Doesn’t pay to be white during #TRYHARDSZN2024

April 28, 2024 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Roux: Utah senior has perfect ACT scores, can’t get into MIT or even Brigham Young

Not going to lie, sure it sucks for this teenager whose dreams appeared to be crushed that his 1A and 1B schools have both turned him down, but I found myself laughing a lot while reading this because of the seemingly very obvious answers to his rhetorical questions of whhhhyyyyy?

But why was Trenton Caldwell rejected by both MIT and BYU? But because both schools didn’t say, he may never know.“It’s pretty frustrating because I really feel like if I knew what it was, I would be able to fix it lickety-split, but it’s just impossible really because I have no idea,” said Trenton.

I mean come on. I don’t even need to Google the name “Trenton Caldwell” to know this guy is whiter than a Paul Ryan intern. A name like that, living in Utah, having Brigham Young as one of your top college picks?

This is an amusing example of the effects of a gradually awakening culture, where the pendulum may have swung back in the opposite direction a little on the hard side, and it’s kind of disadvantageous to be white and applying for colleges these days.

In one side of the room, you’ve got black and Hispanic kids applying for 120 colleges presumably for free, getting into 63 of them, and then boasting on the news about how blessed they are, and on the other side of the room, you’ve got Ben Affleck and Ben Affleck putting their eggs into the 1-2 schools they really really really really hope they can get into as well as a safety school or two, and getting turned down without explanation which is one in itself if they took the time to look in the mirror and thought about what their elders did, it almost seems about as fucked up as racial exploitation.

But buddy, nobody owes you any explanation, and let this be a good lesson as well as a sample of what awaits in the adult world. You can be the most qualified applicant for the job of your dreams, have the paperwork, proof, references and be ready to explain why you’re a perfect fit, but if the HR recruiter got cut off in traffic on the way to the office, or their pour over was short 0.027 ounces, and they’re in a pissy mood, they will delete your application without an explanation on every single day that ends in the letter Y.

Really though, it must suck for Ben Affleck over here. The day he opened up his test results and found out that he notched a perfect score on his ACT, he probably thought that the world was his for the taking. MIT would undoubtedly be impressed with his perfect score and undoubtedly accept him. Boston, here I come.

But no, MIT sends him a form letter of rejection, wishing him well on his future endeavors and sorry it didn’t work out for us. And then to rub salt into the wounds, BYU turns him down too, and neither give anything more than a form response to why he didn’t get in.

All this being said, by the time the dust settles from #TRYHARDSZN2024, Ben Affleck will probably already be on reddit, truth social, or whatever alt-right internet groups bemoaning how much it sucks to be white now, and being earmarked as a promising recruit for whatever future Charlottesville incidents will occur probably not too far from now.

#TRYHARDSZN2024: Cornell or.. China?

April 27, 2024 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Source: California teenager accepted into over 30 colleges; among them Cornell and Duke…Kunshan in China

I have to assume that after like the first 10 or so college applications, most of them are going to be for layup schools for a lot of these #TRYHARDs. Of course they go after the Ivy Leagues, the Stanfords, MITs, Hopkins’ and a surprising favoritism to Georgia Tech, but the reality is that I’m guessing most high school upper classmen can probably only name like 5-6 off the tops of their heads that they actually imagined going to themselves.

So when they apply to well into the 50s and 60, at that point, they just applying to everything under the sun and copying and pasting their essays and utilizing auto-fill in their broswers when filling out college applications for the SUNY-B-tier, UNC-G-tier and Cal-D-tier schools, and doing it for the attention they can get by amassing a large number of college acceptances.

But for this California teenager, the fact that Cornell is the first school mentioned, means that Cornell is the top school that she was accepted into, which means that she probably has at least applied to several of the other Ivy Leagues, as well as many other top-tier institutions in the country.

The fact that the article doesn’t talk about aggregate scholarship dollars earned means that she clearly swung for the fences and got a lot of impressive yeses, and it turns out that she comes from a family of tryhards:

According to Tye, Madison had the academic inspiration she needed to pursue scholar status from her brother Chandler Brown, a Harvard graduate now pursuing his doctoral degree at Stanford University. Tye, Madison’s mother Yvonne Brown, and sister Brittany Brown also have higher education degrees from acclaimed four-year universities.

Her resume is pretty impressive, and it’s commendable that she’s coming out of the ashes out of some rural rando desert town in the San Bernadino valley area, and it’s clear that #TRYHARD as she may be, she’s definitely in the upper class that actually is trying to shoot for the moon and isn’t just doing it for attention and to phish out a free ride somewhere.

But the funny thing for me is the fact that her short list is Cornell and Duke Kunshan out in China. It’s not often, and in fact, it’s not something I’ve ever heard before of anyone in America ever aspiring to go to a university outside of America. Much less to a place like China where the language barrier will be debilitating, not to mention China is super racist when it comes to black people.

The above photograph is from 2016; not 1976 or 1916, but literally within the last decade. That’s from an in-flight magazine on Air China, for all passengers to read optionally, the advice they give about steering clear from Indians, Pakistanis and black people.

I’m not even black and could realistically hide in plain sight if I were to go to Shanghai, but nowhere in China is high on my list of places I want to go visit, much less gain an education from.

I know the temptation is high, to try and break the mold of molds, by being a black American to march into China and flip the narrative, but my god would that be walking into a lion’s den of putting your life into hell.

Girl, you got an acceptance into Cornell; you know a quarter of the population of Suzhou, China probably applied to get into Cornell since it’s an Ivy, don’t be the hipster who just has to try something different. Save it for after you get your degree and have the flexibility to peace out of China at a moment’s notice when you go and realize that the place just isn’t as friendly to you as you might have thought it would’ve been.

Does a Popeyes title make Chris Jericho the Nueve?

April 26, 2024April 27, 2024 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Despite the appealing card on paper, I didn’t watch AEW Dynasty. Frankly, I don’t know how I’d watch it, or any true pay-per-view event anymore. I don’t have cable, so it’s not like I can call an automated system and pay over the phone. I typically refuse to download anymore apps, especially to watch a singular event, and frankly, the WWE has conditioned me over the last few years of just how convenient it is to have a singular service where I can get these events included, and it’s about as easy as it is to tune into something on Netflix or Disney+.

All the same, I was intrigued by the card, to where I took the effort to seek out results, on the same night in which it happened. Most everything happened close to how I’d have predicted it, showing that my decades of watching professional wrestling has gotten to where I barely need to watch the product to know what’s going to happen anyway. Okada over PAC, the Bucks over FTR, Ospreay over Danielson, and I figured Swerve was finally going to dethrone Samoa Joe, because you just can’t keep feeding a champion the same guy three times in a row and expect the result to just continue to be the same.

But amidst the results was one thing that caught my eye: Chris Jericho defeats Hook to become the new FTW champion.

So the question I have is, does Chris Jericho winning a Popeyes title (unsanctioned) count towards his world title count? After all, it does say “World Champion” on it and frankly, even in the ocean of championships that AEW has floating in its pool, between Hook, Jack Perry and Brian Cage, the holder of this Mickey Mouse blet has done some good work.

That being said, that would make Chris Jericho no longer the Ocho, but the Nueve; I doubt such will happen, but it is still funny to hypothesize the silly wrestling logic.

But even funnier will be the fact that despite it not being a sanctioned championship that “counts” in the AEW canon, I think it’s a safe bet that Chris Jericho is still going to elevate it to the point where it’s going to get some substantial television time and attention over a number of the men’s championships the promotion has in circulation:

Because that’s what Chris Jericho does, he elevates things, regardless of how much the fickle AEW fanbase seems to have turned on him, and are giving him the old Big Show treatment of pretending like they want him to hang up his boots. These are the same fans who will be bowing in the crowd and chanting positive things like “you’re the great-est” when he actually does hang it up, but a guy like Jericho also doesn’t care, because he understands the most important thing about working is the ability to get a reaction at all, and he’s a man who has thrived under fan hate in the past, and will undoubtedly do it again and again until he’s done.

It seems obvious that he’s basically repeating the same program he did with Cesaro Claudio Castagnoli, where he won the Ring of Honor World Championship, ducked him repeatedly and made him work to get back in contention, and then dropped the title back to Claudio, but with the title in a better place in which it started.

Chris Jericho hasn’t hidden the fact his desire to work with, and elevate young talent, and there’s no question that he’s going to accomplish such with Hook. And by the time Jericho drops the title back to Hook in 5-6 months, the Popeyes title will probably be worth more than over half of the above listed championships, because that’s just the kind of thing AEW would let happen, having a meaningless blet become more meaningful than their own prizes.

#TRYHARDSZN2024: Student Loans vs. Walmart U?

April 26, 2024April 27, 2024 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

😊: Bentonville teenager accepted into numerous prestigious schools, among them multiple Ivy League schools and . . . Georgia Tech

Shoutout to this kid who decided to flash his Georgia Tech acceptance letter in the same photograph with Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, Penn, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Berkeley and Stanford. He must really think highly of their robotics program, or perhaps he’s a thrill-seeker wanting to go to a school where students are allowed to concealed carry.

Aside from the obvious clowning about Georgia Tech, this kid really is among the higher-tier TRYHARDs of the SZN, having notched five of the eight Ivies, and it seems pretty clear that Brown and Dartmouth are the Ivies that people either forget and/or don’t care about, because of all these TRYHARD stories that I’ve been trying to track this SZN, those are often the two that are omitted with these kids. Or maybe Harvard is trying to outreach and not be so staunch, while Brown, Dartmouth and seemingly Yale want to keep their velvet ropes up intact and do as much curating as possible.

Either way, what drew my attention was the fact that this particular TRYHARD being from Bentonville, Arkansas, to which I would guess most people might be aware, is known for being the home and headquarters to one of the biggest capitalistic cancers in history, Walmart.

Which begs the question of what if this bright young man were to forego the pursuit of college, and be one of those guys that just got his foot in the door young to a literal Fortune #1-caliber company like Walmart and just began applying himself into the corporate grind.

As unsexy as it might seem, there are countless stories of people who enter large corporations at the ground level, and through almost no other means than longevity, eventually begin climbing up the corporate ladder, and by the time their peers have graduated college with avalanches of student debts, they’re sitting in management with a very high ceiling still left to achieve, and ultimately end up being the stiffs in suits that make six figures and live in Microsoft Office all day long, when they’re not delegating.

I’m curious if a kid as bright as this TRYHARD were to just forget school, and put his brain into the Walmart machine instead, if he would ultimately have a more lucrative career in the long run, instead of becoming a cog in any Ivy League school or Georgia Tech, and falling into student debt, bad habits and academic rat racing. I don’t know what this kid’s specialty is, but perhaps being as bright as he is, he doesn’t have to slave away at the store level first, and can get into corporate early, and work on technology, POS or other technological ways to part their shoppers from their money.

But then again, this kid is either Indian or Pakistani, and living in a hicktown like Bentonville, Arkansas, I get why he probably wants to get the fuck out. Forget everything I said about considering Walmart U over Harvard or Stanford. Good for you kid, for being smart enough to light the path out of Arkansas; hopefully you’re smart enough to not pick Georgia Tech over those fancy Ivy League schools.

#TRYHARDSZN2024: Dook sounds about appropriate

April 25, 2024April 27, 2024 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Souse: South Fulton teenager accepted into allegedly over 50 schools; claims to have already selected Duke University

Dear god, of all the #TRYHARDs on the planet, here we have actually managed to circle back and find ourselves at the same school as one of the already chronicled tryhards. Coming out of the same school that earlier this SZN boasted two fellas who humblebragged about gaining 63 and 50 college acceptances, we have yet another TRYHARD who has allegedly been accepted into over 50 colleges herself.

And because the lion’s share of the colleges aren’t worth writing home about, it’s pointed out that the cumulative amount of scholarship dollars that she’s amassed has exceeded $1.3M dollars despite it not working the way people might think it does.

But imagine being the students on the senior wall next to this girl’s, or the two other TRYHARDs who have 63 and 50 schools under their heads, and they’ve only got their three acceptances, and not to any particularly noteworthy schools either. I can’t imagine it’s a particularly great system they’re running at the school, where such obvious visual measuring sticks are literally pasted onto the walls among their peers. This is about as close to Japanese score-posting as we’re going to get in ‘Murica.

One thing that is interesting about this particular TRYHARD’s journey is that she claims to have spent a tremendous amount of time; three hours a night over several months, applying to all these schools. Considering the circumstances, and the desire for lots of schools to be able to check off their Affirmative Action participation, I was under the impression that if one was a poor minority from a title-1 school, all they really had to do was fill out forms as basic as signing one’s life away to an online credit card application to apply for schools, which is how so many of these kids manage to churn out 50+ applications.

However, among those 50+ college acceptances, our TRYHARD in question does appear to be shooting for the moon a little bit, and isn’t just settling for an HBCU offering up a free and clear ride; she has proclaimed her intention to go to Duke, which as much of a school I loathe for their athletics, is still an academically reputable institution, and if for anything at all, getting that piece of paper and gaining access to the alumni network is worth its weight in gold in the long run.

But Duke seems pretty appropriate for this TRYHARD, because like a lot of the tryhards before her, she’s got that air of insufferable humblebraggart already down, and that’s precisely the type of people whom Duke would be a great fit for.

The jury’s still out on whether or not she’s getting a free ride or not, I have to guess that it’s probably not entirely free, but it’s also probably not just an acceptance and go fuck yourself, get your own student loans and fall into our trap kind of situation; after all her goal was to not pay for college, but it’s hard to imagine a money printer like Duke actually be willing to give anyone not in athletics a free ride.

Regardless, I hope this girl knows what she’s in for, going to Duke. As intelligent as she might think she is, Duke is still a notoriously racist and classist environment, and if word gets out that she’s the black girl from the sketchy part of Atlanta, lord only knows what the fuck is going to become of her student life among the snobs and privileged among the Dook Elite.

Well you know what they say, which is something that literally only one friend of mine likes to say, if you TRY HARD, you die hard.

#TRYHARDSZN2024: Oh he’s got jokes

April 24, 2024April 27, 2024 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

酱: Massachusetts teenager accepted into numerous colleges, including several Ivy League schools; including Harvard

You can always tell the difference between a #TRYHARD that got into a whole bunch of really good schools and the ones who got into a whole bunch of schools, regardless of quality, because the articles about them won’t bother to talk about an aggregate of scholarship dollars, and just start dropping names of the prestigious schools that the tryhard got into.

In the case of this particular #TRYHARD, he definitely falls into the former, where the boy shot for the moon and got quite a few hits out of it. Out of his alleged 20-21 college applications he fired out, among the schools that he will not be selecting to attend are Cornell, Brown and Stanford; because he was accepted into Harvard.

It doesn’t sound like Harvard themselves is giving him a free ride, but apparently this #TRYHARD tryharded enough to have been awarded something called a Gates scholarship which completely covers the cost of any four-year college. The fact that he’s cashing it in on Harvard makes me think of those assholes at Starbucks who wait all year for their free, no-strings attached Starbucks birthday drink, and compete with all the other assholes to see who can get the most ludicrously expensive drink concoction they can get, and they end up walking away with a cup of caffeinated liquid sugar that should’ve been like $72.

Regardless, the #TRYHARD seemed ready for his news story with a joke, that was the perfect mixture of passive-aggressive humblebragging and Chinese dryness in the arena of humor:

I was like, yes, I got into a local school,” Ly said. “My Mom was like, yay, my son got into Harvard and so she was super happy.”

With the best part being his mom’s response and the boy having to explain that she was in fact, “super happy.”

And because a lot of these #TRYHARDs have to sound as insufferably passively arrogant as possible, he had this to say about Stanford:

I was kind of praying they didn’t take me — because then I didn’t want to make the decision,” he said.

Because somewhere in that psyche of his, is probably the oppressed wanderlust that exists from an academic Chinese kid most likely sheltered by his parents under the necessity to excel at whatever it takes to get into Harvard or Yale, and the idea of getting into a prestigious school out west, and getting as far as humanly possible from his family probably was an appealing fantasy for him.

But in the end, the dutiful aZn son wins out, and when it comes to Asian parents, it doesn’t matter if Harvard or Yale are even the best schools in America, their namesake alone is all they need to be able to actually be proud of this #TRYHARD child, so they can endlessly brag to their Chinese peers about how their kid is Harvard bound and that theirs are probably not.

Let’s talk about the WWE’s new tag blets

April 21, 2024April 27, 2024 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

In one of those I should’ve seen it coming but I didn’t, the WWE has recently redesigned and unveiled new tag team championship blet designs. Over the last few years, almost all the blets have been systematically been redesigned from top to bottom, except for the tag blets, which were still red for RAW and blue for Smackdown.

Blets being in the middle of a reign didn’t seem to matter for when to unveil new designs, as Roman Reigns, Asuka and Rhea Ripley all received the new versions of the blets that they had held, but for whatever reasons, the Usos having the combined tag team championships on lockdown didn’t warrant swapping of those designs, but seeing as they were broken up and sent off to different shows seemed as good as time as any for the E to finally unveil new titles.

When the new World Tag Team Championships were unveiled on RAW, one I was happy for the Miz and R-Truth, two WWE lifers who are the consummate pros who do anything and everything they are asked for, do it well, and always manage to get absolutely anything over. But two, my knee-jerk reaction to these blets were that I was relieved to see that they were finally gold blets again, seeing as how fewer things made the tag titles feel lesser-tier over the last 10+ years than the fact that they were bronze and then silver plates.

The shade of gold, amount of flourish and the weird griffin chimaera creatures made me think that this perhaps could’ve been a previous version or option of the World Heavyweight championship blet that ultimately ended up looking like a spin-off of the old WCW big gold blet in terms of its general shape and composition.

But overall, I do really like the new World Tag Team blets, except for one thing – the font they used on it. Not digging the spiky, Glaive-like typeface they used, and it looks like they’re trying to be a 2005 RAW graphic package with it. Furthermore, the type is just too fucking large, and much like my general aesthetic preference when it comes to clothing, I think when apparel requires too much text to explain it, then it’s design that is not optimal.

If the fonts were smaller, I could overlook the undesirable typeface selection, but overall, I’m pleased with the way the new World tag blets look. Not sure if I’d want to own one, but typically a really good discount has gotten me possession of other blets I’ve felt similarly about.

Obviously, once RAW had unveiled new tag blets, among the first thoughts I had was pondering what Smackdown was going to do, because it was obvious that they were going to get a redesign as well. But the question was, was it going to be carbon copies of the RAW titles, but with blue paint behind the globe and type? Or was it going to be something completely independent?

Fortunately, the answer was just days away, when Smackdown unveiled the WWE Tag Team championships, with blets that looked completely different from their RAW counterparts. Immediately, my eyes noticed the familiar shape of the center plate, which was an obvious throwback to older tag team blet designs, that had what I like to jokingly call the nutsack shape, because for whatever reason, the bottom has two bulges like a pair of testicles.

Regardless of the homoerotic comparison, my knee-jerk reaction was still positive. I liked that it was a completely different design, and this will prevent any future embarrassing title swaps in future draft storylines. It’s general design is much more muted and subdued than the World tag blets with its design being more etched and not molded. In doing so, it does look like a cheaper blet in comparison, but as far as design goes, it’s a preferable design over its counterpart.

The font treatment is much more subdued and exactly how I prefer it, and the throwback shape of it is pretty much all that it needs to have to be the preferable of blets between the two.

What it all boils down to is if I had to pick one, which would I go with, and that would be the Smackdown WWE Tag Team blets. The homage to the classic design is fantastic, and even though the World is the more detailed and nicer looking blet, the font is a turn-off for me

Either way, I’m glad to see that the E has redesigned both, because in the future when the tag blets are used as a prop or a means to reward two mildly over singles guys, at least they’ll look good holding some actual gold straps instead of silver-plated toy-looking blets.