Tag: game of thrones

#TRYHARDSZN2024: All hail the queen

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t think anyone’s beating this: Hinesville, Georgia high school senior accepted into approximately 231 schools, amassing approximately $14,790,695 in cumulative scholarship offers

Welp, I think we’ve found our alpha #TRYHARD for the 2024 season, at least for the category of kids who apply to every single college under the fucking sun, because I can’t imagine that there’s anyone out there that’s going to surpass 231 acceptances at this stage of the season where most selections have to be made, like last week.

What’s amusing to me from this article is the approximation as far as the number of acceptances and the cumulative scholarship dollars are concerned.  Usually I feel like lots of these #TRYHARD stories just kind of round to a nice round number, usually 50+ unless it’s really high, to which approximation comes into play, and I suppose when you’ve got 231 fucking college acceptances, you really want to shout that from the rooftops.

I mean earlier in the year we had like 60+ and 80+, but this girl right here is the true queen, who clearly has been applying to colleges since 2022, because I remember how long a single college application takes, but to repeat the entire exercise over 231 times because I don’t believe that it’s possible for her to have batted a perfect 1.000 here, she clearly has been copy and pasting her credentials, or she’s getting some sort of advantageous means to apply to all these schools on a fast track. 

Either way, it does seem kind of fucked up, and really makes me wonder what the quality of life this girl has been living over the last few years, or wondering where she’s had time to apply to all these schools on top of the supposed extracurriculars, volunteer work and workload commitments she must’ve had.

Imagine if she had to pay for all these applications because I don’t imagine she had to pay a cent if she’s applying to over 231 schools.  Google says the average is around $75-90 which is bullshit because I remember it being way higher when I was applying to schools, but even still, multiplying that to just 231 is still $17,325 on the low end, not including the schools applied to that she didn’t get into, let’s round up, and since all these #TRYHARDs love to spout numbers, let’s estimate that she should’ve been billed about $20,000 just to apply to all these schools but more than likely didn’t have to pay.

But in true #TRYHARD fashion, as mind-blowing as 231 acceptances is, the lack of clarity on any notable acceptances, the rush to boast numbers and aggregate scholarship dollars, still indicates that the quality of the #TRYHARDING is on the low-end, especially considering her end result is selecting High Point University, in North Carolina.

I know where High Point is, since it’s in that space between Charlotte and Greensboro, and I know if it as a place that signifies that the boring-ass stretch of nothing in between the two is coming to an end when going northbound.  I also work a lot with a studio out there that did photography for my old company, and knew some nice folks there, but still by and large, High Point is a place where most people don’t really know where it is and probably have to Google it in order to find out where it is, and the fact that out of 231 schools, High Point University is the one that wins out means that the pool probably wasn’t populated by any heavy-hitters.

I mean, a free ride is a free ride, but High Point’s average tuition is allegedly $42K a year for an out-of-state student, and if she’s getting a free ride, we’re looking at like $170K give or take.  That being said, considering she amassed just under $15M in scholarships, I can’t help but be curious to know what kind of underwhelming offers there were from the 230 other schools that don’t have the dubious distinction of being selected by the 2024 queen of #TRYHARDs.

Whatever though, good on this #TRYHARD for getting a free ride.  I’m sure her parents are proud and relieved to know they won’t have to pay for schooling, and that they’ve got a child that will finagle an expensive piece of paper for free, and has demonstrated the ability to do a repetitive, monotonous task over and over again, like applying to mediocre colleges.  Can’t imagine the much more sky being the limit for these underwhelming expectations, but then again I also never finished college either, so I guess I should take my own advice and bow down to the queen (of #TRYHARDs).

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.

Dad Brog (#130): Parenthood did this

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I haven’t really felt much like writing over the last week or two.  It’s like no matter how much I try to streamline my days and look for ways to open up a little bit more time in the evenings to where I can have some quiet, wind-down time to myself, the more it seems like the windows of freedom get smaller and smaller.

Whether it’s daily chores and the resetting of the house for the kids to wreck it the following day, food prep for the kids, side projects that have long since gotten to the point where it almost feels like a chore but I still have to follow it through to the end, or when I feel like I need to do some exercise, what used to be 4-5 hours a night of downtime feels more like three hours, sometimes two, where I feel like I can actually goof off and do something, not necessarily productive.

And then I get choice paralysis and/or trapped into doom scrolling on my phone, where I fall into a reel pit of Game of Thrones clips where I muse about how good the television show really was in spite of the dodgy ending.  Now I have like an hour to myself, and an hour doesn’t feel like an adequate time to get my head into the act of writing, so I end up watching Ted Lasso clips on YouTube or continuing to fall into the pit of old GoT clips among other useless things.

Or, I watch an episode of Yellowstone, which is actually something that’s been on my list of things to watch.  I’m on season three currently, and I’m relieved that save for the pilot episode, the episodes are a fairly manageable 45~minute range.  It’s not necessarily the banger of a series that I thought it might be, but at the same time it’s still slowly intriguing.  I have yet to watch Succession, which is another show on my list, but given what I know about that show, I feel like Yellowstone is basically a cowboy version of it.

Not giving anything away, but some of the moments of the show that I’ve found myself enjoying every time, is whenever Kevin Costner’s John Dutton character, is interacting with his grandson, Tate.  At least so far, the boy is as innocent to the world as they come, and in spite of being the cunning mastermind of just about everything that goes on in Yellowstone, Montana, John Dutton turns into a tender, caring and seemingly awesome grandfather to Tate, and as a parent to young children, it’s scenes like these that pique my interest every time they present themselves.

But it’s not just Yellowstone solely, I’ve come to the realization that when it comes to watching shows or movies, what tends to elicit the most uncomfortable reaction out of me is whenever there’s anything pertaining to violence, trauma or just a negative situation against young kids.  Like if a kid is in danger, I find my anxiety beginning to spike, and these are the instances where I feel like I might squirm or squeeze an arm rest. 

It bleeds my heart when children characters have to deal with non-physical trauma like learning of a death in the family, abandonment, or divorcing parents.  Just about anything that results in a child becoming sad, breaking out in tears or wailing out hits a place in me that obviously didn’t exist prior to having children myself.

I’m not saying that I was ever immune to empathy for children prior to having my own, but now that I do, it’s amplified and it’s almost like I’m going to start needing trigger warnings on things that feature children having to deal with trauma of any sort.  Having my Dada-radar tripped and bringing me close to tears watching innocuous television is something I didn’t know was going to happen when I had children.

TIL  that the Hound was also Lurch

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know why, but for whatever reason, I’m getting a tremendous amount of Game of Thrones clips being fed to me on social feeds.  Perhaps it’s because of the announcement of House of the Dragon’s second season is coming in the summer, I don’t know.  I definitely fall into the category of fans that were largely unimpressed with how the television series came to an end, but seeing a cavalcade of GoT clips from seasons before the ending, did remind of just how brilliant the show was prior to its conclusion.

It almost makes me want to marathon the entire series all over again, but after watching eleven seasons of Shameless in short order, I’m definitely not wanting to commit a ton of television time on something that I’ve already watched before, especially since my queue of things to watch is already about three year’s worth of content long, so I’ve been fairly content to just scroll and imbibe on short clips for the time being.

I would say that throughout the show, I tended to favor a lot of the side characters over the core cast.  I’m basically pegged as House Stark until I die, but really, my interest and enjoyment of the show always revolved around the happenings of characters that weren’t necessarily from one of the great houses, like Bronn, Brienne, and Sandor Clegane.

And speaking of the latter, one of my many favorite scenes from the show would be the part where Sandor and Arya go into a tavern, and come across several shithead Kingsguard soldiers, and the Hound basically goes on a diatribe about eating chickens and it culminates with him, and Arya killing all of the soldiers, with Arya getting her sword, Needle back from the one that captured her and murdered one of her friends.

But it was in this clip that I did notice a comment from another viewer that posted a screen grab of Lurch from Hot Fuzz, and making some remark that made the connection that the Hound was Lurch.  No fucking way was my knee-jerk reaction, but it’s also something that I never thought about before, and staring at the picture of the dim-witted heater of the Sandford Neighborhood Watch, I begin to really see that there’s a possibility.

Of course, next game Googling Rory McCann’s film and television history, and sure as shit, confirmation that Game of Throne’s Sandor Clegane was definitely the same guy who played Lurch from Hot Fuzz.

Color me amused; the same guy who was Lurch, just so happened to be one of the sneakiest, underrated and complexly most developed character in the entire Game of Thrones television series

Yarp indeed.

What is leadership?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Overvalued.

Now I could be real nihilistic and period full-stop this post with just that and call it a day, but then it would sound like something traumatic had occurred, and I wanted to be vaguebooking about it or something, which is not accurate at all. 

This post stems from a conversation had over dinner a night ago where it was determined that I lacked ambition, because I don’t really want to strive for any leadership positions in my career. The thing is, I’ve been in positions of leadership already, and although I did take a lot of satisfaction in being the best leader I could and the relationships I cultivated with my reports, it really still amounted to a tremendous addition of stress that I feel is wholly unnecessary at this juncture of my life, and I would much rather just be given objectives and the space and means to do my job to the best of my ability and be for the most part, left the fuck alone.

The problem is that I feel that the working world we live in places a tremendously inflated sense of worth in leadership, and not nearly as much in the ability to get shit done, as in the people with the ability to actually move a company’s objectives forward.  I’ve made no secret that throughout my career, the most difficult people to work for are the people that I know can’t do my job in a moment of need, and I find it tremendously difficult to respect and accept any sort of judgment of my talent from those who have zero idea of what I do.

If I could rephrase my original statement, it’s not that all leadership is overvalued, but there’s just so much piss poor bad leadership exists out there that it just makes me feel like all of it is overvalued, overrated and feeds the narrative to how the working world is just so broken and misguided.

At my previous employer, I was promoted into a position of leadership, which I willingly went into, because I felt that I had reached a ceiling with my entry-level designer role, and I felt ready to move up and try to climb the ladder within the company.  But the thing is that even though I was in a position of leadership, it was always, always important to me that I still know how to do the jobs of my former peers now reports, because there was no way I could be any sort of leader unless I knew the job at the same granular level from those who have to do it.  But because I was promoted from within and I wasn’t brought in to abruptly lead people whom I didn’t know, I felt that I was very successful at being a leader on my team, because everyone knew me, knew my background, and knew that I was good enough to be a decision-maker.  It’s just that I had a massive cunt of a boss above me that actively made my life a living hell to where I had no choice but to cut and run, regardless of how much my team brought satisfaction to me professionally.

So that’s where I’m really going with this, is that it’s not that I lack ambition and don’t want to be a leader, it’s that my whole idea of leadership is that it’s something that grows organically and leadership rises and takes shape, and it’s definitely not something that can just be plugged into a team or a company, by someone who has fluffed up their resumes and qualifications in order to get the job.  That type of leadership is the leadership that I don’t want to strive for, even if it makes it look like I’m not ambitious.

I’d like to work a job where I’m paid well for the work that I do, and I want to get so good at it, that I organically rise to a position of leadership, to where I can lead in the best way that I think I can, which is typically by example, and typically in a servant leader capacity, and not some game-playing schmuck who only knows how to delegate and live in Excel and Outlook all fucking day and have no actual talent.

Unfortunately, like so much world, that’s just now how things operate these days, and short of me winning the lottery, it doesn’t seem likely that I’ll be a part of a working world that jives more with my ideals and ideas that work ethic and talent competency is what’s needed, instead of the ability to “play the game” and “it’s who you know” and other flaky bullshit that shapes the job market today.

I’m surprised it survived this long, honestly

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

TIL: The Greenbriar Mall Chick fil-A was the first-ever Chick fil-A opened, in 1967.  But it’s closing for good now

I did know that a large part of the original expansion for Chick fil-A’s strategy was to get themselves into mall food courts, like they did at Greenbriar Mall.  I remember the first time I ever encountered a Chick fil-A, it was at Landmark Mall in Alexandria, Virginia and like most kids embarking on a journey towards childhood obesity, the main standout was the fact that they had waffle fries.

But it’s interesting to learn that the very first Chick fil-A that was opened was in Greenbriar Mall, and it’s even more fascinating to know how it has managed to survived throughout the passage of time, because the passage of time hasn’t been particularly kind to Greenbriar Mall.

Since I’ve lived in Georgia, Greenbriar Mall hasn’t exactly been known for the best of things, and off the top of my head the greatest (read: not greatest) hits are:

  • Former home to the only Magic Johnson theater on the east coast which ultimately succumbed to the increase of crime and shenanigans and closed down
  • One of the hottest areas on crime heat maps in the entire Metro Atlanta area
  • Where a massive flock of sneakerheads gathered in the middle of the pandemic for the release of the latest Air Jordans, garnering global ridicule

Needless to say, I didn’t even know that a Chick Fil-A was in the mall and yes I have been there before, because it was pretty much where the last Circuit City in the area was, and I have gone a few times in the past to get computer shit.  But it’s safe to say that Greenbriar Mall was basically the inspiration for Chris Rock’s entire routine about black malls, and even Donald Glover’s Atlanta show acknowledged it as much.

But considering the company as a whole is extremely guarded and calculated with their locations, I’m amazed to have learned that they stuck it out for over 50 years in that location.  I’m assuming that history had something to do with their staunch tenacity at staying put, plus the fact that since the company is based in nearby Hapeville/College Park, there’s something about keeping the OGs intact as long as possible. 

However, there’s no denying the unsatisfactory area that Greenbriar Mall and surrounding area have become throughout time, and I can’t say I’m the least bit surprised to hear that they’re shuttering the location.  I’m more surprised that they managed to last 50 years there, so at this point, it’s not really so much a sad departure, as much as it’s kind of like a sort of honorable death from the Night’s Watch.

And now their watch is over.

Year’s End: Was 2022 a bad year?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

My fantastic mother-in-law signed me up for some virtual races that give medals for Christmas, but among them was a run called F*CK 2022.  The medal of the run is a middle finger which of course I’m cool with, but what got my brain churning was the idea that there being a race with this theme, there has to be some overwhelming sentiment that 2022 was anything but a good year.

Which brings us to the question in the subject of this post, was 2022 a bad year?

Honest question, because I’ve been living in a pretty small bubble since 2022, and my exposure to the news and happenings of the world outside of it are more limited than ever, and I’ve become one of those grownups who lets theFacebook feed me curated news and really only hear of things from that, Apple News and the shit that my friends talk about in a group chat. 

I don’t watch any television beyond the specific things I want to watch, which most certainly does not include any form of television news and I don’t venture out on the internet to all the news websites and Atlanta-centric sites I used to, so I’m going blind to even local things.

In the past, I felt it was important to be well informed and knowledgeable of news and current events, because if anything at all, that could make me better at conversation, but I really just like being in the know of things.  But after the rise of COVID and having kids and having kids in the age of COVID, it’s just not as important, and far behind the priority of making sure my kids are safe and fed every day.

Needless to say, my bubble has shrunken to where I have to ask other people if they think a year was bad or not, because I don’t really think my opinion holds any weight.  Because within my bubble exists pretty much just my kids, mythical wife, sports, wrestling and working for the sake of making money in order to live, and just about everything else exists outside of it.

Throughout the last few years, I’ve created living documents for every year, where I’ve literally narrated a tiny blurb to summarize every single day, of notable things and happenings, because I’m of the mindset that something important happens every single day, be it as small as one of my kids successfully eating something new, or as momentous as Russia invading the Ukraine and daring the rest of the world into another World War.

Some years have been really sad to look back through, because there’s a mass shooting every single month, or the deaths of notable people in the world, but as far as my interests and explorations of the world via the internet go, combined with the happenings of my daily life, I don’t think I’m wrong in thinking that something important does happen, every single day.

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