Tag: OG

Musing about WORLDS

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m never going to deny the fact that ultimately, the impetus for going out to Europe in the first place came about on account of video games, namely the one that I talk about just about every single day, League of Legends. Given the fact that Riot Games made it clear that the annual World Championships would take place in different countries each year, it was a pretty safe bet back in like March that 2015’s WORLDS was very likely going to take place in Europe, considering the previous two WORLDS were in two of the other primary LoL markets of the United States and South Korea. And when it was confirmed that WORLDS would be scattered throughout Europe, it was full speed ahead on making plans not just for attending WORLDS events, but also providing the opportunity to do some European travels.

But yes, for lack of a better term, it all started with WORLDS, and frankly it ended with WORLDS too, since the entire trip was bookended by the WORLDS semifinals in Brussels, with the finals in Berlin.

Everything in between was the sweet gravy of personal travel and new experiences, with the mythical girlfriend.

Anyway, in an attempt to compartmentalize and try to organize my thoughts into neatly organized brog posts, I’m taking an approach of writing about one thing at a time, if I can manage to stick with it; seeing as how WORLDS was what led us to Europe in the first place, I figure there would be no better place to start talking about my Europe trip than talking about WORLDS.

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This pleased me greatly

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

After such a lengthy break from the routine that I’d more or less adhered to for the better part of the last decade, I have to admit that it’s been kind of difficult to get back into old activities.  And as is often the case whenever I come back to work, it’s rarely a smooth transition back into trying to get back into the rhythm of work, it’s always something waiting for me, and eating into my time and mental capacity to want to do other things.  Furthermore, the shitty weather waiting for me as soon as I got back to the United States, doing things like trying to get back into running, just wasn’t happening.

Among other things that I’d like to get back to doing, but feel the need to ease myself in, warm-up so to say, is naturally, tending to my beloved brog and writing words upon words upon words about well, things.  Europe, the countries visited in Europe, my Worlds experience and thoughts and so forth.  But my brain’s been a little mushy; perhaps it’s the long layoff from writing, too many European spirits throughout my travels, the jet lag I’ve experienced for the first time, the fact that I decided to dive head first into picture processing, or any combination of any of these things, but it’s resulting in me not really being in any rush to start clacking away at the keys to put words down on .docx.

So in an attempt to simply get my brain moving and my hands used to the feel of recreational writing again, I thought I’d start with something of a comfort topic, something that I know I can write about pretty much in my sleep if I wanted to: baseball.

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The pursuit of exploration

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Growing up, I didn’t travel a whole lot.  Up until I was like maybe 11 years old, my entire world revolved around the states of Virginia and Maryland, bouncing around between family visits and, family visits.  Family vacations as I aged were to places like New York, Chicago, and to Niagara Falls, where we barely crossed into Canada for a spell.

Conventions, afforded me opportunities to visit other states, although I didn’t really explore any of them outside of the respective conventions I went to, but for what it was worth, I started visiting places like California, Georgia and the Carolinas.  And when I became my best impression of a functional adult and got super into baseball, the pursuit of baseball parks has given me the best excuse to visit a whole slew of places I never imagined seeing growing up, like Seattle, Portland, Miami, Boston, Minneapolis, Phoenix and San Diego.

However, aside from visits to cities in adjacent countries Canada and Mexico, I’ve never been outside of the United States.  In fact, I’ve never been out of the western hemisphere in my entire life.  For shame, when you consider the fact that I’ve never been back to the Motherland at any point, and it’s still my goal to ultimately take my mother to Korea one of these days.  I never went, or really had the opportunity for any dramatic international travel in my life; I didn’t go backpacking through Europe, nor did I ever have the aforementioned trip back to the Motherland.  And up until I was really an adult, I guess I didn’t have the financial means and/or the drive to pursue it.

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Gross

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

In short: New York Mets sweep Chicago Cubs, advance to World Series.

It’s a good thing that I’ll mostly be offline throughout the next week, and if all goes really well, will basically miss the World Series.

It’s not that I hate the Mets, it’s just the fact that they’re the Mets; in the same division with the Braves,  they’re supposed to suck, LOLMets, etc, etc… and seeing them storm their way through the playoffs and now into the World Series?   Sure, there’s some jealousy, resentment, but there’s also a good bit of awe, disbelief, and wonder at the fact that the scary thing is that they’re exhibiting a lot of patterns and trends that typically go hand-in-hand with previous World Champions; all the pitching coming together to form these chains of dominance, Yoenis Cespedes has been playing out of his mind, since arriving in New York, in pursuit of both a ring as well as a huge fatty contract at season’s end.

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Yes, we are going to talk about poop

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

In the very first Final Fantasy, Warmech was an enemy that could be randomly encountered on the long sky bridge preceding the fourth elemental fiend, Tiamat. Warmech was the strongest non-boss in the game, as it had a nuclear blast attack that attacked your entire party for a tremendous amount of damage, as well as health regeneration, lots of armor and strong physical damage output.

Subsequently, it rewarded you as if it were one of the elemental fiends if you defeat it, but the existence of Warmech was one-part easter egg, being a high-tech opponent in a world of fantasy, one-part completionist challenge, being such a difficult adversary, and one-part nasty surprise, because encountering one can only happen at a very inopportune time, right before another major boss fight.

It was deduced that the chances of encountering a Warmech on the sky bridge was approximately 3/64; which equates to roughly 5% of the time, but if you’re unlucky like me, you somehow manage to run into Warmech almost every time.

Anyway, there’s a sky bridge in my place of employment.

And there’s a Warmech that patrols it.

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My tolerance for cooler weather is gone

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I knew it was going to inevitably happen, considering I grew up with four true seasons every year for 21 years.  And then moving to Georgia where the summers are brutal and the winters are supposedly mild, it was only a matter of time before the tolerance for cooler weather would begin to gradually chip and eat away at me, before I would inevitably look at a particular temperature and go “god damn it’s cold.”

Well, I’m there now, I think officially.  Granted, 37F degrees in October is slightly low on the spectrum of arriving fall weather, but it’s gotten to the point where I have yet to switch my home’s thermostats over to “heat,” and my home’s temperature is dropping into the low 60s, and my bedroom which is over the garage, creeps into the 50s, leading my to wake up cold and blurting expletives when stumbling out of bed in order to hit snooze.

The point remains, I’m easily cold now, vastly more than I used to be in the past.  Sure, I was more conditioned, not to mention my body’s composition was slightly tubbier back then, so say what you want about the insulating properties of blubber, but now, I’m furrowing my brow when it drops into the low 60s outside, and anything equivalent within my home is becoming “too fucking cold.”

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I guess I don’t think when watching television

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of articles about how American Horror Story: Hotel is like the worst thing ever aired. All sorts of flippity-floo about how Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk have gone too far in their push-the-envelope style of depictions of sex and gore, use of taboo concepts like homosexuality and transgendered people, how Lady Gaga is more or less portraying what people think Lady Gaga is, which is a weirdo who likes to do things for shock value, and how the franchise is undeniably dead with the fact that Jessica Lange (supposedly) has left.

Perhaps I don’t analyze things so much when I’m watching them, or more likely the fact that I’m just not really thinking too hard, but I haven’t had any problems with AHS:Hotel so far, and I’ve found them to be entertaining.  For baseline sake, I found Freak Show to be entertaining, in spite of the popular belief that it was the weakest of the four prior seasons.

In some regard, I think I’m a little desensitized when it comes to shock, gore and sex depicted on television, and I’m more apt to ponder on whether or not someone, be it show creators, or someone at FX is going to get in trouble for pushing the envelope as hard as they’ve been pushing it, but when I’m watching people getting their throats slit and/or sexually assaulted, I might cringe and go “Ohhhh” but it’s nothing that’s going to mentally scar me for eternity, as the rhetoric spouted by Parent Television Council sheep would have you believe it should.  If anything at all, just seeing “Murphy/Falchuk” combined with the fact that it’s on FX, by now, anyone should know that they’re going to see some pretty intense stuff.

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