Month: June 2018

The very definition of social media being miserable

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Not news: man uses app to order Chick Fil-A

News: that man is Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, and this occurrence happened to be in the midst of pride month

And because Chick Fil-A on the internet, is known first and foremost for hating the gays (despite it usually being known as one of the better fast food chains in actual human dialogue), the users of the CEO’s very own company that he runs, go full internet on him, meaning insufferable passive-aggressive shaming, finger pointing and being the keyboard tough guys so many turn into when they feel all safe and cozy behind the anonymity of the internet.

The CEO of Twitter getting obliterated by his very own platform, all because he wanted to enjoy some delicious chicken.  This epitomizes how miserable social media is, when a guy can’t be a little bit pleased with saving a little cash from use of technology, without the masses of keyboard warriors and the finger-pointing Chick Fil-A Watch scrambling to the tops of their soap boxes to shame and go way out of their way to publicly shame others.

And as I’ve said before, I would wager an ungodly amount of money that in spite of the holier-than-thou attitude so many people portray themselves on the internet, whether they’re gay, gay-supporting, or whatever, the people that love to act like they boycott and hate Chick Fil-A, still eat Chick Fil-A from time to time.  It’s just fucking food, and it’s okay to eat it, and surely without the necessity of the judgment of the internet.

Bottom line is that social media is garbage.  The analogy I keep going back to is that it’s like the whole world is connected to AOL at all times, and anyone can IM anyone at any time, with mostly useless nonsense, spam and negativity.  My weekend was kind of soured because of something I found out about over social media, and it’s put me in a mode where I don’t want to really look at it for a little while.  And I’m just some nobody in the world; I couldn’t imagine what it would be like for any sort of celebrities or actually important figures out there.  When the day is over though, I don’t really care.

I wonder what the textbooks of tomorrow will look like

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A few weeks ago, I was helping mythical gf clean out her classroom, and I couldn’t help but take a little bit of time to look through some of the textbooks that her students used.  Obviously, it’s been nearly 20 years since the last time that I had a county-issue textbook to learn from, so I was curious to see just what kind of stuff children are inundated with these days, since the world has for lack of a better term, changed somewhat over the last 20 years.

Now, not a tremendous amount of things were at all that different, since math is math, and the rules of math aren’t ever going to change.  However, including the math, the social studies textbook were giant explosions of color and photographic content, that I certainly don’t remember being the case when I was in contemporary education. The text is gigantic, the photos are bold, colorful and honestly visually captivating, as I am sure there are educational experts who do this by design in order for the eyes of young children to absorb them as much as possible.

Naturally, as an adult looking at elementary school-level content, it’s a little surprising to see how rudimentary the subject matter is, but then again I’m 20 years past this point in my education and should know this stuff and thankfully I do.  But I think things are meant to be way easier for the kids of today than they were back when I was a kid, with pretty much all key information and subject matter being pre-bolded, pre-highlighted and basically be given to students on a silver platter for testing purposes, without the kids necessarily having to study that much.

However, the point of this whole post really stems from the thought that despite the fact that mythical gf’s class didn’t have any U.S. history textbooks, it really got me thinking about how I’d be very curious to see one today, to see just how educators spin some of the more historic things that have happened over the last 20-30 years, as well as how they describe and try to educate of events that I remember learning about, like all the wars of American history.

This is of course, leading to the inevitable mentioning of the rise and regime of our current president, whom it doesn’t require a lot of imagination to see just how divided the nation is as a result of their ascent.  But I’ll admit that I think I’d be fascinated to see just how the educational field treats all of it from the standpoint of teaching children of what was happening in the United States during this time.

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The Family Guy effect for sports

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m not even going to pretend for two seconds that I’m a hockey fan.  The biggest importance of hockey in my life is Al Michaels’ call of Do You Believe in Miracles? from the 1980 Olympics when Team USA upset the Soviet Union in one of the greatest upsets in the history of sports.  Otherwise, I know and care very little about the sport, personally considering it fourth-tier in the hierarchy of professional sports.  I know a lot of names of players and teams mostly through osmosis of ESPN and other sports outlets I keep my ear to the ground with, but really I’ve given no shits about the NHL ever in the history of my life.

However, it hasn’t been lost on me that over the last few years, the Washington Capitals have had some difficulty in overcoming the Pittsburgh Penguins.  Something like the Penguins winning three straight playoff matchups against the Capitals, en route to winning the Stanley Cup each time or something or other.  A cursory search shows that that the Penguins won seven consecutive playoff series against the Capitals since 1995.

This stigma had been amplified over the prior two seasons, with the respective stars of both squads, Alexander Ovechkin of Washington and Sidney Crosby of Pittsburgh in the primes of their careers, as well as the ever-prevalent and pervasive presence of social media for all the fairweather and casual fans to blow shit up more than others might want.  And as had been the norm, the Penguins ended the seasons for the Caps, and went on to win Stanley Cups each time, while fans in the DC/Virginia/Maryland area bemoaned the seemingly endless curse of DC sports.

When I noticed that the Caps and Penguins were on yet another collision course in this year’s NHL Playoffs, I talked a few times with a close friend who is an actual hockey fan, and a Caps fan no less.  And as a DC sports enthusiast, he’s pretty much been there, done that as far as the low expectations for sports teams in DC, regardless of their records or the hype.  Whether it’s the Redskins, Nationals, Wizards or Capitals, we’ve all seen them ascend to contention, only to fall from grace, perpetuating the stereotype with each crushing defeat.

We basically talked about how it was about to be another year, another Caps jobbing to the Penguins, and to prematurely begin engraving the Stanley Cup with this year’s Penguins personnel.  And then the Penguins went on to win game 1 of the best of seven, further reinforcing the feeling of déjà vu of another Caps shortcoming and another DC sports team, collapsing.

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I wish I could have Seoul searched in Seoul

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Until it streams online, it’s new to me.  I just recently watched on Netflix, the film Seoul Searching, apparently released back in 2015.  Long story short, it’s basically Breakfast Club for Koreans, and there’s no mistaking the immense John Hughes influences throughout the entire film.

Instead of in-school Saturday suspension, the story takes place in 1986, where a bunch of Korean teenagers who grew up outside of Korea are brought to Seoul to participate in a government-sponsored summer camp where foreign-born Koreans have the opportunity to learn about the cultures of their parents’ native land.  The tropes are broad and prevalent, but there’s still a diverse cast of characters from the misfits, the jarhead, the adoptee, the tomboy, and the most mind-blowing to me, the Koreans from countries such as Mexico and Germany.

Now I know that quite a few of them exist in the world, but it really isn’t until you hear the accents and behaviors does it really sink in that Koreans did in fact immigrate to countries other than America, seeing Koreans ripping perfect German or Spanish with names like Sergio and Klaus.

Ultimately, it’s a film that obviously hits home pretty hard for me, given my circumstances as an American-born Korean.  I feel like if when I was a teenager, I probably would have rolled my eyes and loathed the opportunity to go to Korea to learn about my heritage, much like most of the characters of this film were like.  But as an adult, it’s all too easy for me to say that I wished that such a government-sanctioned and probably extremely affordable opportunity to go visit Korea still existed, for adults, like me, and that I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to be all over it. 

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Hakus in video games

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I was watching a YouTube video of a speed run of Super Nintendo’s Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts, often considered one of the most challenging games ever, and midway through the game, the player triggers aggro of a Red Arremer Devil, or what Capcom and Google insist was always named “Firebrand.”  The speed runner ran for it, with Red Devil continuing chase, but as soon as the player passed a stage checkpoint, they immediately turned around, and jumped to their death, committing a suicide.  They restarted the level past where the Red Devil was and resumed running the game, without having to fight the flying nuisance.

I understand that in speed runs, speed is all that matters, even if it means strategic suicides in order to save some time.  This is a common practice in Zelda runs or any action/RPGs that spawn fresh lives or load states in strategic locations.  But it always feels kind of cheap to me that suicide is necessary, because perhaps it’s just me, it’s just more impressive if one didn’t have to literally kill themselves in order to beat a clock.

Make no mistake, Red Arremer Devils are extremely pesky throughout the entire franchise, as they have very erratic and difficult to combat patterns, and can absorb a good deal of damage before actually going down.  Furthermore, they’re virtually impossible to ignore and outrun, because to my experience, they will follow you until they die, or more likely, you die.  But they are not impossible to kill, and with a little bit of luck, the ability to read patterns and most importantly, patience, they can be handled.

However, patience is the very antithesis of speed runs, and in the case of a Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts run, it makes a degree of sense to kill yourself once you pass a checkpoint, and resume playing without being hounded by a Red Devil.  The difference between this tactic and strategic suicide in like Zelda is that this speed runner does it to avoid having to engage a difficult opponent, whereas in games like Zelda, it’s done in order to avoid having to traverse an entire dungeon in reverse in order to leave.

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I feel bad for the B-Team

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If there’s ever one thing I’ve observed about the WWE throughout the decades, is that every now and then, you can tell when there’s a character or character(s) where it’s extraordinarily obvious that the Creative department has absolutely no ideas for.  However, the performers themselves are either competent in the ring and/or are personalities that are genuinely decent, therefore they are desired to be kept on television and therefore employed, as opposed to being completely taken off of TV in general and allowed to rot in obscurity.

More notable and recent examples of this would be early incarnations of The New Day, Damien Sandow and Rusev, whom were all given pretty lame duck seeds for characters, but were all pretty decent performers or supposed good locker room guys, hence the desire to keep them at all, even if their personas were lacking in effort.

The thing is, the wrestling smark culture is smarter than ever with the advent of the internet and the ability to know what’s going on the vast majority of the time, or at least be able to talk it out with other wrestling fans and come to conclusions that differed from the days when communication wasn’t quite so simple.  Subsequently, whenever the smarks have been able to identify when a wrestler or wrestlers were getting the shaft by Creative, these are precisely the wrestlers that they begin to get behind, in a defiant, contrarian manner to kind of play a chicken and egg game with the industry to put the test towards the claim that the fans make the stars and not the other way around where stars make fans.

That said, all three of my examples are cases where almost by sheer will and a relentless refusal to give up with seeds they’re sowing, got over with the fans, and to gargantuan amounts.  The New Day singlehandedly resurrected tag team wrestling in the WWE in an age where countless names in the industry have stated the company’s secondary opinion of it, and have become probably the most lucrative merchandising property in the company.  Damien Sandow became Damien Mizdow, the super-over stunt-double for The Miz, and probably spun more gold out of shit than anyone else before him, and Rusev took a dead-end partnership with Aiden English, and through forced-meme determination, gotten the Rusev Day gimmick over like crazy.

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Just when you think the NBA couldn’t get any dumber

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It was naïve of me to think that the Houston Rockets attempting a million three pointers when it was apparent that nobody had the NBA Jam fire code running was the dumbest thing to happen in the playoffs.  After all, the NBA Finals hadn’t yet occurred.  And much like tempting Murphy’s Law, something worse must occur.

Obviously, I didn’t watch the vast majority of Game 1 of the NBA Finals, but thankfully I watched the part that really mattered.  Where Cavaliers guard JR Smith corralled an offensive rebound on a missed free throw, with the score tied at 107 with five seconds left, but instead of calling for a timeout or attempting a game-winner, he dribbled it out to half court and let time expire – much to the abhorrent dismay of his teammates who clearly understood the situation better than he did.

Despite the fact that Smith alleges that he thought a timeout would be called or he was going to get fouled, the fact of the matter is that he clearly was not aware that the score was tied, and that he could have very well won the game, had he even bothered trying to get a shot up or passed it off to someone else who could.  Commentators quickly and often, pointed out claiming to have heard that immediately after the gaffe, Smith claimed to have “thought we were ahead,” which is mortifying that a guy would lose track of the score, in the NBA Finals.

This isn’t really a big deal if the Cavaliers won the game, but naturally they lost in overtime, magnifying the incident fifty times over, as the sole reason why they lost.  And this isn’t an instance where a player could politically correctly state that the team lost as a team, because LeBron James scored 51 points and JR Smith’s brain fart is what denied the Cavs a chance to even win in regulation.

Bottom line is, JR Smith is an idiot.  He’s a bonehead that somehow managed to lose track of the situation in the most critical part of the game in the most critical part of the season, in the NBA Finals.  Regardless of if he actually knew the situation and was hoping for a time out or to pass the ball off, or he did in fact forget, neither changes the fact that he’s an idiot.  His excuse that he was waiting for a timeout or that he was going to get fouled is weak, because as the ballholder, he himself could have called for a time out, several of tenths of a second faster than the coach could have, but he didn’t want to take accountability for that decision.  Or, despite the fact that when he snatched the offensive rebound, he had the ten-foot tall Kevin Durant up in the air and could very easily have gotten up a fairly uncontested shot at close range up and made a game winner, but again, no accountability assumed there either.  Neither of which are any better than simply having forgotten the score at the most juncture of the game.

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