Month: March 2018

Imagine if…

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Last night, amid the news that horrendous storms were going to pass through Georgia overnight, I went to bed with some concern over the trees in my back yard, and concerns that a large branch that really could be better off being pruned off would be the greatest risk to my home, if it were to snap and fall on my house.  I made sure my freshly repaired computer was properly powered down, and I was hoping that my dog wouldn’t be scared by all the arriving flashing lights of lightning pulsing through the night skies.  Regardless, I went to bed fairly easy because I am old.

However, I woke up at 5 am to other dog whining, wanting to be let out.  This has become something of a normal occurrence now, and I’m finding that I’m not even making it to my personal alarm more frequently than not, much to my occasional annoyance.  Regardless, with the night (mostly) passed, my mind began churning with curiosity of how bad the weather still was, at 5 in the morning.

Taking the dogs out, it was just wet outside, like it was just any other rain that had passed by.  After coming back in, I went to the rear windows to try and get a scope of the backyard, and despite it being dark, I didn’t see any large branches sitting ominously in my yard, mocking me with an “almost got you” proximity to my home.  So, with the supposed nightmare storms in the past, I tried to get a little bit more sleep, failed anyway, and began my day earlier than usual, since I can justify going in at ass o’clock because of the busy season at work.

Durning my morning surfing rounds, I come to discover that despite the fact that my region of the metro Atlanta area seemed to make it through the night relatively unscathed, there were other areas that weren’t as lucky.  Namely, one specific neighborhood in South Fulton County which got a literal brunt of the night’s storms, as an actual tornado touched down right in the subdivision and basically obliterated an entire neighborhood.

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I guess kids will have no choice but to grow up now

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I guess it’s getting to the point where it’s inevitable that the things of our youths ultimately end up dying slow and undignified deaths.  I kind of wonder if this is one of those generational things that happens to every generation, but given the fact that some of these iconic companies are often times nearly 30, 40, or 50+ years old, I’m going to have to lean towards that such might not be the case for every generation.

Now I’ve gotten nostalgic and poetic waxy about franchises of my own youth, like K-Marts, Old Country Buffets and Sears, but the impending death of Toys ‘R Us is a pretty hefty blow in its own right.  Whereas the deaths of most of the other aforementioned businesses tended to hit grownups the hardest, there’s almost something cruel about a business that primarily made their bread on butter on the wants of children getting the axe now.

I mean, business is most certainly an unforgiving, indiscriminate venue, but taking it out on the children seems especially harsh.  It’s no secret that lots of people hate Walmart, and Target and Amazon are pretty universally loved, but when it really comes down to it, all of them, as well as all other businesses that could be considered competition were all involved in twisting the knife that eventually succeeded in bringing death towards the most iconic toy retailer, at least of my entire lifetime.

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Some more freaky Black Mirror shit

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Let’s just go ahead and say it, the end of the world will likely begin somewhere in the New England area.  Regardless of who came first in the weird chicken and egg argument on whether Black Mirror stories were inspired by tech, or if tech was inspired by Black Mirror, all that really exists is that a lot of familiarly freaky shit all seems to be taking shape in various labs out in Massachusetts.

Whether it’s Metalhead-like robot dogs now being capable of opening doors and actively working together with one another, to some rogue iRobot robots that can basically do moonsaults now, now we’ve got some eggheads up north tinkering around with the idea of being able to digitize human brains so that the people who choose to do this, can essentially live forever.

Basically, kind of like the oft-used Black Mirror concept of digitizing human consciousness and uploading them into other people, tech or inanimate objects; the human vessels might be dead or comatose, but the consciousness still remains, capable of feeling stimulus or having memories.

Yeah, some nerds out in some incubator (man, I hate that phrase, what are we, chickens?) in Massachusetts have come up with this concept of preserving the human brain so that it can be basically accessible and for lack of a better term, backed up, so that it could theoretically live beyond the limits of the human body.

There’s one tiny little caveat though:

The product is “100 percent fatal,”

In order to do this, you will die.  There’s no ifs, there’s no gray area.  In order to become a thinking vegetable, YOU. WILL. DIE.

Hell of a sales pitch there.  Explain the benefits of digitizing your brain, etcetera, etcetera, blah, blah, oh yeah, but you have to volunteer to, y’know, end your life in order to do so.  Seems real appealing doesn’t it?

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Asuka’s streak is the most valuable commodity in WWE

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Whether it’s coincidental or not, I feel like every Wrestlemania Season™ I always find some excuse to contemplate and write about the value of all of the WWE championships.  Maybe it’s because Wrestlemania is the culmination of the year’s stories and scripts, and it’s theoretically where everything comes to a boil, and the chips are all put on the table so that things can be settled, and things can be sown for the year after, but the bottom line is that everything is on the line, and the paths into the future become clearer for all the important players.

The thing is, the WWE has done a lot of things and integrated some plot devices that have taken their own shapes, and manifested into tangible things that are on par with championships, if not competitive in value with the coveted belts that superstars wish to hold.  Be them briefcases, winning streaks, or the ironically self-aware rights to face certain superstars or even simply get to point at signs, there are things that exist in the WWE Universe™ that have become as valuable, if not more, than the litany of belts available in the company today.

And above all of the belts, briefcases and signs stands a streak, the one currently ongoing with Asuka, who hasn’t lost a single match since arriving with the company in 2015.  Sure, wrestling is scripted and the finishes all predetermined, but it still takes a tremendous amount of work to get people to like and care about you to where a promoter sees the value of keeping that character completely undefeated for ongoing three years straight.

It goes without saying that Asuka’s streak is the most valuable commodity in the WWE today.  I know they’re really trying to make it look like she’s going to run into some massive resistance at Wrestlemania when she takes on Charlotte Flair in a proverbial Championship vs. Streak match, but I would wager money that Asuka wins regardless, and then the streak has a belt as well, increasing its overall value further.

And Asuka has worked her ass off over the last three years and making the streak mean something, first by dominating NXT, and missing out on the first wave of superstar callups, solely based on the fact that she was carrying the developmental league and couldn’t be promoted without a suitable cache of replacements in place, before showing up to the main roster and continuing her stellar work rate with a wider variety of female opponents.

Furthermore, streaks in general are things that require a lot of time and patience to culture, and in an industry where patience is scant and knee-jerk reactions are commonplace, successfully developing one and keeping the company’s faith to maintain it are extremely rare things.  Consider the fact that Goldberg’s 162-0 streak was snapped nearly 20 years ago, and up until now hasn’t seen anything remotely close in storyline to remember the importance of an undefeated streak; and many former guys in the industry even regret breaking it then, because there’s no limit to how valuable a streak can get, because the longer it goes unbroken, the more meaning it has when it actually does.

Ironically, my biggest concern is that the WWE will eventually hit a wall of what they could possibly do with Asuka, and eventually run out of competitors.  Women’s wrestling has been growing rapidly, but it’s still staggering behind the men’s side, and there will come a point where viable challengers to break the streak will either be girls Asuka has already defeated time and time again already, or worse off, it’s going to go to some tourist like Ronda Rousey.  If the streak becomes too grandiose, it stops being a matter of trying to execute a suitable end to it, but the difficulty of building up a woman worthy of doing it.

But let’s cross that bridge when the time comes.  Frankly, I hope the streak doesn’t ever end, even if it means that the blue women’s championship becomes worthless in the sense that there’s almost never any chance Asuka drops it, because if there’s just one thing that I still enjoy in a fake sport geared to kids, it’s Asuka’s streak.

And the rest of the rankings:

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Can David Wright surpass Ryan Howard for worst MLB contract?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I was skimming baseball news recently, when I came across this article about how the Mets’ third baseman, and the Face of Major League Baseball™, David Wright has suffered some physical setbacks, and has been shut down for eight weeks, thus missing out on Opening Day and likely all of April.

For the record, David Wright has had a laundry list of physical ailments throughout the last few years, such as spinal cord stenosis, a hernia in his neck, rotator cuff surgery, and another undisclosed back injury.  Over the span of the last three seasons, Wright has played in a grand total of 75 games, with a big fat zero in 2017.  Needless to say, it’s been particularly challenging for Wright to stay healthy, and I can only imagine the frustration of a guy who makes his living playing baseball, being so physically incapable of actually playing it.

Here’s the thing though: baseball contracts are guaranteed, unlike in the NFL.  If your contract states you make X over Y number of years, you get exactly that much money, regardless of if you play or not.  David Wright signed an eight-year contract back in 2012 that dictated that between the years of 2013-2020, he would be paid $138 million dollars.

Considering the fact that he’s played in 15% of games over the last three years, you might be able to see why this is a problem for the Mets, and a legitimate question to whether or not his contract just might be the worst contract in baseball history.

Among baseball nerds, the debate is endless on who really is the worst contract in baseball history.  But for the sake of ease, and the fact that I dislike the Phillies, we’re just going to go with one of the more popular options, as the de facto current worst contract in MLB history: Ryan Howard’s five-year, $125 million dollar contract he signed with the Phillies in 2010.

How does David Wright’s current, and still active deal stack up to The Big Piece’s albatross that hamstrung the Phillies for five years?  Let us compare.

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Danny’s watch list, winter-spring 2018

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Over the last few months, I’ve been watching a lot more television instead of burning every single evening playing League of Legends.  I still enjoy the game, but I’m not going to pretend like my interest in the game is nearly what it was a year or three ago; it’s kind of like how my baseball mania peaked and tempered back down a happy medium, to where I wanted to pursue other interests instead of letting myself get so completely absorbed in it.  I don’t follow professional play anymore, and I don’t even bother reading patch notes, and have gotten blindsided by some new in-game mechanics here and there, but I just don’t care. 

I could easily write more about why I’ve grown distant to the game, but that would be long enough to be another post for another time.

Television, has kind of filled the space in my free time that was so fervently accounted for by playing League.  Every now and then, I feel like I’m falling behind the ever-growing libraries of content being produced at a breakneck pace, and sometimes I just want to sit back and watch something and not be so interactively vested in my entertainment.  Sometimes it’s just nice to have stories told to you, without having to exert any more effort than pulling the tab on my recliner to sit back and enjoy television on my projection screen.

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I am so sick of rain

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Can we go back to having a drought again please?  Seriously, I don’t know what it’s been like in other parts of the country, but as far as Atlanta is concerned, it’s pretty much rained every single fucking weekend throughout the entire year.

I’m fairly certain the only weekend it didn’t rain was a week ago, and it was the single greatest weekend weather in history since it did not rain, it was unseasonably warm, and I actually went outside to jog for several miles.  And then the clouds came back and brought the rain and the temperatures plummeted again and here we stand back in colder temperatures with rain, rain and more god damn fucking rain.

We all understand the importance of rain, but can we talk about just how fucking miserable it can also be, when it just never seems to stop coming down?  Rain makes driving more difficult because all the pleebs think it’s liquid incompetence and they drive like morons.  Nobody really likes to get wet while clothed, and feel the need to bring god damn umbrellas everywhere. 

And all rain-related frustration is exacerbated for those who own dogs, as dogs require the need to periodically go outside to conduct their business, but then both dogs and owners must endure repeated trips outside where we all get wet and become miserable, and hate the world when we have to do it multiple times a day.

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