Tag: comics

I would like a small Batmobile to curate my lawn pls

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

You know what I’ve found out to be an extraordinarily harder task than I imagine it would be?

Finding a landscaper.

With baby #2 on the way, and my general limits already pressed past capacity on a regular basis, mythical wife and I decided that perhaps we’re long overdue to just hire landscapers to take care of cutting the grass and making it HOA/NIMBY Karen-proof at the very least.  I had done it for the vast majority of the time we’ve lived here, and it’s never been easy because I have a lot of grass I’m expected to cut, so we’ve decided to bite the bullet and just pay people to take care of the problems that we don’t want to deal with.

I would say that 75% of the homes in my neighborhood have landscapers, but getting any of them to come and service my property has proven to be as frustrating as one of those speedbike levels in Battletoads.  For the landscapers that have actual names, branding or contact information on their company’s vehicles, literally none of them ever return my phone calls or reply to my emails.  For landscapers that people have referred me to, it’s easy to speak to any one of them once, but again, getting any sort of follow-up is pulling teeth.  And then, there are all sorts of landscapers with no identifiable affiliation that are teams of efficient Hispanic men who show up, get the job done, and then gtfo before I can get shoes on and try and stop them to ask for service; those are the types of guys I’d want, but it’s like they’re a shiny Pokémon and hard to catch.

I think I’ve finally gotten someone now, but it’s only been one cut so far, and this guy services one of my neighbors, so the jury’s still out on his affordability, but I have to say that I never would’ve thought it would be such a colossal pain in the ass to get a landscaper, and I hope I don’t have to deal with this again any time soon.

Anyway, because theFacebook is scary and clearly listening in on conversations and/or my general rants about the frustrations of landscaping, I started getting targeted ads for this robotic mower made by Husqvarna, that looks like a miniature Batmobile.  Now there’s a rich guy’s house outside my subdivision, where I’ve driven past, and seen a little robotic mower doing its job at the edge of his property; it looked like a little lawn version of a Roomba.

It also felt a little Black Mirror-ish to me that the idea of robotic mowers exist now in the first place, because it’s one part the pinnacle of human laziness, that robots that cut grass have emerged in the real world, but also to go back to that Black Mirror thought, one step closer to having machines dominate us like Maximum Overdrive. 

Regardless, something that looks like a Roomba doesn’t seem as insidious or intimidating if they were to go rogue and try to kill humanity, I feel like I could probably stomp on it like a goomba from Super Mario Bros. if one tried to revolt against its makers and snuff out the rebellion.

But one that looks like Husqvarna’s Batmobile?  This little motherfucker looks like it might have some machine guns that will emerge from some hidden compartments and end my life if it chose to.  It basically looks like it was already sprayed with that shit from Transformers that turned a Nokia into a killer robot, except that the Batmobile is just laying dormant in standby mode and not yet ready to kill everything in sight.  It looks like it’s ready to team up with the robot dogs from that one episode of Black Mirror to go on hunting sprees for remaining human life.

All the same, if it didn’t cost $4,000, I think I’d want one.  The idea that this little murder mower would run constantly in order to keep the lawn short always versus landscapers coming weekly/bi-weekly is appealing in that I’d have to interact with nobody ever, and on a long enough timeline, it would probably pay itself off fairly efficiently.  But a $4,000 tab is a tough pill to swallow, when there are several other things that I’d probably want to do with my property to where that would be better spent in a lump sum.

But it would be great at deterring assholes who let their dogs shit on my property, if something that looked like the Batmobile were patrolling my yard, to menacingly threaten people and their pets away.

Can people on the internet just shut the fuck up

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I know it’s a rhetorical question with the answer being a very obvious NO, but still, I really really really wish people could just shut the fuck up all the time sometimes.

One of the things that I thought was refreshing about WandaVision was the fact that I was completely blind going into it.  I had no earthly idea on what was going to happen, how it came to be, the general players of the series, and most importantly, zero idea to what the source material(s) was going to be.

As much as I enjoyed large swaths of the MCU Phase 1, everyone knew what the source material was, and everyone basically knew how it was going to end.  Most everyone who read comic books at all during the 90s knew what The Infinity Saga was, and it was always widely available in trade paperbacks, or people could just look on Wikipedia to get straight to the point of how it all played out.  Although MCU took tons of liberties on how things transpired, there was a very basic and inevitable conclusion to the journey, and it was pretty much as expected through and through.

After a little bit of a hiatus, restructuring and Didney engulfing even more properties and licenses, the next phase has been launched, primarily with the Disney+ deployment, and the early installment of the series starts with WandaVision.

It’s weird, I have no idea what’s really going on, but there are hints and glimpses of things to come which all seems pretty interesting.  But I’m also loving the general creativity of the visuals, the entertaining journey through time, and just how everything is so crisply presented.

One thing I noticed early on was that despite the supposed 35-minute run times of each episode, around 7-8 minutes of it is dedicated to the credits; it was pointed out to me that the filming of the show, as well as all other future TV series, were basically filmed like movies, but then broken up into episodes, so it seems apparent that each episode seems to be running the full ending credits for what amounts to a film; it’s kind of annoying, and deceptive to the run time, but after realizing that there’s no mid or post credits scenes, I haven’t bothered sitting through them again.

But that was clearly just me; because I try to practice what I preach, I won’t get into the granular details of what’s already been revealed to me because people on the internet can’t shut the fuck up, and are even worse at blurting out spoiler-y clickbait headlines, but I was scrolling through theFacebook, I noticed this headline about how some particular words used in the lengthy credits for WandaVision give some pretty predominant hints on what is to come, plot-wise, and because of the aforementioned inability to shut the fuck up, they basically go on to name it in the subtext, visible in plain sight, plain as day.

So great, now that I’ve seen that, things kind of make a little more sense, and I can kind of see the wireframes of how the show is going to get to such a narrative.

Because a bunch of nerds have to know what the source material or end game of the series is, they have to ruin it for people like me, who simply want to enjoy the ride, not think too fucking hard about things, and accept things as they’re presented to me.

It’s times like this I loathe the internet and social media especially, but because I don’t want to be an island of a person again, it’s not something that I can just walk away from cold turkey.  But god damn does it infuriate me from time to time, and it’s sad that the world is so dependent on it that we can’t seem to operate without.

Why Sting failed in the WWE

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Firstly, I like Sting.  But when I saw him show up on AEW, my first thought was, “wtf?  He’s . . . [checking my phone for Sting’s Wikipedia page] . . . 61 years old!  Whyyyy??”

And then my thoughts swirled around the fact that the show built the entire episode’s identity around his arrival, by constantly lifting Winter is Coming from Game of Thrones, conveniently compounded by the fact that they were wrestling outdoors in 40-50 degree weather, and most wrestling attire isn’t necessarily made for warmth.

But the appearance or the gimmick was no one-off cameo; in subsequent episodes of Dynamite, every time Sting showed up, it was the same song and dance, where the lights go out, fake snow is blown into Daily’s Place, and Sting is standing there, he points a bat, Team Taz runs away from the ring, and then he and Darby Allin stare at each other until JR blathers on about going to commercial, but not of the “restaurant-quality (whatever the fuck that means) picture-in-picture” variety.

Here’s the thing though – he hasn’t done a single spot in the ring, but already I think it can be safely said that he’s had a more successful run in AEW than he ever had in WWE back in 2014.  Frankly in my opinion, Sting in the WWE was never going to work, because Sting was the true one pillar of anti-WWE, seeing as how his entire career he never jumped ship at any point, despite guys like Flair, Arn, Luger, Steamboat, Rude, Goldberg, DDP, and all sorts of legends, having done so at least once in their careers.  Sting was the true bastion of integrity that held his ground and never did go, at least not until so much time had passed, and it seemed like he went solely because of legacy purposes, but honestly, even as a jaded fan, it just seemed like his heart was never in it at all.

Sure, it’s probably because he was immediately buried by Triple H and had his first match be at Wrestlemania, where he lost to Trips, and then nearly had his career permanently ended by a botched powerbomb while working with Seth Rollins, but the fact of the matter is that it’s pretty safe to say that Sting’s run in the WWE was a pretty embarrassing flop.

But the main thing I felt was the reason why Sting failed in the WWE where he seems to succeed and get over everywhere else, is the fact that he had no pop-culture sources that he could steal from.  I mean just look at his general history:

  • WCW, changed his entire gimmick to basically be The Crow; got over, won titles, succeeded
  • TNA, eventually transformed into The Joker from Dark Knight Returns; got over, won titles, succeeded
  • WWE, tried to be just Sting; fail
  • AEW, has adopted the gimmick of basically being a White Walker from Game of Thrones; got over and is currently succeeding; titles yet to be determined

Obviously, the WWE itself is mostly likely the reason why Sting couldn’t lift anything in the first place, as they tread more corporately carefully than everyone else, but the point of this is that as good of a worker as Sting historically is, he hasn’t really been able to get over solely on his own, since like the days of fluorescent tights, the blonde flat-top and colorful face paint.  Frankly, he probably would’ve been better off showing up to the WWE in 2014 with his old surfer Sting persona, it’s not like the WWE had any shortage of dark, brooding, silent icons.

Ultimately, I have a ton of respect for Sting, as he is the aforementioned legendary worker, has accomplished the world over in the industry, and is widely admired and revered as a genuinely good human being, which is more important than everything else mentioned.  But the reality is that his ability to get over throughout the years has leaned heavily on the popular culture being consumed in the world around him, rather than his own personality.  And when he was put into a situation where he had to work without a crutch, it seemed to expose such, especially when compared to when he returned to a setting where he could lift from pop-culture again, and is breaking merchandise sales records.

I wish for the 2.5 hours I lost back

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

My job put me in a shitty mood today, which sucks, but for the sake of writing out a post of criticism, it’s actually kind of advantageous.  I tend to believe that intent is sharpest when paired with an emotion that rides along the same wavelength, so when I’m in a pissed mood, lighting into something might be the right mindset for doing such.

Frankly, I knew what I was getting into when I sat down to watch WW84 because making a title card “Wonder Woman 1984” would have been the hardest thing to do for this day and age where people can sparsely be expected to use vowels when writing their shorthand bullshit, even in a professional working environment.

But I had already heard that this movie wasn’t good, and I’d seen the memes, my favorite of them being the title of this post because I felt the exact same way after watching it.  However, out of one part morbid curiosity and another part simply because Gal Gadot is gorgeous and I could probably put up with watching Boys Don’t Cry or The Boy With the Striped Pajamas if had Gal Gadot in it, I decided to watch it anyway.

Despite knowing that it probably wasn’t good, and despite knowing that it was 2.5 hours long and I could have done a myriad of things with 2.5 hours instead of watching WW84, I did something stupid and watched WW84.

And it sucked.  Unsurprisingly.  Frankly, in spite of the praise of the original Wonder Woman received, I didn’t think it was particularly close to as good as the praise it was getting, and I hate to sound completely sexist, but I think films like it and shows like Jessica Jones get a bump in credit solely for the fact that they’re stories about strong female leads with mostly female production crews.  Frankly, the gender of casts and crews are irrelevant to me, and I’d rather not know it at all as long as captivating and entertaining stories and presented to me.

Regardless, it goes without saying that the original Wonder Woman was easily the strongest DC property film since the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy, and easily the best DC flick in the supposed Justice League universe they’ve tried to cobble together with most notably a Ben Affleck Batman.

But ultimately, that’s like saying the least stinkiest turd in the punch bowl because for whatever reason, DC Comics can’t seem to get their shit together when it comes to translating their properties into film.  Wonder Woman was alright, which makes it the strongest DC film in their respective universe, but honestly, I’d rather have watched episodes of the lowly Iron Fist or the fairly mediocre Defenders shows than DC’s top film.

I kind of feel bad for DC comics.  Because in the actual world of comic books, DC has plenty of quality properties and capable writers and some legendary stories told.  Batman alone carries DC comics way more than any single Marvel property can take credit for carrying Marvel Comics.  But no matter what, they just can’t seem to make good movies, and it’s almost as inevitable that a non-Batman DC movie is going to suck as much as the Braves will always collapse in the most embarrassing or heartbreaking fashions possible.

So needless to say, a sequel to a marginal quality film was bound to be a downhill ride no matter what, and to WW84’s credit, they basically lived up to expectation.  Thank goodness this never made it to theaters, because I already want my money back for it wasting 2.5 hours of my life, despite watching from the comfort of my own home on HBOmax.

New Father Brogging, #029

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It would have been pretty easy for me to do nothing but write about beer all month long and call it a day, but that would’ve been kind of a cop out as far as dutiful brogging is concerned.  Beer is nice, and I’ve been enjoying the fares from Deutschland, but there are still plenty of things on my mind that warrant words, no matter how much I may feel unmotivated to write about them, and when the day is over, it’s more important to me to write out my thoughts than to be lazy, even if it feels kind of forced; this is how seriously I take it to write, sometimes.

Anyway, in this new dad brog, there is one update and there is one observation.  As for the update, things have actually been going fairly smoothly since the last time I wrote about my adventures in fatherhood.  My daughter and I have a fairly consistent routine that’s been making life not too difficult for either of us for the most part, and the days are flying by like leaves in the winter air.  I wake up at 6:30~ish every single day, regardless of if it’s the weekend or not, mythical wife feeds baby, and then I entertain baby until first nap in which I then either really get to work, or if it’s the weekend I nap or sometimes get my jogging out of the way if I’m feeling up for it.  Our nanny takes care of kid for the next four hours on weekdays, or I spend time with her on weekends, and then it’s off to bed by 6:30~ish, to which mythical wife and I try to have some time for ourselves.  Repeat x infinity

However, as we’ve crossed the nine-month mark, naturally nothing stays the same forever, no matter how comfortable it’s been.  And in this particular case, whenever we run into any sort of issue, I can punch it into Google, and the precise query I intended to look up is automatically filled, reminding me that there has been absolutely nothing my kid has done or I have experienced, that millions of parents out there have not already seen.

As indicative in the photo above, that’s my child, standing in her crib.  As her little body and brain have been developing, she’s decided that immediate sleep isn’t something she necessarily needs anymore, and has decided to sit up, and pull herself up to her feet and just kind of hangout in her crib, instead of sleeping.  99% of the time, she’ll spit out her pacifier, piss herself off, and begin crying then wailing, then screaming, which prompts me to have to up and try to reset the whole scenario all over again, before she calms down, I walk out, and then she repeats it 3-4 times, burning us out in the process.

It seems evident that she herself is working things out and is playing a daily game of how many shenanigans she wants to pull in her crib between two naps and bed time, and how much she actually wants to sleep, because since behavior has begun, no two sleep sessions have been alike in how much she fights, how much she wanders around independently and how quick or long it takes before she actually goes out, and for parents like me that like routine it’s been occasionally frustrating.

Continue reading “New Father Brogging, #029” →

Advent Beer #13: Schwarze Tinte by Tölzer Mühlfeldbräu

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Can I just first say that I’m sick to death of these fucking southern winters where we have like a week of 20-30 degree weather, the heat is pumping, everyone is nice and cozy in their hoodies, sweaters and blankets, and I’m forced to drip faucets overnight, so my shit doesn’t freeze, but then days later we’re back up into the 60s, touching 70, and I’m forced to turn the air conditioning back on because my kid is waking up from being too hot.  Especially when I’m looking at the forecast of the upcoming week, and it’s supposed to plunge back down into the 30s in like two days.

It astounds me but it doesn’t how people actually believe climate change doesn’t exist and then it makes me think about Storm from the X-Men and how her character must be written these days, in the age of climate change and the earth itself fucking with her powers on a regular basis.  Makes me wonder if up in Westchester, Storm’s phone is always blowing up when people are getting pissed about the seasons not acting like the seasons they’re supposed to be, and trying to get Storm to fix it.

Anyway, it was just yesterday that I posed the question, does Deutschland even do stouts or porters, and then today’s can answering the question, immediately.  Schwarze Tinte, didn’t even have to add the “collab stout” for me to realize that this was probably going to be a stout, with a can design that looks like it was designed by Scott Hall, adorned in black with gooey drippy patterns on it, that I would have to imagine that this had to be a dark beer of some sort.

It pours out looking like a cola, and is a lot lighter bodied than I’d imagine from a stout, but the flavor hits just right where it’s stout-y but doesn’t have that hard coffee-like bitter note at the very end and instead phases out leaving my mouth feeling sweet, but not really syrupy.

Needless to say, this ranks in the upper third of my subjective rankings, and my knee-jerk reaction was to place it 3rd overall.  But compared with Turbo Prob, the Noble Pils clone that I was very enamored with, when push came to shove, and I was presented with both options to pick one, I still think I’d pick Turbo Prop over, since I feel like that was a beer that can really be had at any time of the year, where my personal preference for stouts and porters, are that they’re best in the fall and winter, but not nearly as desirable come warmer weather.

Then again, I’ve been in a t-shirt pretty much all day today, so it’s been pretty obnoxiously fucking warm for 12 days away from Christmas.

But it turns out Deutschland does do stouts, and to no shocker, they’re pretty good at those too.  Prost!

Current Rankings:

  1. First Coral (#2)
  2. Kirta (#5)
  3. Turbo Prop (#6)
  4. Schwarze Tinte (#13)
  5. Perlenzauber (#9)
  6. Loncium Vienna Style Lager (#12)
  7. Jubiläumsbier 333 (#7)
  8. Zwönitzer Steinbier (#4)
  9. Grandl (#11)
  10. Hell (#1)
  11. Tannen Hell (#8)
  12. Tradition (#10)
  13. Käuzle (#3)

Jessica Jones S3: The Insufferable Adventures of Trish Walker

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Despite the fact that I personally would rank Jessica Jones to be on the lower tier of the Netflix Marvel Universe, as long as it has that Marvel nameplate at the front of it, I’ll still inevitably watch it.  Considering the fact that I’ve watched everything from Daredevil, the Defenders and even Iron Fist, I had to do due diligence and finish up with Jessica Jones; especially since this was truly the swan song last of the Netflix Marvel series, thanks to Disney starting their own service, this was really going to be the last time we’re probably going to get to see any of the Defenders any time soon.

Overall, I didn’t much care for season 3 of Jessica Jones.  Frankly, it could barely be called Jessica Jones, since 90% of the season revolved around the insufferable Trish Walker and her ascent into becoming the ultra-lame Hellcat, although they don’t actually use the name at all throughout the show, except for one episode title that most people don’t actually read while they’re in the throes of binge-watching a show.

Don’t get me wrong, despite my general ambivalence for the season as a whole, I still recognize the show as still having strong writing, with fairly complex and intriguing storytelling, it’s just that I didn’t like particular character(s), but ultimately the goal of storytelling is to elicit some sort of response from the viewer.  By that regard, Trish was written very well, because it was extremely easy for me to dislike her and all her insufferable traits as a person.  But it was almost delving into X-Pac Heat, to where I was just getting sick of the character, but not quite to where I was willing to walk away from too much Trish.

But I digress a little; if not for Trish becoming so insufferable, it probably doesn’t help the story arcs of Malcolm or Jeri Hogarth, because ordinarily they’re pretty pedestrian characters on their own, but seeing them after 15 minute chunks of Trish bullshit makes them welcome reprieves, and storylines worth caring about, that is, until they collide and intertwine with Trish eventually.

Continue reading “Jessica Jones S3: The Insufferable Adventures of Trish Walker” →