Would be hilarious if the patch affects player performance

I love how the 2023 baseball season has barely started, and regardless of the fact that the Mets obliterated payroll records, they still can’t escape being the Mets:

  • Newly re-signed closer Edwin Diaz out for the season with injury incurred during the World Baseball Classic, still getting paid $19.5M
  • Justin Verlander, who will make $43.3M this season, already on the disabled list with a teres-major injury
  • Robinson Cano, who was released by the Mets in 2022, and is currently unemployed, will still make $20M from the Mets

But as the Mets have demonstrated, all that shit’s just money, and they don’t seem to care how much of it they burn if they think its going to lead to moar winz.  The Diaz money is covered by insurance, Verlander will probably still have the best games of his season against the Braves, and well, Cano is a sunk cost that deferred money guys always seem to slip under the cracks unless it’s Bobby Bonilla (also the Mets’ problem lol).

However, this new jersey patch to commemorate the union between the Mets and New York Presbyterian Hospital?  Now that’s some tragic shit, that I can’t believe for a second will actually make it through the entire season.

When it comes to fans roasting their own team, few are as more savage and creatively funny as Mets fans, and despite being division rivals to the Braves, I have always gotten along well with Mets fans on the internet and I respect their candor and creativity when it comes to slamming on their own teams.  And from what I’ve already seen, I can’t really top or better a lot of the shit I’ve seen them dumping on the team for the absurdly ridiculous size of this patch.

But at this mammoth size, I have to imagine that it’s going to be capable of affecting player performance, just because of the general feel and added weight it’s going to add to the sleeve.  Like, when a poorly screen printed t-shirt’s design feels hard on your skin instead of the softness of a cotton shirt underneath; it doesn’t absorb sweat and makes you feel wet flesh on a hot day, little things that can make you feel uncomfortable.

And as neurotic and superstitious as baseball players are, little things that affect the touch and feel of their baseball uniforms, yeah I think it’s completely plausible that these gigantic fucking patches would have the capability to affect player performance.  Being on the left sleeve, I imagine a lefty hitter like Brandon Nimmo is going to feel the subtle weight of it when he gets into his batting stance, and it’s going to take a minute for him to get used to it, but any abject performance that occurs in that minute could be the difference in a winning and losing a game, and considering the Mets lost the division to the Braves by just one game, all wins do matter.

Maybe a player on defense will be uncomfortable with there being this bigass stiff square on their arm instead of the light neutrality of no patch, and it fucks up their timing and they start committing errors.  Or knowing the luck of the Mets, somehow, the patch is going to come into play for an injury stint for one of their $40M pitchers.

Either way, the likelihood of such coming into play isn’t very high, because if players can adjust to all this pitch clock bullshit, the death of the shift and limited pickoff attempts, they’ll get used to a patch, even if it is the size of a Domino’s Pizza box.  But if it did, it wouldn’t be surprising, because only the Mets could be the team that gets derailed by something as silly as an oversized sponsorship sleeve patch.

NJPW Television Championship blet: WTHF

While I was chatting wrestling with my bros, I thought about how New Japan’s upcoming Wrestle Kingdom, which is the equivalent to their Wrestlemania, was looking like a really stacked show, and if not for the fact that it started at 3AM the following day for us in the west, I would totally be interested in watching it.  Just the two matches between Kenny Omega vs. Will Osperay and Jay White vs. Kazuchika Okada are enough to sell the entire show, but really NJPW doesn’t ever have a bad Wrestle Kingdom, top to bottom.

Looking at the rest of the card, most of the other matches seem very appealing, even if it does contain the further stripping of titles off of FTR who will undoubtedly lose the IWGP titles in the triple threat match they’re in, and seeing the new IWGP Women’s champ Kairi (Sane) on the card seems as good as place as any for the rampant news that Sasha Banks will be appearing, to come to fruition.

But the one match that caught my attention immediately, and one that I had no idea was even developing was the finals of a tournament . . . for a brand new championship, the NJPW Television Championship.Obviously this means that there’s a new blet, and when there’s blets, there’s me, hoping it’s awesome so that I could hope to get a replica for my collection, but at the same time hoping it sucks, so that I won’t be tempted to plop down $300-400 I don’t have for something that’s useless and I don’t really need.

Well the good(bad) news is that the design of the blet is this gigantic ball of what the fuck, as in this is the worst fucking designed blet since the days of the NWA territories, and their blets were basically made out of scrap aluminum and Peg Bundy’s pants.

Seriously, I haven’t had a blet boner go flacid so quickly since the old Ring of Honor TV blet whose plates were so vertically long that it couldn’t not be a literal cockblock.  The NJPW TV blet does absolutely nothing for me except say what the fuck, every time I look at it, because nothing about it makes any god damn sense.

Firstly, it’s completely boring and uninspiring, with the shapes of the plates being some fucking rectangles.  The baby shit brown color of the strap with the weird gold piping trim don’t do it any favors, and I just don’t get why all promotions seems so determined to steer away from traditional, classic black straps.

But then the designs of the plates themselves, are nothing but eye-scrunching puzzling.  For starters, it’s deviating from the norm and is not being classified as an IWGP championship; for the matter it’s not really being classified as just an NJPW championship but an NJPWWorld.com title.  As in it is a championship belt that represents a website and nothing else.

And despite the fact that they’re calling it the NJPW Television championship, the word “television” doesn’t appear anywhere on the strap itself, but don’t worry the URL NJPWWorld.com is on it five fucking times, so that anyone who sees the blet who misses it the first four times might still see the address on the fifth spot on the left side plate.

The only thing that gives any hint that it’s for television is on the side plates, which basically has a clipart of an early 2000’s monitor with a gigantic PLAY button on it next to the NJPW lion crest, naturally accompanied by one of the five NJPWWorld.com URLs, so I guess it sort of represents digital media.

I know IMPACT! gets a lot of flack being the spiritual successor to TNA, but at least they have the wherewithal to name their blet the “Digital Media (world) championship,” have the name of it on it, and have a blet that doesn’t look like shit.  For all the weeb-y praise and credit NJPW gets, in this regard, they just got dunked on, hard, by fucking IMPACT! of all other promotions.

Finally, the last criticism I have for this turd blet is the silhouette behind the primary NJPW World wordmark on the center plate.  I have no idea what that is supposed to be.  Usually, blets like to have silhouettes of continents or countries, to signify the regions they’re supposed to represent, but I can’t really make out what’s in the background of this one.  Despite being for a Japanese website, the silhouette kind of looks like North America if global warming raised the sea levels, sunk most of Mexico and western Canada and thinned Florida out.  Or maybe it’s eastern Asia despite the fact that NJPW doesn’t operate in any of those countries.  But all the same, I think the heat can get off of the NXT UK Tag blets for not actually having the UK visible on their plates, because at least some recognizable country is comprehensible.

The bottom line is that the NJPWWorld.com YouTube Championship blet looks like garbage.  If I’m Zack Sabre, Jr., I’m pleading with whomever has the book in New Japan to not have me win the championship, because it would be a colossal embarrassment to be seen having to carry around a shitty looking title as such.  It would undoubtedly be better to be a non-champion than have to carry around a clown championship, and if there’s one thing the WWE and WCW has taught wrestling fans throughout the years, there very much are championships that sandbag careers than benefit them.

The NJPWWorld.com Digital Streaming NJPWWorld.com Championship definitely, definitely is one of them.  What the holy fuck indeed.  There’s absolutely no desire for me to track down a Pakistani bootleg replica of this, even if Rusev/Miro were to set Tony Khan on fire and burn AEW to the ground and make the jump to New Japan that I foretold years ago and won this piece of shit en route to fulfilling his destiny as IWGP World champion.

I think this takes the cake

The ad on the left is the July 4th ad that my former team and I produced for the 2021 year.  The ad on the right is the July 4th ad that was produced by my former employer for the 2022 year.

Now I understand that there’s little sexy and glamorous about newsprint, especially considering the world has such a collective boner about digital-this, omnichannel-that, social, influencers and other forms of marketing approaches that constant insists that the print medium is dying or already dead, but I will fight you if you tell me this to my face.

What good is your digital medium if the internet goes down?  Or you can’t connect to the wi-fi and your 5G can’t make it through the concrete and medal coliseums of the stores you’re in, needing to access the internet?  Or you catch me on a bad day and I slap your phone out of your hand and break your phone for telling me that my occupation is obsolete?  Alright then

I’ll be the first to admit that the 2021 ad isn’t necessarily mind-blowing, or remotely close to the best work that my team has ever produced.  We were still amidst pandemic-this and supply chain-that, not to mention that my team was forced to work in a program that was the equivalent of a Chevy Cavalier trying to compete with NASCARs on the track.  But compared to the ad on the right?  Suddenly the 2021 Cavalier looks like a spaceship compared to the stone and chisel produced ad in 2022.

In short, my old team was completely gutted, laid off and the company’s newsprint was outsourced to an agency in Austin, Texas; literally a week after I had my final day with the company.  I was pretty upset about it despite having dodged a massive bullet, because I still had and have a tremendous amount of care and shits to give about all the people on my old team, because there’s a ton of talent and good people there who were put into a horrible situation.

Fortunately, almost all of them have landed on their feet since, but the point remains that the old newsprint team was effectively killed, with our primary task being outsourced; in my opinion, one of the biggest professional insults to anyone who’s ever taken pride in what they do for a living.

I blame my old boss for all of this.  I’ve made no secret of the disdain, contempt and general hate I have for her, and how they were easily the #1 factor for why I decided to leave the company.  I could list of numerous things I hated about being under their thumb, but I’d be better off saving those 50,000 words for November and completing NaNoWriMo with them instead.  However, of all of the horrible shit she said, did and behaved to me that made her a horrible Bronn of a boss, I genuinely think this is the worst thing she ever did; as the title of this post says, I think this takes the cake.

This piece of outsourced shit,  the July 4th ad for 2022, is a goddamn joke.  The photo does no justice to how poor the entire ad is, because all throughout the circular are errors, alignment and consistency issues, bad crops, obviously distorted images, and zero quality control.  A hundred things I caught in a hundred seconds of scanning through it, that would never have made it past mine or any of my team’s eyes on our numerous proofing rounds.  Ancient Egyptians pounding hieroglyphics on reeds had better brand standards than this sad circular.

She killed our medium.  No matter how hard my team pushed back against evolving trends and proved our positive ROI year after year, she came in and killed us, because no team in the world can survive in the league when their own coach is deliberately and determined to kill them.

Continue reading “I think this takes the cake”

WTF is Capcom thinking with Street Fighter 6’s logo?

When I started seeing people posting about the recent Street Fighter 6 teaser, the very first thing I thought was that it was a fake and/or a joke, because there’s no way that this was going to be the logo for one of the most iconic franchises in video game history.

Ohhh, but it turned out that it really is.

Honestly, I couldn’t give two shits about the game itself, I’ve been so long out of video games in general, much less Street Fighter, that there’s a very high probability that I’ll never even play it in my lifetime.  I never played SFV once, and I only played SFIV a handful of times before I got pissed about there being a quick released SFIV champion hyper turbo or whatever new edition that made my version obsolete, so I never played it again.

But that doesn’t change the fact that I can’t sit on my pedestal and judge logos.  And SF6’s logo is fuckin’ godawful, and it really makes me wonder just what the fuck Capcom is thinking when they phoned it in and “designed’ this shitty piece of clipart and decided it to let it represent the franchise that basically made them who they are today.

I couldn’t even get home from work to point out how turrible the logo is before other sites had already sunken their teeth into the same observation, and a few have already gone as far as to call out the obvious low-effort low-key plagiarism Capcom has done in creating this “logo” that basically says all the same things that I would say.

Seriously though, this isn’t just another case of resisting change for the sake of resisting it.  Street Fighter’s general wordmark has been recognizable and iconic throughout every iteration of the series, and there are common elements and a color palette that continuously make it work no matter the number of sequels they put out.  The gritty, violent-looking delivery of brush strokes to create the words, to the signature yellow-to-orange gradient palettes used in every iteration up to SFV.

And then SF6 phones it in with this lame rip off of some Adobe clipart, and then typing out “Street Fighter” in a jersey typeface that appears to have been modified slightly so they don’t get sued to oblivion by the original font creator.  It’s a sad and insulting edition to an iconic franchise that doesn’t look like it’s real, but it is.

I know I already said that the likelihood of me ever playing SF6 isn’t very high, but I most certainly judge books by their covers, and seeing what is becoming of Street Fighter from the logo alone, would probably give me pause to give it a whirl, even if I were still avidly gaming.

What I feared might happen, happened

I’m sad.  One of my former reports from my old job texted me to let me know that they, and numerous other members of my old newsprint team from my old job were all being laid off.

This is something that I figured could eventually show up on the table, but seeing as how over the last six years I was there, I never saw, or heard of anywhere in the company that did any sort of laying off, I didn’t think that it would actually happen.

It’s funny, when I had planned on leaving the company, my ego and I had hoped that it would get a modicum of respect and acknowledgment.  I’m not saying I was ever the most important cog in the machine that was my team, but I did design the work process that kept us afloat throughout the transition into the Ford Pinto of software we were forced to use.  However, when I had announced my notice of resignation, we were already in the first week of a two-week notice from one of my production counterparts, and unbeknownst to me, my other production counterpart was a week away from announcing their two-week notice.

Suddenly, I was the Stephanie Tanner middle child of resignations, doomed to be unnoticed, and worse off, I begun feeling concerned that this power vacuum that was forming due to the departure of 3 out of 4 managers on the team was going to no longer put the team in a defensive mode until they could staff back up, but now put them at risk of being potentially liquidated, and the work outsourced.

Ever since the pandemic rose and my team specifically took some lumps throughout the last two years because the print medium isn’t as agile and adaptable as digital ones, there was concern throughout the team about the security of their jobs.  I had, honestly opined that I felt that everyone was safe, solely because of the ironic fact that we all had knowledge of the aforementioned Ford Pinto of graphic design software, so it’s not like any joe-schmoe could be hired off the street to do our jobs.  And for the last two years, in spite of how much of a pain in the ass it’s been, our team had navigated the bumpy waters of pandemic retail, and come out no worse for wear at the end of it.

But now, with the Great Resignation™ hitting our team specifically and creating such gaps in the team, I can’t say that I’m surprised to see that liquidation and outsourcing has begun.  The company as a whole clearly soured on the print medium, which was my impetus for starting to look for a new job, aside from the fact that I hated the fuck out of my boss, but none of it changed the fact that I still cared about my team and that all these talented designers all deserved better than they’ve been dealt.

I do feel a little bit of guilt that there is the possibility that my departure, along with the departure of the other managers made this happen, although I have no clue to whether or not this was always on the table in the first place regardless of if we were there or not.  But when the day is over, I still have to, and I did, put myself and my family above all else, and it turns out that I dodged an extremely close bullet.

It’s just that as an empathetic person, it kills me that people that I cared about are put in this unfortunate position.  The saving grace is that they still have nearly nine weeks notice, which gives them fairly sufficient time to begin looking for new jobs, and with the cards all out on the table, it’s not like anyone has to be discreet about it.  In fact, as long as they’re not insubordinate shitbags, all my old team that’s on the block doesn’t even really have to put up the front of being friendly or overly professional anymore, because the company is still going to rely on them to put out all the scheduled advertisements all the way up to Memorial Day.

And then they get a severance package, and fortunately the timing of it will still allow all of them to partake in the company’s semi-annual profit sharing bonuses which usually take place in March.

At this point, what I’m most curious about are the future statuses of other individuals on my old team, namely my old boss.  I don’t get the impression that they’re on the block like my old reports are, and I have this pessimistic suspicion that they probably didn’t fight very hard, nor are they remotely anything close to the type who would go down with the ship.  They have another channel under their umbrella, and I’ve long known that that one was their true passion, while my team was kind of the bastard they had to manage in order to have their role.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they in fact initiated this liquidation, because often said that their life would be peaches if they could get rid of newsprint, and could focus solely on catalog.  But these are things that I’ll never know, but the result of it all is still feeling terrible for a lot of talented designers who will soon be out of a job, and not help feeling a little bit guilty for helping push the boulder over the edge.  I don’t regret anything I’ve done in regards to seeking greener pastures before the shots were fired, but I’m still allowed to feel empathy for those I used to work with who were saddled by this unfortunate development.

I sometimes think only I can find the negative in a really great deal

So in my last bitchy dad post, I mentioned that some really great news came my way, that I couldn’t really feel happy about because I was too busy being a bitchy dad at that moment in my life.  But to any of my zero readers who read my shit with regularity might’ve seen a post a little while back that mentioned that I was in the hunt for a new job.

Well, I succeeded.  An offer came my way, that I’m 99% certain that I’m going to accept, because it’s a higher title than where I’m at now, a fairly substantial raise from what I make, and if/when the day comes when we have to occasionally go into the office, it’s actually a closer drive than my current job, and I wouldn’t have to get on a single highway.

All things considered, it’s a win in every aspect.

So why am I writing about it as if there was some sort of questionable catch?

The thing is, there really are none.  At least from most normal standards.  The only reason I’m not completely gung-ho about the whole opportunity is that in spite of all the wins, this wasn’t my first pick in my job search.

Continue reading “I sometimes think only I can find the negative in a really great deal”

No, it wasn’t

By the graciousness of my nanny, whom I excused from being on time to check at a QT for me, was she able to procure a reprint of the November 3rd commemorative Braves World Series victory edition.  This, was the highlight of my day.

So, I’m happy that I got the one thing that I had really wanted to commemorate the joyous occasion of the Braves reaching the top of the mountain and getting to be World Series champions, a sight and notion that is still hard to digest two days later, but I’m still peeved at just how hard it was to get a small piece of history to remember it by.

I’m pretty sure there’s something in the Constitution that says something along the lines of that news shouldn’t not be available to those who seek it, and it’s a stretch, but the AJC, whether it was deliberate or stupidity, suppressing production of the one and only obviously high-demand edition of their shitty paper, I would interpret as being fucking unconstitutional. 

As relieved as I am to have my own edition, predictably, the well-publicized high demand for these editions has created the dreaded and insufferable secondary market for them, and I’ve seen them on Facebook Marketplace going for at least $10 a pop, and mythical wife, after hearing me bitch and moan about it the night prior, spied some on eBay, going for around $27 a pop.

I’m not going to be a hypocrite about it, because I’ve definitely purchased extras of things before, with the intent of trying to flip them.  But whenever I’ve done that, that makes me an asshole, and what people are doing with these fucking AJCs, are making them assholes too.  I’m just glad that I didn’t have to pay a second-hand price for this, although I would have done so in order to get one.

The irony is that, it’s not even that good of a commemorative edition.  The AJC’s aesthetics and design has always been sixth-rate as far as major market newspapers go, and this commemorative edition doesn’t do the Braves justice.

The newspaper industry took a lot of flack over the last few decades over many publications taking cost-cutting measures and eliminating photographers, and instead tasking reporters to take pictures on iPhones.  I don’t know whether or not the AJC was one of those publications, but based on the shitty photo quality of my collector’s edition, I’m inclined to believe they are.

The photos are out of focus and have been enlarged way past the original resolution, and whatever staffers they have pretending to be graphic artists apply a bunch of high-pass filters to try and sharpen them, but instead make them look all posterized and pixelated.  I’d almost be embarrassed to actually display it after I frame it, but it will eventually become artwork for lack of a better term.

Anyway, I’m just glad I got my copy regardless of all the bullshit and hoops that had to be done in order for it to happen.  I just wish what seemed like a simple thing didn’t have to become such a joy-suppressing ordeal.

Fuck the AJC.