Month: April 2018

The NXT North American Championship seems like a waste

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

As much of a wrestling smark as I can sometimes be, I’m not going to pretend like I knew much about Adam Cole prior to his arrival in NXT.  I knew of his name, and that he was a guy that was pretty big in Ring of Honor, but frankly I didn’t even know what he looked like.  When he showed up in NXT and superkicked Drew McIntyre, my knee-jerk reactions was that he was kind of a Shawn Michaels clone, in look, ring presence and the fact that he whipped out a superkick as the very first thing on screen.

Over the following weeks, I watched Cole with interest and naturally read up on his career up to date on Wikipedia, but I had this suspicion that he was probably going to be an entertaining guy to watch.  Between all the matches he had jobbing to Aleister Black, War Games and his other sporadic appearances, it’s safe to say that I felt that he was a really good talent, and was among the guys I looked forward to seeing the most on episodes of NXT.

When NXT announced the creation of the NXT North American Championship, and that the inaugural champion would be crowned during a six-man ladder match, I kind of cringed when I saw that Adam Cole was tabbed as one of the contenders for the new belt.  But at the same time, I had a sinking suspicion that he was the one most likely to win the belt, because the whole Undisputed Era stable seemed like one of the things going to be relied upon to carry the brand over the next calendar year, and there would be no more serious way to bolster them than to have Adam Cole himself getting his hands on some hardware.

And true to prophecy, Adam Cole did win the North American Championship, and I was a combination of happy to see a guy I enjoyed watching win a title, unsurprised because I kind of figured this was going to happen, but at the same time a little bit disappointed that Cole won it.

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You know what fucking sucks?  Live tweeting

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It was Sunday, April 9th, 2018.  I was sitting in an airport terminal waiting for my flight from Orlando to Atlanta to start boarding so we could begin our journey back home.  Mythical gf and I had just spent a lovely weekend at Disney World where we couldn’t possibly have gotten any better weather than we did.  We dined on a lobster bake at Disney Springs, imbibed in refreshing beverages at the Hangar Bar.  We leisurely ate around the floral world at Epcot’s Flower & Garden Festival, and I caught a Heracross in Pikachu Game, the South American exclusive while there.  And due to some strategic planning on account of some typical Florida rain, we managed to ride the Avatar ride that typically has anywhere from a 3-4 hour wait with regularity, in under an hour.

It was a lovely trip.

However, Sunday, April 9th 2018 was also the same day that Wrestlemania 34 was scheduled.  Obviously, seldom am I ever going to prioritize a wrestling show over mythical gf, and I didn’t even bother crosschecking when WM was going to be when we planned our trip, not that it would have impacted anything in the least bit.  But the fact of the matter was that I still wanted to watch the show when I got back home and had a good 3-6 hours of free time because when taking into account of TakeOver and the pre-show and all the promos, who really knows how much time the ‘rasslin is going to account for.

This is often how I keep up with wrestling these days, watching things after they’ve aired, so that I can really flesh out the main storylines and plots without having to sit through all the commercials and extraneous fluff.  Obviously, I run the risk of encountering spoilers on a regular basis, but seeing as how WWE programming runs every single week, and multiple times a week, and the fact that personally I don’t know a tremendous amount of people that are really still into wrestling, it’s typically never really a problem to indulge in wrestling the way I do.

Except, when it comes to the big pay-per-view shows; like Summer Slam, the Royal Rumble, or, Wrestlemania.

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I love how big of pussies white supremacists are

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment
Fun fact: scenes from Zombieland were filmed in downtown Newnan where the Nazi rally is planned

The Nazis are coming, the Nazis are coming!  On April 21, 2018, the National Socialist Movement is holding a rally in Newnan, Georgia.

Oh goody.

Ironically, I’m long past being shocked and appalled by news like this.  It was more of a surprise that it’s kind of taken this long for a white supremacist rally to happen in Georgia that’s become somewhat nationally known.  Despite the fact that Atlanta is pretty blue and predominantly black populated, there’s no denying that the further one gets outside of the perimeter, the redder and more white redneck the rest of the state becomes.

The biggest takeaway I get from the news of white supremacists converging on Georgia right around my birthday is the location in which they chose to conglomerate at, Newnan.  It’s almost laughable just how cowardly and spineless this gathering is, taking place in Newnan, instead of anywhere remotely closer to Atlanta, where the chances of liberal and/or minority intervention go up exponentially. 

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Have Lexus drivers passed BMW for biggest assholes?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

For the better part of the last two decades, if anyone were to ask me what drivers were the worst drivers in the world, my automatic reaction would typically have been “Maryland drivers.”  But upon clarification of asking which automotive manufacturer has the biggest assholes that drive their cars, my answer becomes “oh, BMW drivers.”

BMWs have always been at a price point to where even the drivers of the low-end 3 series still felt validated to turn their noses up to everyone not willing to drop $35k (then) on a glorified Jetta.  Some of them were legitimately high-performing, and all of them came with a degree of luxuries that when combining all of the above, had a tendency to foster a sense of entitlement and arrogance from those that drove them. 

And it was no more indicative than watching the average BMW driver drive amidst the pleebs of the world; they’d cut people off without using signals, aggressively tailgate cars deemed inferior to their marvels of German engineering, and demonstrate all sorts of driving behavior that exuded me-first selfish and dickish attitudes.  It really didn’t matter who was driving the car, be it a white man, black woman, Asian teenager or an elderly Hispanic; once behind the wheel of a BMW, it’s like there’s a needle in the seat that goes straight up the driver’s asshole and plugs into a very specific node inside the body that triggers all sorts of degenerate behavior, thus fulfilling the destiny of BMW drivers all have to be assholes.

However, ever since I moved back into the ‘burbs, I’ve often been moderately fascinated at the sheer differences of my surroundings compared to my previous foray in homeownership.  Which is a nice way of saying that I now live in a slightly upper-middle class exuding white privilege which is overwhelmingly predominantly white, versus my old community which unfortunately sank into really lower-middle class that was overwhelmingly predominantly black, which in itself is a nice way to say that everyone in the neighborhood was black, and then there was Jen and myself.

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jk, this is the worst of social media

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Well, that didn’t take long.  Leave it to the internet to accept any challenge whenever anyone thinks they’ve hit a low point, to somehow continue to find more ways to test peoples’ opinions on humanity further.

By now, I’m pretty sure most people heard about how a shooter converged on YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno, California and wounded three people before supposedly killing herself afterward.  She was apparently really, really pissed off about how she felt like her First Amendment rights were being violated, so she flexed her Second Amendment right to bear arms and take it out on a bunch of people, most of whom probably had nothing to do with content suppression or the censorship of her stupid “channel” that wasn’t nearly as big of a deal as she thought it might’ve been.

Man, to think back in the day (2017), if you had a dispute with a company and they weren’t paying you, you first try to settle it by yourself, and failing that, get a lawyer, contact the Better Business Bureau, etc., etc., and try to settle it legally.  But nah, forget all that time-wasting shit, let’s just go out and get some guns and shoot up their offices.  That’ll get you paid real quick.

Either way, yet another shooting spree on American soil just occurred, and to nobody’s surprise, society’s gotten so desensitized to this happening that it’s pretty much already secondary news by this point.  Probably because there weren’t enough casualties save for the shooter herself, so there’s not enough bleed for this story to lead, for long enough.

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A fine example of why social media is fucking trash

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

In short: Donte DiVincenzo plays the game of his life, leads Villanova to the NCAA men’s basketball national championship.  Shortly afterward, an offensive tweet from seven years ago emerges amidst the celebration.

This is a perfect example of why social media is fucking garbage.  A guy can’t enjoy the best night of his budding career without having to address teenage behavior from seven years ago that some fuckheads took the time to seek out in order to deliberately piss on a joyous celebration.

I’m not entirely sure why this story has set me off, it’s no secret that I think social media is a cancer on society.  I guess I take objection to the idea that on a night where a guy performs legendarily and achieves success, that there are people who are such assholes that they exert actual effort in order to look for a way to throw a wet blanket on someone’s well-earned celebrating.

Maybe it’s because DiVincenzo’s story was so epic; a second-stringer who came off the bench in the National Championship game and went completely bonkers, and shit on Michigan harder than Chris Webber calling for timeout, that who doesn’t want a guy like that to be able to enjoy the night where he had the game of his life and led his team to a national championship?

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2018’s college Captain Tryhard

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Of all of the things that seems to be a thing every single year, I’m beginning to feel like “kid who applies to and gets accepted into X number of prestigious schools” is becoming one of the most insufferably arrogant things there is.  I get that if a kid is smart and has a very bright academic future ahead of them, they should absolutely be shooting for the top, but to apply to 20 schools?

Lookit, most colleges, college applications aren’t free.  Even if you want to apply to 20 schools, that’s still a lot of cumulative money going towards application fees.  And I only applied to four schools, got accepted into three of them, and barely went to one of them before I nailed down an actual job and decided that I’d rather work than keep going to school.  For someone so allegedly smart, applying to 20 schools seems almost insecure, or desperately seeking validation, since a kid with a 4.68 GPA* and a 1540 SAT** should probably be a layup to get into just about any school they’re applying to.  So he could’ve probably applied to even just the Ivy League schools, gotten into all of them, and called it a day, but instead, little Captain Tryhard here had to go ahead and apply to 20 total colleges.

I’m sure his parents were thrilled with having to pay the application fees for 20 schools, but I suspect that through some convoluted means, it might not have been as financially taxing as it probably should have been.

*how much extra credit needs to be done to get this high over a 4?**how much does it suck for the kids who had to endure the 2400-point scale only for it to go back down to 1600?

Either way, I’ve noticed that a story like this seems to emerge this time every year for the past few, and I can’t help but think how insufferably obnoxious it is every time it does.  At the root of these overachieving choices to apply to every school, I feel like it’s no different than any asshole on the internet hoping to have a reason to have 15 seconds of fame and notoriety in the event that they actually succeed. 

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