I think companies should be more zero tolerance about security breaches

A little while ago, I was having a stressful morning at the office.  My workload has been quite high over the last few weeks and the quality of the projects I’m on have been leaving a lot to be desired as far as the competency of those I’m required to collaborate with, and I spent more time in meetings than I do actually working on most days of the week.

But to top it all off, my company’s IT department sent out a company-wide mandate about sweeping security changes, with a little less than 48 hours of lead time.  My first thought was, when the fuck am I going to have time to go through any of this bullshit when I can barely, actually cannot, get through my own preexisting workload on a regular basis?

I prioritized this less than the importance of finding a quiet bathroom to take a breather in and went on with my days, but unlike a lot of the bluffs that IT sends out, on Wednesday morning, I finally hit a point where all my authentications had expired, and it was now time to reauthenticate onto the network and all the shit controlled by our SSO procedures.

Naturally, since I had neglected to address it when initially notified, I had to scramble to get back on the network, and unsurprisingly the instructions that were sent by IT on what we needed to do weren’t working.  I’m no engineer, but I’m technically competent enough to be able to follow directions, and when shit wasn’t working, I had to go down to our IT floor, which is the pain in the ass I don’t want to do it equivalent to mythical wife’s feelings about needing to speak to someone on the phone.

Turns out there was still something that IT had to do with each and every user, which wasn’t mentioned, and within five minutes of having to get some face time with IT, my issues are resolved, and I could be on my merry way, but not without having derailed my entire morning and frankly, all future instances of where I need to reauthenticate my credentials.

All I could think of after this stupid ordeal, was how shit like this became a necessity on account of one or a few isolated incidents of some dumbasses within the company that probably fell for a phish or continuously have failed our periodic security checks.  No security protocols are as secure as the intelligence of the dumbest end user, and the prevailing thought in my mind is that I think that companies should be more zero tolerance when it comes to their employees failing security checks, and fire them on the spot for getting busted for being weak links in the fence.

Now full disclosure, I have failed a phish test once, on account of a moment of weakness where the company clearly managed to pique to my Asian love of name brands, claiming to have company apparel made by UnderArmour.  Since then, I haven’t bitten on a phish test, and am probably one of the more obnoxious end users who reports emails as possible phishing attempts on a regular basis, even when I’m 99% sure it’s legitimate.  And sometimes, I’ll use the report phish button as passive aggression, reporting things I just don’t want to see from the company as phishing attempts, but the point remains despite my own early-tenure discretion, I’ve been pretty exemplary when it comes to not getting phished.

I feel like if companies were a little more draconian and zero tolerance when it comes to security protocols, the more stimulating of a workforce we’d be in.  It would help weed out all the olds who won’t fucking retire and allow for the advancement of more competent employees, and it would naturally help filter out all of the unqualified goons who lied or affirmative action’d their way into their roles. 

Companies shore up their security, and those who have been axed for their shortcomings have a chance to learn, grow and with the sheer amount of job fluctuation in the workforce, allows the entire marketplace to be stimulated and fresh, with people moving around at a rapid rate.

And then there would be lesser needs for companies like mine to do massive, reactionary, wide-sweeping IT initiatives like my company had to do, and there would be less wasted time on massive scales.  Everyone wins!

Heat check: Kelsey Plum’s fan interaction

SI: debates churn over WNBA star Kelsey Plum’s conduct when encountering an autograph seeking fan outside of the team hotel

My knee-jerk reaction when I saw this clip, was along the lines of lmao, the WNBA hasn’t ever had fans since before Caitlin Clark that their players have no idea how to conduct themselves when it comes to interacting with people who want autographs. 

I didn’t think the fan was overstepping any boundaries beyond being an obvious autograph seeker-slash-reseller, but it didn’t sound like he was being a pushy dick, and I thought Plum’s reaction and conduct were unnecessarily rude and combative, which led me to immediately think about how ironically funny it was that she probably just wasn’t used to there being such an interest in women’s professional basketball, and her going off the deep end as a result.

But I’m also a man, and I understand and can see both sides to the debate.  Women have gotten the short end of the stick when it comes to respect in athletics no matter how much they excel at the crafts in which they apply to, and so many men in the world are just fucking creeps, so I don’t really blame many women for having their shields up by default, especially when it comes to seeing men, looking for them specifically.

Autograph seekers-slash-resellers aren’t exactly the most savory people in the world, but they’re one of those things that comes with the territory when it comes to being a professional athlete and/or a celebrity.  Some people want autographs because they’re fans, and there are unfortunately people who want autographs because they see them as a way to make a quick buck.

It also doesn’t help that like 100% of them are dudes, which they already have one strike against from women, being men, but then they’re doing something that is most likely for selfish purposes which doesn’t help.

The fact that this story is a story goes to show that the WNBA has garnered more interest than it did a few years ago, and although I imagine that a lot of its players have grown to resent the Caitlin Clark train, she clearly has helped bring an increased level of focus onto the league as a whole, to the point where autograph seekers are now seeking autographs from other players.

Who really knows what was going on in Plum’s head at the very moment of this interaction.  Maybe she was having a bad day, the Sparks were coming off of an L or something, I don’t know, and neither does anyone else.  But I do feel like coming out firing with criticism probably wasn’t the best approach, regardless of if anyone feels she should be grateful that people have grown to care enough to want autographs, regardless of their motive.

Honestly though, Kelsey Plum kind of had it easy with this fan.  Female professional wrestlers have it way worse, with creepy wrestling fan incels not only doing the exact same thing, hanging out at hotels, but also following them at airports or public places, with a few having been noted to following them in parking garages.  Plum having a guy waiting outside the team hotel, in daylight, around other people, maintaining a stationary, manageable distance away when asking for autographs is nothing on the creep scale in comparison.

My personal conclusion is that Plum was in the wrong on this one, she could’ve been a little more polite and not come out guns blazing.  Her criticisms potentially make future fans think twice about trying to have an interaction with her or any WNBA player, and those fans could be the little girls and women that the league is trying to inspire.

Perhaps if more people get interested in the WNBA, the lesser we’ll see such weird and uncomfortable interactions between their players and potential fans.

CAITLIN CLARK CAITLIN CLARK CAITLIN CLARK PAIGE BUECKERS PAIGE BUECKERS PAIGE BUECKERS lol

Tin foil hat theory time

Apparently, a home very close to my home was victim to a drive-by shooting last night.  0.8 mi from my house to be precise, but not in my subdivision.  This is the kind of thing that I would have expected to hear happening in my old neighborhood and most definitely not something where I currently live, where the crime rate is pretty low, and incidents like this occurring are extremely few and far between.

The good news is that despite there being gunfire, nobody appears to have been hurt, and the assailants have been caught by the police.  The article states that the victims of the shooting did not know the attackers, which it’s hard to know what to believe, because otherwise why would a car full of people come to a house in the middle of the night and just unload gunfire on the property if there were no connection whatsoever?

Either way, it’s disheartening to hear of such senseless violence and gunfire occurring in my generally otherwise peaceful community, but this is where the conspiracy theorist in me begins to come out to try and make sense of the incident.

See, unbeknownst to the news article, and what those who don’t live around the area are aware of is the fact that the home that was attacked, is also on the market.  I know this, because I drive past this house on a regular basis, going to and from the office, most of the time when I run errands; I drive past this home regularly and often.  According to Zillow, the attacked home was listed as pending, but I have to imagine that once the police report becomes public and the party who made the offer finds out about this incident, it probably won’t be pending for much longer.

Inevitably, the value of the home will most likely take a substantial hit in price, and the poor family who was probably hoping to capitalize on the still-seller’s market will have their hopes stepped on when they’ll have to drop the price in order to compensate for the fact that the property was just freshly involved in a drive-by shooting incident.

Additionally, across the street from this home, and within the next four lots are two properties also on the market, with one of them being under contract currently.  Granted, one of them is solely a plot of land, but I have to imagine that even land is affected by incidents of crime, since those whom might want to built a home on said land, would still might be unnerved building right across the street of a home that was shot up in the middle of the night.

So what I’m thinking here is that, in this day and age where big, evil, soulless property investors who go around hoovering up property and effectively cockblocking tens of thousands of Americans from becoming homeowners, one of the more nefarious and lacking in any sort of ethical practices investment companies, set all this shit up.  Set up some expendable fall guys to go shoot up an innocent home on the market, drive down its market value, as well as the value of any nearby properties, and then swoop in and pick them all up while they’re all forced to discount on account of fresh crime.

For all I know, the pending offers on the victim and the nearby unit were the same party, and they’ll pull out now that some big and bad albeit orchestrated crime has occurred, but they’ll wait in the wings for the prices to come down and then swoop back into the fray and make some lowball offers and get the homes at a deep discount.

Not very likely, but I also don’t think it’s entirely unrealistic either.  The real answer will be when inevitably when all these available properties eventually flip, if they’re bought up by actual human beings, or if they’re picked up by some ambiguously named entity that is code for asshole investor.

Regardless, this whole situation sucks, hearing of gun violence so close to my home, shattering the façade of peace and tranquility, especially after I left a real warzone to come to where I am now.  And of course, if the victim family really didn’t know the assailants, the fact that they were just picked to be target practice for a car full of psychos, regardless of if this was orchestrated by some shady shitty investors or not.

Why the Mercedes Mone blet collector gimmick isn’t as impressive as it looks

When I saw that Mercedes Mone was scheduled to fight Zeuxis at their Grand Slam Mexico show, I knew right away that Mercedes was going to walk away with yet another blet.  That’s the problem when someone is booked so invincibly over the last two years, that after a little while, no match seems remotely debatable to what the outcome is going to be. 

And I know that the mouth-breathing troglodytes of the internet wrestling community are always debating on whether or not Mercedes has creative control (AKA makes the call on their own wins and losses), and I really don’t care enough to seek out the answer for myself, but it’s also not like those who believe she does have it, doesn’t have reason to believe it.

Typically, I love blet collector gimmicks, and as a collector of wrestling blets myself, I always appreciate seeing it done in actual industry storylines.  I loved when Ultimo Dragon walked out of Japan with ten championship blets at the Super J-cup, I was a big fan of when Lance Storm when on a collecting spree upon arriving in WCW, winning the United States Canadian championship, the Cruiserweight 100 Kilos or Less championship, and the Hardcore Saskatchewan Hardcore Invitational Title in short order.  I loved when The Miz was holding both tag team championships at the same time as holding the United States championship, carting three blets out every show.  Even though he turned out to be a colossal asshole, I liked the journey of Austin Aries amassing a bunch of blets, and I was a big fan of when Matt Cardona became the King of Independent Wrestling, collecting blets like he were Ultimo Dragon.

AEW has dipped into this well a few times already, with Kenny Omega holding three world championships concurrently (AEW, AAA, TNA), as well as when FTR had their greatest year ever, holding the ROH, AAA and IWGP tag team championships, and I did enjoy those as well, in spite of my oft-criticism of AEW as a whole.

Which brings us to the present, where Mercedes Mone has been hoovering up blets like Thanos collecting Infinity Stones, currently carting around six straps: AEW TBS championship, RevPro Women’s championship, Queen of Southside blet, the AEW Owen Hart Memorial women’s blet, the EWA Women’s championship, and the freshly won CMLL Women’s championship.

Ordinarily, six blets does sound impressive, but my issue is that several of these blets are mostly useless, and (are trying to) make her look more impressive than she really is.  In my opinion, the TBS, RevPro and CMLL straps are the only ones with any actual value, but the other three blets are basically decorations and aren’t real championships:

  • Owen Hart Memorial Championship – this is strap that is awarded to a tournament winner, and isn’t actually defended. Britt Baker carried it around for two weeks tops after winning it the first year, as was the case with Mariah May a year ago, before dethroning Toni Storm for the actual AEW women’s championship.  While Mercedes is still lugging the women’s strap around to boost her blet count, the men’s winner Hangman Adam Page held the men’s strap for two seconds to acknowledge and pay respect to the late Owen Hart and then gave it immediately back.
  • Queen of Southside championship – I don’t follow the British scene much, but a little research shows that the Queen of Southside championship was deactivated in 2019, with its actual value being merged into the RevPro women’s championship. Not sure why the physical blet was still being hauled around six years later, but because it’s been kept around that long, means Mercedes is more than happy to do the same, again to make her look more impressive than she is.
  • EWA women’s championship – I’d never even heard of EWA in my life prior to Mercedes winning their women’s championship, but I suppose that is the point. Based out of Vienna, Austria, they’re an indy promotion more than happy to utilize Mercedes’ name to boost their exposure, and she’s more than happy to carry their championship in order to boost her collector status, even if this is basically the equivalent of Norman Smiley invading a backyard wrestling group and absconding with their tin foil championship blet

In all fairness, the three that do have value, are still respectable championships, and put her on a similar tier of collector as Kenny Omega and FTR, but I just don’t like the fact that she’s hauling around three blets that are mostly useless with the intention of making her look more impressive than she actually is.

Frankly, AEW/ROH missed the boat on really boosting Mercedes’ odyssey by not having her go after Athena’s ROH women’s championship, after their actual banger of a match a few months ago in the Owen Hart tournament, but considering Athena has been champion for over 800 days, it’s evident that they didn’t want to job her out just for Mercedes’ burgeoning ego trip, nor did they really want to cannibalize within their own ecosystem, at least not yet.

Instead, they’re going to feed their crown jewel to Mercedes, when Timeless Toni Storm, not long removed from winning back the AEW Women’s championship, will effectively become a transitional champion when she has to drop her blet to Mercedes, capping off the insane run of blet collecting.

Frankly, the real interesting story is going to be, when inevitably all the partner companies start wanting their blets back, what is going to happen with Mercedes.  Her whole career can mostly be defined by her massive resistance when it comes to taking L’s, which is undoubtedly the biggest reason why Sasha Banks left the WWE, and since she became Mercedes Mone, has almost never lost, and in fact has taken a fall just two times in the last three years, with one of them being on account of an improvised finish due to legitimate injury.

So it’s going to be a real telling story when RevPro, CMLL want their championships back, and it’s going to be an even more telling one when minor leagues like EWA wants theirs back, and Mercedes is going to be expected to not win a match in some backyard fed in Wien.  The Owen Hart strap will just magically disappear in the mass exodus, but ultimately all that’s really going to matter is the AEW women’s championship, which will undoubtedly be the last blet standing.

But still, Mercedes will be expected to do the business back to all the partners who have been helping boost her, and as history as shown us in the past, we can’t be too sure on if that’s going to work for her – brother.

Baseball players’ lives are clearly so excruciatingly hard

The Athletic (paywall’d): MLB players complain about how hard their lives are because they have to work all summers

Honestly, I didn’t intend on actually reading the article, because the quotes in a teaser post were all I really needed to get all hot and triggered and ready to lay blast onto a bunch of overpaid professional athlete man-babies.  But I clicked the link in order to get the URL to link to, and must’ve gotten lucky or something because the paywall didn’t come up before I could copy the whole article, paste it into a document and actually read it after all because fuck paywalls.

But the TL;DR of the whole thing was apparently an anonymous (of course) poll went out to all MLB players and apparently the query of what the biggest misconception about the lifestyles of baseball players was a hot button topic, because it spawned this entire snowball rolling downhill to where it became an article, and snarky broggers like me use it as fodder to air out my own grievances with the wealthy complaining about first-world problems.

More than 130 anonymous (of course) players basically were quoted with some absolutely asinine and tone-deaf lines about how hard their lives are, despite the fact that the league minimum this season is $760K.  And almost every one of these quotes is easily rebuttable and can chalk up to the fact that some privileged millionaire is complaining about things that most anyone that wasn’t a professional athlete would gladly switch places with in order to just get a taste of.

And for the sake of my own amusement, I’m going to take guesses and switch in names of all these anonymous baseball players, because frankly it’s probably not that difficult or too far off to identify who’s been saying some of these idiotic quotes.

Our life is awesome, but it’s not as easy as people think it is,” one National League pitcher Zack Wheeler of the Phillies said. “I don’t know if fans realize that when we say we spend more time with our teammates than our families, we’re not exaggerating. It’s not even close. That’s why I say if you want to be a good dad, a good husband, it’s not easy.”

As both a husband and a dad, I’ll admit there are times in which I’ve felt the want for some general freedom from any sort of attachments.  From what I’ve gathered from all sorts of professional athlete autobiographies I’ve read in my life, I’m sure a lot of pro athletes on the daily probably aren’t complaining about the general nature of getting to be alone and unattached when they’re on the road for 3-4 months of a season. 

Frankly, I bet the underlying message between Wheeler’s remarks is the fact that it’s hard for him to be a husband and dad when he’s home, because he’s all used to being among bros and the team and struggles to turn it off when he’s actually home.  And if that’s the case, that’s more a matter of his maturity and priorities than it is baseball being hard

Continue reading “Baseball players’ lives are clearly so excruciatingly hard”

WTF is AEW doing #412

In short: AEW unveils the Unified Championship to be awarded to the winner of Kenny Omega vs. Kazuchika Okada, thus “unifying” the AEW All-Atlantic International championship and the AEW Continental Championship

Man, there’s a lot to unpack for me upon this topic coming up.  I know that I have a fairly unhealthy collection of replica wrestling blets, but I’m fairly certain that Tony Khan is worse than I am.  Almost to the point where I begin to have doubts on whether or not I want to continue my collection, because TK is running so many blets out there that it risks them all becoming meaningless, and ultimately uncool.

I mean, AEW has Mercedes Mone running around carrying five blets currently, with only two of them being remotely meaningful with the TBS championship and the RevPro Women’s championship.  But she’s carting around the Queen of Southside title which frankly nobody outside of England has ever heard of, recently went to Austria to win some backyard federation’s championship, but my favorite is that she’s carting around the Women’s Owen Hart tournament blet, which really was meant to be a blet to be shown like three weeks of the year, for the winner and maybe 1-2 weeks afterward.

Hangman Adam Page basically held the men’s title up once, and then immediately gave it back, while Mercedes is still slinging the honorary degree around like it actually means something, and it’s a shame that she’s inevitably going to overthrow Toni Storm for the AEW Women’s championship, and as much as I like Blet Collector gimmicks, Mercedes’ is just really kind of off-putting, given her station within the industry.

But this post isn’t meant to be about Mercedes Mone, but I was able to barf out these thoughts without having to dedicate an entire post to it in the process, but rather the fact that AEW has unveiled yet another new blet on television, and all I can really do is laugh and shake my head about it, even if it’s ultimately meant to kind of alleviate the excessive number of titles within the TK-verse.

The AEW Unified Championship is a hilarious name for a title, considering the titles in which they are unifying are for lack of a better term, mid-card titles.  In all other combat sports, boxing, MMA, and even the WWE, the term of unifying titles is typically reserved for unifying top prizes.  Boxing especially has had all sorts of unified world champions throughout its history, due to federations and promotions merging and separating and merging and requiring consolidation.  Even the WWE has had unified champions in its history, but always reserved for World championships, most notably Roman Reigns unifying the World and the Universal titles and then holding it for 1,000+ days.

But AEW is basically unifying two mid-tier titles, into a single one, but then best of all, calling it the Unified Championship.  It will have an A-tier name, but still have stemmed from B-tier titles, and inevitably, if they don’t swap the name of it at some point like they did All-Atlantic to International, the Unified champion will run into the AEW World champion, and what are they going to do, unify the Unified championship into the World?  Call it World Unified championship?

Honestly, I don’t really know what TK thinks, beyond when he’s going to get his next bump, but I dunno, you have the International championship, and you have the Continental championship, seems natural if it were to become the… Inter-Continental championship or something.

I mean, it’s no secret that AEW has absolutely refused to adopt that name, seeing as how the WWE Intercontinental championship is one of the most coveted prizes among those in the industry, but it’s not like they own the word or anything.  NJPW for the longest time had their own Intercontinental championship, and they built that title into something equally as coveted within the company, thanks to guys like Shinsuke Nakamura and Tetsuya Naito.

And perhaps NJPW has been spending too much time with TK, because they dropped the name when they unified it with their World title, and in an attempt to re-create a mid-card title, have only produced the woefully uninspiring IWGP Global Championship, but designed it to look precariously similar to the old, white-strapped IWGP Intercontinental blet.

Back to AEW though, it’s funny that the Unified Championship is just a merger of two mid-card titles, because within the company and all adjacent companies, there are still a whole litany of other B-tier prizes, and C-tier prizes within the TK ecosystem.  The TNT Championship, the ROH World and Television championships, and the revolving door of straps from other promotions that their talents drag onto AEW television, like the NEVER Openweight, the IWGP Strong championship and the RevPro World championship.

Would the Unified champion be like a Borg and just go after other champions to unify their championships into the Unified?  Or what if a Unified champion takes an L to another champion, does that keep the titles separate, or does the winner take the Unified and unify their titles? 

So many question marks!

Of course, the true motivation behind all this hullaballoo most likely stems from the fact that the two titles being unified in question are currently held by Kenny Omega and Kazuchika Okada, two of the biggest stars within the company.  And TK seems to have this belief that the importance of them coming together for a match actually needs the incentive of both guys carting championship straps around, and decided that two guys with blets need to be fighting over a new blet, despite the fact that they have had some of the greatest matches within the last decade, whilst in NJPW.

If I had to put money on it, I’m guessing Okada is going to be winning, and becoming the FIRST-EVER AEW Unified championship, because Omega is banged up and doesn’t need to be taking on a champion’s workload and frankly, Okada needs the professional rub more than Omega does.

But I would also wager that, even though it won’t be for long afterward, despite the fact that the Unified championship was introduced to remove two blets from play, I would bet that Okada will show up at least once, carrying all three blets on television, like when Eddie Kingston was carting around a ton of blets at one point, because Tony Khan appears to have a bigger hard-on for championship blets than I do.

Hate to see it, but it’s not like it isn’t deserved

NBC: Fewer international tourists are visiting the United States; economic losses estimated to be ‘staggering’

Like the subject says, this is one of those things that most Americans probably wouldn’t like to see or know of, but at the same time, it’s not like it isn’t deserved, and I can only hope that there are more businesses whose owners and managers that voted for the dumbass orange turd in Washington are being affected by this over those who didn’t.

Like, America was no saint of a destination before dumbass orange turd took office again, but now that he is, I can’t imagine why anyone outside of the United States would have any real inkling of desire to visit it, save for experiences like, Disney World or Las Vegas.  But frankly, even those probably have better alternate options, like the numerous other Disney properties in Europe or Japan, and casinos in Macau or Italy.

I always go back to this particular story of how I came back from an international trip, and had a layover in JFK, and had to clear customs there before catching my next flight back to Atlanta.  I remember seeing these foreign tourists struggling immensely to get through customs because they spoke little-to-no English, and the customs agents were all salty New Yorkers who spoke nothing other than English and basically the faces of these tourists were miserable and scared, and I felt bad that this was basically how their trip was starting in the United States.

Meanwhile, mythical then-gf and I had gotten back from Germany or Korea or wherever we were, and the customs agents in all these places spoke English, weren’t miserable New Yorkers, and were by and not entirely unpleasant experiences getting past them to our destinations.  I remember when we got out of the airport in Munich, and there were already holiday booths and vendors and it was airy and pleasant, and compare that to walking out the door of JFK or any American airport, which is usually just a lot of unhinged drivers trying to pick people up, power-tripping security blowing whistles and screaming at people, and just a whole lot of ugliness, and I always wonder why anyone with a brain would actually want to visit the United States.

Furthermore, like the above photo shows, there’s a meme out there of all sorts of countries around the world, where people say they’re going to visit, when they’re really referring to small sections of each respective country; like all the weebs who say they’re going to Japan are really referring to Tokyo or Osaka, all Koreebs are really visiting Seoul when they say Korea, Paris to France, London to England, and frankly most Americans aren’t aware that Amsterdam is but a city in Holland and not the country itself.  The same applies to the United States, where most anyone from outside of it, when they say they’re coming to visit America, really is saying they’re visiting places like New York City, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Washington DC, or Disney World (obviously not Orlando).  Everywhere else is pretty much not America as far as the eyes of the average tourist goes.

All the same, as much as I hope nobody I know is affected by the financial windfall of dwindling tourism, it’s one of those scenarios where it’s smirk-worthy with that I told you so kind of vibe, that this was inevitable to happen with the current political regime that basically has told everyone else outside the country to fuck off, and them being surprised that nobody wants to come visit anymore.

It’s like if people are getting hurt by this development on account of shitty leadership, a lot of people have nobody to blame but themselves for voting for a leader who’s so racist and xenophobic and is the chief reason why tourism dollars are evaporating and that nobody wants to come visit America.  But at the same time, it’s not like this should be anything of a surprise, once our glorious leader kept flapping his gums about America’s so-called superiority, so I guess all I can really say at this point is, owned.