Spirit Airlines dying is not good for the industry

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

NPR: Spirit Airlines ceases all operations after failing to get bailed out by the government, effectively killing the company and costing thousands of people their jobs

I know that for years, Spirit has more or less been the butt of almost all jokes when it comes to airline travel.  Costs money to breathe, nickels and dimes for seatbelts and bathroom access, it’s the Greyhound of the skies, only a certain demographic travels on Spirit, etc. 

However, regardless of all the people who think they’re comedians, there was a definite place for Spirit in the industry; there is always a place for the company that deliberately tries to be the cheapest option, in a sea full of companies who couldn’t give two shits about customers.

I remember when Spirit rose from the ashes in like 2006 or 2007.  I didn’t know they had existed for a decade before then, but I remember how aggressive they were at trying to build a customer base, and I vaguely recall they had flights as low as like $14 and other mind-boggling fares, all to fill seats, sell their mission, and let people know that they existed.  I never did capitalize on any of those dirt-cheap fares, but it definitely did its job at announcing their arrival in the market.

I’ve actually flown Spirit more than most people probably care to admit.  Sure, they’re cheap, and their seats are basically plywood with light fabric covering them.  Yes, they do nickel and dime you for just about everything they can.  Yeah, luggage can be problematic if you don’t plan well.  But the thing is, if you know all the rules, and are willing to adhere to them, they’re actually not that bad.

In spite of their general reputation, I can’t say that I’ve ever really had any major problems with their performance.  Sure, there have been some delays here and there, and last year was the first time in which they inexplicably cancelled a flight on me, causing me to have to scramble, but by and large, I have flown with Spirit many times, to places like Washington DC, Dallas to Las Vegas, and they’ve typically been pretty satisfactory.

I’ve never needed to swindle, try and game the system, or cheat the agents at the gate, as long as I prepared properly, they’ve always been cost-effective and reliable at getting me from point A to point B.

So I’m sad to hear that they’re now basically dead.  Not just because tens of thousands of people are losing their jobs, not just because that hundreds of travelers were boned and left absolutely stranded and shell shocked at the notion that their flights were cancelled on account of, the carrier going completely tits up right in the middle of their itineraries.

But because the airline industry needs cost-effective carriers like Spirit, in order to keep the monopolies honest.  Sure, lots of people wouldn’t mind paying more to get a little more comfort, a checked bag, in-flight snacks and wi-fi, but when the price difference starts creeping into $300+, that typically tends to make even the most cash-flush flyers begin to scratch their heads and deliberate whether or not the cost difference is worth it.

And when companies like Spirit go away, and take their $149 RT from Atlanta to DC off the table, it leaves the lowest option to be like Delta’s basic $299 RT that passengers don’t get to choose seats, get no SkyMiles, get no cancellation policy, basically everything Spirit already did, but for double the price.

It’s crazy too, because from my point of view, Spirit didn’t operate too differently than like, AirTran did.  But for whatever reason, Spirit could just never get to that point where they grew to the point where they were enticing by a bigger company to come assimilate them like the Borg and the people running Spirit would have succeeded in the American Dream of being able to get to a position to where they could sell out.

Especially over the last few years, there were always rumors or press snippets about Spirit merging with others, like Frontier or JetBlue, but clearly nothing ever came to fruition with those.  I have no idea nor do I care to research on why that was the case, but it just seems sad that everything always seemed to fall through, and Spirit was put in this position of being the first head cut off in regards to low-cost carriers.

I don’t fly nearly as much as I used to these days, but I always did consider Spirit to be a viable option, and I can’t help but feel sad that they’ve been put out to pasture.  As much as I still bemoan the departure of AirTran from eons ago, I figure the next time I see the lowest cost option to fly to BWI or MCO being like $379, I’m going to be salty at all the parties involved that contributed towards the removal of Spirit from the field, knowing that I probably could’ve saved at least 50%, had I been willing to pay for my oxygen and sitting on covered plywood.

I’ve never had an April that has sucked more than this year’s has

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Even in the most curmudgeon periods of my life, I’ve always kind of held my breath and walked on eggshells whenever it’s come to the month of April.  Seeing as how it’s the month in which my birthday is, I’m always cautiously optimistic that they can’t possibly suck that much, seeing as how there’s a very concrete day in which the world is obligated to not be too much of a dick to me on, and I always hope that the grace of a birthday has a tendency to permeate through as much of the rest of the month as the fates are willing to grace.

Sure, I’ve had some shitty things happen in Aprils before, and history has shown a predisposition for some real bad shit to usually happen around the time of my birthday, but save for large swaths of the world crying, memorializing or mourning the departed, most of the time I can usually rely on my birthdays themselves to not be the worst days in the world.

Throw all that shit out the window this year, because not only was a really fucking sick on my birthday this year, it’s not a far stretch to say that I’ve basically been sick all throughout the month, and the fact that I can’t seem to get back to being 100% healthy has been mentally challenging, frustrating and demoralizing, especially since I feel like I could handle or have handled a lot of the frustrations of the month better than I have, had I had my health to rely upon to be in good standing through it all.

It’s like, #2 and I caught a cold of some sort early on in the month, that I remember taking almost an entire week off from the office and worked remote, and I kind of got better.  But it’s like neither of us truly got fully recovered from that sickness, and by the time I hobbled back home after my week of exile back up in Northern Virginia to clean up my old joint, both my kids had ear infections, and within a week, such had passed onto me, leading to me spending my actual birthday in a lot of pain and misery of having an ear infection that went undiagnosed by the first urgent care I went to because they suck, leading to me to suffer throughout it for several days afterward before I went to get a second opinion, and confirmation that I had some shit going on.

I’ve never had an ear infection in my life before, so let me just say how much it sucks to get one for the first time.  The feeling of a swollen or burst ear drum, the constant throbbing and being able to hear my heartbeat, the sensation that it’s like I permanently have an AirPod in the ear with noise cancellation on, because I’m hard of hearing through it.  And before I got put on antibiotics, the main was just so dull and persistent, and was absolutely handicapping when I wasn’t on some sort of painkillers.

Furthermore, ear infections are usually byproduct of bad colds, and it’s like I’ve had this one, or maybe two colds all month long, and although I mostly feel fine, it’s one of those bugs where it’s left a Chinese Great Wall of mucus in my chest and sinuses, that is taking its dear sweet fucking time in going away, resulting in a lot of aggravated coughing spells, which is wreaking havoc on my sleep and my wife’s sleep, and I haven’t felt like I’ve gotten adequate sleep almost throughout the entire month.  It’s been like an entire decade since I’ve had this kind of phlegmy misery, because I remember how much is sucked back then, and how much it sucks to have it again now.

The bottom line is that I just can’t seem to get healthy, and it sucks that basically the entire month of April has come and gone with me being sick throughout most of it.  And to add insult to injury, there’s been all sorts of bullshit happenings between my dad, the workload at work, my dad, all of the shit I have to do for my dad, the disappointment of trying to accomplish things but relying on the responses and communication of others, and of course, my dad.

As is often the case, I feel as if I’m being pulled from all sides from everyone in my life, leading me to grow frustrated and wish people would just take the reins and run without having to review everything with me first, and that I’m taken for granted on such a monumental level by pretty much everyone in my life.

And because as much as I’d like to memorialize these folks with individual posts but don’t really feel like I have the energy to do it in remotely a time-sensitive manner, some dudes I enjoyed or revered kicked the bucket this month, just to hammer down the notion that April this year sucked goat ball sacks.  But Darrell Sheets from Storage Wars apparently killed himself, with there being tremendous speculation that it came at the urging of a psychotic online bully stalker.

And although there wasn’t as much scandal behind a 91-year old man with dementia passing, Roger Sweet, the creator of He-Man passed as well, and this is one of those situations where there’s no hyperbole when I say a piece of my childhood just died, because I lived, died and breathed He-Man and the Masters of the Universe growing up, and it is truly sad to learn that that creator of such an iconic property of my childhood has left us.

Needless to say, this April has sucked colossally, and I’m relieved to see it nearing its end.  I try to not put too much stock into arbitrary windows of time, because there’s no guarantee May will be better than April for no other reason than it not being April anymore, but this past month has sucked so much that I’m willing to set my pessimism aside for just a little bit and hope that May doesn’t blow half as much as April of this year has.

More than anything, I just want my health back, and for my ear to stop ringing and to be able to hear like a normal functional adult again.  I feel like if I’m at least physically healthy, it will only help in enduring any other bullshit that might come along and is immediately made worse by my not feeling well.

I still want a re-do on my birthday though.  I haven’t opened any of the gifts I received yet, because I’ve been in such a negative headspace, that I don’t want the good intentions of any presents to be soiled by my negative headspace.

The poor Chick Fil-A recruiting class

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A long time ago, there was a Chick Fil-A that then-mythical gf and I went to pretty regularly.  There was a guy that managed the place, who we called Sam; whether that was actually his name or not is irrelevant at this point, but Sam was one of those guys that had an explosively bubbly personality, was always smiling, always happy, and clearly had an 11 on his attribute slider when it came to people skills.

One time, he saw us in the drive-thru line and addressed the two of us by name, and after we had left, we had one of those collective moments that both found it a little weird that he clearly learned, us, and that we probably come by too often, to where it’s gotten to this point.

All the same, as slightly uncomfortable as it felt to be learned by Sam, there was no mistaking the fact that he ran a really tight ship, and this particular location was always firing on all cylinders.  The line moved fast, orders were almost never inaccurate, and the place had to be among the leaders or the region in terms of profit and satisfaction.

Any time mythical wife and I come across any sort of business, whether it’s another Chick Fil-A or not, where the customer service and general quality of employee performance seems below par, we often remark about how this place could use a Sam.  He’s basically become the measuring stick of effective leadership, regardless of it it’s in the fast food space or not.

Anyway, I’ve made no secret of my general love of the Chick Fil-A app, and locations that utilize an app-only lane.  The app is one of the greatest apps in the history of mobile application development, and I love how it gives me access to the app-only lanes of certain CFA locations, because fewer things in the world tickles my fancy than checking in with the app, and then bypassing at least five cars, slowly ordering and waiting in the pleeb line, multiplied only by how fast I get my food and am on my way versus how many cars are still waiting in pleeb class.

One of the greatest days of my fat guy life was when the CFA location that my house frequents the most, underwent renovations in order to implement a dedicated app lane.  Sure, when they re-opened, there were some growing pains and some training needing to be done by the restaurant and to the idiot customers, but eventually we got to a point where it became business as usual; I could whiz into the app lane, check in, pass by 3-7 pleebs in the old people manual ordering line, and be on my merry way.

However, over the course of the last contemporary school year, it has been noticed how ineffective the local CFA has become.  Long waits, frequency of inaccuracies rising.  It didn’t matter if I were using the app or not, the kitchen would get backed up and overwhelmed from what seemed like fairly predictable and busy periods that should be relatively easy to anticipate.  The app lane did very little to change things, and the gleeful text messages I’d send mythical wife of how many cars I passed in the pleeb lane were often replaced by frustrated texts detailing how long I’ve been waiting, and how generally annoyed I was feeling from this experience.

The coup de grace was when I was coming to pick up some food from the CFA, and I noticed that although the drive-thru still began with two lanes, with one of them being solely for app users, prior to reaching the pickup point, the lanes forcibly merge.  And in some cases, in a twist of irony, by the sheer nature of zipper merges, occasional pleebs who ordered with sticks, nuts and pebbles get to jump in front of the savvier app users, and conversely, few things annoy me as much as that.

Naturally, when inane bullshit like this begins to go tits up, I often ponder, how?  I began to think about how the whole school year, performance has been relatively on the lower-tier of output, and I concluded with the notion that my local CFA just simply had, a bad recruiting class. 

Much like in the same vein of when a college has a poor recruiting class, resulting in poor performance throughout the season, and an eventual sense of wanting this to be over with so that they can possibly retool and rebuild for the following year.

I suppose the people in my community and I have been taking for granted the general strong yearly performance of our local CFA, seeing as how when it’s actually bad, it’s really noticeable, but it’s still disheartening that they seem to operate much like a college program, where if you’re bogged down with marginal talent, you’re stuck with it until they all graduate out, and hopefully a more talented class takes their places afterward.

But make no mistake, the problems at my local CFA definitely stem from the fact that they had a very poor recruiting class for the 25-26 season, that can’t handle the kitchen, which in turns taxes the runners, which in turn slows down the drive thru lines, which unfortunately results in the deactivation of the app-only line in order to drop the general speed to something that the kitchen is capable of handling.

All I’m saying is, if Sam were in charge of this CFA location, none of this bullshit would even be a part of the discussion.

Every business out there, regardless of if it’s a Chick Fil-A or not, could only benefit from having a Sam of their own.

Why do people like Twizzlers?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Honest question.  Mythical wife bought this huge fucking sack of them, and they’re sitting on the kitchen counter.  The kids want them every time they see them, and much like a lot of the junk food that mythical wife buys, she barely eats it, so either I eat more of it than I should, the kids eat more of it then they should, or it ultimately gets thrown out.

Needless to say, I’ve had like two ropes of the crap, and each time I take a bite, I ask myself, why do people like Twizzlers?  They’re basically barely edible plastic, hardly have any flavor, and I feel that they’re more effort to eat than they are to enjoy, as if anyone could actually enjoy these shitty things that feel like you’re biting into a candle, with about as much flavor.  I imagine that they’re like the human equivalent of Greenies treats for dogs, because they look like plastic, are minimally edible, and when they break down in your mouth, I imagine the effect is the same, where they passively scrape and inadvertently clean your teeth.

In all fairness, I’m talking about the traditional twists variants, because I’ve found that the pull ‘n peel Twizzlers are actually enjoyable and tasty, but as far as brand recognition goes, it’s all about the traditional twists.  And the question remains, why the fuck do people actually like these things?

As I said, the bag has been laying, mostly open, on my kitchen counter.  Usually, I try to be cognizant of any food that’s left out on the counter, because once everyone goes to bed at night, the cats in my house definitely like to get up onto the counters to snoop around and look for anything remotely edible.  And yet night after night, the Twizzlers remain completely untouched by the cats.  Just a day ago, an errant bag of cereal that was left on the counter fell victim to the fucking cats, and I found it on the ground the following morning, with it shredded open in the middle like it had been caught by velociraptors.

So the dumbass cats in my house won’t eat these shitty Twizzlers, but my wife argues with me that they’re remotely supposed to be good.  I do not understand how any people think these are remotely as good as to warrant their continued survival in the junk food space.

Make it make sense pls

Crashing out

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I had just gotten home.  I was exhausted, in a lot of pain, and completely drained of just about everything needed in order to be a functional adult.  However, I decided to go get the mail before I went inside because I’m the only one in my house who ever gets the mail unless someone is expecting something, otherwise it will pile up and look like nobody lives in the property which I’m always paranoid of because I used to live in the hood and I know of all the little things to do to help reduce your property from becoming a target.

It was while I was trudging down my driveway did I see my shadow stretched out to look like a 17-foot slenderman, that I had the thought of how appropriate that visual is, because that’s probably what I should look like based on how much people in the world pull and tug and rely and lean so much on me, despite the fact that I really wish that such wasn’t the case and that everyone around me would just step up and make some fucking decisions on their own without needing me at all sometimes.

I came into my home, and was pretty quickly greeted by my eldest.  She welcomed me home, and I could already feel the tears welling up in my eyes.  #2 came shortly and by then I was already struggling to hide the fact that I was already crying.  My perfect little daughters, sometimes my sole reason for existing, wanting to show me things they drew, crafts they made at school.  #1 said to me before I got on the stairs, you should go rest now.

Great idea, I said to her.  I went into the bedroom, changed into sleep clothes, and plopped down in bed.  I couldn’t really stop crying and I have no idea when I actually fell asleep, but it was a miserable night’s sleep, waking up numerous times due to the pain from what I would eventually discover was a bad ear infection which wasn’t a surprise considering both my kids had it the week prior, in spite of urgent care brushing it off like it was nothing when I went to go see someone about it on my fucking ruined birthday.

Either way, it was about 10 hours in which I was in bed, sleep or not asleep, or whatever I’d call the fugue-like state of bizarre dreams, pain and tossing and turning because of the pain, and it was at around 5 am in which I decided to punt on trying to get any more sleep, and to get up and prepare for the day that I didn’t want to deal with after the one I had just gone through, but life and the passage through time stops for nobody, and I still had my kids to take care of and if I don’t do it pretty much nobody else will, so on with the show all the same.

As is the popular saying these days, I had really crashed out.  Ironic a little bit, because I had taken all of Wednesday off of work to spend the day with my dad to deal with a lot of dad stuff in order to not crash out when stacking it on with working remotely, but a crash out still occurred regardless, but not necessarily due to just my dad per say, as much as it was a moment in the day in which I had a number of duties and obligations concurrently swirling over my head, and I succumbed to the feeling of how much pressure there was on me.

Continue reading “Crashing out” →

Can I have a re-do on my birthday pls?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I know that I don’t really make much to do about my birthday in the first place, but is it too much to ask to at least not be saddled with a vicious virus on my actual birthday?  Because that’s exactly what happened to me this year, where I spent my entire birthday clouded with brain fog, mostly in bed, barely eating, a trip to urgent care, and still on the hook for some daily obligations.

I went to Starbucks to get at least one treat for myself, since those cocksuckers only give you the actual date of your birthday to redeem a free drink, and they messed it up, giving me a smaller size than I had ordered, and since I was in the drive-thru, I was unwilling to clog the line and wait longer than I already had for them to remake something that wasn’t even going to taste like what I hoped it would, on account of being ill.

The adults in my home had already arranged for me to sleep in on my birthday, but for it to have become mandatory on account of the fact that I was hit pretty hard by this bug wasn’t exactly the way I had hoped it would go.  I know it’s futile to wax poetic about the fairness of life, but to get really sick on one’s birthday is definitely one of those things that just doesn’t seem fair at all.

I just wanted to sleep in, perhaps go for a jog while the weather was nice, go on a mini adventure picking up what very few and scant free shit items that are still offered up these days, and come home, spend some time with my kids, perhaps go get burritos for lunch, and then watch Wrestlemania day 2 in relative peace and health.

Instead, I wake up feeling like a bowling ball is embedded in my head, I can’t breathe through my nose from all the gunk trapped in there, and I can’t think straight at all.  I’ve got chills which means I’m fevering up, and it’s going to take a minute for the acetaminophen to help break it.  My kids, my perfect little children, come to bring me breakfast and coffee in bed and I love them so much, but I feel like shit that I can’t really reciprocate.  Eating feels like a chore and nothing feels like its sitting right, and I can hardly will myself to do anything but lay down and occasionally rotate sides, with hopes that the gunky congestion in my head will gravitate toward the opposite side.

Needless to say, my birthday this year was a miserable ordeal, and I’m not so much putting it in writing because I expect any sort of sympathy, but so I can remember just how bad a birthday really can be, and what I hope for it to not be like in future years.  But it all really sucks that this was my birthday this year, because now I don’t have it to look forward to anymore, and can only look at it in hindsight with resentment and disgust at how shitty it was, and if there were every such a thing as a re-do, this would definitely be one that I’d like to really have one for.

WTF is AEW doing #666

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I was aimlessly scrolling while slogging my way through the final episode of DTF St. Louis, I saw a spoiler-ey post about how Darby Allin was going to get his shot at MJF and the AEW World Championship; in the main event, tonight!!!  Seeing as how I was already in HBO Max watching DTF St. Louis, I thought for a second that I could just as easily switch over to AEW Dynamite, even if the app makes it impossible to find it without manually searching for it, but then I thought, nahhh, might as well cross this series off my list, and maybe I’ll tune in afterward, but that didn’t happen either because I then went into catching up with several episodes of Daredevil: Born Again S2 instead.

Regardless, after I had moved on from that post, I had this thought in my mind that I had this sneaking suspicion that AEW was going to have MJF drop the title to Darby Allin, because why the fuck not, Darby is one of the most protected and over talents in the company, he’s clearly over with the fans, and who gives a fuck about any sort of genuine buildup, and to go straight from a PPV on Sunday to a title change on television the immediate Wednesday?

Before I went to bed and was aimlessly scrolling again, I saw postings about how Darby Allin has defeated MJF to become the AEW World Champion (!!! And Sting came out to congratulate him!!!), and my immediate thought was that it’s clear that I still had, it, when it came to accurately being able to predict the outcomes of predetermined professional wrestling matches.

Full disclosure, Darby Allin isn’t my cup of tea; I think he puts his body through an extraordinarily excessive amount of punishment, and even though the perspective of the industry is endlessly trying to change the narrative of the importance of size, I’m old and I just can’t buy into some 5’8, 155 lb. emo band-looking edgelord being anything remotely close to a World champion in professional wrestling.

However, I do recognize that the guy has an immense passion for the industry, after all a person wouldn’t be willing to basically attempt physical suicide as much as Darby Allin did if he didn’t, and in spite of his limited physical stature, the guy is a hard worker who clearly puts 110% effort into his work every night he performs.

Darby Allin has an incredible mind for the industry, is clearly going to be a life-long idea guy in the business when his body can’t take it anymore, and most importantly, he has a connection with younger fans that just can’t be artificially cultivated.  He moves merch and captures the imagination of young fans, and those things by themselves are invaluable, even if an old like me isn’t a fan.

As a whole, Darby Allin absolutely deserves to be World champion in AEW; he works hard, has given everything to the company, is over, the fans are behind him, and there’s absolutely no argument from even me, that he should be rewarded with a run with the company’s top prize.

However, it’s just the way this all transpired that had me scratching my head, and triggered the want to brog about it, and continue on the use of the WTF Is AEW doing titling.

For starters, I’m going back to the fact that there was basically no build up for this whatsoever.  Over the last few months, the World title picture in AEW has basically been Kenny Omega, Hangman Adam Page and Swerve Strickland, with talents like Konosuke Takeshita, Andrade and Brody King lurking nearby.  Jon Moxley is still strong, albeit tied up with whatever tier the Not Inter-Continental Championship is, and in spite of his own ballast with the International Championship, eventually Kazuchika Okada is going to be due a shot at the World.

Darby won a number one contender’s match at Dynasty against Andrade, so we all knew that he’d get his shot at MJF, but little did many of us realize that it would be immediately afterward, and on the very same night.  Considering MJF’s general history with the company has been under a colossal amount of protection, very limited appearances and a seemingly high amount of creative freedom, I figured Darby would’ve had to have gone through the cliched trial of tasks that most of all of MJF’s feuds ultimately have to go through before they’d have a match at whatever PPV they have to try and rival SummerSlam, where MJF would win after a 30 minute scrap, of course courtesy of a punch while wearing the Dynamite Diamond ring, like he’s basically won nearly every single match over the last five years.

I know Tony Khan lives to try to surprise internet wrestling fans, but I feel like he left a lot of money on the table by skipping the foreplay, and going straight for Darby vs. MJF, because one of MJF’s greatest attributes is his ability to cut promos, and by not building it up, viewers were denied at least 6-8 weeks of potential promos to hype up the match, even if it were going to end the way it did then as it did just yesterday.

Next, I have a lot of thoughts about MJF didn’t just lose the match to Darby Allin, but he was basically squashed.  Here’s a guy in MJF who has been through absolute hell in the matches that he’s had over the last calendar year, with multiple scraps with the likes of Hangman Adam Page, Samoa Joe, Swerve Strickland, Brody King and Kenny Omega.  He has taken some insane bumps, basically been strangled by ropes, taken avalanche-version of every high-impact slam, and had a large number of excessive bodily harm inflicted onto him.  Just a day ago, the internet was abuzz over a top rope One-Winged Angel he took from Kenny Omega, and that’s one of the most protected moves in the entire industry, when done regularly, but MJF kicked out of it from the top rope.

And then against Darby Allin, he basically takes a low-blow, four Coffin Drops, which I’m sorry, is a really lame finisher, especially considering the treasure chest full of moves in which other AEW talents, including Darby Allin are capable of performing, and to top it off, MJF is pinned after being rolled up in a side headlock takeover, which is like, the very first move done in any Ricky Steamboat vs. Ric Flair match in history.

Basically just about everything about Darby Allin defeating MJF for the AEW World championship is head-scratching puzzling, and kind of reeks of being done for intentional shock value, but not necessarily any real long-term net positive.  To me, it completely derails MJF’s championship reign, which has seen him overcome an impressive list of names already, and even though I fully believe that the title will be back with MJF before the end of the year, once again, I’m old, and I believe that rapid changes of championships devalues them, and even if MJF gains it back in two weeks, the clock has already stopped on his previous run, and we’re onto reign #3, instead of continuing on the reign of terror that #2 was shaping out to be prior to this occurrence.

I may not be a fan of Darby Allin’s, but I respect the work and passion for the business, and I have no problem with him being given a run with the AEW World Championship.  I just wish it happened under more auspicious conditions, and not have been done to artificially shock fans for the sake of being surprising, and not at the cost of burning the equity of one of the company’s most protected assets, as well as passively burying an all-star team worth of talent in doing so.

But then again, this series of posts wouldn’t exist if TK weren’t always trying to be so disingenuously surprising.  Hopefully it leads to something better than I would surmise, and that Darby doesn’t have a completely forgettable first-ever World championship run, like so many in the industry have had before him.