Tag: geeks

When kids make grown-up money #2

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I have a hard time answering whenever anyone asks what I want for my birthday/Christmas.  For those people whom I do exchange gifts with, I imagine it’s extremely aggravating having to shop for me; shit I aggravate the piss out of myself whenever I want to do my own recreational for-me shopping, so I know this is fact.

So back in April, when my sister asked what I wanted for my birthday, I actually had an answer for her: I wanted a Tyrannosaurus Rex Dinozord that I’d seen existed.

I am nearly a 40-year old man, and I wanted a toy back from my grade school days.  Like when I got my DragonZord figure a few years back, and ultimately my MegaZord a few years after that.

Anyway, the issue with this is that the price of this particular toy remake is that the price has a tendency to fluctuate, as it seems to be available in only places that are not the United States as if America needed any more reasons why I’m beginning to think we suck on a daily basis.  During the holidays, I’d seen it dip down into the $50s, but at around April, $100 was the typical going rate.  I implored my sister to keep watch and she basically told me to keep watch and let her know if the price dipped to something more reasonable.

Long story short, it dipped down to $65, and my sister pulled the trigger on it.  However, this also coincided with the biggest spike of coronavirus across the fucking planet and the seller was in Japan and explained that JapanPost was no longer sending to the US for the time being, so that the shipping would be on hold indefinitely.  But as I am nearly a 40-year old man with no rush on when this toy should arrive, I told my sister to hold out and wait it out.

That was back in April.  Needless to say, after like July it seemed pretty obvious what was happening; the seller was making shit up to get my sister to refund and cancel the order, so that the guy could relist the toy back up to $110, where it seems to have spiked back up.  If it were up to me, I’d have held true and maybe gotten Amazon involved to see if they could strongarm the dick in Japan to pony up, but my sister is not me, and she instead just got the refund and gave me a $65 gift card.

Slightly dejected at not getting my tyrannosaurus Dinozord, I went on eBay to see if I could test my luck.  And lo and behold, I found some figurine collector in France who was selling the same toy, brand new, for $50~.  And to sweeten the pot, I had just gotten an email from eBay to congratulate me on being an OG member back from 1999, and they gave me a $25 coupon code, so now I was in a position where I couldn’t not buy this thing.

Anyway, my T-Rex dinozord arrived today, and I’m quite pleased.  It’s amazing the lengths and money I expend in order to acquire things that ultimately just end up sitting dormant on shelves or walls, but damn it, they make me happy.

But the best part about this new toy, was the evident ability to compare it to the old toy.

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The entertaining absurdity of baseball rules

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When mythical wife showed me a picture of the score of this game, my jaw kind of dropped.  It turns out that 29 runs is some sort of National League record, that I don’t really have the motivation to look up the finer details of.  All I know it’s not better than the 30-3 thrashing that the Texas Rangers dropped on the Baltimore Orioles some time ago, and doesn’t quite erase the stink of the 20-2 drubbing the Yankees dropped on the Braves in Turner Field’s final season.

But anyway, of course I’m entertained generally pleased by any Braves win, but it’s not the 29 runs scored that amused me the most, or the seven home runs they clubbed en route to their scoring barrage.  No, a nerd like me finds amusement in other parts of the box score, like the fact that the starting pitcher for the Braves, Tommy Milone, didn’t get the win for a game in which his offense dropped 29 runs on the opposition.

In fact, as satisfied as I am any time I see a W for the Braves, it’s actually very much a bad and concerning thing that Tommy Milone allowed eight runs to the Marlins.  It’s not every day that the Braves are going to score 29 runs, much less ten runs, much less five.  But lost in the pandemonium of the Braves blowing up on the Marlins is the fact that their own starter was pretty abysmal in his own right, and he absolutely did not deserve to get the win in this game, and I think the Braves did the usual Barves thing during the trade deadline, and went after a jobber like Milone to fill in their pitching rotation, instead of going after a starting pitcher that could really fortify their chances to capitalize on the short season.

Instead, the win goes to Grant Dayton, a reliever that I’ve never heard of which isn’t difficult considering how far off the baseball radar I’ve dropped off, but anyway, he gets the win, solely based on the rules of Major League Baseball which states that the pitcher on the mound while the team has the lead and finishes out the 5th inning, is the guy eligible for the win.

Basically, this is the equivalent of going into arcade, walking up to the six-player X-Men arcade game, where five other players are at Magneto, he’s already blinking red and close to death, and jumping in as Dazzler because nobody ever played Dazzler, hitting him once with your mutant power blast, and taking credit for beating Magneto.

That’s basically what Grant Dayton did.  By no fault of his own, of course though.  Tommy Milone sunk $7 worth of quarters into X-Men and stunk up the joint getting past the Blob, Juggernaut, Wendigo and White Queen, and needed a bunch of people to come carry him through the rest of the game, with Dayton getting the credit for beating the game.

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Neck Beard Club is 2 sweeeeeeeeet

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Don’t wait, get on board with the hottest merch in professional wrestling!  Official Neck Beard Club merchandise is available at Hot Topics across America and ProWrestlingTees.com.  And why stop with the official t-shirt, when you can get the official fedora, and top it off with the official Neck Beard Club vape pen!  Supplies are limited, get ‘em while they last!

This is actually an idea that’s been rattling around my head for a while now, but just very recently did I get the motivation to actually bring it to fruition.  Maybe it’s because I recently went to my very first New Japan Pro Wrestling show, and even in spite of the mass departure of all the guys that ended up birthing All-Elite Wrestling, Bullet Club remains as relevant as ever, even if it’s sort of kind of beginning to feel like the nWo black and white after Hogan and Nash basically imploded the entire faction.

The point is, Bullet Club started to become kind of lame once it reached peak popularity, and much like the nWo, hit a level of where it began saturating so much of NJPW, it was basically the only thing you saw fans gravitating towards.  Suddenly, the whole world’s wrestling fans all started becoming huge Bullet Club marks, and it wasn’t that they were fans of NJPW, it’s just they were fans of this idea that didn’t originate in the WWE, and it was cool to like wrestling things that weren’t WWE.

And in my own little head, when things become too popular, they become lame, and I barely had any time learning about Bullet Club before I began thinking they were so popular, that it was nigh impossible for them to live up to the hype that the collective internet had put them on a pedestal with.

A year or so ago, I went to Dallas, and with my brother, we went to a Ring of Honor show.  Back in like 2012, I went to an ROH show in Baltimore, and it was an enjoyable experience seeing a lot of talent that I’d never seen before and just witnessing a brand new scene, very different than that of the WWE crowds that I have little desire of going to their shows anymore.  So I had high hopes that this ROH show in Dallas was going to be as good as my first time.

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The Jeopardy! GOAT: As if it could’ve been anyone else

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It took just four nights out of a possible seven, but the long-awaited answer was finally given its question: the Greatest Of All Time Jeopardy! Contestant?

Who is Ken Jennings?

Ultimately, I’ll admit that I was rooting for Jeopardy James Holzhauer to win it, partially because of likely recency bias, but also because he’s a known baseball stat geek, and he plays the game with such reckless abandon that a known gambler should play, that it’s hard to not become a fan.  But I do also remember the summer of 2004 when Ken Jennings emerged on the scene and it seemed like every single day after work, he was at the podium with a $15,000+ lead.  He would end up winning 74 games in a row and raking in over a million dollars in the process, and I’m pretty sure it was decided then that he was, at least unofficially, the greatest of all time.

But unofficial doesn’t ever count in the grand spectrum of things, plus not to mention that in several of the follow-up specials and tournaments, Jennings often times fell short of winning some major crowns, and was dually humbled when IBM’s Watson AI wiped the floor against him (and Brad Rutter).

Regardless, as most people know the narrative, the emergence of Jeopardy James meant that Jeopardy! finally had a third worthy contender, and with the declining health of legendary host Alex Trebek, there was no better time than the present to embark on the long awaited matchup to decide, who is the GOAT of Jeopardy?

Frankly, with no real disrespect to Brad Rutter, but he didn’t belong in this.  His run as a Jeopardy champ was nearly 20 years ago, and despite the $4 million+ he’s raked in through repeated tournaments and follow-up appearances, there was no way he was going to hold a candle against a savant like Jennings or a gunslinger like Holzhauer.  It was no more evident than through the four episodes of the GOAT shows, where Rutter finished last in every single match, and repeatedly wiped out and finished with 0 points after Final Jeopardy; if he was even allowed to play, as in, not being in the negatives.

Although he was a class act the whole time, gracefully singing the praises of his competition as well as honoring Alex Trebek, when the day was over, his presence made the entire GOAT tournament a two-man race.  I would’ve seen someone like Arthur Chu or Julia Collins in the third spot; I know they don’t stack up in terms of wins or earnings, but based on the way Rutter performed, it’s hard to imagine that they’d have been any less inconsequential.

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The Mandalorian has what a lot of Star Wars lost sight of

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It was kind of interesting watching through The Mandalorian leading up to, as well as after watching The Rise of Skywalker.  Going into The Rise, I can’t say with much certainty that I was particularly looking forward to it other than the fact that there’s always some sort of nerdy obligation to see Star Wars films fairly immediately upon their release.  In contrast to after watching the first two episodes of The Mandalorian, I bought in, and as Disney+ released them at an agonizing weekly episodic pace, I looked forward to each on a weekly basis.

Now it’s a little unfair and partially not quite an adequate balance comparing a television series to film, but when I sit back and think about everything I’d taken in that are all part of the Star Wars universe, the ultimate takeaway I really have is how much I really enjoyed The Mandalorian, versus how lukewarm I am as it comes to not just The Rise of Skywalker, but just about all Star Wars films released within the last decade.

In all fairness, I did really enjoy Rogue One, but when the day is over, Solo just kind of existed, and I’m at a push when it comes to the latest trilogy; The Force Awakens was a fantastic film, but The Last Jedi was pretty awful, and The Rise of Skywalker spent 80% of the film digging itself out of the chasm its predecessor put it in.  But as a whole, the decade’s Star Wars films all add up to a widely mediocre median.

But The Mandalorian, I thought was exceptional.  If I had a Disney+ subscription, I’d say that this show is probably easily the hard carry of the entire service so far, but that’s really not saying that much considering it’s basically the only piece of original content they have so far, but I guess what I’m really saying is that it’s almost worth the price of a subscription just for this show, it’s that good.

To cut to the chase, what I really loved about The Mandalorian, aside from how it was short and sweet, was that boiled down, the show simply has a heart.  They don’t waste a lot of time trying to piece together a complex plot, or weave a web of characters and potential storylines; they move in a very linear path from episode to episode, introduce characters who are immediately used, and then move right along.

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Winning ugly: the Star Wars third trilogy

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Fewer things I’ve seen over the last few years have been as divisive as the third Star Wars trilogy.  In a way it’s kind of a microcosm of today’s extremism society where people feel the need to have either completely bonkers dedicated opinions in one direction versus the other, with those of whom aren’t hard on one side are perceived as flakes and/or invalids. 

Either people completely loved the series (aka loved The Last Jedi) or they hated the series (aka abhorred The Last Jedi), with there being no real space in the middle.  Fights broke out on the internet, people unfriended/unfollowed/muted/ignored others on social media, and eventually The Last Jedi became something of a topic like politics during Thanksgiving; a powder keg of a topic that’s often at the tips of everyone’s tongues, but kept quiet for the sake of the group’s collective enjoyment, but really it’s an uncomfortable armistice just to hold their mouths shut.

At the risk of being an invalid flake, I am kind of in the middle when it comes to the series.  I thought The Force Awakens was an outstanding entry into the Star Wars primary series, and I often likened it to being JJ Abrams’ love letter to the Star Wars franchise.  It introduced solid characters and laid down the groundwork for a fairly logical path to success.  In terms of comparing it to a football score, I would have said The Force Awakens was like a solid 31-7 score at halftime, in favor of the light side.

Obviously, the shit really hit the fan after The Last Jedi, directed by Rian Johnson; normally, I wouldn’t bother mentioning directors, if not for the fact that it’s Johnson himself whom is either loved or reviled by Star Wars fans across the globe, for the way he handled the series, once given the reigns to the story.  Personally, I’m definitely in the camp that’s more dislike than like, but I will still maintain that in spite of the negative outlook on The Last Jedi, I would say it was still better than the Jar-Jar Trilogy.

But there’s little denying that Rian Johnson shit the bed with The Last Jedi, twisting the storyline to some strangely asinine directions, introducing strange characters, veering existing character arcs into weird plot/relationship chasms and missing out on some really easy layups.  After such careless bumbling, the score of the game was 42-31, with the dark side scoring five consecutive shit touchdowns to take a commanding lead heading into the final period.

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Avengers: Endgame and the obnoxious evolution of hype

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Disclaimer: I may or may not say things that might be interpreted as spoilers for the movie.  But then again considering the fact that I am still offline, it could be weeks or literal years before anyone other than myself sees this post.  Always good to maintain good brogging etiquette though.

So mythical fiancée and I went and saw Avengers: Endgame today.  It’s been two days since the formal release date of the film, but because Hollywood ticket sales data is weird and loves to fudge things to make profits sound way more impressive than they might actually be, it could be anywhere from three to four days since other people of the mostly public world has been watching it.

Typically, this is the type of film that I don’t exactly make such an effort to see so immediately after its release.  Frankly, I didn’t even see Avengers: Infinity War in theaters, and didn’t actually watch it until it started to be available for home releases.  But as a person who was raised heavily on comic books, and as someone who actually read the actual Infinity War/Gauntlet/Crusades comic book arcs, it was still something that I’d be interested in, and despite the fact that I’m not exactly a opening night/special screenings kind of seeker, I’ve still kept up pretty well with just about all of the films of the general Marvel Studios Phase 1 series.

However, because the world is so connected and locked into the internet these days, and damn near everyone is attached to social media in some way, shape or form, I felt somewhat of an urgency to watch Endgame on the earlier side of the spectrum, solely for the fact that I recognize that the citizens of the internet, be it through news and pop culture websites, or through social media itself, are completely incapable of not spoiling things, and waiting to watch anything runs the serious risk of having anything and everything spoiled for you, by people on the internet who just can’t shut the fuck up.

So, we went and watched Endgame.  2-4 days after its initial release.  And it was good.  A solid film that tied up just about every loose end that was unraveled throughout the last 11 years of Marvel Cinematic Universe.  Lots of comedic moments here, some very serious moments there, some slightly eye-rolly fan service moments occasionally, and a few nods to the actual comics, which nerds like me probably recognized.  As I said, it was a solid flick that was fairly enjoyable, and didn’t feel like the three hours that many bemoaned was going to be a test to all viewer’s constitutions.

But do I think it lived up to the hype that the internet artificially created over the last few months?  Absolutely not.

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