A funny thing happened at the gym today

My gym isn’t a very large gym.  Considering the small number of tenants in the building, the people who do come on the regular are pretty familiar with the existences of one another, even if we ultimately have no idea who we are.  That being said, I think it’s never a good idea to exorcise bad habits around people you coexist with on the regular.

Every now and then, I’d come into the gym, and there was typical asshole evidence of gymslobs; weights left all over the place, not putting anything back, most likely nothing wiped down either.  But when you’re the only one(s) there, you feel like you can get away with being a slob, so a slob they were.

This is something that asshole gymslobs can get away with at like an LA Fitness or a Gold’s Gym, gyms so crowded and churning with people, that it would be nigh impossible to pinpoint who the culprits were.  But at a tiny office gym the size of mine, it wouldn’t take long to narrow down the list of regulars who come, especially if one were so determined to run the badge log to see who has accessed the gym on a given day.

Today, I went into the gym, and these two dudes whom I occasionally have overlapped with were there.  Typically, they’re fairly early goers, but I guess their schedule had something that made them be there when they were there today, overlapping with my time there somewhat.  But I noticed the two of them hit the lockers, leaving all of the shit they used all over the place; a barbell laying out on the floor, a few dumbbells left out on a bench rolled into a very inconvenient place.

Normally, I wouldn’t say anything to anyone about it and just grumble internally or blast them amongst my friends in group chats.  Society has conditioned everyone to avoid not just conflict, but just speaking to people anymore, and in doing such, invites people to be dicks and exorcise dick behaviors like being a slob at the gym and not putting the shit they use away like any normal civilized considerate human beings.

But I don’t know, I didn’t feel like letting it slide today, and I thought to myself that if I addressed them calmly and without any aggression, I could at least make them aware that what they were doing wasn’t acceptable.

I happened to catch them on their way out of the locker room, and with my hands, I got their attention by pointing to the area of the gym which they left a mess.  I just simply said to them, hey guys, sorry to bug you, but could you put all those weights away?  I thought you guys might’ve been coming back out, but if you guys are done, could you please put those weights away?

And then the funny thing happened, they didn’t scoff, put up a fuss or show any sort of defiance, they were just like, oh my bad, yeah, and then went to go pick up after themselves and put their shit back; not perfectly back in order like they probably started, but baby steps here.  I said thanks to them, sorry to bug y’all, but thanks.

Granted, after they left the gym, they probably muttered about that fuckin’ Chinese guy on their way and in the elevators, and I’ve probably made gym nemeses now and should probably start considering bringing a lock to the gym to protect my shit from now on, but the point remains, I don’t think I’m in the wrong for calling out poor behavior, and by doing so in a calm and best-as-I-could non-confrontational manner, the poor behavior was corrected.

If I or anyone else never said anything to these guys, the behavior would undoubtedly continue, and honestly, one of these days, someone could get hurt, the gym would get shut down, and everyone loses.  At the end of the day, the people who have to straighten the gym out are the custodians, which are comprised of entirely smaller and older Hispanic women, and they shouldn’t have to be responsible for lugging around 30s, 40s and the 50s that some assholes left on the floor, and I would sooner straighten them out myself before them.

I get that people don’t like being told or even asked what to do, but if they didn’t do shitty things to begin with, then it wouldn’t ever have to happen.  This was entirely a situation where the only reason why correction occurred is because the violation was caught.

I don’t have a lot of faith that this won’t happen again, but at least these guys are aware that if they’re unlucky to be working out when I’m there, it’ll sit in their back of their minds that I just might call them out on their bullshit laziness, and as much as I don’t want to invite engagement, I’m hoping that they’ll want to avoid getting called out again and just do the right fucking thing in the first place.

It only took twelve years

A long time ago, I wrote a post about how cursive was being phased out of educational standards, and that it was only a matter of time before the ability to read cursive writing would become a viable job, due to the fact that all of the nation’s most critical documents were all written in, cursive.

Welp, twelve years later, and the National Archives are seeking volunteers to decipher the ancient cursive text from documents from the Revolutionary War.  I love their choice of words like “decode” and “decipher” to make it sound like these are ancient historians deciphering hieroglyphics and non-Roman character text like they’re characters from The Mummy or National Treasure, but when you get to the meat of the blurb, it’s more big words to describe a pedestrian objective:

and help make them more accessible to everyone.

In other words, legible to dumbasses who are no longer required to learn cursive writing.

Honestly, there’s no way this is the first real known instance of this occurring, but it’s something I saw that seemingly made it to national news. 

Now the trick is how I can be put into a position to where I can capitalize on this pathetic educational hole and make a little scratch on the side before more older pleebs realize the undervalued skill that really shouldn’t be a skill.

Seriously, everyone should stop volunteering for this shit, and start charging some money for it.  As the image above describes, if you’re good at something, don’t fucking do it for free.  Especially since we live in a country that’s actively at war with itself, with a government as rotten as the bottom layer of a package of strawberries from Kroger.  If they want something from the people, the people should have the wherewithal to realize that they should charge for it.

I suppose it’s now acceptable to put cursive reading and writing on my resume as a viable talent, and I really want to make sure my kids are taught cursive, and want to see if I can get them to utilize in their school work in the future, befuddle their teachers who inevitably didn’t have to learn it themselves, and see if they get reprimanded and called out for using it, so that I can throw in their face that they’re the dumbasses who allowed for such an elementary skill to fall to the wayside because society is stupid and lazy.

But I knew this was going to happen eventually. I fucking called it. 

My 600 Lb. Life needs to go into rebuilding mode

The other night, I logged into Max and went to My 600 Lb. Life, hoping that there would be a new episode posted.  Season 13 has been a clunker of a season, with no real standout participants for all the wrong reasons, and the show has always had a tendency to start and finish their seasons with the best or worse people. 

Episode 7 Juan was another forgettable episode, and I figured that there would have to be someone better to close out the season, but it’s never easy to tell how many episodes there are in these arbitrary seasons, because it’s never been consistent.  So after I logged in and checked in on the series, it became apparent that Juan was the last episode of the season, and mythical wife and I are just kind of like, oh..

Counting season 12, I think it’s safe to say that the series as a whole has put up two straight clunker seasons.  There have been no real memorable participants, and although it’s the guiltiest of pleasures to see when some of them turn into shitheads and fail spectacularly, an occasional success story is always welcome and leaves viewers like me feeling optimistic and satisfied for five minutes. 

But over the course of the last two seasons, there have been barely any successes, even fewer to actually succeed and get the weight loss surgery, and an increasing number of participants whom never even get to Houston and the episodes are these droll journeys of stock footage of Dr. Now wandering around his clinic or St. Joe’s Hospital lamenting at the dangers of being morbidly obese, and occasional video calls with participants where they’re all super eager to comply and participate, before they hang up and do jack shit.

I know the pandemic made TLC and the show have to pivot and allow for more remote participants, but what was the exception has gradually become normal, and the episodes where you just know that a big motherfucker ain’t going to step foot in Houston and actually get face to face with Dr. Now, where the real charm and magic of the show tends to happen.

In fact, S13E06 Deshaun was probably the most depressing episode of My 600 Lb. Life I’ve ever seen, and that’s really saying something considering the clinging to survival nature of the show as a whole.  The man from Omaha had no goals, no aspirations, no dreams, and no motivation whatsoever, with the closest thing to a want being, getting out of Omaha and going to fucking Missouri.  Like, when the place you want to end up going to is Missouri, you know the bar couldn’t possibly be buried under the ground any lower.

Unsurprising, he like loses no weight, dodges his weigh-ins, so we never get a number of his actual weight, dodges his virtual therapy sessions, is extremely difficult to get a hold of with Dr. Now, and by the time the episode ends, two months early, he’s completely fallen out of contact, and is speculated to have blocked Dr. Now’s office outright. 

As I’m watching this episode, I know all human life is precious and all that, but I genuinely was feeling like this is a person that really has no business, existing.  He probably draws disability, basically exists solely to eat trash and play video games and watch television, but he provides even less purpose to the world than inmates in prison, whom at least have to do some sort of labor to repay society.

I’d never been more depressed watching an episode of My 600 Lb. Life more than I have with Deshaun, and that’s a pretty bold proclamation because there have been episodes where the participants have actually died.

Frankly, I think the show really needs to go back to the drawing board with their format.  It genuinely feels like it’s been on auto-pilot for the last 4-5 seasons, but it’s easier to ignore when you get the occasional gem of a participant who is a total trainwreck, an ass to Dr. Now, which usually takes the shackles off of him to start zinging back, but then eventually goes to therapy, supercharges their mental health and they get on the train and actually lose some fucking weight.

But over the last few seasons, the show has basically been following a template.  Every episodes starts with the participant waking up, lamenting on how they’re surprised to be alive, they have an awkward shower and then eat the mother of all breakfasts before the first commercial break.  Month 1 starts with them all talking about this doctor in Houston that specializes in helping people like me as if we all haven’t seen the last 13 seasons of this show, and depending on where they’re located, either they make a very long drive where you just know every participant is looking forward to the highways of road food available to them and they gain an extra 5-10 lbs before they see Dr. Now, or as has been increasing, they’re just too far away from Houston, and have a mostly pointless video call with Dr. Now, eagerly agree to get started on the program, and then hang up and probably go on another binge once the cameras are off.

Afterward, 9 out of 10 participants completely fail to meet the initial weight loss milestone, and nobody ever exceeds it, and Dr. Now has been too nice and too empathetic over the last two seasons, mostly because his reputation seems to precede him and nobody wants to throw hands with Ali, and he has little reason to be tough in return, and he just tells them the same goal, 70 pound in two munt and they’re on their merry way.

The show then goes into a strange fast forward through the remainder of the months, with sometimes them going back to Houston for follow-ups, and others ducking Dr. Now or their appointed therapy, and if there’s any surgeries, they usually happen in like months 7-10, and that’s only if they’ve managed to get their shit together and lost at least 80% of their goal weight loss, and find a place to live in Houston. 

The endings of every episode feel real rushed and hackneyed, and it’s fairly obvious to me that such is done in order to create separation between the filming of an episode of My 600 Lb. Life versus their eventual Where Are They Now? episode, and I feel like the latter is probably why the prime show has gotten so templatized, because the spin-off has become as much of a mainstay as the prime, and it’s like it’s a means to conserve content so that there can be a follow-up.

Like I said, I think the show needs to take a few steps back and reset their approach to producing.  I get that Dr. Now is like 80, not going to be doing this much longer, and probably on a personal level, doesn’t want to deal with shitheads like the Assanti brothers, and people who give him a colossal amount of grief.  But this shit is television, and we degenerate viewers need to see some shitheads and strong personalities that bring the best-worst out of Dr. Now, and everyone ends up happy when he lights a fire under their asses and drags results out of them.

So we need some real strong participants, that will bring out the Dr. Now fans all love, perhaps some more stringent participant rules and guidelines to ensure we have fewer Deshauns who turtle up the whole episode and more Jonathans (S13E01) who actually manage to do things with his life.  The current format has also been a little deceptive in presentation, because most everyone over the last few seasons fails after their initial consult, and we’re never seeing the diet cheating they’re doing, so that it’s more of a surprise (but it’s not) when they go to their next weigh-in and have only lost like 7 lbs.  It’s like, we know they’re going to fuck up, might as well let us see it.

Fewer remote participants because the journey is already hard enough, but adding insurmountable distance on top it leads to more episodes you just know are going to eventually dead end, and at one point, I found it to be astounding when there was a season where zero people actually got surgery, but now it’s becoming the norm, and this isn’t helping.

I love the show too much to give up on it cold turkey, but we’ve literally had two straight duds of seasons.  Megalomedia, TLC, and the Nowzaradans need to get their shit together, and breathe some life back into the series, because although I might, I can’t speak for everyone else out there, on if they’ll tolerate sitting through a third straight turdy pound turd, especially when we all know what the series is capable of.

WTF is AEW doing #387

When I first saw this shirt, I thought it was a joke, a bad photoshop from some shitty wrestling shitposting meme account or something.  But nope, it’s very much real, and actually available to you for the low, low price of $29.99 plus tax and shipping, which means it’s basically a plain white t-shirt for somewhere just under $40.

Of course I know that there are all sorts of brand name designers out there who have been peddling plain white t-shirts for upwards of $100+, but they’re often times players in the egregious fashion industry, whom most of them have earned the right to hawk their shitty wares for exorbitant prices, and people not smart enough to realize that they’re being fleeced will actually buy them.  But yeah, them, they’re not a professional wrestling promotion, whom most equate their product and their merchandise as tantamount to carny shit, and only exist at that price range solely on the basis of inflation.

Yes, I can see the Property of the Death Riders wordmark on them, anyone (with a magnifying glass) can see it, but the point remains is that AEW’s merch team has basically posted up the absolute bare minimum effort in an actual product available to the public.

In the past, I’ve called out other bullshit cash grab products like Faarooq’s DAMN shirt which is basically just the word DAMN written on the chest in Rockwell Bold, and the B-Team’s signature shirt, which was obviously deliberately shittily made to help sell the fact that Axel and Bo were B-tier talents, but still turned into a screen print and peddled for $30 a pop (plus tax and shipping).

Well, Property of the Death Riders joins that club of some of the worst wrestling shirts in history, without any question at all.  Like, I’m becoming desensitized to a lot of the weird and silly shit that AEW does that I have a hard time grasping because I grew up with the WWE, but to offer up a plain white shirt with the tiniest of logos as an actual product definitely stands out in a sea of weird and silly shit, at least in my mind.

Here’s the funny thing though, as I’m typing this out, there’s a part of me that actually does admire the fact that in spite of the overall bullshit this shirt really is, as far as utility and being able to wear it out in public outside of wrestling shows or flaunting fandom, this shirt actually probably a GOAT.  Being a plain white t-shirt, it’s a perfect undershirt, and the lack of any design whatsoever on it means that there’s zero concern of any design being visible behind an opaque white dress shirt.  And 10 times out of 10, whenever I’d be wearing a plain white t-shirt, it’s tucked into dress pants, and the dorky little Death Riders wordmark wouldn’t be a factor at all.

But I’m not really fan of white t-shirts in general, because white fabric is like this ticking time bomb where they’ll slowly turn yellow from absolutely no other reason than existing, and any exposure to air, water, moisture accelerates it, and even more so when exposed to human oils or perspiration.  I literally had a few white tees that were still in their Ziploc bags, completely unopened and unworn, and when the day came where I felt the need for one, and ripped open the sack, it was yep, yellowed with age.

White t-shirts are basically for weddings and funerals, or any other instances where I’d need a specifically white t-shirt underneath a more priority garment.

Back to the Death Riders white shirt, the jokes just write themselves, as far AEW’s fanbase is concerned.  The schlubs who will be willing to plunk down the cash to get these bad boys don’t have to worry about them yellowing from age, because they’ll rapidly turn from the sweat, nacho cheese from Daily’s Place, and vape juice they’ll be exposed to, accelerated whenever they see Toni Storm, Harley Cameron or Skye Blue.

All these observations, without even having to even scratch the surface of what failure the whole Death Riders faction has turned into, because when they formed, they had a ton of momentum, but as is often the case with Tony Khan booking, there’s no focus, no end game or no execution, and all members of the group have been swirling around doing dick and butt for weeks, with no end in sight.

It really is incredible how Jon Moxley in NJPW took his Death Rider persona and absolutely slayed over there, but bringing the name to AEW and making it a group has been absolute death to the brand and identity of it completely.

And I don’t really get it either, the whole white t-shirt thing was Bryan Danielson’s, and the Death Riders basically smothered him and killed his career, and suddenly Mox picks up the whole white shirt thing, acting like a jacked psychotic Andrew WK or something?

As the subject of these posts goes, jesus, wtf?

Catching up on Marvel shows long after the fact

With the weather being as shitty as it sometimes gets in the peak winter months, I’ve been resorting to getting my cardio in via the treadmill as opposed to going outside to run and walk.  That being said, treadmill time opens the door for me to catch up on watching shows from the seemingly endless queue of titles that are added more frequently than they are crossed off.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve actually managed to cross two titles off of the list, them being Marvel’s season 2 of Loki, and the presumably standalone season of Echo.  In the past, I used to rush Marvel properties to the top of the list and watch them as soon as humanly possible, because the internet and social media are terrible things that have a tendency to spoil things.  But over the last few years, life, time, apathy, the algorithm, and a ridiculous oversaturation of content has shied me away from keeping up with the Marvels, and they’ve just instead sat in the queue to when I had the time, and shits to bring myself to start watching them again.

It’s actually kind of interesting to watch certain shows once a significant passage of time has occurred, because a lot of things can happen in the course of a year or two.  Like watching Loki S2, where Jonathan Majors’ Kang is so very much a major player in not just this show, but at the time, the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it was almost a shame to watch a show filmed at a time when he was still this guy knocking on the door of cinematic stardom, because I think he really is a talented performer, not just as Kang, but I also enjoyed him tremendously in Lovecraft Country, and now in spite of his role in the MCU, is basically for all intents and purposes, cancelled.

Echo, was short and sweet, being just five episodes, but again, when the show dropped, there was no news that the, for lack of a better term, the Daredevil/Kingpin universe was going to be reset, although I suspect that such was probably brewing in the background considering the direction they went with the Kingpin himself.  I did appreciate that Charlie Cox had a part in Echo, naturally doing one of his ridiculous one-take extended fight scenes, and good on Alaqua Cox for having the skill and stamina to keep up with it.  But again, it was another show watched long after its drop date, and a lot of things in the background have changed, and kind of alters the perspective on the show as a whole.

Staying on Echo though, I have to say that of many of the Marvel television shows, I would put Echo up among the top of the rankings when it comes to music selection.  All throughout the MCU television universe, there have been some real banger soundtracks, and Echo’s is right up near the top as far as my auditory preferences are, along with Luke Cage and Punisher.  The song, Burning by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs was one that I liked tremendously, and I rarely skipped the opening credits

Here’s the thing though, among the changes that have occurred within Marvel itself, are the changes to the world as a whole that really make watching “older” things like Loki and Echo and presumably any other Marvel property that lets 2-3 months surpass kind of are, and yes unfortunately I am referring to things that are occurring on account of the shitty political wasteland ‘Merica continues to slide down, mainly the unfortunate mass abolishment of DEI policies.

There’s no sugarcoating it; Marvel has been doing a pretty good job of organically adhering to the inclusion of diversity throughout the years.  Loki excels at having a diverse cast, and I was tickled to see Ke Huy Quan show up as a key character in S2, and I love how Data is becoming a commodity in Hollywood in general.  Echo was basically a DEI jackpot, with the titular character Maya Lopez, being of indigenous descent, who also happens to be hearing impaired, and oh yeah has a prosthetic leg.

It was still a great show that definitely highlights indigenous culture, but I can’t help but wonder if shows like this will actually see the light of day in the rapidly devolving ‘Merican ecosystem, and if Disney themselves will fall into the ranks of other notable companies, and eventually scrap their DEI initiatives, and gradually we the viewers start to see less and less diversity in future projects.

All the same, maybe I’m just thinking too much about it, or perhaps the state of the world is permeating into my headspace, no matter how much conscious effort I put into avoiding the news.  Both of these shows were still enjoyable, and at least while they were produced prior to the last election, I can still look forward to Agatha All Along and any other rando series and films that I might’ve missed before I eventually expend the effort to catch the new Captain America flick.

Cobra Kai, fin

Over the weekend, when I was having one of those nights where I didn’t feel like I had any real time to do anything, so I was instead just sitting around dicking around on my phone min-maxing my Duolingo XP as well as playing Fire Emblem Heroes, my au pair pokes her head into the media room and asks if I had started watching the final installment of Cobra Kai S6.

I looked at her perplexed and asked if it had dropped yet, and she said that it just released.  I looked at the clock and immediately grabbed the remote, and I said, why the fuck are we not watching it right now then?

We ended up watching four episodes and then it was 1 am, and I said that I needed to stop so that I wouldn’t be butt-tired in the morning, and that I wanted to save the final episode for the following day, preferably in a scenario where mythical wife wasn’t aware that we were going to watch it in front of her, since she’s such a giant fan of the show like we are.

Mission accomplished, and with that, the saga that is Cobra Kai is finally completed.

Frankly, it’s a show that desperately needed finality, not just because it’s the worst show in existence that had no right to be good as it was, but as is the case with any show that features child actors, it’s been like 6-7 years since the show started, and all the youth talent was growing the fuck up faster than kudzu, and the show needed to wrap up ASAP, before Dimitri grew to 7 ft. tall and Kenny turned into Terry Crews.

[Obviously at this point, spoiler alert is on, because I’m probably going to say shit that would be construed as spoilers]

Continue reading “Cobra Kai, fin”

Check it out, the lamer version of me

Inevitably when the new year begins, all gyms generally experience an influx of new goers, no matter how small a gym is, like my small but serviceable work gym.  There’s this one guy that I’ve noticed being new to the gym in my building, primarily because he’s Asian, and there are maybe like 3-4 of us in this entire building that I’ve bothered to know exist.  He’s probably around my age, give or take five years, and it seems like that he must have been casually active prior to coming to my gym, since it’s not like he’s a fat blob or anything.

But what has caused this guy to become the subject of a brog post is typically what lots of things elicit from my head do that ultimately end up as brog post fodder: questionable annoyance.

Basically by virtue of being Asian, going to the same gym I do, doing a few exercises that I do, having a similarly intended hairstyle as I do, and even wearing Jordans to the office, I’ve decided that this guy is basically a lamer version of me, ripe for criticism and immortalization in my brog that nobody reads.

Hear me out though, he’s not a lamer version of me just because he’s not actually me, it’s just that he falls overwhelmingly short in the world of standards that he isn’t aware of that I’ve set for him, making him, the lamer version.

For starters, the guy seems to barely works out for more than a half hour whenever I’ve seen him.  He does one set of a variety of things, and if there’s one thing that’s been engrained into me from exercise is that sets and repetition is where growth is, and the fact that lame me is doing one set of a few things, and then wraps it up, to me, seems like a tremendous waste of time and effort.  Like today, he did some dumbbell curls, walked on the treadmill for like five minutes, did some assisted pullups, and used the rower machine which is always a surprise because I was convinced for the longest time nobody but me used it in my building, which adds to his list of commonalities with me.

But when I hit the lockers after wrapping up my workout, he came in to start dressing out, which perplexed me considering how deep into my workout I was in when he even showed up in the first place.  Lame me couldn’t have spent more than like 20-25 minutes out on the floor, to which has me thinking, why even bother coming to the gym for such a short and inadequate workout?  Could it even be called a workout?

Additionally, lame me didn’t even shower.  I get that he had what could barely be construed as a workout, but he still went through some physical activity, and I know myself, it takes next to nothing in order for me to get a sweat broken, especially if I’m mentally prepared to workout.  And if I sweat, I want to shower, and the shower is almost as important and critical to the whole ritual of hitting the gym, to the point where if showering is not available, then the workout as a whole, can be in question on if it will even happen.

But lame me goes straight to the locker, and starts pulling out his clothes and gets right back into his office slave garb, content to be potentially sweaty and potentially stinky from exercise.

And this is where I notice his choice of sneakers, which are a two-tone navy and white Air Jordan 1’s, the best shoes there are.  Now I typically save my J’s for special occasions, but I do rock my Pandas as my daily shoes, to which Dunks are basically J1 clones, so lame me also shares a similar aesthetic when it comes to sneakers, annoyingly adding to the correlations that make him, a lamer version of me.

So to summarize, man is Asian, goes to my gym, does a few similar exercises that I do, tries to wear his hair similarly to how I do, seems to like the same shoes that I do; but works out significantly less than me, doesn’t shower, and based on his conversations in the locker room with company that I wouldn’t keep, seems to kind of be an Uncle Tong right-leaning Republican.

In conclusion, a lamer version of myself.  And to anyone who understands the gif above, I wouldn’t really lose any sleep if a similar fate happened to my lamer version as what happens to Harold and Kumar’s.