Setting the value of today’s WWE titles

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Watching wrestling these days, I can’t help but think about how much has changed throughout the decades I’ve been watching this crap. I’m amazed and aggravated at just how over Ryback is, considering he is the verbatim second-coming of Bill Goldberg, but somehow worse because he has an even more limited arsenal of moves, speaks too much during matches, and has the annoying habit of bobbing his head to his own music.

I’m also concerned for the WWE in regards to just how many shows they have now. Off the top of my head, they have RAW on Mondays, Smackdown on Fridays, and I believe they have shows on Wednesdays occasionally and also a Saturday morning program. I don’t know if they have any reality television shows at the moment, but they have developed a fairly prominent YouTube channel, which now puts the onus on WWE performers and personnel to provide content for, while they’re not being pressured to engage the “universe” with their seemingly mandatory Twitter accounts. The level of saturation they’re reaching at this point is enough to kill WCW twice over at this point, and I know the WWE is very adaptable and a smart-operating company, but it still heeds an orange-level warning as far as I’m concerned.

But anyway what this post is about is in regards to the seemingly excessive number of titles that are circulating throughout the WWE at this point. And I guess this would be useful for an older fan hoping to pick up watching wrestling today, despite the fact that I’m pretty sure nobody reading this would fit that criteria, but it seemed like a good idea to write at the time. But what I’ll basically be doing is taking today’s current array of WWE championship belts and achievements, and appropriately providing an equivalent from an older generation, to help provide perspective for today’s viewers.

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As if MARTA weren’t enough of a joke

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

There’s so many things to possibly say about this little gem that I would never have seen if it not for my friend Bunny, but for the sake of letting the “gawd, danny is such a racist” thermometer cool down a little bit, I’ll refrain.

But anyway, as if Atlanta needs to be the butt of any more jokes, here we have this embarrassing video that exists, because there are a lot of people that genuinely have no common sense when it comes to dealing with public transportation. Not only does it seem completely unnecessary and ironically depressing, it makes an attempt to create awareness that Atlanta, does in fact, have a WNBA team. I didn’t know the WNBA was even still around, too. And its mascot goes around cockblocking a bunch of MARTA users from being time efficient; seriously, if you don’t make an attempt to run after a bus or try to beat elevator doors, what happens afterwards? You waste time, end up late, and get shitcanned from Taco Bell.

Honestly, I’m not sure what’s worse – this video, or the fact that there are “subway fights” that show up with World Star Hip Hop watermarks on a weekly basis that are obviously happening at MARTA trains or stations.

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I don’t get you people sometimes

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Back in 2007, pro-wrestler Chris Benoit was discovered dead, along with his wife and his son.  Immediately afterward, the WWE broke all storylines for one night, and put together an entire tribute show for Chris Benoit and his family, where there were some great matches, but most notably an array of tear-filled, emotional outpourings of interviews of Benoit’s fellow wrestlers sharing touching stories and memories of their fallen comrade.

Days later, it was revealed that it wasn’t an attack on the family by a second party that ended up with the Benoit family dead; it was Chris Benoit himself, who had murdered his wife and his son, before hanging himself.  Suddenly, all of the RIPs to Chris Benoit were rescinded, the WWE did everything they could to break association with Chris Benoit, and wrestlers everywhere expressed emotions of betrayal, disappointment and disgusted sadness at the guy they all thought they once knew.

It wasn’t really “rest in peace” anymore, as much as it was “good riddance, you fucking murderer.”

Recently, a player on the Kansas City Chefs, Jovan Belcher, murdered his girlfriend and mother of their three-month old child, and then killed himself.  This has all been confirmed and is all fact at this point – Jovan Belcher was a murderer before he killed himself.

So why the fuck are so many people bidding him to rest in peace?  The guy is a fucking murderer, and fellow football players, and people all over twitter are wishing him the same farewell, reserved for people who live their lives honorably, or at least without committing murder?

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Hauntingly beautiful

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I watched Sleeping Beauty on Netflix.  Not going to lie, the reason I watched it because I kind of crush on Emily Browning, and I heard she pretty much goes full frontal in this flick.  But anyway, it was about an hour and forty minutes of wtf, and frankly, I don’t think even the most transcendental hipsters would be able to put two and two together with this movie’s plot or direction.  As far as the basics goes with storytelling, Sleeping Beauty deviates from just about all of them, and they just keep moving as if everything’s already been explained when it hadn’t.

Convoluted story aside, I will give the movie that it’s one of the more visually beautiful movies I’ve seen.  I’m obviously no cinematographer, so I have no substantial weight to my opinion, but when I actually take notice of how beautifully shot everything is, then it just might have been well shot.  The framing and concise angles stood out to me a lot, likely a culprit because nothing story-wise was, but I still say it was beautifully shot.

But no more than the picture above; there’s something hauntingly beautiful about Emily Browning in this one particular scene where she decides to burn money.  To be perfectly honest, in spite of the classical beauty features she has, there’s something about her that objects to my personal aesthetic preferences; maybe it’s her eyes or something.  But in this two minute scene where she’s burning money with a reflective and amazed expression on her face, in the middle of the night, I find Emily Browning to be the prettiest girl in the world.

The disillusionment towards design

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Anyone who’s ever gone inside a Walmart might be familiar with their private label products; the Great Value name that Walmart uses as their store brand.  Fairly easily identifiable by the uniformity of white packaging or labels, and their minor variation of colors based on the product.

It’s clean and it’s simple, there’s absolutely no denying that.  It’s exactly what Walmart wishes their own brand to appear, despite the fact that their name is synonymous with lower-class America, but I’m straying from the point.  For its efforts and objective, the current iteration of the Great Brand identity has won a couple of design awards, and received lots of accolade from the general design community.

It is that part of the story, that I cannot necessarily agree with.

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Steal from Walmart, get owned – to death

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A sadistic part of me finds morbid amusement at reading about the tyranny and carnage that occasionally takes place during each year’s Black Fridays.  As unfortunate as it is that the worst stories that emerge from Black Fridays typically include death, I can’t help but be astonished at some of the lengths people will sometimes go to in order to get their grubby hands on particular doorbuster items.

I saw this story of a man getting essentially brutalized to death at Walmart, and was kind of half-surprised, half-not surprised at the fact that it led to an AJC link, meaning the incident took place in the greater Metro Atlanta area.  I’m never really surprised when some of the worst things happen in Atlanta, because that’s kind of how I perceive this place sometimes.

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Another November, another 50,000 words

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

With two days to spare, I crossed the 50,000 word threshold for the sixth time.  If I dedicate enough to even start, I refuse to fail; I have not, not succeeded to hit 50,000 in the six times that I’ve tried this.

The Siffee Food Chain is a story that was meant to lampoon the SyFy Channel’s endless parade of “combo-monster-animal” movies, but somewhere along the line, an actual story actually began to emerge as I was writing about the adventures of Megashark, Sharktopus, Velocipython, Supergator, Dinocroc and Megaraptor.  About how mankind’s inherent desire to constantly play God eventually digs themselves deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole as their creations constantly end up going rogue, and bigger, badder creations are necessary to combat the old evils, until they too eventually revolt.

Yes, the premise of my story this year was absolutely putrid crap, but that hasn’t been the reason I’ve been doing this, and I don’t think has been since the first time I ever tried it.  As someone who really likes to write a lot, it’s always a fairly interesting experiment whenever I embark on Nanowrimo, because in the effort to put 50,000+ words together, you really are enlightened to what your current vernacular really is like.  The kinds of words you fall back onto, the choices of adjectives and verbs, and how you get around to explaining and writing situations without sounding too repetitive.  It also really makes you realize that your wealth of word choices may or may not be as diverse and expansive as you may or may not have thought it was.

No matter, another November, another successful 50,000-word adventure.  Needless to say, I always feel a good bit of relief and a weight lifted off my shoulders when I finish, because now I can get back to brogging about nonsensical crap instead of writing about mythical fake monsters.  The ironic thing is that I honestly think this would have a possibility of being greenlit by the SyFy network.