus Screech (and Lisa, who more or less got into drugs and religion at different points and mostly dropped off the face of the planet, but didn’t seem to hold ill will or have any real desire to stay in Zack Attack), where everyone reprised their old roles and acted out a skit with Jimmy Fallon basically being the nerdy dork who needed Zack and Co to help a brother out.

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Can people on the internet just shut the fuck up

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I know it’s a rhetorical question with the answer being a very obvious NO, but still, I really really really wish people could just shut the fuck up all the time sometimes.

One of the things that I thought was refreshing about WandaVision was the fact that I was completely blind going into it.  I had no earthly idea on what was going to happen, how it came to be, the general players of the series, and most importantly, zero idea to what the source material(s) was going to be.

As much as I enjoyed large swaths of the MCU Phase 1, everyone knew what the source material was, and everyone basically knew how it was going to end.  Most everyone who read comic books at all during the 90s knew what The Infinity Saga was, and it was always widely available in trade paperbacks, or people could just look on Wikipedia to get straight to the point of how it all played out.  Although MCU took tons of liberties on how things transpired, there was a very basic and inevitable conclusion to the journey, and it was pretty much as expected through and through.

After a little bit of a hiatus, restructuring and Didney engulfing even more properties and licenses, the next phase has been launched, primarily with the Disney+ deployment, and the early installment of the series starts with WandaVision.

It’s weird, I have no idea what’s really going on, but there are hints and glimpses of things to come which all seems pretty interesting.  But I’m also loving the general creativity of the visuals, the entertaining journey through time, and just how everything is so crisply presented.

One thing I noticed early on was that despite the supposed 35-minute run times of each episode, around 7-8 minutes of it is dedicated to the credits; it was pointed out to me that the filming of the show, as well as all other future TV series, were basically filmed like movies, but then broken up into episodes, so it seems apparent that each episode seems to be running the full ending credits for what amounts to a film; it’s kind of annoying, and deceptive to the run time, but after realizing that there’s no mid or post credits scenes, I haven’t bothered sitting through them again.

But that was clearly just me; because I try to practice what I preach, I won’t get into the granular details of what’s already been revealed to me because people on the internet can’t shut the fuck up, and are even worse at blurting out spoiler-y clickbait headlines, but I was scrolling through theFacebook, I noticed this headline about how some particular words used in the lengthy credits for WandaVision give some pretty predominant hints on what is to come, plot-wise, and because of the aforementioned inability to shut the fuck up, they basically go on to name it in the subtext, visible in plain sight, plain as day.

So great, now that I’ve seen that, things kind of make a little more sense, and I can kind of see the wireframes of how the show is going to get to such a narrative.

Because a bunch of nerds have to know what the source material or end game of the series is, they have to ruin it for people like me, who simply want to enjoy the ride, not think too fucking hard about things, and accept things as they’re presented to me.

It’s times like this I loathe the internet and social media especially, but because I don’t want to be an island of a person again, it’s not something that I can just walk away from cold turkey.  But god damn does it infuriate me from time to time, and it’s sad that the world is so dependent on it that we can’t seem to operate without.

Don’t know what to do with free time when I have it

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I could’ve written this last night.  Or the night before.  But instead, I’m writing it now, under the challenge of wanting to knock out something before I have to go wake up my child from the first nap of the day, because I’m feeling like I haven’t really accomplished anything productive over the weekends that I pine for during the week, but have no idea what to do when they finally arrive.

So I close my work laptop on Friday afternoon, and spend the rest of the afternoon playing with my daughter until it’s time for her to go to bed.  Bath time, and then bed time, and after she’s asleep, I finally have some free time for myself for a few hours, before I go to bed at a conservative hour because I’m up at 6:30 am every single day and I don’t want to bone myself just because I want to stay up late just because it’s the weekend.

I don’t really do anything at all.  I sit at my laptop watching random YouTube clips of chiropractor cracking, Initial D, and the seemingly endless parade of rehashed Parks & Recreation clips.  Actually, I take that back partially, I watched the first two episodes of WandaVision, which I think it’s too early to tell how I feel about it, except that I’m able to stay in the game with it unlike Legion, but both episodes combined were about 45 minutes once you factor in the 14 minutes of ending credits in the first two episodes.

Before I know it, it’s 11:07 pm, it’s too late for me to watch anything else, but it’s still a hair earlier than I’d rather go to bed, so instead I lay in bed playing Fire Emblem Heroes or doing surveys for pennies on my phone until it’s time to go to bed.

Saturday was a pretty good day, as I like to tie in little excursions amidst caring for my child throughout the day and in between her naps, so that we can all feel like we’re actually leaving our house, even if it the vast majority of places are contactless or curbside pickups.  We tried a new restaurant, ran some errands with no complications, and I heard from a friend that had been on my mind lately.  I felt in such good spirits, I felt as if I should capitalize and buy a lottery ticket, since the Powerball was up to $640M, and why the fuck not.

Baby goes to bed, and then it’s really more of the same – I don’t really know what to do, so I end up sitting at my laptop dicking around, feeling like I should at least watch something, hemming and hawing for way longer than most people typically do, and then watching the last two episodes of Lovecraft Country that I hadn’t seen, except my heart’s not really into it, and I ultimately end up thinking it’s just kind of okay.  Now it’s 11 pm, and I’m thinking of retiring so I don’t kill myself at 6:30 the next morning.

Which brings us to today.  Instead of the one nap I give myself while baby naps (that was done on Saturday), I go ahead and get my every-other-day run out of the way.  I pre-prepare a recipe that mythical wife and I hope will be baby-friendly, and now I’m sitting here thinking that I’ve let a large portion of the weekend go to waste, and musing at the simple fact that I don’t really know what to do with my free time whenever I do have any.  I could watch television or movies and chip into the queues that have bloated to gargantuan proportions, but then I often times get choice paralysis and then end up shutting down from overstimulation, and instead wishing that there were just more 90 Day Fiance or My 600 Lb. Life to watch instead, which are the only shows that I really truly stay up on top of.

But that’s where I’m at now.  I just don’t really know what to do with my free time, and that alone is enough to make me anxious and wordy but not do anything about it.  It just becomes a topic for me to mindlessly brog about to consume 25 minutes in a manner that doesn’t feel like completely a waste.  Then soon will be time to wake up my child, and proceed with her day, and if she’s fussy or cranky, then I’m guiltily counting down the clock until the next nap to when I can have some free time that I don’t know what to do with, and then the cycle continues until it’s time to go to bed and then a larger cycle continues.

It sounds way more depressing than I actually feel, but when I try to look at things objectively, that’s really how it kind of looks.  But at least I hit the Powerball three times, so I’ll get back a whopping $12 on my $20 investment.

OK, let’s talk about Cobra Kai S3

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

[Full disclosure]: I make no promises that I will not write things that can be construed as spoilers.  Read at your own risk, if you think Cobra Kai is as so bad it’s great as I do.

Despite the fact that I think I’ve established that I have very little free time to myself on a very regular basis, I still made it a point to churn through Cobra Kai season 3, fairly pretty quickly as soon as it dropped.  It’s very fortuitous that the episodes are all barely 22-30 minutes, so they breeze by quickly, and it’s very easy to binge watch and complete without that much commitment, and of course, the show is so fucking terrible that I can’t help but think it’s great.

That kind of description doesn’t really help to determine on whether I like it or not, but when the day is over, I’ve seen every single episode of the show, and I have no real regrets in watching.  I’ve also written and analyzed the show numerous times on the brog, back when I was still acting like it was beneath me and I was doing the show a tremendous favor by writing about it.

Anyway, S3 – shotgunned it, and finished it in two days, over one evening and two baby naps.

Continue reading “OK, let’s talk about Cobra Kai S3” →

The Mandalorian Season 2 Thoughts

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Mythical wife and I just caught up with The Mandalorian’s second season, which is kind of miraculous in its own right, as we’re both on new parent schedules plus we don’t want to introduce our child to screens, so our general television consumption is probably a tenth of what most of our friends and family tend to watch.  The fact that we’re only a week removed from the finale is a miracle, since there’s a litany of shows and movies that we’ve stated interest in wanting to watch but the realism is that it’ll be eons before we do, if we even remember to watch them in the first place.

However, a week removed wasn’t nearly enough time for the shitheads of the internet to spoil a ton of shit for us in advance of our opportunity to watch the show.  Between all of the excitable fuckwits on social media who couldn’t shut the fuck up even if it there were guns held to their family’s heads, and now actual sci-fi/pop culture sites themselves just outright blow covers and spoilers under the guise that there’s some appropriate official statute of limitation when it comes to being allowed to talk about shit, it’s been impossible for mythical wife and myself to not get spoiled to varying capacities.

Mythical wife apparently got it worse than I did, because of her choice of people she connects with, but even a relative shut-in like me was still spoiled to some degree when someone posted a gif of X doing Y, revealing a pretty substantial moment of the show (was that so fucking difficult, no), so we agreed that before it could get any worse, we needed to buckle down and watch the show before I declared jihad on everyone I know for when they would inevitably spoil more shit for me.

Yes, it sounds like I’m making my problems the problems of others, but at the same time, do people really lack the common sense to just shut the fuck up about things for just a little while?  Yes, the answer is always yes.

Regardless of quality of acting, plot, and other superlatives, one of the greatest things about The Mandalorian in general, is that they’re fairly quick and short episodes, and it’s a very easy show to stay on top of, provided the effort is put forth to actually start watching it.

And just like that, I’ve conveniently blathered on long enough to create a meaty post that hasn’t actually gotten to the point, and now I can comfortably tuck anything else that might be considered spoiler-ey behind a cut.

Continue reading “The Mandalorian Season 2 Thoughts” →

Advent Beer #22: Kurpfalz Bräu Kellerbier by Weldebräu

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

With just three days left in the journey, I’m really hoping to have at least one stalwart bier to drink out of the boot from, and I’m still kicking myself a little bit for not busting the boot out sooner, if not from the start.  And when I saw “kellerbier” listed on today’s can, I thought to myself, I’ve had a kellerbier before, and looking back, it was First Coral that was also a kellerbier, which sat at the top of the rankings until Day 16, so I felt that this might just be a worthy bier to be drinking from my boot.

Unfortunately, the fact that it’s also a kellerbier is about where all the comparisons end, because after beating the bubble and finishing off the boot, this one just wasn’t really at all that fantastic, and definitely not worthy of being savored from within the boot.  I should’ve seen the red flags of just how much of the can was actually translated into English instead of remaining in its native Deutsch, so a demerit goes towards Kurpfalz Bräu for Americanizing it up too much, in spite of having probably the most German name of all the beers there’ve been so far.

It wasn’t a bad beer, but it also wasn’t a great beer either.  Considering my first exposure to a kellerbier sat at the top of the rankings for over two weeks, I had higher hopes for this, and perhaps the expectations of the prior kellerbier was the downfall to Kurpfalz, because it was just kind of grassy and bitter, and had a dry finish that left me feeling thirsty and unsatisfied in the end.

It’s sad too, because I was having a good evening with a stomach full of Mexican takeout, mythical wife and I were bingeing the last few episodes of The Mandalorian season 2, my daughter was sleeping soundly which hadn’t happened in quite a few nights, I ran yesterday so tonight was a no-run relaxing night and an outstanding beer from my boot would have been the perfect topper to what was already a fairly pleasant day.  But the bier was a letdown, there’s only two more beers to go, and I only have hopes that the creators of the calendar had it in their minds to stack some home runs at the tail end to hopefully walk-off with, because boot or not boot, ending strong is going to be important.  FOR THE SAKE OF CHRISTMAS.

Current Rankings:

  1. Jubilation Suds (#18)
  2. Bären Weisse (#16)
  3. First Coral (#2)
  4. Kirta (#5)
  5. Turbo Prop (#6)
  6. Schwarze Tinte (#13)
  7. Perlenzauber (#9)
  8. Loncium Vienna Style Lager (#12)
  9. Märzenbier (#20)
  10. Jubiläumsbier 333 (#7)
  11. Zwönitzer Steinbier (#4)
  12. Alpen Stoff (#17)
  13. Kurpfalz Bräu Kellerbier (#22)
  14. Erl Hell (#19)
  15. Grandl (#11)
  16. Altbairisch Hell (#15)
  17. Hell (#1)
  18. Tannen Hell (#8)
  19. Perlenzauber IPA (#21)
  20. Tradition (#10)
  21. Hallertauer Hopfen-Cuvee (#14)
  22. Käuzle (#3)