Tag: technology

Let’s talk about Love Death + Robots S2

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I was excited when I saw that Love Death + Robots season 2 had a formal drop date.  I enjoyed the first season tremendously, even if there was a lot of controversy around the perceived subject matter of two specific episodes, and regardless of what a bunch of SJWs on the internet felt, I still loved the first season, as it was an enjoyable, fast-paced anthology of short and sweet stories that paraded a myriad of animation styles, which touched all spectrums of the heart and mind, and was over in the blink of an eye because every episode ranged between 7-15 minutes.  So when I saw that more LD+R was on the way, I was quite pleased, and made sure to earmark some of my limited daily time to indulge.

At just eight episodes, S2 was over in the blink of an eye as well, if not shorter, and I watched all eight episodes in two short sittings, although I could easily have done so in just one if I timed it correctly.

I will say, I think that the polarizing reception of the first season probably had some influence on the second, or maybe it’s because it was a shorter season, but I felt like S2 didn’t have quite the bite that the first season did.  I’m not saying I require gratuitous violence or violence towards women specifically, but I felt that there was a little bit of edge lacking in this second season of the show.  The subjects of the episodes were more abstract and broad, and in most cases, did not seem to contain all three of the requisite love, death or robots, not that such was ever an established rule to begin with, but seemed to be better adhered to in the first anthology.

This isn’t to say that I didn’t like S2 at all, but after I had finished all eight episodes, there wasn’t one in particular that I was enamored with and could gush to anyone who wanted to talk about LD+R that it was my favorite.  But for all intents and purposes, this is how I’d rank the episodes (in parenthesis, according to Netflix’s order)

  1. Pop Squad (#3)
  2. The Tall Grass (#5)
  3. All Through the House (#6)
  4. The Drowned Giant (#8)
  5. Automated Customer Service (#1)
  6. Ice (#2)
  7. Snow in the Desert (#4)
  8. Life Hutch (#7)

Really though, it would be my top three, and then the rest were just kind of there, interchangeable in rank depending on the mood I were in, which is to say that they were all kind of okay, and not particularly close to standing out above the others.

I would however, like to talk about Pop Squad; the reason I would say it was the best episode of the season was not necessarily because I liked it the most.  In fact, the theme of the episode is completely horrific and I kind of hate it, but it was one of the episodes of the season that invoked all three love, death and robots, and frankly evoked the most emotional response out of me, which whether I liked it or not, makes it successful all the same. 

**Spoilers ahead, that being said**

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This is the shit that makes me lose hope in humanity

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

For reasons I have no idea, one of the more questionable targeted ads that I saw while doomscrolling through theFacebook was this video ad for what was basically a personal robotic piece of luggage.  Like, it showed some hipster douche walking through what was probably Central Park in New York because why would something like this not be demoed in New York, and he was being closely followed by this robotic caddy. 

No context was given to what it actually did aside from follow its master like a pathetic slave, but when curiosity got the better of me and I clicked the comments, aside from the bitter old man vitriol being exhibited by all sorts of commenters, it appeared to be something of a personal robot backpack, except not having to be worn on your back.  It just follows you like a puppy, and can hold your shit for you, without having to be affixed to your actual person.

Oh and one of these is supposedly like $3,200.

For basically a robotic backpack or briefcase.

I’m quite curious to know the impetus for inventing something like this.  Like, someone out there was so over having to drag a piece of luggage, or wear a backpack or hold a briefcase, that they just had to invent, what’s basically like a Home Depot bucket with some motion sensor and wheels that can be programmed to follow you around.

Lord only knows just how much something like this probably cost to develop, considering how over-designed it is not to mention the whole, probably didn’t need to exist in the first place thing.  I’d guess probably something like 200-250 thousand dollars went into making these robot caddies, meanwhile there’s a rash of fast food restaurant walkouts because workers can’t even make remotely close to a livable wage.

Needless to say, I hate the ever-living shit out of this invention, and it makes me cringe that something like this even made it this far into production, advertisement and inevitable integration into real modern society.  It’s an epitome of something that doesn’t need to exist, but does, and its development sucked up all sorts of resources and manpower that so should have been better spent doing something more productive, or useful.

I get annoyed enough at airports when people lugging their carry-ons are oblivious to how much space they make them consume, when space is already at a premium when they get crowded, it’ll be worse when these fucking R2-D2s are crawling behind the assholes wealthy enough to flaunt these, and the conflicts they’ll start when other people inevitably run into them or fuck with them.

Like most internet of things frivolous things, I hope these robots are rife with security flaws and vulnerabilities, and the people who actually think these are a good idea and covet and purchase them, are victimized by savvy hackers who hijack their motorized caddies, and simply steer them away from their owners, who end up losing them without even noticing, because they’re so self-absorbed in their own arrogant heads that they don’t notice when their little robot slaves just veer off in a different direction into the hands of some hacker.

That shit would make it worth it to me for these things to exist then.  Otherwise, fuck these things, and it’ll be really hard to resist the urge to not “accidentally” bump into them with some force if I ever were to come across one.

Can’t say I really blame them

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

TL;DR: the railroad system in Dalian, China went down because it supposedly was running on Flash, which was formally shut down in December of 2020

Now this might seem like a real easy layup to clown on the Chinese, like my Korean self occasionally likes to do, but frankly, I’m more on the frame of mind that understands the situation and can very easily relate in the sense that something similar, but not nearly as detrimental kind of happened at my place of employment.

Despite the fact that I work for a Fortune 50 company, the clock punch platform that we use still runs on Flash.  And in spite of the common knowledge that Flash was going kaput at the end of 2020, you’d think something would be done about the platform, so that the legions of hourly associates that work for the company wouldn’t be boned when inevitably Flash stops working, and nobody can access the system to punch in, punch out or any other time-related administrative functions.

December passes, and there’s no real news, and when January rolls around, I start getting emails, my peers within the company who also have reports are getting messages, and there’s a lot of people wondering why they can’t log in and punch in to work.  Naturally, there was nothing done to prepare for the long-reminded demise of Flash, and a scramble ensued, and basically some hackneyed band-aid is in place to hold shit together in the interim.

So I can understand how even an essential service like railroads, can fall victim to negligence of the end of Flash, because my multi-billion dollar company that I work for did the same thing, and they typically pay obscene amounts of money for people to be smart to prevent such things from happening.

I like to think of this really as a case of reminding too early, as bullshit as it seems.  Adobe did nothing wrong at all, they can’t be pinned for any of it, because they really have let the entire world and all industries know that Flash had a timeline, but because it happened so far in advance, nobody really paid any attention to it.  It’s like there really is such a thing as too advance notice.

But the best part about the whole story in Dalian was, how casual the article was about how the problem was fixed by installing a pirated version of Flash.  Because of course in the land of counterfeit everything, are they so cavalier about using bootleg software to solve their problems because of course they are.  But honestly, it’s probably no better or worse than the solve my company utilized to mitigate the need for Flash, but it’s just ironically sad and funny at once, all the same.

Have ad blockers become obsolete?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Ever since I got my brog back up, I’ve occasionally struggled to find a good groove in which to get back to writing.  Even being down for four years hasn’t really changed anything in that regard, in spite of how gung-ho and excited I was to get it back up, and thought that I could bounce back quicker than hoped.

Honestly though, it’s not so much the lack of want or desire to write, it’s just that I’ve had difficulty finding things that I want to write about.  Considering my life is basically like 85% thinking about baby, I kind of rely on the internet to feed me news, articles and stories to hopefully inspire me to write words, instead of me having to search for them currently.

But a large part of my difficulties these days is that all of the sites I used to go to, to look up local and national news, stories and potential inspiration, all of them have become neigh unusable for people like me who don’t want to be inundated with ads, because either sites all have anti-ad block blocks on them, or I have to white list them and I’m drowning in an ocean of ads that turns me off faster than seeing pictures of psoriasis on Google images and I leave disgusted.

I guess this is one of those points in my life where I realize how much of a parent I am because I don’t want to dig to find out or look for solutions, but basically I’m a Chrome user, and having Ad Block Plus on either makes the browser mostly unusable unless I whitelist all sites to which then the aforementioned drowning in ads becomes the norm.  I’ve given cursory Google searches to why this is the case but finding no real tangible proof of it, but all I know is that in the end it just discourages me from seeking news from once-reliable sites to seek out inspiration to write about, and it’s definitely contributing towards the struggles to keep on writing.

It’s frustrating because this is one of those situations where a little bit of give and take on either side might fix everything, but advertising has gotten so out of hand these days, which is what necessitated ad blocking to begin with, but with advertisers getting into bed presumably with the sites that shill them, they’re making it less possible for people to browse them without the luxury of blocking.  Maybe if every banner wasn’t animated, needed sound or autoplaying video, they wouldn’t be so obnoxious to want to block, but here we are.

Anyway, this is all mostly one big excuse to why I’m struggling to write more regularly, on top of the usual explanation that my kid comes first.  So I’ll leave it with this unnerving photo I saw on the AJC of some Asian women wearing MAGA caps and shirts that appear to state Asian Pacific Americans for the Baked Potato, and all it really does is make me wince, cringe, and shake my head at how disgusting such a thought is, and how I really can’t comprehend how any Asian minorities, much less those of the female gender, can support a guy who fucking hates their very existence.

What a perplexing and obnoxious ‘Murica we live in today.

Blet Money

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Over the last two months, whenever I’ve had any downtime, I’ve been doing online surveys for mostly pocket change.  Jokingly, I declared that all of the piddly change I’d make would eventually feed into a larger pot, and that the goal would be to get enough money to where I could get myself a new replica wrestling belt for my collection, and hopefully by then, the WWE Shop will get their heads out of their asses and release an NXT UK Tag Team Championship replica.

Well, as you can see above, I’ve done quite a lot of surveys, and the pot has filled up way faster than I would have ever imagined, and I’ve more or less got enough money socked away to where I could be ready to pull the trigger most any available belt out there.  Shocking nobody, the WWE has still yet to release the one belt that I really want, but I’m hoping that perhaps the re-launching of NXT UK in mid-September might jog someone’s memory that there’s still an active belt out there that still has no replica available.

The funny thing is that a long time ago, I used to do random surveys on pen and paper, when companies would send them to me, with pre-paid postage envelopes, which made it easier.  I remember the first time I got actual currency in an envelope, which inspired me to keep going with it for a little bit longer.  Jen on the other hand, got a free pack of toilet paper to sample and judge, which was always funny since I was getting cash for doing surveys.

Ironically, it was mythical wife who introduced me to 1Q (yes that is my referral link), as an app that provided digital surveys, and the payouts were immediate and through PayPal.  Sure, they were only quarters, but still, a bunch of quarters turns into a bunch of dollars over time, and every little bit helps, when there’s one pot all this change is getting dumped into.

I say ironically, because this clearly re-ignited this compulsion to do surveys for pocket change, because it lets me at least be making something, in my downtime, as opposed to making nothing when I’m bored and doing nothing, although that’s hardly the case this day and age, seeing as how there’s a baby in the equation.

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There is no software Adobe doesn’t know how to make less efficient

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Since the onset of coronavirus, I’d been working remotely since basically, my daughter was born.  I kind of got the jump on remote working, on account of being available for my wife and newborn daughter, but then when coronavirus started shutting everything down, I had a head start on working remotely.

Needless to say, my internet at home isn’t quite the fiber-optic connection at work, so it goes without saying that I deal with a little bit more slowdown at home than I do when I’m in the office.

Regardless, I still have to do my share of work, no matter the circumstances, and these days a large part of what I do is a whole lot of reviewing documents, namely PDFs.  So I’m in Acrobat a large portion of my days, whether I’m reviewing PDFs, marking them up, collating them for higher-ups, or whatever.  I’m in Acrobat a lot.

A long time ago, when Adobe products were all offline, I always took a mental note of how much space every program took.  Photoshop would always be a beast, but often times Illustrator would be larger.  Once InDesign came into the picture, it too was rather large, and then with the assimilation of Macromedia, Dreamweaver and Flash were large chunks of disk space necessary to have to install.  All the while, always in the background was Adobe Acrobat, which was but blips on the radar, and took minimal space in comparison, and also ran as smoothly as a well-maintained Audi, all the time.

No matter how much I had my feuds with PageMaker 6.0, Photoshop 5.5, Illustrator 8.0, InDesign CS3, InDesign CS6, Acrobat was one of those programs that was always steady as a metronome, and stable to boot.  I remember the first time I managed to get Acrobat to crash, but it was primarily because I was running it off of my old netbook, and I was trying to open a shoddily-made PDF that had a kabillion vector points in it, and frankly nothing short of a NASA computer could open it without issue.

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If only I could’ve held out for another year

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I haven’t really paid much attention to cars in a while, especially since I’d just gotten a new one less than a year ago, and that whole having-a-baby thing kind of tends to take mental capacity away from just about everything else in the galaxy for the vast majority of our waking lives.  But my Apple News feed randomly spit out this article about a Nissan electric car with an attractive looking thumbnail so I clicked it, and then I’m staring at my screen with a not bad look on my face at the Nissan Ariya, that’s supposedly going to hit the United States in 2021, and there’s a piece of me thinking damn, if I could’ve only held out for one more year.

And it’s not like I couldn’t have; my old Kia Forte was still running fine, and at “just” 150,000 miles, I probably could’ve easily gone longer, especially with the sheer lack of driving that’s been done during this fucking coronavirus pandemic keeping smart people like me sheltered in place more often than not.  I just simply wanted a new car, and I wanted a bigger car, because a baby was on the way, and it would’ve behooved me to be ready with a larger and more comfortable vehicle for my pregnant wife and then-eventual kid.

But if I were able to hold out for another year, then most definitely the Nissan Ariya would’ve been in the conversation, when I would be looking for a new car.  I used to always be dubious about electric cars, because of their supposed mileage range per charge, but considering my new car now and most Tesla Model 3’s typically range 280-300 miles per charge, and there’s really not a tremendous difference.  The real angst lies in the scenario of taking an electric car out on a road trip, and running out of juice with no idea of where to get more, in the middle of the night.

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