Month: April 2024

#TRYHARDSZN2024: Dook sounds about appropriate

~ 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

~ 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

~ 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.

#TRYHARDSZN2024: Oh the humblebragging

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Salsa: 17-year old Southern California girl accepted into 15 universities, among them a free ride to Harvard

As the title to this post might indicate, this #TRYHARD doesn’t hesitate to throw a little bit of shade while simultaneously humblebragging about her achievement-worthy number of acceptances into many well-reputable schools.  However, unlike a lot of tryhards out there, this one actually acknowledges the fact that she had taken a few L’s in the sense that she had been waitlisted and rejected by some schools:

I didn’t think I was going to get into any of the top colleges because I had been waitlisted and rejected a couple days before and also day of,” Figueroa said. “So, I was like, there’s no way I could get into Harvard or anything like that.”

Naturally, quotes like this are brought to you by the fact that not only did she get accepted into Harvard, but she also managed to secure a free ride as well.  Considering her mind-bending 4.7 GPA and her extracurriculars, it shouldn’t be surprising that she got in, but getting a free ride is an impressive feat in itself. 

Sometimes I think Harvard dangles free rides to kids further away, with the hopes that they don’t take the bait, and they the school can still try to use it as a leverage play with donors, boosters and those who hold the purse strings to cry poor, that kids aren’t taking free rides anymore because they presumably not offering up enough incentive to get kids to pick fucking Harvard among other schools in the nation.

What I am a little curious about is what schools did turn her down, considering that aside from Harvard, some of the other schools she did get into were Brown and Columbia, two other Ivies, as well as Stanford, Duke and Berkeley and a whole bunch of Cali-based safety schools which obviously she won’t be going to.  It would be funny if it were schools like Georgia Tech or USC or Oregon State that rejected her.

But the obnoxious thing about this particular #TRYHARD is how insufferably wishy-washy she’s trying to sound, pretending like she’s deliberating where she’s going to pick, as if she were LeBron James or some highly-touted high school football recruit grandstanding some selection day show for where they want to go to school:

I didn’t think I was going to get into Harvard so my dream school was Columbia and I honestly think I’m preferring Harvard now, so I think I might go there instead,”

It’s like bitch please, not only did you get into Harvard, you got a free ride; we all know what the answer is going to be, especially if Columbia or Stanford isn’t giving you a free ride so just shut the fuck up and stop humblebragging, because it’s coming off as insufferable and obnoxious.

If there’s one thing that remains consistent between the different tiers of #TRYHARDS, it’s that being tryhards always equates into being entitled to being obnoxiously humblebraggy about their accomplishments, to the degree where it seems like that’s solely the reason why they applied to so many goddamn schools in the first place.

Can I get a do-over on my birthday?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

So far, I’m having a birthday that has been leaving a lot to desire, and I’m trying my best to stay positive because I don’t want to get down on my birthday no matter how much I try to tell myself to treat it like any other day, but it’s feeling like one of those days where I shouldn’t have gotten out of bed and I should’ve taken the day off from work.

Because it’s naïve of me to have thought that being a WFH day, things would be easier on the workfront and that being my birthday, I would be a little more resistant to bullshit flung in my general direction.

Honestly, it didn’t start off poorly, my kids wished me a happy birthday before they went off to school, and I got some early work accomplished.  I felt like a million bucks when I was able to go to the DMV and successfully renew two cars’ registrations in four minutes because people that typically go to the DMV are afraid of technology and the self-serve kiosk was completely available, easy to use, and I was in and out in a manner that made post a bunch of eggplant emojis to various friends/groups.

I had a good run on the treadmill, and I’ve already come to the conclusion that my home treadmill and the ones at work are two completely different species of treadmills, because a 6.3 speed at home is completely tolerable, but trying anything 6.0 or higher at the treadmills at the office, and I might as well be trying to race Usain Bolt.

And that was really the last positive thing to happen, because, and I blame myself for this one, I really shouldn’t have tried to accomplish selling something on Facebook Marketplace on my birthday, because the failure rate of a sale is astronomically high, but I’ve been desperate to unload this item for months now, and I got a general commitment from this one shithead.

Naturally, he ghosted, so at this point since I had it loaded into the car, I was determined to not return home with it because I just wanted it fucking gone, so I took it to a Goodwill drop, where they claimed it was basically a piece of furniture, and wouldn’t take it, so now I’m pissed, but at this point there’s nothing else I can do about it, so I go get some lunch, so I can try to redeem some free birthday shit.

Or so I thought, despite the fact that I had an offer for some free loaded fries, the restaurant is saying I can’t redeem it because they’re already half off for a FRYday promotion, and that I should save it.  I tell them that I’d rather pay $0 than 50%, and I don’t come here often to where I probably won’t be able to save it until it’s expired, and at this point I’m annoyed that they’re challenging me at all, that I just turn around and walk, and so I end up paying for my own lunch somewhere else nearby, very agitated.

So as I’m driving to my next free shit, I remember that there’s a pawn shop, and despite the racket those places typically are, at this point, I’d take $0-10 for this piece of shit in my car.  Surely, they’d take a piece of fitness equipment right??

Wrong.  Maybe if I had some jewelry, or a gun, or perhaps some spare Air Jordans laying around, I might be able to have done business, but who would’ve thunk that lowly pawn shops have become so insufferably curating, to where they wouldn’t take my crap, even for free?

Which brings me to now, where I’m at Starbucks, amazingly the one place that made it free and easy to get something, where I decided to bring my laptop to where I could check my work email, cruise for the remainder of the workday, and perhaps do some casual writing.

I get my free drink and sit down, and lo and behold, Outlook is blowing up with many emails about new tickets, and shocker of the century, all of the tickets have less than a week turnaround.  I stare at my screen with a  face, and ping my boss that I should’ve taken the day off, and instead of doing the mountain of work that materialized out of nowhere, I opened up Word and started vomiting this colossal failure of a brog post out, because so far, this has been a real forgettable birthday that it’s taking a tremendous amount of patience to not go scorched earth on.

I want to hope that my birthday will get better, but with the exception of myself, my entire household is sick and combating various illnesses, so it doesn’t seem likely that anything but taking it easy at home is going to be on the agenda for the remainder of the day, but honestly, compared to the afternoon that I’ve had so far, that doesn’t really sound bad.

It’s my birthday, where’s my free shit

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

If you’re one of my zero readers and have known me for while, you probably know that I don’t make much of a deal of my birthday at all.  The lower the expectations I have for them, the less I can be disappointed if they’re not met, so I typically try to treat them like any other day of the year, except people typically try to be a little bit nicer to me.

However, the one area in which I do have expectations are the litany of companies in which I have accounts with, or they at least have my email address in exchange for offers, news and occasional free shit; when my birthday rolls around, yeah, I am expecting some free shit, in the realm of some free and/or discounted food.  Even if everyone I know makes me feel inconsequential and invisible on my own birthday, I can still usually take solace in the fact that I can wander off and get a free meal or cobble together some free food from all the places where I’ve willingly volunteered some personal information with.

That is until this year, where it seems like everywhere where I’d hoped to have gotten any sort of offers from, have been circling the wagons and playing defense with free birthday shit.  This isn’t to say that nobody’s giving away anything, it’s just the shit that has been offered, if anything at all, have been way less impressive than in previous years, and at this point, it doesn’t appear that I’m going to be able to fill my stomach on free food, unless I want to go into a diabetic coma afterward.

A few years ago, my favorite burrito joint in the city used to straight up offer up a free burrito on my birthday, one that I always went out of my way to cash in, because fuck who am I to turn down a free Willy’s burrito?  A year ago, it was a 50% off burrito, which I still redeemed, because fuck who am I to turn down a discounted Willy’s burrito?  However, this year, at the 11th hour I might add, the email finally comes with this year’s offer, and it’s for but just a free side guacamole or side queso, and I’m like wtf.  Chips are inconsequential when it comes to my desired burrito meal, and this year there’s no burrito at all attached to the offer.  Pass

Other restaurants where I frequent enough to have apps on my phone, because I embarrassingly order from them frequent enough to warrant it, all I’m getting are offers for free desserts.  I mean, I have a ridiculously high status with Chick Fil-A, and they’ve yet to give me fucking anything at all, and I’m wondering if they’re going to spring something up on my actual birthday, as if I weren’t trying to plot out my day to maximize how much free shit I can redeem.

You know it’s bad when Starbucks is the only company to offer up something of decent value, which is the customary free drink, no strings except that it can only be redeemed on the actual birthday instead of the week, or the month of, as it used to be in the past.  Of course I’m going to redeem this one, seeing as how this year I have the luxury of my birthday falling on my work from home day, so there is even the remote possibility I might be able to chill at a Starbucks to enjoy my free drink while working remotely.

Otherwise, all the other companies in which I’d hoped there would’ve been free shit, all fucking fail.  I don’t ask for a lot in my life, and I don’t have a tremendous want for any material things.  All I really want on my birthday is some free food and not get aggravated too much, because anything else is mostly unreasonable and likely to not happen and disappoint me, and I don’t want to be disappointed on my birthday, no matter how much I try to tell myself to treat it like any other day.

F for all the companies that I generally pour my money into that won’t give me anything substantial on my birthday.  You’re all disappointments with your stinginess.

How to fix the wage gap

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Among one of my group chats, the topic of wage inequality came up again, starting with the embarrassingly low salaries of WNBA players.  Basically despite being the female equivalent of Steph Curry, the #1 draft pick of the WNBA draft, Caitlin Clark, she who led Iowa into prominence and caught the imagination of hoops fans across the country, will basically be making a paltry $75,000, or something close to that, in her first season in the WNBA. 

It’s not often that I can say it, but I make more money than the WNBA salary, and I am not a professional athlete.

To put it in perspective, I’ve been doing a lot of daily research on history, in an attempt to simply enlighten myself with useless knowledge, but one of the things that I like to do is when I come across financial figures from various points in time, I like to punch in the numbers to compare to how the dollar amounts translate with today’s inflation.

Like for example, Alaska was purchased for $7.2 million dollars in 1867, and $7.2 million in today’s dollars would be like $155M or somewhere close.  And then off the top of my head, I could rattle off several baseball players who are on contracts for double that amount or more, putting into further perspective just how overpaid professional athletes not in the WNBA are.

Ford lit the world on fire in the 1914 when they instituted a $5 daily wage; I’m not sure how accurate internet inflation calendars really are, but basically that breaks down to a $19 an hour minimum wage, yet somehow across the country, less than half of that is still considered the federal minimum.

For about a minute, we pondered on what the world would be like if even the most menial jobs making minimum wage, were still paying $19-21 an hour.  People would be grossing $3K+ a month if they could notch full-time hours, and that’s definitely closer to being able to survive in the world than where we are now.

Then came the rhetorical pondering of how fucked up it is that there’s such an inequity in wages in the world; leading me to snarkily blurt out that with wages like these, American employers might as well reinstitute indentured servitude, because if you’re going to treat people like slaves, might as well give them a roof over their heads and three square meals a day for the exploitation.

And then it dawned on me that if rich white people were forced to shelter and feed and give rudimentary human consideration to people, they would ultimately favor paying them more to keep the poors away from them, and right here, we’ve just fixed the wage gap.

I would absolutely want to tune in and watch, some politician in a suit, march into Congress or the Senate or the House or whichever place in Washington DC where white people argue over the state of the country, and with a completely straight face, propose reinstituting indentured servitude.  Obviously, don’t tell them why it’s being suggested, but I would wager that the intended result would undoubtedly happen, because as much as rich white people love turning the screws to poor people, the hate being around poor people.

If they were put into a position to where they not only had to be near them, but actually had to cohabitate with them, then there’s no telling just how fast they would agree to up wages across the board just to prevent such a ludicrous idea from even come remotely close to becoming reality.

And just like that, I’ve figured out how to close the wage gap up, real fast.  As the ancient Egyptians once paraphrased, slavery – it gets shit done.  But in this case, it’s indentured servitude, but it really is close enough to where the point remains.