A free weekend of wrestling

January 29, 2018August 5, 2020 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It doesn’t happen that often, but it turned out that I had an entire weekend free to watch all of the wrestling available for the Royal Rumble weekend. Weather derailed my hopes of breaking in my new grill with its maiden meats, and all I really wanted to do alternatively was absolutely jack shit other than watching NXT Takeover: Philadelphia and the Royal Rumble.

Surprising no longtime fan or wrestling smark, NXT Takeover was the true gem of the weekend, as just about every single match on the card was pretty good, and I can’t help but wonder what goes through the mind of Vince McMahon sometimes knowing that both his daughter and his son-in-law are basically openly declaring war on his own product with their own personal projects in the women’s evolution and NXT.

Since NXT developed and turned into the officially televised developmental product and started putting on shows since Arrival, they have pretty routinely outperformed the main roster, and just about every single Takeover event has outshined the primary shows that they’re supposed to be the lowly undercard for.

Superstars are given the time and leeway to properly build up their characters, let feuds develop, and are given the latitude and clock in matches to put on actual good matches. This was no more prevalent than at the last Takeover, where just about every single match on the card had some degree of development behind it, and wasn’t just some fly-by-booking where opponents are pitted against one another without reason.

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The Braves’ latest failure: Blooper

January 28, 2018August 5, 2020 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

So, to recap what kind of off-season it’s been for the Braves between the 2017 and 2018 seasons:

Their general manager, John Coppolella was fired and banned for life by Major League Baseball for basically cheating the system when it came to signing international amateur talent
As a result of Coppolella’s tampering of the system, the Braves were penalized by means of forfeiting the rights to 13 prospects
The Gwinnett Braves decided to rename their team because they want people to believe that their fans are stupid enough to mistake minor league Gwinnett Braves tickets for major league Atlanta Braves tickets, so to avoid the confusion, they decided to hold a contest for a new name, where the winner ultimately ended up being none of the selected options but instead, the “Gwinnett Stripers”
Their new spring training facility in Sarasota has gone from approved, to having an estimated cost of $75 million, to now costing $110 million, with likely more increases to come as time passes
Despite plenty of speculation that the team would try to capitalize on the Miami Marlins’ fire sale and make a trade for budding star Christian Yelich, they didn’t, and lost him to the Milwaukee Brewers (where his career will likely stagnate and become forgotten, in a boring market)

Needless to say, it’s been a pretty typical crappy offseason for the Braves this year. It’s hard to say that things could possibly get any worse, but whenever anyone decides to tempt fate by saying that things couldn’t get any worse, inevitably they just have to.

Introducing Blooper, the new mascot of the Atlanta Braves. What is Blooper? Nobody really knows. Apparently, he came from the “Character Builder 3000” and is a pretty good metaphor for the organization itself: uncreative, stagnant and nowhere remotely near innovative.

All anyone does know is that Blooper is like a Caucasian, less fat imitation of the Phillie Phanatic, of the division rival Philadelphia Phillies, which is extremely sad that the Braves are basically copying the Phillies. Aside from when the Phillies won the World Series in 2008, nobody should want to copy the Phillies – they suck, their city sucks, and everything remotely associated with Philadelphia sucks.

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I want to enjoy food as much as Kasumi does, someday

January 26, 2018August 5, 2020 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Going down the Netflix rabbit hole, after I finished watching Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories, the immediate suggestion by the algorithm was a show called Samurai Gourmet. Upon watching the preview; not like I had any choice, because Netflix forces previews upon you like James Franco’s alleged sexual aggression, I decided to give it a flyer, because I was sad that I had watched all of Midnight Diner and was wanting to get more of that peaceful, slice-of-life feeling that it had provided, and a show about a retired man leisurely seeking food to savor and enjoy seemed like it had some potential.

Now I don’t think it’s as good as Midnight Diner, but Samurai Gourmet has so far been pretty enjoyable as well. Whereas Midnight Diner was more about a centralized location and the people that gravitated to and around it, Samurai Gourmet is conversely centered around a singular person, freely flowing to different locations. However, it does manage to capture that light-hearted feeling and emotions of internal thought processes and the enjoyment of comfort foods in perfect circumstances.

I feel like the best analogy for the show is that it’s like Stephen King writing, when he was still in his literary prime. He’d take something like his protagonist going into the kitchen and doing mundane things, and somehow bilk 5,000 words, mostly adjectives to describe every little activity, before the last two paragraphs in the chapter are loose ties to the inevitable aliens/demons/monsters/spiders that the story is supposed to opposed by. Except in Samurai Gourmet, there is no supernatural villain to derail Castle Rock, just protagonist Kasumi’s own imagination of his inner samurai dealing with his fairly minor conflicts.

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SURPRISE, SURPRISE

January 26, 2018August 5, 2020 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t remember the exact numbers I estimated when I originally started going off on diatribes about the Braves’ new Spring Training facility that’s being built in Sarasota, Florida, but I do recall it being somewhere in the range of 40-50% more than what was estimated. Because if there’s one reoccurring pattern in the development of stadiums is that there is a 150% chance that whatever is originally estimated, will be exceeded, and by no small amounts.

That being said, it’s about as shocking as finding out that the WWE’s Enzo Amore has been accused of sexual misconduct, that the Braves’ original estimation of somewhere around $80 million dollars for their new training grounds, has risen.

Somewhere in the revisionist history of the timeline of this unnecessary extravagance, I’m pretty sure the original price tag was set at $75 million dollars. Apparently, prior to the start of the new year, it was revised to $100 million, and as of this morning, it’s been confirmed to have hit $110 million. I want to say that in my earlier rants about this bullshit facility that I predicted that it would top out at around $125 million.

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Today’s forecast has had a high amount of white privilege

January 24, 2018August 5, 2020 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

While I was in the locker room getting dressed after my afternoon workout, there were two guys having a candid conversation about how white they were. They actually weren’t talking about literally how white they were, but the entire conversation they were having was pretty much explaining just how white they were. It’s not that I wanted to eavesdrop on their conversation, but they didn’t make any effort to suppress it in a public area, and I couldn’t help but hear just how white they could make the locker room.

They were complaining about how close to turning 30, and how they were “old as shit,” and then they started talking about how their parents are just turning 60, and how their grandparents are getting old, and that the next visit to them might be the last, so they should consider taking a week instead of three days to visit them… because they’re overseas in foreign countries, because like most white-collar stereotypical white people, they come from some money.

And then came the comparisons to their parents gallivanting in Greek villas, and how much of an inconvenience it would be to spend time with family, when it encroaches on their time in which they’d probably rather be snorting coke off of hookers or belittling minorities; but who’s to say not both, and simultaneously at that?

I left the gym with a feeling of agitated disgust at perceived as white privilege on display. Both these guys are clearly younger than I am, but in cushy corporate positions doing most likely intangible work on computers that is probably eons removed from consumers, but probably make more money than I do. They come from families that are younger and way better off than my own parents, in their Italian vacation homes on remote private islands. They’re discussing foreign vacation plans, and although I’m no stranger to international travel, I’d wager that my trips are vastly less extravagant as theirs might be.

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Growing Up Type-R

January 24, 2018August 5, 2020 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I know I touched on this subject before in the past at some point, but seeing as how the car has been green lit very similarly to the initial concepts, it doesn’t hurt to revisit this. Sure, cars rarely change dramatically from their concept stages, and I wasn’t expecting the Civic Type-Riceboy to go from Gran Turismo Edit B pocket rocket to a sleek sophisticated sleeper, but we all can wish, right?

Anyway, upon seeing the updated photos of the release model, the first thought that popped into my head was the immediate comparison to the Homer Simpson car that tanked his half-brother’s original fortune, that’s how clown-y it looked, with its giant spoiler that I’m sure will be described as “aggressive” and face that looks like a smashed down Stormtrooper helmet.

And that’s just the superficial details that aren’t to the standard that I once held the vaunted Civic Type-R when I was still 19.

Mechanically, it’s definitely the strongest Civic, and one of the strongest Hondas in general off the factory line in history, but there too, it seems to have lost all the cool shit that made Hondas back in the late 90s. An alleged 306 horsepower is advertised, but it’s coming from a turbocharged 2.0 liter with a redline of “just” 6,500 rpm.

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