Month: December 2017

Star Wars: The Last Jedi thoughts (spoiler-free)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It was good.

Three-star Yelp review, A-OK. 

I walked into the theater completely blind, because I staunchly avoided seeing anything and everything in regards to the film because previews and even teasers give away more information than is remotely necessary.  I wanted to know jack shit going into it, so that I wouldn’t have any preconceived notions or expectations, and nothing but my own predictions formulated from the events from prior film.

The Last Jedi wasn’t the best installment of the series, but it was far from being remotely close to the trash that the first three episodes were.  I do not think it was not better than its predecessor, The Force Awakens, and if I had to rank the series, it would go as such:

  • Empire Strikes Back
  • A New Hope
  • The Force Awakens
  • Return of the Jedi
  • The Last Jedi
  • 37 pounds of cat poop
  • Jar-Jar I
  • Jar-Jar II
  • Jar-Jar III

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Florida gets all the good shit

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Lakeland, Florida – a semi stalls on train tracks, and is decimated into two pieces when a CSX train plows into it, sending its cargo consisting of a variety of meats flying all over the place. Fortunately, nobody was hurt, and a lot of people went home happy after scavenging the remains for free meat.

So obviously this isn’t a story of a tractor trailer overturning on the highway, nor did it happen in the state of Georgia, typical criteria in which I try to integrate these stories into the highway buffet.  But a train slicing a stalled semi full of meat into two pieces?? 

Yeah, that’s brog-worthy alright.

Talk about a chaotic story.  Sure, it sucks for those involved in the accident, from the truck driver to all persons on the train.  But thankfully nobody was hurt, which means the rest of the story is fair game for ironic humor and criticism.

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Looking stupid, even in victory

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Long story short: Democrat Doug Jones defeats publicly and nationally accused sexual deviant Republican Roy Moore in the Alabama senate race; by a margin of less than 2%

I can’t believe that I’m writing about politics twice in the same week, much less about the dumb state of Alabama, but this is something that I grew remotely intrigued about as the story transpired.  Honestly, despite the fact that to like-minded people, the battle between an accused sex offender versus a not(yet accused)-sex offender should seem like a layup victory for the morally superior, I actually would have put my money on Roy Moore.  Because, the country I live in has repeatedly demonstrated a sheer lack of decent human values in favor of blind misguided political fanaticism, and I would never have imagined a state like Alabama of all places would have been one capable of snapping out of the tragic pattern.

But I was proven wrong.  It’s not often in which I like this result to be the case, but for the sake of the greater good I believe is needed, I’ll take this L with a modicum of relief. 

Naturally, despite the fact that it was a battle between an accused sex offender and someone who has yet to be accused, it still ended up being a race tighter than Mariah Carey’s workout apparel, with a margin of victory allegedly less than 2% for Jones.  Meaning despite the fact that Roy Moore had been drug through the mud and accusers popping out of the woodwork claiming sexual deviancy, over 49% of educated Alabama voters still voted for the him to represent their state in Washington.

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In Netflix, Marvel trusts

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

One of the good things about getting snowed in for most of the weekend was that it gave me the opportunity to sit on my ass and do nothing but watch television that I’d started to fall behind on.  But who am I really kidding, snow or no snow, sitting on my ass and doing nothing but watching television was already kind of on my agenda regardless of the weather outside, but it does sound like the snow was a convenient excuse to do such.

Anyway, I took the opportunity to start and finish the entire Punisher series on Netflix.  And much like several of the Marvel properties that preceded it, I have to say that Netflix has once again managed to take a fairly one-dimensional character, and make a watchable and fairly compelling season of television out of it.

I’m not going to pretend like I was a huge Punisher fan, really.  I always thought he was kind of an outlier in the Marvel Universe, since he wasn’t a superhero in the sense of having any powers or abilities, but instead more like an extremely well-armed vigilante with a death wish that actually killed people on a regular basis.  He was loosely separated by only a few degrees from bigger players, with associations to Nick Fury, Matt Murdock and the Kingpin, which puts him in remotely the same neighborhood as Spider-Man and the Avengers, but at the same time, Frank Castle wasn’t the kind of guy we’d expect to see in any major events or crossovers.

Seriously, what would Frank Castle contribute during the Infinity Crusades?  Weapons?  Tony Stark among others has that covered.  Micro’s hacking expertise?  Reed Richards and Ant Man, as well as again Tony Stark, probably have computers way better than Micro’s cache of 486s, much less his downfall when the wifi is unplugged.  I’m pretty sure Thanos with his power over, everything, wouldn’t even notice a trigger-happy psychopath with a glock when Thor and Hulk are trying to flank him.

However, the Punisher beat-em-up arcade game Capcom released in 1993, that used the same old Final Fight engine that 20 other games used was still pretty fun.

The point is, the Punisher was always a property that I thought was really out of place in the Marvel Universe, but he still existed so that storylines of New York-based superheroes could get dark and broody from time to time.

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Only the Braves

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Back during the summer, the Triple-A Gwinnett Braves announced they were going to change their name, moving forward.  After sifting through the dank and salt for viable candidates, the final ballot was narrowed down to the following six options:

  • Gwinnett Buttons
  • Gwinnett Big Mouths
  • Gwinnett Gobblers
  • Gwinnett Hush Puppies
  • Gwinnett Lamb Chops
  • Gwinnett Sweet Teas

Obviously, none of these were particularly fantastic options, but I figured Buttons would’ve won easily, since it was the least over-the-top campy name, and that there was the historical element behind it, as Button Gwinnett was whom the entire county was named after as well as a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Regardless, at the county level and those who were remotely interested in the distraction of a dumb story like this, there was much debate, but more pettiness when it came to the topic of renaming the Gwinnett Braves, that really could be summed up with the fact that all available options were pretty shitty.

So naturally, the winner of the contest ended up being the Gwinnett Stripers.

What’s that you say?  It wasn’t an option?  By golly, it wasn’t!  The Braves blindsided the fans yet again, with the bat of no-transparency, and went ahead and made choices without the people that sign their paychecks!

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What would Alabama be without college football?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t really like to talk about politics, but I just read an article about how Alabama senate candidate Roy Moore was quoted stating something about how he believes that the last time America was great, slavery was still in existence.  The same Roy Moore who has also been in the crosshairs recently for alleged sexual misconduct with underage girls.

However, this is also the same Roy Moore, whom in spite of these discouraging associations, is not only not out of the running for the senate seat, but statistically neck-and-neck in the race with Democrat Doug Jones.

All I can really deduce from this absurd notion is that red state Alabama’s conservative voters are so against a Democrat gaining some measure of power, that they’d knowingly and willingly continue to vote for and support a pretty known sex offender and seeming racist Republican on their own volition.

This isn’t so much a discussion about politics as much as it is revisiting the frequent topic these days of where human values have gone, really.

So yes, the headline is a serious question: what would the state of Alabama be reduced to if college football were removed from the equation?  As fanatically blind and brainless as the voters are in the state, there’s no shortage of blind loyalty and prestige that the success of college football brings to the state.  But if the University of Alabama and Auburn University either bottomed out permanently, or ceased to exist, what would the state of Alabama really have left?

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lol South Fulton Renaissance

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Not that anyone except for me and like two people who are following this actually care, but the City of South Fulton AKA “Renaissance” is having their new city’s name contested, protested and put back onto the chopping block by of all people, a 16-year old.

This is my surprised face.

Long story short, to the surprise of nobody who lives there or had lived there, the local government can’t even do something as traditionally democratic as including all involved parties to a vote, and allowed a segment of the City of South Fulton to decide on the name of ALL of the City of South Fulton, which ended up being “Renaissance.”  On behalf of a lot of people who had no involvement in the naming of the city, this segment of people went ahead and declared Renaissance to be the new name anyway.

Naturally, whether it’s the fact that people object to the questionable practices in which the name was decided upon, the fact that they simply don’t like the name “Renaissance,” or perhaps both, the whole thing is turned controversial, and in like a week or so, there’s going to be yet another meeting or town hall or whatever gathering of people necessary in order to iron out the city’s name, among other bullshit.

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