Tag: comparison

This shit gets ridiculous sometimes

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A few months ago, I chronicled how the week in which I was on a cruise with my family, was a week in which the whole fucking universe decided that they needed to get in touch with me, there were emergencies, there were fraud alerts, and I had no less than 69,000 emails, messages, chats and other alerts that took an inconvenient amount of time to sift through and deal with the most critical of issues.

Since I realized that the world most certainly does revolve around me, it’s been comical at just how predictably reliable it’s been that basically, when I am indisposed, unavailable, busy, or just plain not in a position to communicate, is when the whole fucking planet wants to communicate with me.

Case in point, I’m on a flight, connected to shitty WiFi.  I can receive texts and check email, but most all else is woefully unreliable, and I feel like I’m on the 2400baud modem that my old 486 was equipped with.  While on this flight, my boss DMs me despite my out of office being on, and since I’m not as smart as I think I am, I haven’t disabled notifications from Teams so I’m seeing them come through; additionally, there’s a ping for an impromptu business meeting, to which this sudden nature means something substantial, like someone critical leaving or having gotten shit-canned.  I don’t know and won’t know until I get back to the office but I am curious, but not curious enough to reach out to a colleague on a day off to find out.

A voicemail comes through, and it’s apparently my doctor’s office wanting to reschedule my annual that’s in two months, scheduled a month ago, because the American medical system is completely fucked, and I have to figure out what shitty appointment time probably three more months out I can get in on and hope the doc doesn’t schedule an out of office then too. 

And then I get a text from my sister telling me to call when I can, which is honestly these days tantamount to ask me to cure cancer as much of an aggrandizingly obnoxious ask to make of me.  But I can only imagine it pertains to my dad whom I just left after a fucking week of babysitting, so now I’m curious but can’t call because although I have shitty WiFi, making calls is still not something we do in the air.

It’s been like this fairly regularly since I realized that I control the universe.  No matter what I do, it’s when I try to take some time for myself is when everyone in my world starts trying to get in touch with me.

When I’m at my desk, available, ready, and willing to communicate?  Fucking crickets

Hit the gym during lunch?  Ping
Go out for a run on WFH Fridays?  Ding
Spending time with my kids?  Bing
Driving anywhere, any distance?  Be-doop
Running errands with an objective?  Boop-boop

And so on and so on.  It’s one of those things that sure, nobody knows what I’m doing at any given time but all the same I still feel that fucking everyone needs to give my time some more respect and just leave me the fuck alone.

One of these days if I ever get to have a single god damn day sabbatical, I think I need to hole up in a hotel room all by myself and just sleep, shotgun a show, eat whatever I want to eat, and put my phone the fuck away except for to do shit that I want to do, because the conclusion I’m coming to while I’m blathering all this shit out in that I need to just not be so god damn plugged into so much shit.

I don’t believe he didn’t know how poorly this would be received

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

ANF: US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy basically says the majority of airline passengers are a bunch of slobs, encourages people to start dressing better when they travel at airports

Honestly, when I read the headline to this story, I couldn’t imagine that it was headed in any other direction than mass defiance, triggering and straight up rage-baiting from the federal fucking government.  To which it’s kind of sad, yet entertaining, but really more sad, that the federal government would go to the trouble to immaturely rage-bait as if they were a low-tier Instagrammer trying to get shock views with a poor take.

There’s no way Sean Duffy wouldn’t have known that posting a video, calling out primarily everyone who goes to airports in sweats, pajamas or otherwise comfortable clothes, and essentially blaming them for the uptick in disorderly conduct incidents at airports and on airplanes, wasn’t straight trolling.  As if he himself actually ever goes to airports for any other reason than to do his job, but he’s most definitely not flying commercial, with the rest of the pleebs, when he probably flies private, when for his own personal needs.

I mean it goes without saying that Americans today, more than ever, hate being told what to do, but telling them how they need to be dressing, that’s a tier above as far as triggering the defiance of modern America.  The response from the masses have been predictable and not at all surprising.

I’m sure all the fights and incidents have nothing to do with the fact that over the last two decades, the airline industry has been stoking the flames of passenger dissatisfaction, with all sorts of bullshit shenanigans such as cramming more seats into planes, reducing leg room, personal space, charging for bags, charging for snacks, and of course, the escalations of fares in general with absolutely no justification for doing so other than to line the profits of companies that are already billion dollar companies, among other things.

It’s totally because people are rolling into airports wearing sweatpants or pajamas.  Yep, makes total sense.  Hey, perhaps if we’re being encouraged to go back into the golden age of airlines, why not allow smoking on flights again?  Why not fire all the male flight attendants, and make sure all planes are staffed by attractive stewardesses instead?

The more I think about this whole thing, the more I can’t believe that this was absolutely anything other than a classic rage-baiting troll job, except that it’s coming from within our own government.  Like some defiant shit influencer who wants to throw shade, except in this case it’s coming from a 54-year old man(-child).

Honestly, this is all probably part of a larger, more nefarious plot, in order to force more martial law into things that ordinarily never needed it.  Duffy rage-baits the traveling nation, many predictably start dressing up like even bigger slobs at airports in defiance.  Airlines have little choice but to enforce their own dress rules, leading to more irate customers, passengers, and causing more incidents.  The National Guard suddenly has to start showing up at airports, and funding somewhere more essential is depleted in order to support.  Hashtag ‘Murica.

PWI be drinking that blet kool-aid

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

SI: Pro Wrestling Illustrated drops their Top-250 women wrestlers, topped off by Mercedes Moné

I had to laugh when I saw this list, because not only do I disagree that Mercedes Moné isn’t the #1 female wrestler this year, I barely think she’s top-5, and mostly on account of industry impact and not necessarily strength of work.  Also, I always love how whenever people make all-industry encompassing lists, there’s always what seems like some forced integration of talents from promotions not in the Americas.

Obviously I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but I have this suspicion that short of having infinite time on your hands, there aren’t a lot of people who contribute to a North American publication are always up to the minute on all of the wrestling going on in AAA, CMLL, New Japan and in the case of this women’s list, Stardom.

Don’t get me wrong, any time I see Stardom highlights, they’re incredible, they’re intense, and Japanese women work with a level of stiffness that would make Fit Finley, Vader and Gunther wince and cringe while watching.  Their level of in-ring work probably eclipses a lot of the women on PWI’s or anyone’s top-women workers lists, but the problem is that most people aren’t on top of their product like they are with the mega promotions of the Americas, and I say all this to preface and cover the fact that when it comes to listing talent, I simply cannot factor them in, due to general unfamiliarity.

But if I were to make a top-5 or top-10 list, it all starts with Iyo Sky, whom not only is the best female wrestler of 2025 in my opinion, she’s frankly the best wrestler in general throughout the calendar year.  She’s had incredible matches all year long with Rhea Ripley, Stephanie Vaquer, Naomi and Bianca Belair, and I’m still hard pressed to think of a single match this year better than Iyo vs. Ripley at Evolution.

#2 is Toni Storm, because she’s not only the hard carry of AEW’s entire female roster, she’s arguably the most entertaining talent they have on their entire roster outright.  I know I get critical about AEW in general, but there’s no questioning my love for Timeless Toni, and she’s simply the greatest character to have emerged from that land of chaos.  But the main reason I don’t rank her above Iyo is that when it comes to in-ring work, Toni is nowhere close to Iyo’s level.  Which is ironic, because young Toni was an absolute technician in the ring, but over the years, she’s clearly put way more work into her character, and less in the ring, and maybe it’s just the general green-ness of AEW’s women’s roster, it’s harder to find high quality matches that don’t devolve too hard into props, weapons and gimmick, versus just straight great wrestling matches.

#3 goes to Stephanie Vaquer who had the year of all years, having won three* different championships throughout the calendar year.  She’s a counting stat monster, having won the NXT North American and NXT Women’s championships, and then moving up to the main roster where she eventually won the WWE Women’s World championship.  She’s also a master technician in the ring, and frankly in pure technical skill, she’s probably better than Iyo, but she also hasn’t been really tested into a real masterpiece, save for her match against Giulia in NXT.

*I don’t count the blood money Saudi blet as a championship

#4 would be Rhea Ripley, for whom was the main reason why Iyo is #1, because it takes two to tango, and her and Iyo are basically one of this generation’s rivalries that could be on the echelon of Stone Cold Steve Austin and the Rock or Ric Flair and Ricky Steamboat, because the two just have such nuclear chemistry where every time they get in the ring together, it’s brilliance, regardless of if there’s an extra player involved or not.  Frankly, the only reason she’s not higher is because she didn’t get as many matches, and with talents like Vaquer which helped push Iyo over the top.

And #5 is where I’d put Mercedes Moné, and like I said, it’s mostly on account of her impact on the business and not necessarily her strength in the ring.  She’s (still) horrible on the microphone, and staying on the train of AEW nerfing women’s technical skill, her in-ring work in AEW is nowhere as clean as it was when she was still in the E.  It’s ironic that AEW keeps spamming the narrative that it’s where the best wrestle, but that must apply to men only, because a lot of the women known for great talent, aren’t having their best work under the Turner banner. 

However, what Mercedes has been doing all year, touring the indies and getting out in the world and lighting fires, collecting blets not-withstanding, is unprecedented, and in a holistic sense, worth giving her some rank on a top-women’s list.  Bonus points for the rumored stories about how she’s donating a ton of her independent bookings to local charities of the places she’s touring, and despite my general critical skepticism of her, I do think she’s doing a lot of good with her platform, albeit while obnoxiously leaning into the heel persona, but deserves does deserve respect.

#6-10, I would put rank, in this order: Athena, Tiffany Stratton, Asuka, Naomi, Becky Lynch.

Toni Storm might be the hard carry of the AEW women’s division as far as presence and entertainment go, but Athena is honestly, the best pure wrestler that exists in the AEW/ROH ecosystem.  As far as my previous comment about how AEW nerfs talent, Athena has remained immune, and has demonstrated to have good, watchable matches with anyone she’s been paired up with, and her match against a motivated Mercedes Moné is probably the AEW/ROH women’s match of the year as far as I’m concerned.  The endless ROH Women’s champion might not have a large pool of talent to work with, but it’s not just for lack of better options that she’s been holding her title for nearly three straight years.

Tiffany Stratton, is one of those talents that as far as her character went, had a really quiet year in general.  After winning the WWE Women’s championship, cashing in on Nia Jax, she had one heated program with a 60%-ready Charlotte Flair for Wrestlemania, but really not much else throughout the rest of the year except repeated matches trying to carry Jade Cargill. 

I feel like one of the comps I think for Tiffy is that of Mr. Perfect, in the sense that her character work is still pretty uncomfortable and needs work, but once she steps into the ropes, she’s a natural in the ring.  She’s managed to pull off respectable carry jobs on Cargill, and didn’t get outclassed when in the ring with a master like Vaquer and frankly dropping the title in her fourth or fifth match to Cargill can only help her grow some more, now unburdened with the duty of having to be the champion.

As far as Asuka and Naomi rank for me, Asuka is very much someone on the upswing, having returned in the middle of the year, and has been one of the most entertaining and watchable character on television as she’s working the heel sempai role to Kairi Sane and gaslighting Iyo Sky, and if she pulls this off for a whole calendar year, there’s no doubt that she’s a top-5 next year.

Naomi on the other hand, would have been an easy top-5, as her heel turn, Money in the Bank win and cash-in, and rise to the Women’s World championship were all booked outstandingly, and she was really picking up steam and momentum to be the top female heel in the company, but ol’ Big Jim decided to derail her career once again, and she’s been knocked out of the ring for the next year on account of having gotten pregnant.  I mean there’s fewer better reasons to go on the shelf, but the unfortunate byproduct of it was that it happened right at the biggest push of her career.  But if she can come back and pick up where she left off, there’s little reason to believe that she couldn’t get back to that upper tier.

And #10 I have to give to Becky Lynch, even in spite of how unpopular she is among the unwashed masses of the internet.  Her character work has been upper-tier, playing the obnoxious, gaslighting heel, and her in-ring work will probably never be above a 6/10, but she’s one of the few workers, male or female, that still understands telling stories in the ring, working body parts and maximizing her skillset to work logical and digestible matches.  But she’s clearly accepting of what’s asked of her at this current juncture, which is to remain in the mid card, elevate the Women’s Intercontinental championship and bringing the best out of lesser talents, like her current endless feud with Maxxine Dupri.  As much as the internet pretends to hate her and call her shit like Becky Hogan, I think she’s a consummate professional and a team player and seems to be down and willing to do anything that is asked of her, and doing it well.  She deserves better than what internet fans and PWI think of her.

The point to this whole diatribe is that PWI’s women’s rankings are dumb, and they clearly put way too much weight in Mercedes’ blet count, and not nearly enough on the bodies of work and the impact of character development, ring talent and entertainment, and artificially injected some Stardom names to make them look worldly.

I get it, but I really really don’t like it

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

ICYMI: John Cena defeats Dominic Mysterio, wins the Intercontinental championship for the first time in his career, becoming a Grand Slam Champion with less than five appearances left in his career

Lord, I always heard that this was a possibility during the whole John Cena retirement tour, and it was always something that I had hoped really wouldn’t happen.  And with the clock winding down, I thought we had hit the point where it couldn’t possibly happen on account of the lack of time remaining on Cena’s tour in order to make the handoff of the IC title remotely meaningful.

But, the WWE is all about creating moments, and short-term bursts of dopamine for fans, and long gone are the days where openly outgoing talent would eat a shit ton of losses on the way out, including the last one, to really drive home the notion that nobody is bigger than the business, and to metaphorically pay back the industry by booting future stars by taking losses.

I’m not saying John Cena hasn’t been taking his share of L’s over the last calendar year, and for the most part, I’m of the opinion that the retirement tour has been handled pretty well and I’ve found a lot of it to be enjoyable, but I have to say that the most recent development in the tour is one part, that I absolutely disagree with and do not like, at all.

Dominic Mysterio has been so carefully curated all year long, protected and booked so brilliantly, winning the Intercontinental championship at Wrestlemania, and then Mexico’s AAA Mega Campeonato, all while navigating through Liv Morgan’s injury, the Judgment Day’s tumultuous camaraderie, and being chased by guys like AJ Styles, Rusev and Penta.

He has defeated all challengers throughout the year, and has shown tremendous growth in character, and honestly, has been one of the only male performers I really bother to keep tabs on.

Feeding him to John Cena, and losing the Intercontinental blet at this stage of the game is something that disappointed me tremendously as a fan, and really makes me wonder if E Creative™ really has a good idea where they’re going with this, or if they’re just eager to check off that very last feel good accolade for John Cena, as to make sure he has every single honor there could be, even if it meant coming at the expense of one of their most valuable long-term assets in Dominic Mysterio.

It also takes a big crap all over all of the guys who have been chasing Dominic Mysterio throughout the year, like AJ Styles, Rusev and Penta, because Dom has been going to war with them all year, cheating and beating them dirty, but then he takes a 10 minute loss to John Cena like it was 2013 all over again, and there’s something about the whole act that makes me feel like a year’s worth of booking has been disrespected and peed on just a little bit.

Like, the Intercontinental championship doesn’t benefit John Cena at all.  He literally has no time to boost it or elevate it beyond what Dom has done with it, because last time I checked, he has three appearances left.  And I doubt that his last match will also be for the Intercontinental championship, so that means he has to drop it within his next two appearances, and in my opinion, fewer things erode a title’s prestige than rapid changes, at least not without a good narrative behind it, and I feel like the E is really pigeon-holing themselves right now with this not-well thought out Cena IC run.

Basically, no way it’s going to any of the 16 guys in the Cena Last Match Tournament, because it defeats the purpose for having a tournament in the first place, if one of them is going to suddenly get to have a match, a title match, against him before the last match.  And outside of them, there’s really not a lot of names that are just spontaneously ready for the Intercontinental title much less worthy to get a win on John Cena, genuinely one of the greatest talents in the history of the industry, which is a topic I may touch on in a future post.

I feel like the only real option is to drop it back to Dominic Mysterio, where Dom will win on account of there being a metric fuckton of interference from the rest of The Judgment Day, the Americanos, and he’ll win dirty with an obvious foreign object, but at that point the question is why they had to have him drop the title in the first place, other than to placate a superficial career milestone?  They derail an extremely strong title run and snuff out its momentum.  Even if he wins it back, the mystique of his first run is completely reset, and it’ll feel like a holding pattern until the next contender is ready, instead of like the run Gunther had with it, where it just felt like nobody was ever going to beat him.

Either way, as much as I have enjoyed the John Cena retirement tour, I will die on this hill that him taking the Intercontinental title off of Dominic Mysterio was not the best idea, and smells more of pandering and fan service than being a careful and calculated choice that would be worthy of being in the next season of UNReal.

Dad Brog (#158): I’m not ready for anything prefaced by “adult”

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m in the middle of one of those weekends where I’ve sparsely had any time for myself; even more so than usual.  The kids are still in this weird adjustment period of daylight savings as well as simply adapting to their general schedules, and this particular morning, they were up at 7 am, not long after I had gotten up to begin my day, and I was completely unprepared as far as having breakfast ready, but it didn’t matter that my kids were ready to begin their day.

Instead of a 60-90 minute quiet time reprieve in the middle of the day, this was a day in which there were two concurrent birthday parties happening at the same time, so mythical wife and I decided to divide and conquer and take each kid to a different party, in different parts of town.  I watched #2 plow through three slices of pizza, a ridiculously gargantuan slice of cake, and a bowl of dipping dots, all while playing a bunch of really shitty games at Chuck-E-Cheese where kids are lucky to get maybe 15 seconds of game time before the credits expire and I can’t imagine paying actual money for gaming time with such absurdly unfavorable math, and I felt fortunate to be on a timed party free-play.

Needless to say, with the kids down, instead of relaxing, I found myself playing catch-up on things that I didn’t get to do on a typical Saturday, which meant hopping on the treadmill to get some exercise, while simultaneously doing my daily Duolingo that I typically prefer to do early in the morning before everyone else is really up.  And then I decided to go run some errands while some stores were still open, all for the sake of not having to them during Sunday, when I would inevitably have to have a kid in tow while trying to do them, and by the time I’m sitting here it’s past ten, and I don’t feel like I have adequate time to really watch something from my endless list of crap that I want to watch, so I bring myself to sit here to write in my brog that nobody knows exists.

But hey, at least I got to go be on top of the drop of Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus, and watched the first two episodes on Friday night, and the show was as good as I would have hoped it would be, so that’s something remotely positive amidst feeling buried by life and looking out the metaphorical window of the world to see the United States completely at peace with itself forcibly starving its own citizens but this post wasn’t meant to be political as much as I just wanted to take that dig in lieu of making a dedicated post about how fucked America is.

However, getting to the point of this post, the biggest occurrence to happen over this weekend was undoubtedly the fact that #1 lost her first tooth, and I’m just not ready for this at all.  Because when it comes to teeth, most everyone knows that the vernacular for them are baby teeth, and when they fall out, they’re supplanted by your adult teeth, and I am so not fucking ready to hear the word “adult” at all, associated with my five-year old child.

It’s crazy, it was just like a few weeks ago in which #1 pointed out to mythical wife and I that she had a wiggly tooth, and we were both having the same reaction about how, wtf has all this time flown by to where our kid is now having her baby teeth starting to fall out.  A cursory internet search confirms that five is a fairly common age for the first teeth to begin falling out, and I have memories of my own childhood of when I had my first loose tooth, where my dad tied a piece of floss around it before yanking it out, and the vague memory of feeling like I’d been punched in the mouth, with a similar result of there being a lot of blood.

But as unfortunate as it was that I couldn’t be there when it happened, there wasn’t really much blood when #1’s first tooth came out.  I had literally just taken her to the dentist just says prior, and I saw the X-rays showing the adult teeth rapidly growing underneath and how to anticipate the first tooth to come out soon, and it was still a harrowing moment seeing those photographs of all these adult teeth starting to grow beneath the baby ones, and again I’m struggling to hear the word adult at all when it comes to my kid, because she’s still just five freaking years old.

Inevitably, like the Korean blood in her body demands, questions about the Tooth Fairy and the whole concept of getting money for teeth came up pretty immediately, and now I’ve got to start ponying up cash to put under her pillow and hope to not wake her along the way.  Plus there’s the whole question of just how much money to give for a tooth; when I was a kid, it was $2 a tooth, but my parents quashed the whole mythos of the Tooth Fairy real quick and just gave me cashmoney on the spot after an extraction.

It’s going to be a tricky next few years, given the fact that I have two kids of close age who will be inevitably be periodically dropping teef throughout the next 8-9 years, and me having to keep up with needing adequate cash to fund all these damn teef and keep up with inflation.

But heaven help me that there are anything at all in my little girls’ bodies that are considered adult, even if they’re pretty much right on schedule when it comes to the first teeth falling out.  They’re always going to be babies to me.

Praise for NXT Halloween Havoc

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Over the last few year and change, there’s been a lot of hullabaloo surrounding the state of the WWE following the company’s sale and eventual restructuring into being an arm of their new parent company TKO.  Questionable decision making as far as staffing, personnel and eventual booking choices, but more primarily how they’re killing the WWE with their flagrant price gauging, cost increases across the board on tickets, merch, and various other microtransactions, masterfully finding each and every nickel and dime to bilk out of wrestling fans.

I often said to my friends that I didn’t really feel impacted by much of it, because I had little interest in going to any live events; I’d been to Wrestlemania twice now, and numerous other ppvs when they were still called ppvs, and at the prices of tickets these days, I would way rather just watch from the comfort of my own home.  Over the summer, I went to NXT’s Great American Bash, solely based on the fact that it was at my favorite venue (Center Stage), but after paying $130 for almost literally the last row of the venue, only to be seated next to 1.75x of humanity, I almost want to swear off going to WWE shows outright, fearing a similar fate the next time I plunk down grown up money just to be in attendance.

Additionally, I would say to my friends that as long as TKO doesn’t fuck around with my viewing experience, then I don’t really have many qualms with how they’re operating the company.  But over the last few months, WWE PLEs have all been shifted over to ESPN++ to some new tier that I can’t get access too without actually having to pay money for it, so I’ve missed the last two major events.  NXT remains on CW which I don’t have access to in a streaming capacity, and I haven’t seen an episode of Smackdown in years because I don’t have the means to watch whatever channel they’re on now.  RAW on Netflix is still available to me, but the production of the show is really wonky and weird, and it’s hard to stay engaged when they’re being so flagrant with performing at 60% so that they can save their ammo for the next PLE.

In other words, TKO has been fucking around with the viewing experience, and it definitely sucks as a fan.  Not knowing what shows are on what platform, if I can even watch them or not, and if and when I can, there being paywalls in order to see things as simply as storyline promo packages and performer entrances.  Obviously, I’m not going to swear off wrestling by any stretch of the imagination, but I am entitled to air out my grievances about the state of the WWE when I find their operational conduct to be annoying.

All that said, I wanted to chirp a little bit about how much of a breath of fresh air NXT’s Halloween Havoc felt like, because it definitely felt like a positive reprieve from the suffocating corporate cloud that the main roster WWE has been feeling like over the last year.

It was on Peacock, which had the occasional commercial break here and there, but the show as a whole had a banger of main song that they spammed throughout the evening, and the replay showed all the promo packages, which helped a viewer like me who can’t actually watch NXT to the minute, to catch up with what to expect in the show.  The show itself was at a smaller venue in a part of Arizona that I’d never even heard of, but it looked like the type of show that I’d have definitely been interested in going to, because it wasn’t a mega arena, and it wasn’t in a clusterfuck of a place like Atlanta, and looked like a fun place to watch wrestling.

And of course, the matches were all pretty entertaining.  Call me crazy, but sometimes some matches don’t really have to have a convoluted storyline behind them, and you can really just take a bunch of entertaining workers and throw them in a match together to great effect, and that’s how I felt with the opening match of Je’Von Evans and Leon Slater vs. La Parka* and Mr. Iguana.  No real story, just an NXT guy teamed with a TNA guy against two AAA guys, and they tore the house down to open the show.

*What’s funny is that on this exact date, there was a Lucha show in Atlanta that advertised La Parka on the card, so I’m amused by the fact that one of these shows got the actual current La Parka, while the other got an imposter, or they’re up to like La Parka IV or V at this point, like the Villanos, but whomever NXT had that night was wayyyy too talented of a La Parka than what fans of his from WCW might have remembered.  Motherfucker was doing picture perfect Asai moonsaults out of the ring and press slams into gutbusters, a far cry from the dumpy fat luchador in WCW that swung a chair and strutted his way to the bank.

Mariah May Blake Monroe got to flex a little bit of her actual wrestling skill in her win against Zaria for the women’s North American title, and I’m pleased that she’s allowed to do some of the work that elevated her so much in AEW, and I really enjoyed Ethan Page’s match against El Hijo de Dr. Wagner, and despite being the heel, Vic Joseph’s commentary about how much of a fighting champion Page has been, it’s hard to not respect the work the man puts into the business.  But the match had some really brutal spots, and it was enjoyable from start to finish.

The Hardy Boyz vs. Darkstate was an entertaining disaster, even if I don’t believe in all at the long-term viability of Darkstate.  They’re like a Temu-grade Shield, with less charisma, but given the fact that the Hardyz are still TNA guys, it seemed likely that they were going to have give those NXT blets back sooner rather than later.

Honestly, it’s not that the Ricky Saints vs. Trick Williams match was necessarily bad, it’s just that other matches on the card were more entertaining and compelling, that theirs just kind of didn’t stand out in comparison.  Both are talented workers, but in the context of the evening their fairly vanilla wrestling match just wasn’t as exciting as all of the matches that preceded it.  Plus, the finish seemed really wonky and almost rushed, and when it was over, I was just kind of like, that’s it?

But let’s really talk about Tatum Paxley’s ascension to the top of the mountain, beating Jacy Jayne for the NXT Women’s championship.  Firstly, I do want to give my flowers to Jayne for a respectable run with the top prize; I know her win was a surprise, considering she beat the aura-filled Stephanie Vaquer, but I didn’t hate it, because she was a solid hand that was easily the most talented worker of Toxic Attraction, and I always like seeing hard workers get rewarded with solid pushes.

However that being said, the same could very easily be said about Tatum Paxley, whom I get some Liv Morgan-like, love of the game vibes from, and like Jayne, her hard work has been noticeable and palpable over the course of the last 12+ months, and I’m pleased to see her get this honor of getting to be the women’s champion.  I think she’s more athletic than Liv ever has been and works pretty cleanly in spite of her general level of experience, but her character work and portrayal of the weird but talented goth girl seems to have captured the audience, and I’d be lying if I didn’t stop and let the look linger on her; she’s cute as hell.

But when she won the title, I definitely got those similar vibes to her championship that I felt when Liv won the women’s title for the first time, or when Iyo won the World championship the last time; it was a sense of satisfaction that a hard worker was getting their justly reward.

Overall, Halloween Havoc was a breath of fresh air of how good the WWE is capable of operating in a manner that I wish were the norm all throughout the company, and not just in NXT.  It kind of reminds me of that period between 2016-2017 where NXT was just firing on all cylinders so well that it was clear that they were the best brand in the company.  Look forward to the next NXT event, that is until they’re spontaneously sold off to start showing on like Tubi or Fubo or some other rando platform.

I’m sure this is going to go over well not

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

SFGate: Southwest Airlines unveils new boarding policy, where passengers board in order of window seats first, middle seats, and aisle seats last

At this point, I really should start implementing a tag on my brog for Southwest, because they keep doing things that I keep finding brog-worthy and then I actually write about them, as if I’m chronicling their gradual downward spiral.  They just can’t keep doing questionable things, and I feel like that at the corporate level, there’s some obnoxious visionary who is trying way too hard to put their stamp on the company by making all these questionable choices for really no other reason than the sake of making them, and probably gets off on words like “disrupting” and “aviation space.”

But circling back to this new boarding process, where windows get on first, and aisles get on last, I just feel like this is something that seems destined to fail, on account of people just not adhering to the rule, and the amount of outcry it’s inevitably going to cause because it’s just not working the way SWA corporate envisioned it working.

It doesn’t matter what airline it is, in the hierarchy of passengers, middle seat is supposed to be the very bottom of the pecking order.  Even in old Southwest internal lexicon such a notion was commonplace, where flight attendants would even make tongue-in-cheek jokes about the old boarding process, where Group A stood for Anywhere, as in you can sit anywhere you want, Group B stood for Back of the plane, because that’s where all the remaining good seats are, and Group C stood for Center seat, because that’s all that’s going to be left for you bottom feeders.

Deliberately creating a policy where the positions are forcefully switched is not going to go over well at all, because not only are passengers who prefer aisles not going to handle being considered bottom-tier very well, imagine the people who hate window seats but like getting on the aircrafts as soon as possible having to deal with this new Sophie’s Choice; status vs. preference vs. potential cost differences.  And middle seats still lose, because although their tier might be considered elevated over aisle-seat losers, when the flight takes off, they’re still parked in the middle seat, most likely squished between two fat fucks because Americans are always going to be a bunch of fat fucks.

My favorite part about this whole announcement was this quote:

If queuing isn’t good, boarding isn’t good,” Lisa Hingson, managing director of innovation, told the Wall Street Journal. “So we spent a lot of time studying queuing.”

Studying queueing, lmao.  There’s nothing to study when it comes to queueing, because a study doesn’t account for the infinite variable that is there are a few billion asshole airline passengers in the world, and there’s no finite way to factor for some flights having none of them on any given flight, or some having many of them.

Sure, there are plenty of people that will be willing to adhere and give the system a chance, but then there are always, always going to be just a few of them that have zero intention of sticking to the plan, and nothing short of the gate agent enforcing the queue and stopping any and all violators from boarding too early, this is going to fail 100% of the time.  Those gate agents probably don’t get paid enough nor do they give enough fucks to even try to stop asshole passengers from jumping in whenever they want and ruining the process for the entire flight, and departure times and delays are inevitably going to get wrecked by this, and in the grand spectrum calculus of airline operations, it’s only a matter of time before this shitty idea is quietly scrapped and they return to more traditional, fall-in-line boarding process.

Somewhere else in this whole thing, I have to be curious on how this is going to impact the whole, large passenger policy that Southwest used to be applauded for in having, where large passengers had the possibility of getting a free adjacent seat if the flight had availability.  If there are going to be price tiers in accordance to boarding priority, surely there will be new ways for people to try and game the system in order to save a few bucks, and I have to wonder if SWA people thought this through enough to merge with existing policies in place, unless said policies were on the chopping block for restructure in order to not lose money on these new potential pricing tiers.

Either way, I can’t imagine that this is going to end well.  I like to imagine that when this shit rolls out, it won’t take more than the first flight, before passengers, by virtue of being selfish dicks or just plain ignorance, queues up out of order, isn’t stopped at the gate, and boards when they shouldn’t have.  They sit down in an aisle, take up overhead space with their carry-on, and later on in the boarding, someone who’s a middle seat passenger is denied overhead space, and/or is jilted over having to wait for the prior aisle-seat dick to get out of the way so they can board, and already the flight experience is stained.

Before we know it, a fight breaks out, and 12 people record it on their phones from differing angles, and Southwest is back in the news again for another passenger fight, and absolutely nothing has changed at all.

gg Southwest, look forward to the next bonehead disruptor idea y’all come up with next.