Month: September 2013

The Braves, playoffs, and what I think their chances are

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Oh noes, sports talk!  After I left Talking Chop, I don’t really have any outlet to gab about baseball anymore, and when the day is over, this is still my brog and ultimately I’ll write whatever I want to write about and post it, and not necessarily worry about catering to my seven readers.

In spite of my general apathy towards baseball these days, I’m still a fan of the game, and still a fan of the Braves.  When the day is over, I still want the Braves to win every single game possible, and I want the Braves to ultimately become World Series champions at least once more in the span of my life.

Over the weekend, the Braves came one step closer to fulfilling that ambition, when they mathematically clinched the National League East division.  In doing so, they’re guaranteed not only a spot in the playoffs, but avoid the bullshit one-game playoff game that was marred in controversy in its inception last year, which culminated with the Braves’ season coming to a close after a single game.

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Riot Graves costume construction: fin

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Alrighty then, Dragon*Con is a month beyond us now, and I feel like I’ve caught up on a lot of things in terms of writing, processing pictures, more writing, and simply getting back into the swing of things. That being said, I realized that I never followed through with my promises to myself and to my seven readers that I’d do my best to chronicle the construction of the Riot Graves gun for the costume I wore at Dragon*Con, and subsequently the other costume components.

So, unlike the LeBlanc staff process that I compartmentalized into many small posts, screw that, I’m just going to go straight into covering everything I possibly can, as detailed as I can, as it came to the construction of the Riot Graves gun, as well as the armor pieces and other doodads necessary to put together the Riot Graves costume.

Admittedly, there aren’t going to be nearly as many photos as I hoped there would be, because frankly there were points during the construction where there simply wasn’t time. Either I would be against the clock against chemical pot life and cure times, or after my haphazard minor league baseball trip, I was against the clock with Dragon*Con quickly approaching. I suppose inquiring minds will have to settle with my intrepid writing abilities instead at certain points.

Photo courtesy of Joseph Chi Lin Photography

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The person people forget about

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes it feels like I could get away with grand larceny solely based on the fact that I’m apparently a fairly forgettable person. Strangers and people I don’t know at all that well, sure that’s understandable, but lately it really feels like people closer to me forget about me as well. It’s little things too, but still somewhat noticeable to a hyper-analyzer like myself, and when enough of them happen in a cluster it really begins to eat at my conscience.

In the end, it doesn’t make me mad as much it’s just a little disheartening from time to time, but it just really makes me want to further distance myself from people, which completely has the capability of making things even worse if I let it get to me like an 18-year old teenager.

I know I’ve pigeon-holed myself to be somewhat of a loner over the last six or seven years, but I still exert effort in maintaining relationships with people. But it’s times where I feel like I do right now, that I think that I have more consideration towards others than others have consideration towards me. It’s like my time, participation or existence isn’t not important, but is very much negligible. It’s not that I always want to be a loner, but I also don’t go out of my way to act in manners that would make me undesirable to some occasional consideration from others. Apparently, that’s not the right course of action either.

This feeling, like every other, will eventually dissipate and wash away, but damn if it doesn’t suck when it is lingering around. I just kind of dislike everyone and my fuse gets short(er), and it’s kind of a downward spiral until I wake up one day and the feeling is gone.

I want a real vacation

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Several times throughout the years, I’ll take vacation time and go somewhere and do things.  Despite the fact that I’m generally accomplishing things that I want to do on my vacation time, I don’t really feel like they’re really vacations in the sense that I’m completely relaxed and at a general state of ease and comfort.

When I go to a convention, there’s the agitation of constantly being in lines and being crammed with thousands of people at any given time; waits, more waits, lines and waiting in lines, the tedious procedure of trying to find a place to sit and eat lunch or dinner.  When I go on ballpark trips, they’re usually not spent very long in any one place, and in order to maximize how much time gotten at each park, and there’s a lot of time spent driving around in cars trying to get from point A to B to C to D and then back to A sometimes.  And then there are the unfortunate instances of having to use vacation time to go deal with family bullshit, where I feel like I need a vacation after each and every single day dealing with my parents’ separation.

And no matter where in the United States you go, there’s always a long line at Starbucks when all I really want is my morning cup of coffee.

Don’t get me wrong, aside from the family bullshit, I enjoy going on trips to go to conventions, baseball road trips, out-of-town weddings and other time-off-work excursions.  I wouldn’t trade any of those things in for the world, but the fact of the matter is that more often than not, none of those things are truly restful, not-a-care-in-the-world, zero-worry, genuine vacations.

So I kind of want to go on an actual vacation, sometime.

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I don’t have enough pictures of myself

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes, I stare at myself in the mirror.  There’s a small percentage of that time when I’m carefully inspecting my face, because I’m paranoid that there’s a blemish that I’m unaware of, or trying to see if there’s like an unruly nose hair or something that’s been agitating the shit out of me for the last random denomination of time that needs to be plucked.  But the vast majority of the time, I’m looking, with a combination of disdain, acceptance and sadness, and the ever-growing number of white hairs that are sprouting all over my head.

Especially at the very front of the sides, like right above my temples.  They’re particularly going white right around there, and I’m beginning to feel like I’m turning into an Asian Reed Richards from the Fantastic Four except I’m not a super genius, nor can my entire anatomy including my clothing stretch like impervious rubber.

But it’s times like this when I kind of wish I could look back to as early as just like two years ago when I didn’t have so much white hair to see what I looked like.  Sure, my weight has fluctuated over the last 5-6 years due to not having a gym to go to on account of inconsistent finances, but at least my hair was almost entire still black, and not full of wispy defiant white hairs as it is now.

The thing is, it’s difficult to do that, because as it turns out, I don’t really have a whole lot of pictures of myself, and in a way that kind of makes me a little bit sad.  Often times I’m the guy taking the pictures, and that’s somewhat of a reputation I’ve developed, so whenever I’m around in occasions where a camera might be nice to have, it’s often me the guy with it, and nobody else.  Sure I could always have people take the occasional picture for me, but frankly it always seems a little awkward to me, and I find that social occasion photos feel the most genuine when they kind of happen organically, instead of carefully planned.

I don’t even have a decent picture of myself to use in conjunction with this post.

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Attempting to harness the power of CHDK

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Despite the fact that I’m not particularly good at photography, I have two cameras.  Ignoring the obvious Asian joke, one is a DSLR, and the other is a point-and-shoot (Canon A3400) that I got to have as a backup camera, or for events and occasions where I still want to take pictures but a DSLR is not logically feasible.

Over the last two years, I guess I’ve grown accustomed to the quality that my DSLR is capable of shooting, so I’ve grown ever critical and dissatisfied with anything shot with my 3400 in comparison.  I like the idea of having a secondary camera that I can take pictures with, because despite the fact that I’m generally pleased with the quality of photos my iPhone takes, I’m always impulsively paranoid that taking too many pictures will tax and bog down my iPhone and suck the battery dry in a critical time.

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I wish I could be a police officer for one working day

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I was sitting in traffic this morning, which is nothing out of the ordinary.  Unfortunately, it was worse than it usually was due to the fact that for no apparent reason, six straight traffic signals were out, and the vast populous of Atlanta is completely oblivious to the rules of the 4-way stop in such conditions.

On more than one (fifty) occasion(s), I watched as people sped off into a turn lane, dividing lane, oncoming traffic, or some other form of asphalt not designated for regular automotive traffic, and then cut in front of some schlub too slow-reacting to prevent impatient and inconsiderate assholes from cutting in front of not just them, but every single law-abiding citizen who opt to grind it out with the rest of the pack.

It’s times like these that I wish that for one day, I could be a police officer.  Not to do anything dramatic and go off on high-excitement, high-speed car chases, bust drug dealers, stop crime and be a hero.  No, I’d love to be a police officer for a single day, just so I could troll the ever-living shit out of law breakers, and by “troll,” I mean enforce the fucking law.

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