NXT Japan? Think of the belts!

Prior to the rise and age of coronavirus, I’d heard rumblings of Triple H’s ultimate goal of basically colonizing various parts of the world with NXT. It’s apparent that he has visions of reinventing the territorial system, but in a manner where he’ll have a finger in every single one of them, by having an NXT division in all of them. And despite the notion that he could be saturating the industry with his product(s), the truth of the matter is that NXT, the WWE and their general modus operandi run pretty tight ships, and I have to ask if that’s such a problem?

One of the most oft-discussed future NXT territories, has been Japan; it goes without saying that when it comes to the professional wresting industry, Japan is easily top-3 when it comes to countries that take it seriously, between them, the United States and Mexico. It goes without saying that if there were any place on the globe that should be a priority for a future NXT brand, it’s definitely Japan. And try, the WWE and Triple H have done throughout the last year or so, and every now and then there’s news of WWE getting into talks to purchase some small federation in Japan, before it fizzles out somewhere along the line.

It’s pretty clear that the WWE’s intention is to purchase an existing company, re-brand it as NXT Japan and go from there, as opposed to starting something from scratch. Which sounds like a decent plan, as to minimize transitioning as much as possible, but if there’s one thing about Japanese culture, is that they’re extremely nationalistic and extremely prejudice towards outsiders seeking success in their lands. Whether the validity of the reports are true, supposedly the WWE has been shot down numerous times by various promotions looking to sell, and in some stories, some Japanese promotions be it New Japan, All Japan or some other players, have swooped in to purchase them, for seemingly no other reason than to cockblock the WWE from getting their foot in the door.

Whether or not any of that is true is really irrelevant in the long run, and I don’t particularly feel like going through the trouble to validate any of it, but the fact of the matter is that in the long run, it’s a moot point, because eventually, the WWE will get their foot into Japan, and NXT Japan will one of these days, eventually come to fruition. It’s not a matter of if, but when, because everybody has a price, and someone will eventually set aside nationalistic pride for financial gain and hand the reigns to their promotion over to the WWE, or failing that, the WWE will start from scratch if the projections of success are high enough.

I for one, am all for an NXT Japan division, because I appreciate and like what they’ve done with NXT UK, and I think there’s a tremendous world of opportunity and growth if an NXT Japan were to come to fruition. They’d obviously be the new base for Asian talent, and much like UK does, they can easily bring in talents from China, the Philippines, and if there’s even any interest in professional wrestling in Korea, why not see a first-ever Korean-born WWE professional wrestler too? They’d be closer for talent in the hot beds of Australia and New Zealand to feed into, and they’re an option for talents from Russia and India as well.

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There is no software Adobe doesn’t know how to make less efficient

Since the onset of coronavirus, I’d been working remotely since basically, my daughter was born.  I kind of got the jump on remote working, on account of being available for my wife and newborn daughter, but then when coronavirus started shutting everything down, I had a head start on working remotely.

Needless to say, my internet at home isn’t quite the fiber-optic connection at work, so it goes without saying that I deal with a little bit more slowdown at home than I do when I’m in the office.

Regardless, I still have to do my share of work, no matter the circumstances, and these days a large part of what I do is a whole lot of reviewing documents, namely PDFs.  So I’m in Acrobat a large portion of my days, whether I’m reviewing PDFs, marking them up, collating them for higher-ups, or whatever.  I’m in Acrobat a lot.

A long time ago, when Adobe products were all offline, I always took a mental note of how much space every program took.  Photoshop would always be a beast, but often times Illustrator would be larger.  Once InDesign came into the picture, it too was rather large, and then with the assimilation of Macromedia, Dreamweaver and Flash were large chunks of disk space necessary to have to install.  All the while, always in the background was Adobe Acrobat, which was but blips on the radar, and took minimal space in comparison, and also ran as smoothly as a well-maintained Audi, all the time.

No matter how much I had my feuds with PageMaker 6.0, Photoshop 5.5, Illustrator 8.0, InDesign CS3, InDesign CS6, Acrobat was one of those programs that was always steady as a metronome, and stable to boot.  I remember the first time I managed to get Acrobat to crash, but it was primarily because I was running it off of my old netbook, and I was trying to open a shoddily-made PDF that had a kabillion vector points in it, and frankly nothing short of a NASA computer could open it without issue.

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I don’t care if it’s a work

I mean, there’s a 100% chance that this is a work, because things in the WWE universe don’t happen if they aren’t; but anyway, I just wanted to say that I took tremendous enjoyment out of Adam Cole blasting into Pat McAfee during his shitty radio show, because I fucking can’t stand Pat McAfee, and it’s a pleasure to hear a strong talker like Adam Cole tear into him.

Since I’ve devolved into a way more filthy casual wrestling fan over the years, my only real exposure to the WWE product really is down to NXT re-broadcasts once they’re made available on the Network, and PPV events.  Without cable, I can’t watch RAW, I can’t watch NXT live, and frankly I can never find the time or want to watch Smackdown despite the fact that I can watch FOX on Friday nights.  NXT UK is currently shuttered due to coronavirus, and I don’t even think the WWE personnel even watches Main Event or 205 Live.

So occasionally, I’ll have the wherewithal to tune into a WWE PPV, and over the last few years that I’ve been able to intercept a pre-show, my thoughts have often been, who the fuck is this guy??

This ginger, jew-fro’d geek with a receding hairline and a voice that makes me think of the scientist guy from The Simpsons, so having said that, I am naturally referring to Sam Roberts.  I had no idea who he was, and why he got to be on the pre-show panel with guys like Booker T and Renee Young, but all I knew was that I thought he was annoying, and I was not a fan.

But then came along this other guy, some douchebag-looking Chad, who exuded a frat-bro personality tantamount to his appearance, and my brow crinkled even more at the notion that the WWE kept opening their doors to these douchey marks to be on their pre-shows.  Well that turned out to be Pat McAfee, and he immediately gave me X-Pac Heat vibes, and I was really tempted to tune out entirely thanks to him, but I wanted to watch the PPV, so I grit my teeth and soldered through.

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Nope.  Never saw it coming

Four games.  That’s all it took for the 2020 Major League Baseball season to have its first cancellations on account of a coronavirus breakout, as the Miami Marlins are the first team to have an outbreak of COVID-19 cases, after 20+ team personnel test positive.  Effective immediately, numerous home games were cancelled for both themselves, as well as the Phillies, the last team they played prior to the announcement, and MLB will have a great time trying to figure out how to re-work all these cancelled games into their already abbreviated 60-game season.

Honestly, it’s about as surprising as finding out that dogs like to sniff butts that this happened so quickly.  Frankly, I’m surprised it didn’t take two games before the first cases started to happen, but then again considering MLB said that testing would only take place every other day, who’s to say it didn’t, but then there was a grace period of a day in between?

Anyway, this is just a microcosm of how fun the rest of this season is going to become, because as far as I can tell, from what I’ve heard is that there will be many more double-headers played this year to accommodate the crunch of games, and much like the Toronto Blue Jays will have to endure, since the entire country of Canada basically won’t let them back in, many of them will have re-jiggered to where the opposite team will be designated as the home teams, on the road.  I guess when there are no fans in the stands, it definitely makes the venues feel a little bit more neutral, but baseball players are neurotic weirdoes sometimes, so who knows how they’ll react to batting last in someone else’s ballparks.

Oh, and the double-header games will all be 7-inning games – just like in the minor leagues, which is an appropriate comp at this point, considering how bush league the season is becoming.

SO, this just opens up the door more for the possibility of some wonky seasons; I hope by the time we’re nearing the end of the 60-game season, the Seattle Mariners will clinch the AL West in Houston, where they’re the home team against the Astros at Minute Maid Park, and some guy from their taxi squad hits a walk-off homerun.  It would be the perfect beginning of their playoff run to their inevitable World Series date with the Pittsburgh Pirates.

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If only I could’ve held out for another year

I haven’t really paid much attention to cars in a while, especially since I’d just gotten a new one less than a year ago, and that whole having-a-baby thing kind of tends to take mental capacity away from just about everything else in the galaxy for the vast majority of our waking lives.  But my Apple News feed randomly spit out this article about a Nissan electric car with an attractive looking thumbnail so I clicked it, and then I’m staring at my screen with a not bad look on my face at the Nissan Ariya, that’s supposedly going to hit the United States in 2021, and there’s a piece of me thinking damn, if I could’ve only held out for one more year.

And it’s not like I couldn’t have; my old Kia Forte was still running fine, and at “just” 150,000 miles, I probably could’ve easily gone longer, especially with the sheer lack of driving that’s been done during this fucking coronavirus pandemic keeping smart people like me sheltered in place more often than not.  I just simply wanted a new car, and I wanted a bigger car, because a baby was on the way, and it would’ve behooved me to be ready with a larger and more comfortable vehicle for my pregnant wife and then-eventual kid.

But if I were able to hold out for another year, then most definitely the Nissan Ariya would’ve been in the conversation, when I would be looking for a new car.  I used to always be dubious about electric cars, because of their supposed mileage range per charge, but considering my new car now and most Tesla Model 3’s typically range 280-300 miles per charge, and there’s really not a tremendous difference.  The real angst lies in the scenario of taking an electric car out on a road trip, and running out of juice with no idea of where to get more, in the middle of the night.

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New Father Brogging, #014

2.5 weeks vs. 16 weeks

It’s been a few weeks since I wrote one of these, not that I had any real intention of making this a regularly scheduled thing by any stretch of the imagination.  But for my own sake of remembrance and for those who want to kind of live life as a new dad with me, I still feel like writing these posts every now and then, so I can one day look back and see where my head was at during this time of my life, as well as hers. 

Plus I occasionally fantasize of my daughter one day as an adult, reading my life’s blathering, and if she’s anything like me, getting teary-eyed at dad’s own words back from when she was but a mere infant.  But that’s completely contingent on the brog still being online 19-22 years from now, as well as her being remotely interested in what _dad_ has to say about things in life and the world.  However, in regards to the former, considering I’ve been brogging for quite literally 20 years, I don’t think it’s that much of a stretch to think I couldn’t keep it up for another 20.

Anyway, to those new dads out there who feel like their worlds are becoming microscopic in the sense that you have absolutely no time to yourself, I can officially vouch for the notion that things to get easier in time.  Believe me, I’d gone through my period of feeling like my world was the size of a lima bean and I’d wonder just how long it would be before I could have 30 minutes to myself.

But over the last few weeks, mythical wife and I have been attempting to do some sleep training with our little infant child, and trying our best to establish a general routine of feeding times and naps, to maximize her growth as well as buy us some bits of time throughout the daytime where she’s sleeping and we can do our own things for 30-50 minutes at a time.  And honestly, so far, it’s going fairly satisfactory, but knowing my mentality, we may have just jinxed it by acknowledging it, and next thing I know, she’ll be going through some other sleep regression stage, and then I’ll be back to being frustrated and fried all over again.

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Oh, Georgia #666

Nothing surprises me anymore: Georgia governor Yosemite Sam attempts to appease his god-king baked potato in charge, by signing an executive order that effectively prevents localities from having the ability to legally mandate mask wearing in public AKA cities aren’t allowed to legally make mask wearing mandatory

If it weren’t the president and all of his followers making all these choices, I’m pretty sure there would be hundreds of politicians and bureaucrats that could technically be guilty of plotting first-degree murder.  If the definition of first-degree murder is that it was premeditated and well-thought out, that seems pretty fair to say that all these old white shitheads in politics are all taking great planning and thinking through the systematic potential killing of thousands of American citizens.  If that’s not premeditation, then I don’t know what is.

Anyway, at this point, I really don’t have any more words to add to the endless slope that America continues to slide down.  This country fucking sucks now and if not for the fact that my entire life and career is here, as well as all of my friends and family, mythical wife and I have often “joked” about the notion of packing our shit and moving abroad to like Korea.  Not to mention the immigration process is painstakingly arduous on both sides of the world.  But it’s still a discussion worth having these days, and if money weren’t an object, it could become a fantasy worth making into a reality.

But the picture alone is worth the metaphorical thousand words, but not really a thousand, because I don’t know enough synonyms for “shitheads” and “bigots,” and frankly both of these clowns are so simplistically terrible that there aren’t even close to a thousand words to describe them.  One hates everyone on the planet that isn’t a fellow billionaire and doesn’t challenge his way of life, and the other will do absolutely anything to appease his god-king, even if it means sacrificing American lives, but it’s okay because the vast majority of the lives at risk will most likely be blacks and Hispanics and the poors, and they’re less than human beings to both.

I mean seriously, look at Bubba in the above picture.  He’s basically eyeing the baked potato’s toadstool, wondering if he should use the swirl or the pinch once they’re in private quarters, and the mask he’s wearing isn’t so much to protect himself from coronavirus as much as it is to contain the rabid salivating he’s probably doing at the thought of getting to pleasure his idol.

But that’s low-brow of me to make such a crude observation.  However, I’m also not plotting on killing thousands of Americans on a daily basis, so when the day is over, a little crude narrative making doesn’t seem so bad in comparison now does it?

I think the saddest part of everything is that everyone seems content to wait until November to see what chips will fall come the next presidential election.  But last time I checked, in America, it’s entirely possible to fire inadequate workers from the job, and it really makes me sad that the office of president seems to be immune from it, regardless of being impeached or not.  Regardless, everyone seems to have this wait until November attitude, but there’s a lot of shit for America to continue to fall into and hang on in until then, and I can’t help but wonder why we’re all waiting, as a nation, instead of acting.  I feel like the country has never been so close to a mass mutiny as it’s been now, but wondering just how much more bullshit will have to happen before anything ever occurs. Because November might be too late for this country, and before we know it, America will have a million casualties due to coronavirus, while the rest of the entire fucking planet won’t even come close to that, combined.

I’ve made a lot of analogies to books and movies and television over the last few weeks to describe the state of the nation, but another one came into mind last night: The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick.  Originally a book, turned into a television series, but basically, America is taken over by the Axis of Evil.  Now without expounding on that much, all I have to really ask is that would America actually be worse off under German/Japanese rule than it is now?

Not a sermon, just a thought.  But sad that we’ve gotten to the point where such a question even comes to fruition.