Tag: cashmoney

Great, now I have to defend the influencer

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I didn’t think I’d find a way to organically work this Keyboard Warriors logo I made into a post, and would have to dedicate an entire post to it, but sometimes the internet provideths

The skinny: 21-year old TikTok influencer makes posts about purchasing a home free and clear, The Internet responds with venom, resulting in the influencer tearfully apologizing for being out of touch with people with don’t make as much money as her

Welp, I never thought I’d ever be in the position for wanting to defend an influencer, but here we are.  I’m on the side of the influencer, and when it really comes down to it, I just feel that everyone who is throwing stones her way is, a jealous fatty.

Because I’ve seen enough people do exactly what this little chica does whenever they buy a home: they fucking announce it to the world on social media, because no matter what way you put it, it is a tremendous achievement, that anyone who gets into the position of entering homeownership should be proud of.

I purchased my first home at 22 years of age.  I obviously wasn’t an influencer or in any field nearly as lucrative as this kid was in, and I most definitely wasn’t free and clear from the onset.  But I still delved into the world of homeownership at a very young age, and it was truly for the best as I’d begun accumulating experience that I feel has been valuable as I’d evolved my living situations since then.

The influencer isn’t really that special in the sense that she got a home at a young age.  Any 20-something that’s remotely responsible with their finances could probably make it happen.  The only real difference between her and the vast majority of the world is that she happens to make her living in a form that is oft-seen as insufferable, obnoxious, and generally not popular with the cynical segment of the world, in spite of the fact that those who succeed at it tend to make lucrative livings from doing such.

And this is where I think it’s pretty petty, ripe with jealousy, and sour grapes from the people who are casting rocks in her direction, but mostly jealousy at the fact that she has managed to get into a position to where she could achieve free and clear homeownership.  I mean, I’m envious over the fact that she’s free and clear, but I don’t hold it against her; if I had the ability to just completely pay off my mortgage, I’d most definitely wipe that shit out too.

But it sucks that she has to endure such abuse from the peanut gallery, just because she happened to have gotten the right combination of finding a working formula, luck in gaining exposure, and the appeal to get lucrative sponsorships and means to make the copious amounts of money needed to afford the lifestyle.  Because I’d wager my house that anyone who flung bile at her, if they were in her position, they’d most definitely be buying real estate and doing exactly what she did too.

The fact that she felt the need to apologize was completely unnecessary and I don’t think she owes anyone an apology for being successful.  And I’m spending a lot more time white knighting for this kid than I thought I would deem necessary, but the point is, this is a scenario where The Internet sometimes makes the wrong choices of picking people to vilify, and picking on an influencer just because the majority of the people wish they could have her success, is one of them.

Now wait for her adventures as the world of homeownership comes closing in on her.  Home repairs, being responsible for fucking everything in the house, taxes, homeowner associations or any of the niggling things about homeownership that often makes us sometimes go “I understand the appeal of renting,” begins.  That can be the content insufferable anons can get up on their high horses about instead, but those who have already taken first swings, are already playing from behind.

The fresh contract tanking has begun

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Poor baby: Dansby Swanson cites exhaustion for pulling out of the sixth inning of a game against the Mariners

Here’s the kicker: this was the 11th game of the season.  Out of 162, plus playoffs if the Cubs can be good enough to get in.  There’s a long way to go before the season is over, and things are only going to get harder as the weather gets harder, the days start piling up, and the wear and tear of an entire season begins to pile up.

Exhausted after just eleven games into the season; as the kids say, the fuck out of here.  He cites excuses like his MLS wife’s knee injury and subsequent surgery as reasons for him not getting adequate rest before playing baseball as if him and his wife weren’t both professional athletes who don’t understand that all they do to make egregious amounts of money is play sports, and that all they really have to worry about is keeping themselves healthy and contributing and that injuries to occasionally happen.

What we’re more likely witnessing here is the start of the traditional tanking, sandbagging, talent suppression or whatever you want to call it, of a professional athlete, fresh off of signing a big money contract.  As most baseball fans in Atlanta know, Dansby Swanson left the Braves and signed with the Chicago Cubs on a seven year, $177 million contract, which I was tepidly sad to see a key contributor to the championship team depart, but the bean counting stathead I can occasionally be, relieved that the Braves don’t have to be responsible for that deal, especially for a guy I just never got any impression really had his heart with the team as much as he was chasing dollars not that there’s anything wrong with that.

But now that he’s got his big money guaranteed deal, Dansby Swanson really has nothing to play for.  He’s going to get paid $20M regardless if he hits .309 with 29 home runs or hits .209 with 211 strikeouts.  There’s absolutely no incentive for him to go balls out in every game until around 2028, when he begins creeping closer to the end of his deal, and he’s going to want to try and prove that he’s got talent to contribute to someone, and possibly land one more multi-million-dollar deal before the sun sets on his career.

And this is nothing we haven’t seen before in the grand spectrum of the professional sports landscape, it’s a practice that nobody admits to but everyone knows happens, and it doesn’t matter if it’s baseball, football or basketball, as long as it’s played professionally and there’s money to be made from gamesmanship, the players are doing it.

The thing is, I’ve never seen such a flagrantly low-effort excuse than exhaustion after 11 games into a season before, which is what prompted this post coming into existence.  Usually, players just loaf and claim to start slow, and if there’s any sort of injury or ailment, milk that cow until it’s shriveled like a raisin before easing their way back into being forced to earn their money again.  They don’t just straight up recuse themselves from an active game and just say they were exhausted, because again, professional athletes are supposed to be the cream of the crop and the greatest athletes in their world.  Not bitches who get exhausted after 11 games into a baseball season.

But then again, Dansby Swanson knows there’s no incentive to even trying to hide it, so he just lets loose with a lame excuse.  Much like my perceived opinion of his attitude of playing for the Braves, apparently, there’s little heart that goes into his excuse making to justify his fresh contract tanking either.

Would be hilarious if the patch affects player performance

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I love how the 2023 baseball season has barely started, and regardless of the fact that the Mets obliterated payroll records, they still can’t escape being the Mets:

  • Newly re-signed closer Edwin Diaz out for the season with injury incurred during the World Baseball Classic, still getting paid $19.5M
  • Justin Verlander, who will make $43.3M this season, already on the disabled list with a teres-major injury
  • Robinson Cano, who was released by the Mets in 2022, and is currently unemployed, will still make $20M from the Mets

But as the Mets have demonstrated, all that shit’s just money, and they don’t seem to care how much of it they burn if they think its going to lead to moar winz.  The Diaz money is covered by insurance, Verlander will probably still have the best games of his season against the Braves, and well, Cano is a sunk cost that deferred money guys always seem to slip under the cracks unless it’s Bobby Bonilla (also the Mets’ problem lol).

However, this new jersey patch to commemorate the union between the Mets and New York Presbyterian Hospital?  Now that’s some tragic shit, that I can’t believe for a second will actually make it through the entire season.

When it comes to fans roasting their own team, few are as more savage and creatively funny as Mets fans, and despite being division rivals to the Braves, I have always gotten along well with Mets fans on the internet and I respect their candor and creativity when it comes to slamming on their own teams.  And from what I’ve already seen, I can’t really top or better a lot of the shit I’ve seen them dumping on the team for the absurdly ridiculous size of this patch.

But at this mammoth size, I have to imagine that it’s going to be capable of affecting player performance, just because of the general feel and added weight it’s going to add to the sleeve.  Like, when a poorly screen printed t-shirt’s design feels hard on your skin instead of the softness of a cotton shirt underneath; it doesn’t absorb sweat and makes you feel wet flesh on a hot day, little things that can make you feel uncomfortable.

And as neurotic and superstitious as baseball players are, little things that affect the touch and feel of their baseball uniforms, yeah I think it’s completely plausible that these gigantic fucking patches would have the capability to affect player performance.  Being on the left sleeve, I imagine a lefty hitter like Brandon Nimmo is going to feel the subtle weight of it when he gets into his batting stance, and it’s going to take a minute for him to get used to it, but any abject performance that occurs in that minute could be the difference in a winning and losing a game, and considering the Mets lost the division to the Braves by just one game, all wins do matter.

Maybe a player on defense will be uncomfortable with there being this bigass stiff square on their arm instead of the light neutrality of no patch, and it fucks up their timing and they start committing errors.  Or knowing the luck of the Mets, somehow, the patch is going to come into play for an injury stint for one of their $40M pitchers.

Either way, the likelihood of such coming into play isn’t very high, because if players can adjust to all this pitch clock bullshit, the death of the shift and limited pickoff attempts, they’ll get used to a patch, even if it is the size of a Domino’s Pizza box.  But if it did, it wouldn’t be surprising, because only the Mets could be the team that gets derailed by something as silly as an oversized sponsorship sleeve patch.

I’m not perfect but I still did the right thing

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

So I’m out doing my food delivery moonlighting, and I get a ping that has me making a pickup at a Taco Mac.  I get to the Taco Mac, and as I’m walking into entrance, I’m pleased to see some bagged orders waiting at the host stand, hoping one of them is mine, so I can grab it and be on my merry way because time is money, and I might be able to eke out one more fare before it gets too late.

Unfortunately, neither of the orders are mine, and when the hostess has to go to the back to check on it, I know I’m in for a wait, which is always an annoyance because again, time is money, and when I’m waiting, I’m not earning, and I’m always concerned customers will take their frustration out at getting their food late on me, by virtue of pulling back tips.  The hostess comes back and says sorry, it’ll be like 10-15 min, is that okay, to which I roll my eyes and don’t give a real committed answer because I don’t want to cancel the fare because there’s no guarantee I’ll get another one as good immediately, but I also don’t want to wait that long.  I opt to wait, and resign myself that this is probably the last one of the night, and I go sit in an adjacent booth.

My foot hits something, and when I look down, I see that it’s a wallet.  Immediately my brain starts popping with the opportunity of finding some rich schlub’s wallet, and the prospect of an immediate payday, but at the same time, I don’t want anyone to really see that I found a wallet, lest anyone think I’m some sort of crook, even though my thoughts are immediately wondering how much cash could be in it.

I discreetly pick it up and a minute later, I pull it up onto the table like it was mine all along and I’m rooting through it, because there’s no harm in looking.  I see the driver’s license of some older white male, 6’0, white hair, lives in the same city as the restaurant.  I find a voter registration card, and based on his look and where we are, no surprise that he’s a registered Republican.  There’s no platinum or black cards anywhere to indicate that he’s particularly wealthy, but the address points to an area of some very affluent homes regardless.

And then we get to the cash, at first I find only a five a bunch of ones, but then I discover that there’s a second pocket, to where he clearly separates larger bills from the smaller ones.  Even still, there’s a few twenties, and we’re looking at $91 in cash here.

My mind is racing at this point, and I’m seeing the scales of justice in my head as I could easily hand this over to the hostess and be done with it, but at the same time having watched the lackadaisical and lackluster behavior of the host staff, I didn’t trust that they would do the right thing with this wallet, and if they were going to pilfer the cash, why shouldn’t I do it myself and benefit from it instead?

Which brings us to the other side, where I could be a complete shithead and just walk away with the wallet, keep the $91, toss the rest into the garbage and be done with it.  Brian McJoneserkowski has a bad Monday but ultimately lands on his feet after he freezes all his cards and goes to get a new license and loses not even a hundred bucks.

Because that $91 is basically a really good night of doing food delivery.  That $91 offsets the cost of breakfast for my household plus in-laws this morning.  That $91 is $91 that I didn’t have that I now have, which would be useful because I never feel comfortable financially and it would be a nice little break to get for once.

All this decision pondering was going on through my head while I was waiting for my tardy order to arrive, and I knew that I had to come to a decision soon, because once the food came out, I was on the clock to get it to the customer.

A part of me was pondering doing the real hero thing and delivering it back to the person’s home, but it was close to 10 pm, and I don’t imagine how well received it would be for some rando to show up at someone’s home at that late at night to return a wallet, and considering they were a white male and I was a minority, I’d probably get shot and/or arrested for suspicion of theft.  Because if this didn’t get resolved tonight, there’s no way I was going to give it any thought in the following days, and then I would’ve ended up keeping the cash and throwing the other effects away and have done the shithead thing in the end even if I didn’t intend to.

Ultimately, the decision I made is that in spite of the temptation to abscond with a free $91 and the fact that I admit to being tempted, and I admit to rooting through this guy’s wallet with not-quite so honorific thoughts in my head, at the end of the day, I’m no thief.  I’m not perfect, as I’ve so disclosed, but I’m not a thief.

To get around my distrust for the hosts, I went to the one worker who probably deals with left behind wallets and personal effects on a regular basis: the bartender.  I dropped it off with her, and hopefully she does the right thing and puts it into a safe or something, and isn’t sneaking off into the back to pocket the $91, but at this point it’s no longer my concern.

In the end, I know that I did the right thing, even if I took a very roundabout and questionable route.  Hopefully Charles McRepublican the III sobers up in the morning and has the wherewithal to get in touch with the Taco Mac and discover that some honorable paragon turned his wallet in without stealing any of his effects, and hopefully this earns me some positive karma that will benefit me in some positive fashion in the future.

I also think about the fact that I’m a dad with kids, and even if they weren’t with me, I’d have a hard time looking them in the eyes and trying to convince them that dada’s a good person, so even when they’re not around, I still feel like I need to be setting a good example for them, regardless of how tempted I might’ve been.

A feeling really old moment

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I went to Willy’s the other day to pick up dinner, and like most intelligent human beings who value their time, I placed an order online with the hopes of timing my drive just right to where I could arrive right at the expected time of ready to pick up, grab my food and be on my merry way home, with minimal waiting necessary for me, my kids, mythical wife and our au pair.

As if I can’t say more positive things about my de facto favorite eatery chain in Atlanta, Willy’s is usually really good about meeting their estimated times, and more often than not, whenever I place an online order, it’s ready and waiting for me whenever I do arrive, and whenever that’s the case, I’m satisfied and feeling smug at walking out with my food while there are a line of schlubs waiting to order.

Except for this one particular location, which ironically is the one closest to my home.  There was once a point where I could quite literally say that I’d been to every single Willy’s location, so I could say with conviction that this one is the worst Willy’s in their entire company network.  Now I know they’ve expanded a little bit since I was the Burrito King of Atlanta but I’d still wager that this specific location is probably still the worst of them all.

And it’s not because they’re in the hood or somewhere unsafe and sketchy, quite the contrary, they’re in one of the lily-whitest, upper-middle class parts of the Metro Atlanta area.  But the problem remains as predictably same as any poor performing restaurant, the fault of bad employees.

The thing is, the employees aren’t bad because they’ve got attitudes or are lazy, it’s just this particular Willy’s location is that they’re staffed from the pool of people in which they’re located in, which in this case is a bunch of mostly white, high school teenagers, whom mostly come from a place of privilege.  And it’s no more prevalent than how often this place is completely overwhelmed by basic orders, leading to long waits, mistakes in orders, and a whole lot of reasons why I should really stop going to this location, but I keep coming back because I like Willy’s, and I keep telling myself that things might have changed by now.

Anyway, the reason this brog post comes to fruition is because when I got to this Willy’s, I was right on time to the estimated time of readiness, and I enter the restaurant and walk straight to the shelf of online orders and lo and behold, there’s no bag with my name on it waiting for me.  In fact there’s no bags at all, but then again I’ve realized that I’m smarter than most people in my area by how much more I seem to utilize online ordering than others.

I stand around for a minute or two, hoping someone would emerge from the prep area with a bag bursting with my order, which doesn’t happen, so I put myself into the line of sight of the cashier who’s this blond, teenage-looking Chad.  At this point, I can see a couple of tickets hanging from a board.  Chad doesn’t say anything to me despite making eye contact with me, so I blink first and ask him about my order which was scheduled to be ready by now.  He has no answer to my query, and resumes making pre-made baggies of tortilla chips.  My eyebrow scrunches at this completely useless response to a simple question.

There’s a manager pacing between the grill, kitchen and the prep area, and when he sees me, he blurts out to Chad why he’s not helping me, and that I’m clearly standing in front of him because I need some help.  I explain that I’m waiting on my online order, and that I can see my ticket there, and it looks unfortunate that I’m behind what appears to be a fucking catering order and who the fuck makes a catering order at 5 pm on a Friday and why would they even take it much less try to fulfill it right before the dinner rush??

But then for the next few minutes, I watch as the poor overwhelmed manager has to basically hold Chad’s hand at instructing him to demonstrate some common sense and feel for the room, because it’s clear that Chad has absolutely no understanding of customer service work, and I’m feeling really old in thinking that the kids these days are fucked and spoiled and that the future is fucked for white America and it’s no wonder the food service industry’s reputation is in the shitter now.

  • Chad has to be told to stop bagging chips and to help customers in front of him
  • Chad has to be told to look at the growing row of completed burrito orders to locate mine.
  • Chad has to be told to use his head and not put a burrito on top of a bag of chips come on now.
  • Chad has to be told to count the number of items on the ticket and make sure it matches the number of items in the bag (he was wrong)
  • Finally, Chad has to be told how to arrange bags inside of a bigger bag to fulfill my order before handing it off

I get my order finally and leave the restaurant noticeably agitated.  What should’ve been a quick pickup took an extra 12 minutes of time that my kids could’ve been exploding in my car, and traffic could have been getting worse, seeing as how it was right at the top of the 5 pm hour.  I’m astounded by the sheer incompetence from Chad, and how this location just can’t seem to ever get any reliable help.  Seriously, no other Willy’s I’ve been to has been so poorly operated, and at this point I’m left with no other conclusion that they are as a result of the employment pools in which they operate in.

But I just felt really old because I remember my first jobs when I was still in my teens, and how I never seemed to get any heat from my employers because I had common sense and a work ethic, and beyond initial training, rarely ever needed to have my hand held as much as this fucking Chad needed to have his held.

And how I need to stop coming back to this fucking location, because they just suck.

The DeVanzo Shift lives

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Brilliant: the Boston Red Sox employ a new defensive strategy that’s basically the shift, but still falls within the rules that were altered to attempt to kill the shift

When MLB banned the shift after the 2022 season, the baseball internet had all sorts of jokes about the players who were ripe and prime to breakout, with infielders being neutered to where they could position themselves to neutralize low-skill, pull-happy batters.

The one name that emerged the most was first baseman, Joey Gallo, who was about the most predictable hitter in history, seemingly completely incapable of hitting the ball to anywhere on the left half of the field.

Over the years, opposing teams have employed the most ridiculous shifts on Gallo, going so far as to having just one left fielder to be the sole safety blanket in case he had a bad pregame meal, and was all gassy and clenched and accidentally tapped something to left, while every other single player on the field shifted hard to the right.

This is a tactic called the DeVanzo Shift, named after the new defensive strategy employed by Manganelli’s slow pitch softball team in Artie Lance’s Beer League.

Joey Gallo is not a particularly smart fellow who doesn’t seem to realize that a bunt to right is an automatic double, or just not really that good at baseball, had been victimized for years by the shift, and his numbers and general employability have dwindled throughout the years.

And because there are lots of other guys like Gallo who can’t/won’t practice and learn to hit it the other way, they all collectively bitched and moaned to the MLB player’s union to where they managed to get the tactic outlawed.

The problem is, they were too granular with their explanation of the rules, and teams filled with smart guys like the Boston Red Sox have already figured out ways to exploit the loopholes in the rules, and just like that, when Joey Gallo walked into to spring training expecting to have a monster spring and not having to look at the teeth of the shift again, bam, is suddenly facing the shift again. 

Except it’s not the third baseman who’s wandering way the fuck out of position, it’s the left fielder who’s wandering even way more the fuck out of position, to help keep the DeVanzo Shift alive for at least one more season, to push oafs like Joey Gallo closer to madness and/or early retirement.  The rules state that infielders can’t go out of position or leave the infield dirt, but ain’t nobody said anything about the outfielders.

So owned, Joey Gallo, and long live the DeVanzo Shift!

I miss Dan Uggla

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I heard about this story about how the Braves ended a spring training game in a tie, because a player got the game-ending third strike on account of not being in the batter’s box in time, because 2023 marks the start of the pitch clock era, where every single pitch now has a timer attached to it in an effort to speed up the pace of games because society’s ever-growing ADD has declared that baseball games are too long and nobody likes them anymore as a result.

No sport gets fucked with structurally as much as baseball does.  Aside from some rule changes to discourage defense because offense is sexy, basketball is by and large the same game as it now as it was back in the 1950’s.  Football’s primarily changed in order to try and reduce concussions and protect quarterbacks, but pretty much everything else goes as it did in back in 1920. 

But baseball?  Any strategy that seems too effective is neutered or outright banned (the shift), pitching mounds are raised, lowered, the physical baseballs themselves are altered, bats are regulated and banned, and there are rule changes practically every year.  One of the lasting anecdotes about baseball was that it was the game with no clock, and as a result, every single pitcher-batter matchup was potentially important, and that there was no strategic milking of the clock, and that every out had to be recorded in order for a team to be declared a victor.

Now, there is an actual clock, which effectively puts the romanticism of baseball having no clock and that every out must be earned to rest, because now baseball has embarked on a path where games really can have a finite time limit now.  With rules in place that prevent managers from spamming pitching changes in order to play matchups, and rules in place that prohibit excessive checking base runners by pitchers, MLB has basically closed the walls around old school baseball strategy and effectively put a hard time limit on every game, flexible solely by the need for extra innings or managers milking pitching changes to the most of their limited new abilities.

The Pedro Astacios who took practically an entire minute in between every pitch, and the Bruce Chens who once trolled an entire stadium by checking a runner at first like 14 times will all be phased out and rendered extinct, regardless of how capable they are throwing a baseball, and future Moneyball will probably be cultivating pitching staffs with wildly different pitch preparation speeds, with the intention of throwing off batter timing throughout games.

With all these changes to the game, I just think about the times in the past where I think about having loved baseball the most and lately, the name that pops up the most as someone I really miss, is Dan Uggla.

He was kind of like the anti-stat geek player that the rise of the stat geeks baseball culture absolutely abhorred, but teams themselves still coveted because of his sheer ability to hit home runs when he actually made contact with the ball.  His defense was below-average, he wasn’t a threat to steal bases, and being a second baseman it’s not like he had much of an arm.  But again, the guy hit home runs, and that’s a talent that every team wants, whether they wanted him as a starter, or a designated pinch-hitter, or an actual designated hitter.

There was once a season where he hit .179 on the year which is abysmal, but he still clobbered 22 home runs, which is still noteworthy.  My friend and I made the joke that all he hit were home runs, and with just 80 total hits on the year, he really did hit home runs over 25% of the time.

I take it back about not having much of an arm though, the guy had more physical arms than just about anyone else in the history of Major League Baseball, because pound-for-pound, Dan Uggla had to have been the most jacked player in history.  The guy was 5’11 which isn’t that tall as far as professional athletes go, but the guy had massive, massive arms, with most people making the comparison that his arms looked like Popeye.

Additionally, Dan Uggla also wore the tightest, most form-fitting uniforms as he could, throughout his whole career.  I’m not sure if it were deliberate, or if across the board there were some sizing issues for a man of his stature combined with his musculature, but my friends and I declared that his uniform size was “smedium” and made the comparison for any time anyone was seen wearing a tight-fitting shirt in order to attempt to make their musculature look impressive deliberately.

All in all, Dan Uggla was kind of the perfect poster boy for ironic baseball player fandom.  He was hated by nerds, but still loved by teams, and basically always had a job as long as he kept hitting home runs, all while wearing his ridiculous smedium uniforms and looking like he had professional wrestling as a post-career option.  But more importantly, he was kind of like this totem of simpler times, where there weren’t so many oppressive rules, fans bitching about game duration weren’t heard, and players had to deal with the shift.  No matter his numbers, relievers and closers in his time, still had to face Dan Uggla with the game on the line and although the numbers may have favored them most of the time any mistake they let loose was probably going to end up in the seats.

Man, I miss Dan Uggla.  Even more now, with the game itself undergoing so many dramatic changes.  It’s going to be weird when I eventually actually watch a baseball game again, and seeing shit like pitching clocks on the HUD, and I imagine they’ll feel noticeably faster in speed, which in some cases might feel pretty convenient, but at the same time, very much not like the baseball that was what I grew to love and enjoy.