Month: August 2026

Well color me surprised

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

NYP: Civil rights lawsuit accusing numerous prestigious schools of racist anti-Asian bias in their admissions processes moving forward, after (then) teenager with near perfect credentials is rejected from most of them

This is a story that’s pretty much as old as time, where throughout pockets of ‘Murica, there are some crazy smart Asian whiz kids with insane academic stats and accolades, that don’t get into the schools they want to, simply on account of the fact that all these colleges are so overloaded with other Asian whiz kids that they don’t want to accept any more.

It’s an ugly reality that nobody in their right mind wants to admit to, but the undeniable fact of the matter is that schools have quotas of all sorts, and when it comes to the numbers Asian students, it’s probably the one that is always got the most swirl around every single year.

That being said, when I first heard about this particular Asian whiz kid in question last year, I thought dang, sucks to be him, getting bodied by the system, after it turns out that after near perfect SATs and a 4.42 (adjusted) GPA, he was still turned down by 16 out of 18 schools he applied to, getting into just Maryland and UT-Austin, but not Michigan, Cornell, Washington or any of the California state universities.

Yeah, it sucks that he was just the latest victim to the dreaded Asian Curve™, but he was not an isolated case, and he more than likely wouldn’t be the last one to succumb to the sad American reality that Asians’ care for academics and education often times is diluted by institutions’ innate need to appear culturally diversified.

When his Tiger Dad refused to accept it, and went after it legally, I remember thinking yeah good luck with that, because ain’t no way in ‘Murica will they give a second thought to something that happens countless times throughout every single college admissions season.  Don’t get me wrong, I support Tiger Dad’s plight, but like I said, this is something that has been happening since desegregation, and sorry for being nihilistic and thinking change seems impossible.

So like the subject of this post states, color me surprised that it actually is proceeding forward.  This means little in the grand spectrum of things because it does not immediately mean that thousands of Asians have been found officially discriminated against, but I am celebrating the fact that this seems to have taken one more step forward than most  attempts have in the past.  It’s been a year since I found about it, so the legal system is moving at about the expected pace, and hopefully it will emerge again next year with an update, but I imagine at this point, Washington and California will be collating metric tons of bullshit, inaccurate data, and all sorts of subjective intel, all with hopes of overwhelming the legal system with busy work and ultimately getting shit to be thrown out.

But good on Tiger Dad for fighting the good fight.  Change doesn’t happen without people continuing to challenge the system and putting up fights, as fruitless and hopeless as they might seem.  He’s a better dad than I would probably be in a similar situation, but that’s mostly on account of my beliefs that college isn’t a necessary rite of passage for succeeding in life to begin with but that’s besides the point.

The funniest thing is that when the day is over, it really is kind of an emblematic battle, that almost feels like the impetus for the legal action has long been expired, but because it’s picking up steam again, Tiger Dad has decided to make it about all Asians and not just his boy.  Because after the 16 rejections from college, Google knew talent when it saw it, and immediately picked him up as an undrafted free agent and made him a software engineer, where he’s probably already making fuck you money without having student loans, so effectively the Asian whiz kid has already kind of won, and won tremendously in that regard.

It’s clear that Tiger Dad is this guy who legendarily believed:

It’s not enough that I should succeed – others should fail

And despite the fact that his son has effectively already achieved success from a job and earning standpoint, he still demands that others should fail, which is in this case, the college admissions system, spear-headed by Michigan, Cornell, Washington and the State of California.

It’s still a lofty uphill battle, that I don’t really think will amount to much in the end, but it certainly would be amazing to see someone persevere so diligently and unrelentingly to where it got schools to finally throw up their hands and simply admit to the Asian Curve, and make it official.  I wonder how many schools would rather pay to not have to do that, versus those who wouldn’t?

lol, suck it LA

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

TL;DR: Atlanta Braves pitcher Chris Sale pitches complete game shutout to finish sweep of the Dodgers, winning 1-0

These days it’s not often where a baseball game is so good it inspires me to want to write about it, but here we are.

Despite being the worst baseball fan in the world, I know I still care enough about the Braves to where I try not to be on too much social media during games, because I don’t want to be spoiled by the scores of any games in progress.  Long gone are the days where the fate of my mood depends on the wins and losses of the team, but it still brings me ten seconds of disappointment whenever they lose, especially to teams that they probably shouldn’t be losing to, especially when it’s a period of struggle and the offense is not producing, costing Chris Sale a near countless amount of wins despite his prolonged pitching excellence.

I knew enough to know that this current stretch of games that they were in was going to be the gauntlet that would make or break the season, seeing as how their opponents would the first-place Brewers and the first-place Dodgers, with a make-up game also in there against the White Sox who were also in first place at the time of their game. 

Naturally, the Braves would start their last road trip, getting swept by the underwhelming Twins, before going into the stretch of 7 games against first place squads, where they somehow won an ugly affair against the White Sox, before dropping two to the Brewers, salvaging a win in neutral ground Williamsport for the Little League Classic, and it was back home for three straight against the defending champion Dodgers.

Obviously, not much needs to be said about the importance of competing against the big bad evil spending Dodgers, and considering how much the Braves had squandered their division lead, there was a mathematical chance that the Braves could have completely lost the lead outright with a poor performance against Los Angeles.

But because baseball is a mysterious game, not only did the Braves go toe-to-toe with the Dodgers, they fucking swept them, taking all three games, in competitive fashion.  Game 1 was led by the oft-criticized and polarizing Bryce Elder, who turned in his 15th quality start of the season, keeping the Dodgers mostly neutralized for six innings, en route to winning the series opener.

Game 2 was also tighter than a Korean person’s wallet, as the game went into the 9th inning deadlocked at 5-5.  And of all the guys in the world to hit a walk-off winner, it would be the much maligned Kim Ha-Seong, who smacked the critical base hit that would win the game for the Braves, and I’d like to take credit for this happening, because I just recently wrote about his season’s woes, wrote him off as someone who’s MLB career is pretty much over, and the Braves would have been better off eating his salary and cutting him loose in order to preserve his roster spot.

Yeah, this guy just had to be the one to hit a game winner against the big bad Dodgers, that effectively took the series, and put the most hated team in the game on the brink of getting swept.

And then Chris Sale in game 3, pitches an ultimate statement game, going all nine innings in an era where people give standing ovations for starters who can muddle through five.  But Sale goes truly old school, notching the progressively harder to get and rarer CGSHO stat with his truly marvelous 11 strikeout performance, completely dominating the Dodgers.

Sale had been on somewhat of a streak of terrible luck, where he’d been pitching lights out baseball over his last few starts, but because the offense has continuously gone completely inept during those starts, he’s still been tagged with losses on his record.  And as incredible and boner-popping his performance was tonight, the fact of the matter still remains one-run of support is still pitiful, and a guy like Sale absolutely deserves better than the support he’s been getting.

But back to the game, it really was a marvel of a game, because the game effectively ended in the first inning.  After Sale got out of the first with no damage, Drake Baldwin swings at the very first pitch thrown by Yoshinobu Yamamoto, crushes a home run that makes the game 1-0, and then it was pretty much nothing but pitching for the whole rest of the night.

I love 1-0 games like this, because the opponent has all night long thinking, ok all we need is one and it’s a brand new game, but then as the innings progressively advance, there’s less and less time, and suddenly that 1-0 score ends up becoming an mountain that can no longer be surmounted.  But the fact that Baldwin homered on the very first pitch of the game, off of a guy as talented as Yamamoto, this is the shit that I absolutely live for.

When the dust settled, the Braves have completed arguably their most challenging stretch of the season, winning 5/7 games against first-place squads.  It figures that stretching the parameters back further, things look worse, because for whatever reason, the Braves get swept by the fucking Twins, and lose 2/3 to the Diamondbacks, but that’s baseball in a nutshell, and why the games are still played.  The division lead remains intact, and with seven remaining against the chasing Phillies, it’s going to be an interesting race to October.

Regardless, this night stands out, and I can safely say that this is probably going to be the regular season game of the year for Braves Country.  Chris Sale throwing a complete game shutout against the hated Dodgers, statistical anomaly of first pitch homer being the only scoring of the game, and even Kim Ha-Seong got another hit tonight.  As the old saying goes, how can you not be romantic about baseball?

I don’t know why the term ‘human kibble’ triggers me so much

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The skinny: Man of mass efficiency meal preps in large quantity, Vice opines whether ‘human kibble’ is viable or is just another internet trend

I’m having a hard time gathering my thoughts and trying to articulate my words, but the bottom line is that I’m triggered by the phrase ‘human kibble’ and it bothers me enough to where it is manifesting in this brog post.

So what we have here is a guy who clearly values efficiency, not wasting a lot of time thinking about what to eat, and understanding the benefits to prepping food en masse.  What he basically makes is a gargantuan amount of fried rice, loaded with tons of veggies, tofu, chicken, rice and beans, and presumably, this is all he ever eats for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and has done so for several years now.

From the looks of the guy, whom based on his names is more than likely Korean, he’s in great shape, doesn’t look at all overweight, and is more than likely tremendously healthier than the troglodytes of the internet judging his culinary decision making who are mostly eating takeout sludge and closer to My 600 Lb. Life The 6,000 Lb. Diaries participants than they are to him. 

As mortifying as the thought of eating the same thing over and over again might seem to many people, it clearly works as far as this guy is concerned.  You’re not dieting for the taste… 

Frankly, I feel a bit of a kindred spirit in this guy, because I too also have the innate ability to eat the same thing over and over again without really getting tired of it.  A long time ago, I used to eat Willy’s pretty much 4-5 times a week for lunch.  Currently, I basically eat the same lunch every day.  Honestly, if I were still single and without kids and didn’t have to ever worry about anyone else, I’d probably have gone the same route as this guy, and been as happy as a clam in doing it.  

Add another idea to embark on if I were ever to discover a time machine and could go back in time to get ahead of the curve.

But where my ire begins is towards the people who have coined it as ‘human kibble,’ because I know that it’s typical dorks on the internet trying to get themselves over as inventors of clever quips, but at least to me, it comes off as demeaning, and even if it’s not its intent, slightly kind of racist.

Kibble is what was designed to the default food for all sorts of animals, and by denigrating this dude’s fried rice by calling it kibble is indirectly equating him to as being an animal.  Especially since the contents of his mass produced stir fry is all clean, fresh food, and again, probably way healthier than the people cracking jokes are eating, there’s something ironic about equating what he’s making and eating to something that is so default, for aniamls.

It doesn’t help that the man in question is Asian, seemingly Korean that doesn’t deter the racist narrative, because obviously there’s a low-hanging fruit of Koreans who have been known to eat dogs historically, and comparing what an Asian man eats to what dogs eat, dregs up this sour negative connotation that feels like it’s stemming from racism, regardless of how innocuous the origins of human kibble may have originated from.

Maybe this says more about me than it does about the masses, but the whole idea of people labeling mass-produced meal prep as ‘kibble’ rubs me the wrong way, and like I said, I’m having a hard time articulating everything the way I want to.  I don’t recall when there was a dude way back who invented a meal replacement shake and called it ‘Soylent,’ people at all denigrating it in any way, and instead applauding the idea and the massive savings in time they could enjoy by replacing all their meals with Soylent.

Mass-batch making fried rice is basically the same concept, except the end result is a hearty bowl of fried rice and not a viscous liquid.  The only differences are the skin color and nationalities of the creators.  It is nowhere near being the equivalent of kibble for humans, and the people who tried to get this to become the thing it already is, can all go fuck themselves.

Y’all thought it was just a joke

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Fox5ATL: man found stabbed at 725 Ponce de Leon Avenue, later died from injuries; suspect in custody

For those unaware, 725 Ponce de Leon Avenue in Midtown Atlanta is a Kroger grocery store located right off of the famed Atlanta Beltline, which I like to call the Jesus Sidewalk because it’s basically a gigantic fucking sidewalk that runs a big ass circle within the city limits of Metro Atlanta, unintentionally creating another hoop of segregation for snobs to flex just how Atlanta they are based on where they live in proximity or within it.

However, it’s not just any Kroger grocery store, but it’s the address of what was once infamously known as Murder Kroger, whereas the name sake implies, several deaths had occurred.  As the Beltline project grew, everyone knew that the OG Murder Kroger was going to get torn down and redeveloped, but the popular joke was that the building could be torn down and massive image rehabilitation could be undertaken, but the general fact that this address would forever be known as Murder Kroger was never going to change.

Longtime Atlantans would always know 725 Ponce as Murder Kroger, and no amount of Jesus sidewalk adjacency or fancy mixed-use buildings being erected on that spot was ever going to change that.

A few months ago, I made a tongue-in-cheek observation after multiple incidents tied to Kroger stores in the Metro Atlanta area where death has unfortunately occurred, that the spirit of Murder Kroger was a lot like the concept of The Grudge, where even leaving the accursed house in Japan didn’t save victims from being cursed by it, and that it was capable of traveling.  725 Ponce might have been rechristened and redeveloped, but the grudge of Murder Kroger was never going to go anywhere, and it had apparently traveled to other Kroger locations in the area, spreading its curse of death towards Decatur and east.

But lest the Grim Reaper of Atlanta forget where their base of operations lie, it didn’t take long before yet another auspicious incident happened at 725 Ponce, where a serial criminal with allegedly over 30 arrests, stabbed a guy on the Jesus Sidwalk, close enough to Murder Kroger to where the infamous 725 Ponce address was what was reported as the scene of the crime.

How a man with as many arrests on his record was somehow allowed to be on the streets in the first place is beyond me, but from what I could tell, he was white and I guess that says everything we already need to know.  But he still took it upon himself to play Judge Judy and executioner and took a life, and the question really is, did the location of the incident make this happen, or was the haunts of past visit to Murder Kroger compelling him to drop another human being?

And seeing as how the victim unfortunately succumbed to their wounds, all joking aside, it’s safe to say that Murder Kroger has claimed yet another life.  Like I said, you can tear the building down, build it back up as something fancy and modern, slather some shiny new paint on it, and attach it to the Jesus Sidewalk.  But Murder Kroger is never going to go away, and nothing short of a Shinto exorcism is probably going to have a snowflake’s chance in hell at getting rid of this curse.

When there’s an app for the commonplace

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

KRON4: SF-based dating site poorly hiding their objective of pairing white guys with Asian females in market where abnormally high WMAF pairings already exist draws massive online criticism

There’s a metaphor I like to use often, about a scenario where a hungry lion leaps into a herd of gazelle, but they’re so blinded by hunger that they can’t seem to focus on a single target, run around frenzied, and eventually all the gazelle get away.

That’s how I feel when I read this article, and I can’t help but wonder if the state of news these days aren’t really so much reports of actual topics as much as they’re reporting on the reception of actual topics.  Like I kind of get it, if I saw an article that was all like ‘there is a new dating app in SF that specializes in hooking white dudes up with Asian gold diggers women’ I’d just be kind of like lol eww fuckin white guys, but give me an article with the hook of ‘internet tears into new dating app in SF that specializes in hooking white dudes up with Asian women’ and now I’m kind of like rage?  What kind of rage?  And then I’m clicking the article and here we are.

But yeah, there’s so much to digest with a story like this that I can’t seem to focus and figure out where to start writing about first, because there’s just so many damn angles to approach this from.

Like how San Francisco is already a place where because there are so many nerdy white dude tech millionaire/billionaires in the area, there’s already a noticeably disproportionate amount of Asian women who land there pretending they’re not digging for gold, and the pairing of WMAFs organically happens, solely based on just fuckin’ nature.

Or how SF is such a smarmy arrogant place so reliant on tech, that they need to make apps and dating services and sites in order for people to function in daily life.  Like, white guys wanting Asian women in a city like SF should be as accessible as walking out the door and breathing fresh air, but these dorks needing apps to curate and do some of the lifting for them seems to be about as the most SF thing in the world.

Or just how gross white guys are, that they continue to fetishize Asian women as much as ever, to the point where fucking apps and services are developed in order for them to expedite their searches, instead of them waiting until they’re in their 50s and relocating to Thailand or the Philippines like legions of white guys before them.

Oh, and Asian women aren’t without criticism either, they’re not helping break the stereotype of Asian gold diggers who are looking for rich white wimps/simps/nerds to seduce and claim for their assets, and then entrap them either.  They’re as palpable to the problem as the white guys they’re seeking.

But like I said, so many angles, so difficult to approach.  San Francisco seems like such a weird place, and I frankly still have to say it’s up there on my top cities in America that I wasn’t impressed with and didn’t care much for.

Maybe they should focus on making an app to help rehabilitate the image of their shitty town, that focuses on identifying savvy PR people to try and take on such a lofty task.

Batman: Caped Crusader – tf did Alfred do to deserve all this disrespect?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When it comes to mediums outside of comic books, it’s no secret that DC Comics has struggled bringing to life most of their property, regardless of how iconic, how much potential and how much of a layup it really should seem.  Fortunately, James Gunn and John Cena seem to be on what I think is a positive direction with a potentially entertaining DC Cinematic Universe akin to what Marvel has accomplished, and I love the idea that Peacemaker, that John fucking Cena seems to be the lynch pin that could be the basis for it all, much like Robert Downey, Jr. did as Iron Man for the MCU.

Animation, has clearly been the strong suit for DC, and they’ve done a pretty good job of bringing stories to life in animated form throughout the years.  The whole saga starting with the Flashpoint Paradox was pretty enjoyable, and of course, a lifelong top-10 possibly top-5 show for me was and always will be, Batman the Animated Series.

It seems kind of surprising that it took nearly two decades for a proper spiritual successor to Batman TAS to come out, but then again, TAS holds up so well that it really didn’t need any successor, but all the same, Batman: Caped Crusader on Amazon Prime has been doing an adequate job of spiritually succeeding TAS, as far as I’m concerned.  It doesn’t hurt that Bruce Timm is back in the driver’s seat, along with JJ Abrams, one of the lord of the nerds who has a knack for breathing love into projects that many might think would be too lofty of endeavors.

I don’t know if I would go so far as to say that it’s remotely close to bettering TAS, but it has still been a refreshing watch, and at the time I’m writing this, I’m over halfway through S2, but felt a compulsion to write about it now and often times I have to strike when the iron is hot, but it’s been good.  I don’t think S2 has been as good as the first season was, but I imagine it will conclude with a massive upshot, considering what the show has obviously been doing throughout the season.

But it has done a good job of partially recapturing the magic of TAS, no doubt due to the completely lifted character design and complete auditory homage to the original, but they gain a little distance by going a little further back in the Batman timeline, as well as taking a much more adult theme, clearly intending this show to be nowhere near the after-school FOX Kids lineup or anything like it.

Batman is undoubtedly nerfed, seeing as how he’s earlier in his crime-fighting career, and definitely takes his share of getting damaged, but most of the differences are very heavy handed throughout this universe, primarily with the mass re-imagination of just about everyone from the series, in various ways.

Jim and Barbara Gordon are now black, Harleen Quinzel appears to be possibly Asian in appearance, Selina Kyle is now raven-haired, the Riddler has been made to be more of a bruising gunman, and the Mad Hatter is now a woman.  Renee Montoya is getting a ton more screen time now, but she’s also been made to be kind of fridge build Latina.  Harley’s also been thicc’ened up, deviating from her lithe petite pixie stature of TAS.

I can imagine that there’s a lot of discriminative takes on the massive wave of changes in CC from those who were passionate about TAS, or just traditional source material.  I notice all the differences, but when the day is over, I really couldn’t care about a lot of the characteristic swaps made throughout the cast, except for one: Alfred Pennyworth.

For some reason, Caped Crusader has decided to make Alfred fat, and look more like “Mean Gene” Okerlund than most traditional variations of Alfred, who is usually of a medium-to-lean, unsuspecting build, which is perfect considering the history of the character was that he was basically an MI5 espionage spy in his younger, active days.

Why CC decided to make him fat is completely beyond me, and one of the few things about the show that I really can’t stand by, and get triggered every time I see him. 

To make matters worse, the show has made the younger Bruce Wayne more of an asshole, pretending way too hard to be a pretentious womanizing socialite billionaire playboy when he’s in his alter ego, but the behavior doesn’t seem to end when he’s back under the mask.  Primarily the fact that he only refers to Alfred as “Pennyworth” like he were the senior jock quarterback of the school while Alfred were some sniveling maggot freshman, lucky enough to be in the stratosphere of Bruce Wayne.

The severe disrespect for Alfred Pennyworth throughout the series is the only true serious beef I have with Caped Crusader.  It’s otherwise a very good show, and an adequate successor to TAS, but it annoys the piss out of me whenever Alfred is disrespected so flagrantly.  Seeing as how I haven’t finished S2 yet, I hope this course corrects at some point, and we get back to an Alfred getting a modicum of the respect that he is deserving of.

Vaya con dios, [redacted location]

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Not that I’m a person of any importance in the world, but all the same, I’m generally intentionally vague when it comes to giving out too many specific details of my life.  I’m sure the internet is ripe with all sorts of information about me, my family, and people I associate with if anyone were so inclined to want to dig, but all the same I prefer to not give too much intel away willy-nilly.

That being said, my family just recently sold my dad’s place up in Virginia, which was a property that I lived in for about seven years, which makes me double take writing that out that I lived there for so short, in the grand spectrum of my life.  But I lived in that town, that county, for 13, which again seems short when I write that out, but I guess what I’m trying to say is that I spent my formative years up in Virginia, so for better or worse, the place will always hold somewhat of importance to me, regardless of how much I actually don’t really like it up there anymore, save for the fact that much of my family still resides there.

My sister made me realize however, that with my dad’s place sold, my family now no longer owns any property up there, as my mom’s gone the route of mercifully ditching homeownership, and opting to live out her remaining years renting in a home of convenience, which suits my sister and I fine, knowing she’ll be closer to family and living in a place that will take care of things for her instead of relying on her children to make a shit ton of calls and handle everything for her instead.

But the bottom line is that as far as one of our primary childhood towns are concerned, we now no longer have any reason at all to go there ever again.  I didn’t think of it, but it is still a tiny bit jarring to realize that, mostly from the standpoint that neither of us will really have a free place to stay whenever we visit in the future anymore, since my mom’s apartment is adequate for two people, tops, much less my entire family or my sister’s.  Maybe some cousins can harbor us, but the reality is that hotels may need to be leveraged in future visits.

Back to the point though, my sister was right, there’s absolutely no reason for us to ever really visit [redacted] again.  None of my family lives there anymore, my closest friends have all moved away from there, and short of my high school, and any former addresses that would show up if I were ever to need federal clearance again, there’s basically nothing left that ties me to [redacted] anymore.

As nostalgic as I may seem like I’m coming off, when the day is over, it doesn’t really matter much at all.  It’s just the tiniest of swan songs for a place that I haven’t lived in for more than half my life now, and melancholy me just wanting to get some words out about the topic before the recency bias of current events evaporates into the aether.  [Redacted] isn’t even my true hometown, just the place where I probably did the most growing up, and truth be it, I haven’t even really liked the last few times I’ve been up there.  The sprawl has gotten out of control, the infrastructure of the whole area has failed to keep up with the demand of population growth, and I often found myself growing frustrated with the lack of shit, terrible traffic, and the fact that it was one gigantic endless vanilla suburb.

And I hit a fucking deer, in a place where deer probably wouldn’t have been expected, but because of the sprawl and destrucity of nearby nature, the poor deer have little elsewhere to go, so now that I think about it [redacted] can go fuck itself, and good riddance to the place.

Without really even realizing it, I kind of had my swan song up there, the last time I was there, cleaning out all of my dad’s shit.  I drove around, ran around the old lake I used to run on, drove around some more, ate at a newer restaurant that had come into existence, visited my old 7-Eleven.  [Redacted] has changed tremendously from when I used to live there, and will continue to change and fill in all available space long after any traces of my family and I are gone, leaving nothing but memories.

Man, that wasn’t the direction I thought this post would go in when I thought about writing about it, but seems legit enough for me.  With my friends all gone, my family ties now being completely severed, there really is nothing left for me there except nostalgia.

Good riddance, [redacted], who knows when I’ll ever step foot there again.  I’m not much into the idea of high school reunions, and I have enough family and friends in the surrounding area to occupy me in the event I’m ever up adjacent to the area, and maybe when I’m much older and somehow more nostalgic, I’ll take my kids when they’re also older, to maybe take a walk or something around the old lake.